Beyond the Deceptions of Mundanity: The Christian Anarchist Thought of St. Valentin Sventsitsky Matthew Raphael Johnson Johnstown, PA Russian history is typified greatly by the constant war between the Christian monarchy and oligarchy. These are polar opposites. The first is dedicated to the common good, “rules” as a symbolic representation of custom and the Orthodox life and is not identical with the “state” which is a necessary evil. Christian monarchy is a religious rather than a legal institution. On the other hand, the common good is fought by private goods: oligarchy and the materialization and brutalization of social life. During the worst years of Jesuit-Jewish repression in Ukraine, the Athonite elder Ivan Vysenskyj forcefully restated the National-Anarchist teaching that would be revived later by the Old Believers, Nepluyev and St. Andrei of Ufa. Ignored in the west (and for clearly good reason), Monk Ivan mocked and verbally assaulted the oligarchy in all its forms and guises. The true church does not rule; it is the truth on earth. Social monasticism is the asceticism of the everyday the de-materializtion of social life where prosperity is not measured on quantitative terms and economic growth is seen as much as a destructive force as well as a productive one. Moral purity is the only claim to property,1 not contract. Apostasy is not just the renunciation of doctrine, but the renunciation of moral behavior as well. Behavior and doctrine are the same object seen from two different points of view. Parasitic behavior derives from false doctrine and vice versa – the prophetic ideal of the Old Testament said the same. As with the prophets of the Old Testament, injustice is identical with parasitism: to reap where one has not sown. Class rule is the result of rents, not economic innovation or the normal satisfaction of basic social needs. I. Under Tsar Nicholas II, incomes rose massively while prices remained the same. For the average urban worker, the year contained 100-110 non-working days. As Dostoevsky described in The Possessed, prosperity is inconsistent with the revolution – success meant a lack of violence impetus. The “pogroms,” such as they were, were instigated by the Jewish People's Will organization. Terrorist cells murdered roughly 10,000 a year between the death of Alexander III and the start of the war. Historians writing in Russian such as Oleg Mihailov suggest that Alexander III defeated the revolutionaries because of his social legislation as well as the immense growth of the economy. Taxes were high only on higher incomes. Tax arrears from redemption payments were canceled. When the Reds took over Russia and created the monstrous “Soviet Union,” the mask of being concerned for “workers and peasants” quickly came off. Playing on the universal 1 Typically, “property” in English does not mean what it meant in 19th century Europe. When Proudhon or Marx spoke of “private property” they spoke of productive capital, not personal possessions. ignorance of the west, Trotsky, Lenin and Stalin, with millions of dollars in western capital, aid and loans, build what amounted to a transmission belt to remove the labor of the workers to the party. In 1937, the NKVD was at 1 million active duty personnel. Contrary to academic historiography, the Civil War did not end in 1921, but at the earliest 1929, with guerrilla flare-ups constant in scattered parts of the empire. The Party required constant tension and warfare. Trotsky's infamous “permanent revolution” was an expression of this fact. Try to find a single major initiative that improved the lives of Soviet workers. There are none. Russians were worked to death. All socialist projects were destroyed upon the Reds coming to power. The peasant commune was destroyed. All the labor legislation from the era of Alexander III was repealed. Wages were near starvation under the Trotsky regime while all capital was in the hands of the party. When the system began to totter, the west bailed the Soviet Union out over and again. Occasionally, “sanctions” were placed on the soviet Union, to be overtly circumvented. Trade between the US and the USSR was always a major part of the “socialist paradise.” The Library of Congress states: For a variety of reasons -- compassion for the sufferings of the Soviet peoples, sympathy for the great “socialist experiment,” but primarily for the pursuit of profit -- Western businessmen and diplomats began opening contacts with the Soviet Union. Among these persons were Averell Harriman, Armand Hammer, and Henry Ford, who sold tractors to the Soviet Union. Such endeavors facilitated commercial ties between the Soviet Union and the United States, establishing the basis for further cooperation, dialogue, and diplomatic relations between the two countries. This era of cooperation was never solidly established, however, and it diminished as Joseph Stalin attempted to eradicate vestiges of capitalism and to make the Soviet Union economically self-sufficient (Zich and Ellis, 1993). A few comments on this passage. First, there was a deep-seated distrust of all things Russian in the west. There was nothing special about the USSR. The US did not “distrust” the USSR for being “Marxist,” it distrusted it for being (superficially) Russian. Second, few, if any, in the United States could define “Bolshevism.” Ideology was not a concern. As always, the only time ideology mattered was when