Schmemann and Social Justice
On reading the Orthodox priest's broadcast talks and diaries
Tonight I finished writing a foreword to a forthcoming volume of broadcast talks delivered by the Orthodox priest Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983), a leading Russian-American theologian. For thirty years, Radio Liberty beamed Father Schmemann’s talks about Christian faith and culture to listeners in the Soviet Union. He began on the same month in 1953 that Stalin died, and continued until his death. The press at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, which he helped found and lead, has collected and translated them, and will be publishing them soon.
They are remarkable documents, and not just because of their historical value. What struck me about them is how contemporary they are. Father Schmemann, a deeply cultured man, was speaking to a people who had seen their churches closed (and sometimes demolished), their clergy jailed or killed, and their religious heritage systematically erased. He spoke to them as if they had little idea of what Christianity is, or, if they did, as if they had only heard a cartoonishly hostile version of it. What’s amazing about these little talks is how relevant they are to post-Christian America.
I have been struggling in my interviews for Live Not By Lies to explain the difference between the Christian idea of social justice, and the woke progressive idea. I haven’t been able to nail it precisely, but one of Father Schmemann’s talks clarified it perfectly. Here’s an excerpt from the book (N.B., this translation is from an early manuscript, and might not reflect the finished volume). The emphasis below is mine:
Take for example the creative world of Dostoevsky, one of the founders of modern Christian-inspired literature. Whichever of his great novels we take—Crime and Punishment or The Possessed, The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov—we discover in them human tragedy, but tragedy in all its depths, for it is the tragedy of free man. This tragedy can not be reduced either to the economy, or to the social system, nor to physiology and anatomy, although all these elements play their role there. But Dostoevsky's man is shown above all as a complex being, irreducible to one formula, and then shown as free, as a free being, but also capable of rising; capable of not only committing monstrous crimes, falling into evil, sin, debauchery, but also wanting to return to his pristine height and purity. Dostoevsky appeared when faith in man, in his freedom and complexity, was replaced by a belief in society, science, etc. We must understand and be horrified that all modern ideologies of a happy world and lifestyle not only substitute the person with society, but simply deny his personality entirely .
And this is where we find the watershed between Christian and non-Christian literature. According to the first, the world depends on man and his freedom; according to the second man depends entirely on the world and such impersonal values as “social structure,” “economic structure,” etc. And here in one world, no matter how much sin, evil and suffering there may be in him, a person can breathe, and in another, with seemingly non-stop fuss over him, he is suffocating. And not only does man suffocate, but literature itself, becomes simplistic, schematic and, in the final analysis, propagandistic, which means—it ceases to be creative. And this, of course, is not accidental, because where there is no longer the recognition of the individual, nor also the belief in the personality, there sooner or later begins the denial of creativity. It is impossible to believe only in the collective and at the same time to permit the existence of that which is ultimately personal, which is what all creativity is. It can not be said that everything, absolutely everything in the world is decidedly determined from the outside, and simultaneously recognize the internal freedom of man. That is why, I repeat, only the literature created by the writers of Christian inspiration found itself in our social and materialistic age to be truly free and creative.
[UPDATE: St. Vladimir’s Press tells me that this quote is from Volume II of the Schmemann talks, which will be out next year. I read them all in a single file, and wasn’t aware that they were going to be released in two volumes. — RD]
There it is. The core difference between the rival ideas of justice has to do with the question: What is man? For the Christian, a socially just society is one that honors the dignity of each individual man as created in the imago Dei, but also possessing freedom to choose good and evil. Peter Maurin, who with Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker movement, defined a good society as one that makes it easier to be good. Of course goodness is defined for the Christian by the teachings of the Bible. No society that denies Biblical teaching can ever be fully just.
