Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, by Patrick Lally Michelson (review)

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1 Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, by Patrick Lally Michelson (review) Alexandra Medzibrodszky Ab Imperio, 2/2018, pp (Review) Published by Ab Imperio DOI: For additional information about this article Access provided by Indiana University Libraries (25 Sep :20 GMT)

2 Alexandra MEDZIBRODSZKY Patrick Lally Michelson, Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, (University of Wisconsin Press, 2017). 307 pp. Index. ISBN: Beyond the Monastery Walls reconstructs the asceticism discourse in Imperial Russia over the century preceding the outbreak of World War I. The book neatly demonstrates that the history of asceticism as discourse and ideology has been characterized by competing interpretations, diverging conceptual horizons, and an array of paradoxes. Michelson also highlights in this cacophonic diversity an underlying commonality: asceticism was seen as the key to understanding a people s national confessional essence and its historical trajectory (P. 10) as a shared hermeneutics in Russia and in the larger European context. The aim of this fascinating book is to understand the way asceticism discourse came to occupy a central place in Russian Orthodox thought, and to recover all the divergent meanings it acquired throughout a century of modern Russian history. The main focus of chapter 1 is the prehistory of asceticism discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Russia and in Europe. The reigns of Peter I and Ab Imperio, 2/2018 Catherine II were characterized by the marginalization of monasteries and ascetics modes of life. The beginning of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed the advent of a monastic revival. Asceticism accompanying the revival contributed to the creation of linguistic and conceptual boundaries within and outside of church walls. Monastic revival also challenged synodal authority, and asceticism discourse became a conceptual and rhetorical arena (P. 36) where debates about ecclesiastical authority took place. During the reign of Nicholas I ( ), asceticism became relevant for lay religious thinkers such as Pyotr Chaadaev and the Slavophiles, Aleksei Khomiakov, and Ivan Kireevskii. Echoing German romantic understandings of the Volk, Slavophile thinkers propagated the idea that the Russian people (the narod) possessed a distinct Orthodox epistemology that should be brought to state and society in order to lead Russia back to its Sonderweg. Chapter 2 takes a step back chronologically, to the reign of Alexander I ( ), in order to capture the beginning of the ascetic revolution behind the walls of theological academies. This section reconstructs the history of the recovery of patristic asceticism by Orthodox theological academies at the beginning of the nineteenth 255

3 Рецензии/Reviews century. 1 These academies published patristic texts in Russian translation in their periodicals, infusing the Orthodox scholarship with ascetic tropes and bringing patristic heritage to the attention of the public. Under the leadership of prominent figures such as Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) and future Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov), theological academies strove for interpretative authority and became a gateway and vessel of confessional authenticity in Russia (P. 72). Patristic texts by Isaac the Syrian or Basil the Great highlighted positive aspects of asceticism, for instance, the potential for moral and psychological renovation. One of the most exciting chapters in the book is chapter 3, which focuses on a debate between critiques and defenders of asceticism. Michelson shows that Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the radical intelligentsia, drawing on German materialist readings, understood asceticism as a neurological disorder that could be cured by atheism. The novel What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky, the Bible of the radical intelligentsia, aimed at disrupting and inverting conventions of Orthodox asceticism by creating a new stereotype of the irreligious, ascetic revolutionary. Chernyshevsky s secularization of asceticism discourse triggered responses by church members such as Pamfil Danilovich Iurkevich. The latter s Orthodox philosophical asceticism was a criticism of materialist anthropology underlying revolutionary politics. In Iurkevich s interpretation, asceticism was transformed into a bulwark against the politics of scientific atheism and into a weapon to combat revolutionary ideology. In the years following Emancipation (1861), the meaning of asceticism became intermingled with questions about Russian nationalism, historical trajectory, and social order. For Iurkevich, Orthodox asceticism was not only beneficial but also necessary for the formation of Russian identity. For Chernyshevsky and the radical intelligentsia, asceticism represented an obstacle in the life of the narod that needed to be eliminated. Chapter 4 investigates how lay religious thinkers contributed to the shaping of asceticism discourse in the second half of the nineteenth century. During this period, asceticism became a widely shared hermeneutic and ideology among educated society, as national and confessional issues became increasingly conflated. Asceticism was 1 Russian Orthodox dukhovnye akademii were institutions of higher education (like universities) and are usually translated as theological or spiritual academies in the literature. There were four of them in the Russian Empire, in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan. The author speaks of clerical academies in the book. 256