Russia sought to build alliances independent of the US. Nationalism, not socialism, was the sole enemy of capital. Third, while rhetorical sanctions were occasionally placed on the USSR, these had few teeth. Trade with the USSR was not an important part of American trade in general, but it was for the Soviets. Fourth, who would businessmen in the west have “sympathy for the 'great socialist experiment'”? The sheer amount of western aid, trade and investment in the USSR from the US and NATO has been understated. While no detail can be given here, Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution gives a listing of all investments from western capital in the USSR from primary sources. There was not a single area of heavy industry that was not built by the west. Stalin sought “economic self sufficiency only after the initial investments and skills were given. II. This essay is a summary of the thought of St. Valentin Sventsitsky. He is extraordinary in that he laid out a coherent social and political conception of the Orthodox church at the time when all was in flux. As always, the Old Testament prophets need to be first consulted since their entire purpose was the building of a just social order. That they are included in the canon of scripture proves that Christianity is inherently political and economic. It has a strong and detailed social ideal that cannot be ignored. He was a new martyr in that he was a supporter of the True Orthodox movement of St. Joseph of Petrograd. For his rejection of Metropolitan Sergius' infamous epistle, he was arrested on May 19 1928 and was exiled to the Irkutsk region of Siberia. This caused health problems and, starting in 1930, an infection was discovered in his liver. The regime refused him all medical treatment and he died on November 9 1931. his body remains in corrupt. St. Valentin was a Christian Socialist. This is why his political work is almost never mentioned in English and his works on the subject have been actively suppressed by the ROCOR and other Orthodox bodies in the west. Sobornost' is a word often used among Orthodox the world over. Understanding it is a matter of experience and intuition. St. Valentin understood the term as the fluidity of the church, an organic network of roles, ideas, institutions and actions that all partook of the singular and uncreated grace that Christ made real at Pentecost. Valentin realized a truth that even today, many refuse to countenance: there is no real culture such that elders and saints can emerge. Oligarchy and corruption are considered “normal” and thus, to act as a Christian is to appear insane. “Usury” for Valentin is a broad term. He uses it to refer to “rents” in general and, like Fr. Ivan Vysenskyj, sees parasitism and the essence of injustice. The main Christian perception of the world is that of a single, integral whole organism. The organism is a history of struggle that generates its internal development. There is no spatial nor temporal separation. Such distinctions are only the external manifestation of internal fragmentation, generating suffering and death, but in the world process seeking its universal unity (Sventitsky, Vol II, 246- 267) . The fall of man removed the innocent, intuitive perception of the world. This created the need for concepts and language as the relation between man and creation became hostile; one of mutual estrangement. He clarifies, What is progress? In contrast to the conventional view of progress as a gradual attainment of the universal, earthly well-being, Christianity does not see this as a quantitative concept. Progress is a slow and painful differentiation between good and evil, the gradual differentiation of mixed and disparate elements that slowly become irreconcilable. On the one hand, Christ will reunite matter with the divine principle, ready to restore harmony; on the other hand, the scattered, self- asserting atoms will be led by Antichrist. Universal happiness on this earth is impossible. The last days of world history are described in the Gospel as the days of unprecedented catastrophe. Hardening of hearts to the point of pathology as nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom and earth will see affliction, such as has never been seen. . . Christianity teaches the victory of Good, that self-assertion will not stand. . . (ibid) Progress is the reestablishment of sobornost of all creation, man and its relationship to the creator. Failures, suffering and dislocation make the need for this re-connection clearer and methods more relevant. What is Progress then? Progress is not the gradual evolutionary unfolding of the Kingdom of God on earth. The Gospel casts down all these human dreams. The last century was one of unprecedented tribulation, the last few were worse, the days of world catastrophe. Progress is not a continuous line, and positing such a line is illusory. Progress is the greater and more detailed differentiation between good and evil. . . The end of history - the final fight of Christ and Antichrist (ibid). In other words, the confrontation between good and evil, or that between the Will of God and the Will to Power, becomes sharper over time. Karl Marx speaks of history being the arena – among other things – where the number of classes steadily shrinks. Capitalism is the last gasp of this, having only two classes. Having only two makes the confrontation more obvious and sharp. The purpose of