What we call social justice today, in a contemporary secular way, defines itself wholly in materialistic terms. The individual becomes nothing more than a bearer of his identity, within the cosmology of identity politics. Justice is determined mechanically, as if judging the affairs of men was no different than herding sheep or sorting butterbeans. Social justice, understood in this way, becomes monstrous. In my book, I quote the 1918 instruction of Martin Latsis, head of the Bolshevik secret police in Ukraine, to agents carrying out the Red Terror:
Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.
The idea, you see, is that justice is not something owed to individuals, on the basis of what they have done, but something owed to classes, on the basis of who they are. And lest you think that social justice can never have anything to do with terror, I remind you of Robespierre’s infamous justification for the Terror of the French Revolution:
Terror is nothing other than justice, prompt, severe, inflexible; it is therefore an emanation of virtue… .
This is what you get when you abandon the ideas of individual dignity, and of mercy. It might not lead to the guillotine or the gulag, but it will certainly lead to gross injustice.
While writing my foreword, I returned to The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973-1983. I first discovered them before I became Orthodox, by reading this long, wonderful 2001 review of them by Richard John Neuhaus. Father Neuhaus began:
Father Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983) is one of the very important people in my life. It is not simply that he helped form some of my ideas, especially about liturgy, or gave me a feel for realities about which I knew little, such as Orthodoxy. He was a great spirit; he lived robustly; he had a confident but not corrosive disdain for the banalities of fashionable thought. He was older and more cosmopolitan than I. He was fun to be with, and one left every meeting with the sense that life could be more, and the resolve to let it be so.
Read the whole thing to get an idea of Schmemann’s personality. I bought the book back in 2001 on the strength of Neuhaus’s review, and devoured it. Going back through it these past couple of days, for the first time in years (maybe for the first time since I became Orthodox in 2006), it was interesting to see which passages I had underlined. Here was one:
“There is no point in converting people to Christ if they do not convert their vision of the world and of life, since Christ then becomes merely a symbol for all that we love and want already –without Him. This kind of Christianity is more terrifying than agnosticism or hedonism.”
That resonated with me because I have been watching with increasing dismay the behavior of many Christians who, like me, identify with the theologically and morally conservative side. The conflation of the Kingdom of God with achieving political power in this world has led in these past few weeks to scandalous grotesqueries. Of course I strongly believe that progressive Christianity often does the same thing. If Christianity were nothing more than the Republican or Democratic parties at prayer, then to hell with it. What would be the point? I see Father Schmemann’s revulsion at this kind of Christianity (which does not have to be political to be this-worldly, mind you). At least agnosticism and hedonism don’t profane the sacred.
But Schmemann also rebels against a Christianity that is too otherworldly. Another passage I marked (and Neuhaus also cited):
“Since the Orthodox world was and is inevitably and even radically changing, we have to recognize, as the first symptom of the crisis, a deep schizophrenia which has slowly penetrated the Orthodox mentality: life in an unreal, nonexisting world, firmly affirmed as real and existing. Orthodox consciousness did not notice the fall of Byzantium, Peter the Great’s reforms, the Revolution; it did not notice the revolution of the mind, of science, of lifestyles, forms of life. . . . In brief, it did not notice history.”
The priest was reacting against what he regarded as the turgid formalism of Russian Orthodoxy, especially in exile. Maybe he was talking about Orthodoxy worldwide; it’s hard to say. It is strange to me to read those words as a convert to Orthodoxy of 14 years. That has not been my experience worshiping as an American Orthodox, in our parishes. But he wrote that passage in 1974. A lot has changed in Orthodoxy since then. I wonder what he would think about us now?
He wrote this about the spirit of Western Christianity after attending an Episcopal service as a guest:
Following the service — traditional, festive — I thought about the deeply rooted, hopeless well-being of the Christian West, maybe even the irreparable bourgeois state of Western Christianity. All the words, the rites, the prayers presuppose, reveal, make you feel some great tragedy, but tragedy in the Greek sense of the world.