4 frequently used by churchmen and lay thinkers as a device to construct myths about the essence of Orthodoxy and the Russian narod. Fedor Dostoevsky, for instance, in his last novel The Brothers Karamazov, reformulated Orthodox asceticism by privileging a shared practice of active love as the basis of asceticism. Another thinker, Konstantin Leont ev, delegated primary importance to asceticism in his efforts to construct a distinct Byzantine Orthodox historical-cultural type, in the spirit of Pan-Orthodoxy. Philosopher Vladimir Solov ev, in Michelson s interpretation, had an ambiguous relationship to asceticism, but eventually divorced his central idea of deification and deified human society from ascetic feats and patristic heritage. The chapter presents a wide array of potential and actualized meanings attached to asceticism and shows that contrary to claims that asceticism would salvage and unite the people it actually divided the public and the Church. The last chapter of the book focuses on ascetic tropes and myths that occupied a central place in Russian Orthodox thought during the Revolution of and World War I. New aspects emerged in the conceptualization of asceticism as practice and as discourse, Ab Imperio, 2/2018 including the medical (especially psychological) and moral viewpoints. Advocates of asceticism ascribed diagnostic and therapeutic value to it, while critics identified asceticism as the result of physical and psychological deprivation and treated it as a disease that could become a national epidemic (P. 184). 2 Popular piety and ideas by lay religious thinkers acquired interpretative authority over questions of authenticity, while academic discord prevailed regarding the meaning of asceticism. Theologian Ivan Popov and members of the new generation of the Orthodox intelligentsia, Sergei Bulgakov and Pavel Florensky, made attempts to make Orthodoxy meaningful and accessible to secular society and focused on the potential of asceticism to combat atheistic, revolutionary turmoil. For many religious thinkers, lay and academic, the world war was a messianic clash between a godless German civilization and a godly Orthodox Russian one. By the time of the outbreak of the war, asceticism discourse became established and familiar, a shared, normative language (P. 216) to express ideas about Russia and its people. The book ends with an epilogue sketching the history of asceticism discourse among émigré Russian 2 On conflation of medical and religious discourse, see Daniel Beer. The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church ( ) // Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History Vol. 5. No. 3. Pp

5 Рецензии/Reviews thinkers and in contemporary Russia. Nikolai Berdiaev, one of the most well-known Russian religious philosophers in the West, rejected earlier interpretations after the revolution, and identified the monasticascetic ethos of Orthodoxy as a precondition for the flourishing of the anti-christian Gnosticism of the Bolsheviks. In this interpretation, asceticism did not serve as an antidote to revolutionary politics, but anticipated and prepared the scene for the Bolshevik revolution. For the majority of religious thinkers abroad, however, asceticism remained an important and often instrumentalized linguistic reservoir (P. 222), especially for George Florovsky and the Neo-Patristic movement. In contemporary Russia, ascetic practices and discourses are associated with confessional and nationalist mythologies, highlighting the exceptionalism of the Russian people and their faith. Michelson s book belongs to the current of research that emerged after a religious turn took place in Russian historiography in the 1990s, following Gregory L. Freeze s critique of the traditional image of the Russian Orthodox Church as a handmaiden of the state. 3 Over the past decades, scholars ventured into uncharted territories to reconstruct the heterogeneity of religious phenomena and the dynamic nature of Russian Orthodoxy, especially in the field of lived religion. 4 Michelson s work reflects this research framework and spirit, but it also shifts the focus to a new aspect, to the study of religious discourse and language. 5 This well-written, comprehensive history of asceticism discourse in modern Russia highlights three important findings: hermeneutical shifts in interpretative authority; the conflation of national and confessional mythmaking; and asceti- 3 Gregory L. Freeze. Handmaiden of the State? The Church in Imperial Russia Reconsidered // The Journal of Ecclesiastical History Vol. 36. Pp See Nadieszda Kizenko. A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. University Park, 2000; Vera Shevzov. Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution. New York, 2004; Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Eds.). Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia. Bloomington, 2007; Heather J. Coleman (Ed.). Orthodox Christianity in Imperial Russia: A Source Book on Lived Religion. Bloomington, 2014; and Manfred Hildermeier and Elise Kimerling Wirtschafter (Eds.). Church and Society in Modern Russia: Essays in Honor of Gregory L. Freeze. Wiesbaden, This approach was introduced in an earlier volume, Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia, edited by Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, which highlighted the significance of context in understanding Russian religious thought: Patrick Lally Michelson and Judith Deutsch Kornblatt (Eds.). Thinking Orthodox in Modern Russia: Culture, History, Context. Madison,