the entire world process is the embodiment of the divine idea in the world. The soul of the world, the beginning, connecting everything with its divine absolute beginning, has now been severed from the Divine and has created a chaos of disparate elements. . . The purpose of existence is the connection of the world with the divine. The “world soul” is all those transient and fragmented elements that come to be called “nature.” Clearly, this unity can become real only under the condition that it is absolute, but it can be absolute when it is a free union of nature and God (ibid) Christ is two natures united in a voluntary bond. It is “voluntary” in that they each have their own will. God does not force himself on man. The fact that his human nature has its own will means that it can fall away at any time, it is not forced to follow God's law. The same occurs in society. As Christ is the perfect unity of both natures within a single hypostasis (that is, in a single person) all of reality is commanded to develop the same. This is the purpose of history. ` Finally, he defines the conception in more detail: Everything that happens on earth – war, the emergence of states and cities, the birth and death of people – is part of the great struggle between good and evil. All the changes that we see, all phenomena, from handheld machines to steam engines to new styles of our clothes – everything is the result of a constant struggle between good and evil. No act of evil, no sinful thought passes without a trace. All serve to strengthen the good or to strengthen evil. Therefore, good and evil are developing equally and, over those thousands of years, each, little by little, is getting stronger, each in its own way. The confrontation continues to sharpen. The Gospel speaks of the last times. These are not happy times in the least. They are a terrible, unprecedented display of evil before its last, final struggle with goodness. All evil will unite around one person, the person of the Antichrist, the Beast, and stand against the light, against God (Letters, Vol II, 606- 612) The point is clear: history is the elimination of the detail and ambiguity between the two Wills, one to power and the other God's. The conception of Antichrist being a single person (or an entity that acts like one) is that the dichotomy becomes so sharp and clear that only a single individual can properly manifest it. Russia, that is, Orthodox Russia has the historical role of being the manifestation of the Orthodox Church, the summation of all earthly goods in her grace-filled mysteries. Her human element is flawed, something Valentin never tires of mentioning. This should not blind us to the fact that the church is as close as the Holy Spirit gets to having its own hypostasis. She is pure as to faith and doctrine. All of Eden is reconstituted on earth in God's church, yet her members are unable to properly control their ego in order to see it. The Program of the Brotherhood is the most comprehensive vision of St. Valentine's social ideas. It is overtly anarchist, as we read in section 2 of part 5: Any power of one man over another, resting on any external rank such as wealth, origin, tradition or external authority, from a Christian point of view, is undoubtedly unacceptable and therefore must, in the church, be abolished. Anarchy is our Christian ideal.2 The relationship among community members should be determined solely by internal criteria laid down by the Holy Spirit as each is gifted with different abilities. In this way within our communities we must eliminate all the dark consequences of public life. You must destroy the courts and prisons, and reject any participation in the war. Our life in Russia means the faithful will perform only those requirements which are not contrary to our faith, and therefore they should always and unconditionally refuse to perform military service. All the affairs of the community should be based on the elective principle. In elections we realize the main feature of community life – communion (общение). The clergy will be elected at all levels (The Struggle of the Christian Brotherhood and Our Program, 1905, 584-594). Economically speaking, his 1905 program rejects all private property and seeks a progressive income tax. All state land should pass into the local rural communities or their regional associations. Workers should control their industries. Labor protections, including a minimum wage and an 8 hour day are also demanded. The purpose of the Christian life is freedom, one that can only be granted by grace through the Holy Spirit. He rejects the libertarian, “negative” concept of freedom and says: The Christian idea of freedom is quite different. She is not only an external condition, but also the inner content. This inner content is necessary to distinguish between the two sides, firstly, what is commonly understand by freedom of will - the freedom of choice. Will is regarded not as a passive transmitter endless chain of causal relations, but enclosing a special property of being the root cause. It is not only the object of the action at her best, but she 2 В христианских общинах должен быть осуществлён полный идеал безвластия. freely, defines himself (Vol II, 162-188). Freedom is autonomy, not arbitrary choice. It is common among moderns to see freedom as an act unfettered by external cause and, because of that, it has the property of being free. However, a