What God reveals to people is unheard, impossible, and the tragedy consists of this deafness. And this revelation can no longer penetrate Western life without ripping it apart. … Genuine Christianity is bound to disturb the hears with this tearing — that is the force of eschatology. But one does not feel it in these smooth ceremonies, where everything is neat, right, but without eschatological ‘other-worldliness.’ This is, maybe, the basic spiritual quality of any bourgeois state of mind. It is closed to the sense of tragedy to which the very existence of God condemns us.
Maybe it is the absence of the poor and the suffering, but then I realized that this was not the reason. In Byzantium, in St. Sophia, there probably was a thousand times more gold and riches, but Byzantium was not bourgeois. There always should remain a feeling of absolute incommensurability; it is the knowledge that there is but one sadness, which is not to be a saint; it is the hearing of the call, the breath, that cannot be reduced to ‘social problems’ nor to ‘the place of the church in the contemporary world,’ nor to a debate about ministry.
I do have that feeling in Orthodox liturgies — the feeling that one is both comforted and confronted. It’s an unusual sentiment, and I don’t think I can convey it properly. After you have become accustomed to Orthodox worship, nothing can put you more in a mood receptive to God than to hear those familiar chants, to stand amid those icons, to smell that incense, to say those same prayers. It feels like home. But at the same time, the evidence of your senses, if nothing else, tells you that you stand (you always stand!) on holy ground. Whatever else Orthodoxy in America is, it’s not bourgeois. It’s too weird for that. At the same time, bourgeois people like me come to it. The point is to be converted by it, to learn by the fasts, the prayers, and the way of Orthodox life to train our hearts to want what Christ says we should want.
Weird: after fourteen years of living as Orthodox, I feel less capable of explaining it today than I did after two years of being Orthodox. But back then, I had no idea how much there was to learn. I was still under the impression that Orthodoxy was a set of doctrines and propositions that one could affirm intellectually. There is that, but it’s really far more about a way of life that requires ongoing conversion of the heart. You can read in a book about how a violin is created, but you can only learn to play a violin by doing it. Orthodoxy is like that. I cannot imagine any other life for myself.
It was just over a year ago that I went to Russia for the first time. It was late October/early November, and I didn’t think it would be that cold. Wrong! In St. Petersburg, the wind was so cold off the Neva River that I had to buy an ushanka, the Russian style fur hat. My little piddly-pop fleece beanie did me no good. In theory, I would love to experience a real Russian winter, for once. I find winter so beautiful, and as someone who lives in a place with gruesomely long, hot, humid summers, the opposite seems attractive to me.
But that’s not possible. I’ve had an immune system condition called Raynaud’s Syndrome for about twenty years. It amounts to a kind of allergy to cold. When exposed to cold, the capillaries on one’s feet and hands spasm, causing the blood to rush out, which in turn makes them really cold. Painfully so. It is a progressive disorder, so it has gotten worse for me as I’ve aged. Now I have to wear thick wool socks in bed even in the summer. In winter, I double up on socks, and still, like right now, my feet are cold, and it feels like my energy is draining out of my body. This, even though it is not cold in our house.
The ushanka is really, really warm. There was exactly one day last winter in Louisiana that I could wear it. I had more fun wearing it inside to align my chakras with my friend Ignatius J. Reilly:
Here’s a story from a reader about the places where he feels most at home in the world:
My place is climbing out of a wet (very wet) tent in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Northern Minnesota. It was calm and beautiful, minus the mosquitos the size of hummingbirds and the rousing Boy Scouts, including my oldest son, anxious to see Native American pictographs. My cup of coffee and the sort of dry log I sat on were all I needed.
My place is climbing out of a frost covered tent halfway up a mountain in the staggering beauty of Philmont Scout Ranch, New Mexico. The mosquitos were less aggressive yet still the Boy Scouts, including my middle son, were anxiously moving as the promise of shooting black powder rifles was on the day’s agenda. My cup of coffee and the sort of dry log I sat on were all I needed.