6 cism as a contested key concept in Russian intellectual history. The reconstruction of the hermeneutical shifts contributes to the better understanding of power relations, knowledge production, and discourse in the Russian Empire. The first shift occurred at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when asceticism discourse moved beyond the walls of monasteries (and the Holy Synod), and spread in theological academies. Due to their prominent role in the recovery of patristic heritage, these academies could put forward a claim for interpretative authority in religious matters. Another shift occurred in the second half of the nineteenth century, when asceticism discourse transcended the church domain, and lay religious thinkers acquired interpretative authority as they introduced ascetic tropes to the wider educated public in their works. The linking of the search for the essence of the Russian narod to Russian Orthodoxy and ascetic tropes is an important contribution to the history of late imperial Russia, which also has implications for studies of post-soviet identity. Michelson reconstructs in detail how clerical and lay thinkers participated in a pan-european national-confessional mythmaking about national character and the way asceticism served Ab Imperio, 2/2018 as a common trope linking various discursive planes. The power and potential of asceticism as an interdiscursive link owed to its unstable, versatile, and contested nature. The rich semantic field pertaining to ascetic tropes and discourse is connected to interrelated social and historical phenomena, such as monasticism or patristic heritage, providing an additional source of intellectual dynamism. Furthermore, asceticism as a technology of the self has a connection to modernity and to the formation of modern selfhood. 6 Further research is required to contextualize asceticism discourse in relation to other types of discourses shaping the national identity during the period under consideration. We need a critical revision of the concepts that were used by competing traditions striving to essentialize the Russian narod, be it the notion of sobornost (as a spiritual and conciliar community in freedom) or obshchina (peasant village commune). One of the inherent difficulties in Michelson s endeavor to reconstruct a discourse as complex as asceticism is the task of identifying and contextualizing all the actors who played a role in the development and shaping of the discourse. Michelson, however, creates a coherent and persuasive narrative by populating 6 On the connection of modern selfhood and secularized ascetic self, see Laurie Manchester. Holy Fathers, Secular Sons: Clergy, Intelligentsia, and the Modern Self in Revolutionary Russia. DeKalb,

7 Рецензии/Reviews it with a wide array of protagonists: theologians, lay religious thinkers, monks, clergy, radical intelligentsia, philosophers, novelists, sociologists, and historians of past and present. Contemplating the state of research on Russian Orthodoxy, Michelson argues that contemporary historians should be self-reflective about their own role in the sustaining asceticism discourse, and calls for contextual restraint and theological abstinence (P. 229). Michelson s in-depth research is a great contribution to the field of religious and intellectual history, but scholars of nationalism and literary studies will also find the book relevant and revelatory. Despite the controversies and paradoxes surrounding asceticism as practice and discourse, one thing is beyond doubt. Asceticism was, is, and will be a key referential point for Russian culture and for Eastern Orthodoxy, and thus should remain in the focus of disciplinarily diverse academic attention. Gwendal PIÉGAIS Borislav Chernev, Twilight of Empire: The Brest-Litovsk Conference and the Remaking of East-Central Europe, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017). 301 pp., ills. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: Borislav Chernev s book is dedicated to one of the key events at the end of the Great War the Brest- Litovsk Conference, which resulted in a peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918, between the Bolshevik government of Soviet Russia and the Central Powers (Imperial Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire), later joined by a Ukrainian delegation. A close look at the peace negotiations allows us to see how wartime alliances make it difficult to reach a peace settlement because of the allies conflicting agendas (P. 6). The author reconstructs the negotiation process and the very mechanisms of elaborating a treaty. This sets his book apart from the historiographic mainstream, which is concentrated on criticizing the draconian terms of the treaty imposed by militaristic Germany. 1 Moreover, Chernev brings to the fore of his study the actors neglected by traditional histo- 1 This tradition was most notably established by John W. Wheeler-Bennett. The Forgotten Peace: Brest-Litovsk, March New York,