free act can only exist through deliberation. The act is free because the agent wills it knowledge from an array of other options. Something that is done out of impulse, habit or during sleep is not free for this reason. Unfreedom is the rule of passion. Things might be It is “choice” perverted by heteronomy. The drives to money and power are unfree. The spirit alone is autonomous. External situations that restrict one's free choice are clear enough. What is less obvious are the internal drives that lead to unfree acts. In the political realm, for example,he distinguishes what delineates free from unfree acts: Christians can and should deal with economic oppression by violence such as strikes and so on. However, they should not do this the sake of some personal passion such as dreams of a decadent and luxurious life, as is often done now and in the name of Christ but needs to be done from the foundation of freedom from these heteronomous drives (Letters, Vol II, 606-612). The Russian commune is the specifically Christian Socialist and Christian Anarchist alternative to modernity. The “Mystic Anarchist” idea appealed to Christians and non-Christians alike in the Russian empire at the time of its destruction. Writers such as Yuri Chulkov or V. Ivanov wrote on this question, though often from a non-Christian viewpoint. Alexander Blok argued that solipsism is the result of modernism and nominalism as the ego severs man from reality. The institutional setting that can best enhance this conception of freedom is one that is based on a Constituent assembly guaranteeing basic “negative” freedoms and transparent, independent courts. This is not so much an ideal of good government but an anarchist conception where the shrinkage of the state will lead, not to chaos, but to the development of strong communal ties that were not yet totally corroded in Russia at the time. If freedom is the true end of the Christian life, then the ethical ideal of the church can be expressed like this: Never treat the person as a means, but always as an end – this is the principle, which was proclaimed first by Christ, and then, many centuries later, by Kant. These are not empty words, but an absolute truth that contains much more than people think. It encapsulates a purely religious content in that it is connected with the idea of immortality. If a man is a transient phenomenon of the physical world, some combination of atoms constantly changing with age and finally changing into death, then death is nothing but an act of simple mechanical change one form to another. Here, not only can a person be treated as a means, he can be destroyed at will (Vol II, 247-247). Kant's synthesis of earlier Enlightenment thought was that an act is truly ethical if it derives from an autonomous will. This is one, as mentioned already, that derives from a will, from a soul, that has no drives or passions working on it. To the extent that drives such as lust or greed are interfering with the normal operation of the will, it is that much less free. As with political acts, these are legitimate only if they are autonomous: strikes and ideas that derive from a desire for revenge or hate are not legitimate and will soon show their true colors. If man is capable of this, then he has a soul that is spiritual and he is not merely a plaything of fate or causality. This also means that he is of infinite value since it contains an absolute end. A life at the level of an animal – the drives for nothing other than sex, money and power – reduce the actor to a non-human. Habitually and unreflectively, such a life can be determined to be totally unfree. Non-human animals exist as a part of a cosmic order that their instincts provide for the common good of all plant and animal life. It is a grand ecosystem where “communities” of matter interact synergistically. For a man to do this is a perversion. It is a necessary (and perhaps sufficient) requirement of any tyranny. For one living at this level, of course, there would be no realization of tyranny, since its opposite would be unknown. St. Valentin's conception is that someone condemning a system for being “authoritarian” only works if autonomy is the ultimate end. To condemn a system in this way only because the agent is not able to exercise such power or that their passions are not being satisfied has no moral worth. Such an agent would, if given the right, rule in the same tyrannical way. III. For both capitalism and Leninist socialism, work and production are the only real variables of social life. Valentin writes concerning this obsession: Overwork brings people to stupor, to the loss of all that is sacred in the human person; poverty and ignorance turns a man into an animal, pushing him to the tavern, to brothels, and into a mad frenzy of base passions. Wealth, on the other hand, destroys more people and more dulls the soul; it corrupts the heart and mind, awakens the animal lust and transforms man into something only semi- human, the state of most of our “natural leaders.” (Sventsitsky, 606-612) Stalin instituted a six day week, eliminating Sunday, and forced labor to work practically each waking hour. This became the norm until his death, but that it was perfectly compatible with living in a “worker's paradise” shows that labor was not a concern for socialism. “The workers” was a non-existent ideal in a theory of the world that was not supposed to have ideals. Trotsky