My place is climbing out of a dew and mosquito covered tent in the still heat of the Atchafalaya Swamp in the southwest part of Louisiana. You couldn’t tell the mosquitos from the morning damp, dripping from the Cypress. And the Boy Scouts, including my youngest son, were anxious to get going as an airboat ride was on the day’s schedule. My cup of coffee and a sort of dry log I sat on were all I needed.
My place is climbing out of amazingly dry tent in the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska. There are plenty of mosquitos, but no boys. Only me and God. The boys are grown. The Boy Scouts a newly distant memory. My cup of coffee and the pleasantly dry log I sat on were all I needed.
There are many tents and many mosquitos and many cups of coffee. The camps were 5 miles from home and thousands of miles from home. God revealed his creative genius on those mornings, with that coffee cup on that log.
So, my answer is this. My place is where the mosquitos are. I bring my trusty, dented festooned travel mug. I wake, I watch, I am still and know that he is God.
More stories about old and dying animals. This one from Washington state:
Sorry to hear about Roscoe. Our wonder dog, Gracie, is also nearing the end of her life and it is breaking our hearts. Gracie's our "bario" dog. She was found wandering the mean streets of Pasco, Washington, and dumped in the city dog pound. Unfortunately, mongrel black dogs don't get as much love as other dogs. When Sandy found her, she was only days from being sent off and killed. This particular pound kept dogs for three months and if they aren't adopted by then, it's curtains. I can't describe how much I love that dog. When she was younger, she could run for miles, and when I watched her racing with the wind (and winning most of the time), I just knew I was seeing joy in action. She'd come up on the porch after a morning run, all covered with burrs and dried grass, panting hard, but so full of life I could almost feel it like sunshine on my skin. As I brushed her coat, I'd ask her where she'd gone. Oregon? We lived just a couple of miles from the border. All the way to California and back? Idaho? She was magical. She still goes on walks with us, but her sight and hearing are failing, and she can no longer jump up into the cab of my truck, one of her favorite places to be, heading out with me in the truck for some grand adventure -- off to the dump, for example, or maybe the lumberyard, or, when she was young and spry, along some dusty road for a day hike in the Olympic Mountains. Now I have to lift her into the truck, and she can no longer jump out on her own. She'll look down at the drop and then up at me, and I understand: "Boss, I need your help." So I do. So, her time is coming and I will miss her so very much when she's gone.
Here’s another one:
I have a dog photo, which is now the cover photo on my phone. This is my husband, my granddaughter and the last photo of our labradoodle, Foto. So much about this picture makes me happy. You can see my 3 year old granddaughter was hopping along, holding the leash. It was God working, that I was trailing the trio and just happened to snap a picture. This was Foto’s last walk. We had him put down shortly after this. At 13 1/2, he had a benign growth in his mouth such that he could no longer eat well and he kept getting skinnier and weaker. He still loved his walks, even though they got shorter and shorter. Just a couple of weeks ago, through a friend of a friend deal, we got a new dog. It took nine months for us to be ready for a new dog. It took time but it’s great having him around.
I don’t remember where I heard or read this, but a quote that stays in my mind is that you don’t get the dog you want, you get the dog you need. Praying that at the right time, after you’ve mourned your beloved Roscoe, the right dog comes into your life.
From a Colorado reader:
The recent writings about Roscoe and other's beloved pets has stirred memories of my favorite dog.
Shadow came to us in the wake of my parents divorce. My dad owned a motel in a small town here in Colorado called Redstone (which you should visit sometime if you ever want to really get away). The town at the time maybe had 50 full time residents, and three motels. My dad received a call from another motel owner saying that someone had left a dog, and the man was planning to put him down unless someone decided to claim him. My dad decided to go pick him up. Shadow was some sort of hound mix (golden fur, built like a lab, with a very distinct hound shaped head). It really did seem like he knew he had been rescued, and he seemed to become a loyal member of the family almost immediately. Like my dad, he was a free spirit, not loving being contained in any way, which wasn't an issue in Redstone. Shadow was certainly my father's dog, but he loved me and really anyone who would pet him. I've never known another dog who just seemed to so thoroughly enjoy humans in general. He was playful, he would snuggle up on the couch, and he would go out wandering whenever he had the chance. Some of the best memories of my life are my childhood summers in Redstone, of which Shadow was always a part.
My dad eventually moved to an even smaller town called Marble (he didn't like having neighbors for various reasons). Shadow became somewhat of a community dog. He would disappear for days but he would always make his way back to our house. On numerous occasions, we received pictures in the mail of Shadow hanging out on some neighbors couch. Turns out several people in Marble would feed Shadow and let him stay until he asked to be let out, and then he would wander on to the next place. But, like I said before, he would always make his way back home.
In the Spring of 2002, when I was 15, my dad road tripped out to California to take care of his dying Aunt. There is a lot more to what I am about to write, but this story is more about Shadow so I will keep it brief. My relationship with my dad had deteriorated for numerous reasons, a big one being that he had relapsed into drug and alcohol use. Before he left, we got into a huge fight. Unfortunately, that was to be the last face to face interaction I had with him. He fell asleep at the wheel driving back from California, overcorrected when the truck hit those bumps on the side of the road, rolled, and was ejected out the front window. He wasn't wearing a seatbelt. I was devastated when a police officer from Utah called us to inform my family that he had been killed. As you may expect, this has become a defining event of my life.
In the midst of mourning the first few days after receiving the news, we received a call from my dad's girlfriend at the time. She told us that a trucker in Utah had found Shadow at a truck stop which ended up being a few miles away from where my dad crashed. Somehow he had survived the accident, and, in very Shadow fashion, wandered to the nearest place with people. This trucker called the number on his tag, and my dad's girlfriend happened to answer. The trucker was on his way through Colorado, so he arranged to meet my dad's girlfriend and return Shadow to us. In the midst of a horrific tragedy, Shadow coming back to us has always felt like a divine intervention to me. He was like an angel to comfort me and my family through our grieving.
Shadow moved in with us at my mom's house, which was in a bigger town where he wouldn't be free to roam like he could in Redstone. That first summer was fine because I was home a lot during the day with my younger brother. However, when school started in the fall he started escaping from our yard during the day. He would either come find me at football practice (this happened several times) or he would wander to the middle school where my brother was. Unfortunately, he was picked up by dog catchers a few times and my mom was fined. This became such a regular occurrence that he ended up in the newspaper under the cops and blotters section (Shadow the dog was found roaming around the middle school again). My mom decided that we couldn't take care of him and he needed to be with someone who was with him all day. There was an older gentleman that my mom knew who had recently lost his dog, so my mom offered Shadow to him. I was devastated to lose Shadow, and I was angry at my mom for giving him away. However, I eventually realized it was for the best. This man lived alone and worked from home, much like my dad did. In some ways it seems like Shadow had been the angel for my family that he needed to be, and it was time for him to move on and be a companion to someone who needed him more than we did.
I saw Shadow a few times after we gave him away, and his new owner would send us pictures of him occasionally. Shadow was already old when we parted with him, and he died a few years later, but his owner told us he was happy and peaceful. This man said he was one of the best dogs he ever had. I don't doubt it. Shadow is the best dog I have ever had as well. I've teared up several times in writing this to you. A mix of sadness and joy for sure. It's always this way when I reflect on my father's death and the part Shadow played in that story.
My wife and I have a family dog now, the first I have had in my adult life. She is a 90 lb Rottweiler named Bernie. She is a wonderful dog and loves our little girls like they are her own pups. We got her before we had kids, and she has definitely become a little bit of an afterthought since they came into our lives. Your musings about Roscoe have touched my heart and directed it back towards her. She is probably half way through her life now, which means we may have her for 3-5 more years. I want to make the best of that, because it will truly be heartbreaking for me, my wife, and my kids when her time comes.
Thanks for all this, readers.