used the term for those supporting Jewish or communist goals. Hence, Armand Hammer was a “worker” while a poor Orthodox peasant is a “capitalist.” This justified the destruction of monasteries, Old Believer settlements and all other forms of idealist socialism. The socialist destroyed actual, functioning manifestations of socialism in order to build a socialist paradise. If a group of men come to power concerned only with creating a state serving the workers, then all successful forms of non-alienated labor would not only be preserved, but seen as examples for future development. Part of my argument that Leninism had no interest in labor at all is shown by the destruction of all tried and true communal forms of non-alienated labor. The commune was replaced by the collective. The former was non-alienated, but it resisted the imposition of the party. The latter was the result of the former's destruction. It was not a community, it was a collective. The former is organic, the latter is mechanistic. In this vein, he writes, Christians should obey the authorities as long as long as they do not require anything contrary to God's commandments. If they demand some action that Christ has forbidden, you need to obey Christ, not the regime. . . If the king calls himself God, he violates the commandments of Christ. To accept this is a crime. Christian baptism is a betrothal to Christ and, as a result, must faithfully serve Christ (ibid) It is shocking to read how, since Patriarch Sergius did nothing explicitly against the canons, he was a legitimate patriarch. Hence, by this line of reasoning, one can work with and for the destruction of the church and still be fully compliant with canon law. This might be an extreme example of legalism and its transformation into a totem, but it is a common and unsettling one. He writes to the clergy under the Reds: Grace has abandoned you, you've abandoned your people. You've locked yourself in a warm house, indifferent to the people – you're pathetic, you're dead. You put expediency over truth and duty. The church is gone, you serve nothing. You've lost the power to discern the spirit and where it is. You've committed the worst sin: the church of Christ was entrusted to you and you gave it over to the Beast. You slavishly obey the world and its powers. The shepherd sits with the prosecutor, the representative of pagan power – the executioner – and is paid from the same funds that strangle the martyrs. . . this hideous union . . . (ibid) Valentin was not merely reproaching the Red clerics, but he had the same harsh words to those serving the Petrograd bureaucracy as well. His harsh words are purely in tune with the prophets and is justified given the situation he is addressing. The fact that these clergy were claiming that they had “violated no canon” shows just how limited canonical analysis is. “On the Program of the Volunteer Army” is a brief pamphlet for the masses. It is a reply to certain patriotic forces seeking the unity of a great Russia. While not rejecting this notion, he sees it as a means to cover over severe natural problems. He writes: We cannot be a “United Russia,” while the population is subjugated to the power of autocratic commissioners from top and bottom; There cannot be a single Russia with no civil liberty provided by law. There can be no unified Russia when a single class of the population dreams of dictatorship over the rest; There can not be a single Russia with no fair trials; There is no unified Russia without protecting the fruits of honest labor. It is precisely this that is not protected. However, the massive conglomerates of the elite as considered “sacred”; There can be no great Russia, until the family hearth is protected against rapists; There can be no great Russia until every Russian citizen will not be granted the right to profess the Orthodox faith; To ensure the solidity of civil liberties, the family as an untouchable sanctuary, and to protect the sacred rights of the Orthodox Church – Without these, there can be no unified Russia. Our Volunteers raised the sword for the sake of a unified Russia. In our case, that means that they came to the defense of trampled freedoms, dishonored the family and the persecuted Church! (Sventsitsky AB. Invisible Threads, Moscow 2009: 388-402). There is no nationalism without socialism, there is no Christianity without social equality. Here, of course, we use “socialism” in the broadest sense, one, as St. Valentin states, is not statist but idealist and communal. What does he mean? Any political vision that does not start from the group up is authoritarian and tyrannical in that it is unnatural. For the human conversation, our practical needs give birth to ideals, and these ideals give birth to the heights of cognition. This does not mean that these ideals are generated by utility, only that we discover them through necessity. The solution can only come from the parish. He has a four part plan for the reconstruction of the Russian church that he lays out in his Open letter to the Bishops of the Russian Church. The first is the reconstruction of the parish. He writes: The parish must become a living unit, living the full life of the Church and organically bringing together the clergy and the laity. To create this unity is necessary that the priest be not an alien, an unknown person appointed from a bureaucratic agency in distant St. Petersburg. Believers should have the right to elect from its own ranks their priests and deacons. . . . (1905, Vol II, 556-560) Second, that the parish become an economic unit; a central economic part of the community. Priests should be maintained by the people themselves, not by the state. He is upset by some fees charged by rural priests (who at the time were very poor) that make them more “like salesmen and results in an almost universally hostile or contemptuous attitude to the clergy.” Third, the parish must be tied to the commune and the local neighborhood. In Peter the Great's massive purge of the church, thousands of rural parishes were closed and others consolidated. Many parishioners wee strangers to one another, very much like the situation in modernity. The goal is that “believers will become a single community living a collective life.”3 He says in addition that, as a result of this, “The multitude of believers will be one heart and one soul, and no property will be one's own, but all they will have in common; and there will be none in dire need since everything will be distributed according to the needs of each.” Finally, that the royal priesthood of the laity needs to be stressed. Having the priesthood as a caste is a Roman Catholic doctrine coming from the Gregorian Reforms and is not part of the Orthodox life. Once the church is reformed on this basis, the monastics, white clergy and laity will be seen as equals, each with different functions rather than as forms of control. He summarizes his views like this: The return of the church to the people is associated with the restoration of the true life of the parish. The church will heal from its [former] blindness: the land and society will again fall into its field of view and the Christian attitude will be restored. . . . The laity cannot be hierarchically organized as if they are a “lower” 3 The original reads: Из отдельных посетителей храма -- прихожан -- верующие станут единой общиной, живущей коллективной жизнью. I took only a portion of this. part of the church, but the conciliar (соборным) consciousness of the church will be regained. The church must be a part of all aspects of life and must respond as the sobor, the true body of Christ, which bears in itself the mind of Christ. This answer is a new revelation, because the fullness of Christ's truth we do not have in ourselves, but the unity in life and mind (ibid). This is very similar to Andrei, the bishop of Ufa, in his socialist view of a new Russia. Like Valentin, his vision is actively suppressed by western Orthodox people who fear any concern about oligarchy is tantamount to “socialism.” Valentin was arrested for these and other utterances of his, but was acquitted at the St. Petersburg Judicial Chamber on November 4 1906. There are many kinds of socialism, and it need not be the materialist, Judaic and Marxian sort. Regardless, fears about socialism have nothing to do with people spending millions on luxuries while the poor are down the street from them. The “conciliar” consciousness of the church – sobornost' – is the understanding of the church and Christina society as a single organism taking into itself external form and inner content. These terms and boundaries are, at best, consequences of human sin and weakness. There is no “individual” and no “collective,” but a living community that makes room for both as synergistically interdependent. Rational and instinctive, ideal and real, thought and feeling, law and custom are all gathered into a single interdependent whole. It is the synthesis of the one and the many, but a synthesis that can only be brought about by self-sacrificing love. It is a function of grace, but is really the community of truly autonomous (not “free”) people as defined above. IV. The single most powerful work of social thought penned by Valentin was his rhetorically potent: “Letter to the Bourgeoisie.” It is so powerful that it will be reproduced in its entirety: Your silk and gloss – your self-satisfaction and “refinement” of your external life hides the insane, miserable, mutilated soul. Its ugly claws clutch the ghoulish monster, the freak whose name is “Capital.” Your social life is full of servility, the clergy serve with their cardinals robes and diamond miters. . . In your churches, not a living soul. Those remaining to protect their riches are dead – they are Pharisees. “Woe unto you that are rich! . . . Woe unto you that are full! . . . Woe unto you that laugh now!” However, since you have dropped your clown outfit and openly declared yourself the priests of the golden idol, you pretend still to hide behind the doctrine of Him who mercilessly unmasked and exposed your fraud of your perfidy! . . . It is precisely what you mock that you consider irreplaceable. In Acts we read: “. . . the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and one soul, and no one called anything his own, but all was held had in common. . . .They sold their possessions and goods, and parted with them to all who had need.” Because of this, the Apostle continues, “There was no lack among them, those wealthy sold their goods, and the money they brought with them was more than sufficient for the needs of all (Acts 4). The Canons state explicitly that you are to “Divide everything with your brother and do not say you possess anything” (Canon 12 of the Apostles). The lords of old divided the land into pieces, which are called “states,” and