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THE NORM/ANTI-NORM DIALECTIC
IN THE MORAL PARADIGM OF RUSSIAN CIVILIZATION
A. L. Kazin
“And one of the malefactors which were hanged railed on him, saying, If thou be Christ, save thyself and us.
But the other answering rebuked him, saying, Dost not thou fear God, seeing thou art in the same condemnation?” (St. Luke, 23:39-40) “A Russian can be a saint, but rarely is an honest person”
(K.N. Leontiev)
Any education and upbringing is centered around learning the difference between what’s good and what’s bad. Those are the ground rules of civilization, the script of a person’s positive and negative behavior codes. Roman law was excruciatingly clear on the subject. In China and Japan, there was an intricate sequence of ceremonies, now proverbial, that taught the difference between good and evil. In the Catholic tradition, it is what the person does that’s good in God’s eyes that exculpates that person; in the Protestant tradition, only Faith has exculpating power. In the Russian Orthodox tradition, whether we like it or not, there are hardly any formal prescriptions regarding those “opposites” in public or private life. Remember when a peasant meets a thief in Vasily Shukshin’s film Pechki-Lavochki. The tractor driver, Ivan Rastorguev, and this suspicious-looking “engineer with an aerospace slant” find that somehow - on a metaphysical plane, perhaps - they complement each other: one has what the other doesn’t. Shukshin further explored the themes of crime, sin and repentance in his other film, Kalina Krasnaya, where the two weathered criminals (“I was convicted seven times,” Egor Prokudin tells his fiancee) oppose each other in a standoff of near-Biblical proportions. Egor is a peasant and a Christian who has sinned, and he gets a bullet from a real ghoul from Hell in the end.
Russia has always abounded in thieves and robbers. Peasants, too. And Russia has never had any dearth of saints, either, both canonized and those no one ever heard of. A saint, a peasant and a robber are the three quintessential Russian socio-ecclesiastical “types”, and they are “thick as thieves.” “You have to sin before you can repent,” goes the Russian saying, somewhat cynically.
We could bemoan the fact that Shukshin never showed us any jail scenes in his films. He never filmed the horrors of jail life, unlike certain
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post-Perestroika directors who spared us no graphic detail. But even the author of GULAG Archipelago himself exclaimed “O, blessed prison!” somewhere in the middle of his gruesome narrative. Leo Tolstoy wrote extensively on how the prison experience is incomparably more valuable than the well-fed, mechanical routine of everyday life outside the prison walls. Fyodor Dostoevsky, who was once handed the death penalty but ended up doing years of forced labor instead after his sentence was commuted, time and again led his characters through crime to punishment. Clearly there’s something about prison life, or, more precisely, "prison” as a metaphysical place (a certain enclosed realm of being), that appealed to the best Russian people. There is nothing "romantic” or "sentimental” about the prison experience. It’s completely and utterly horrible. But I think, what Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Solzhenitsyn, Shukshin and others prized about it was the religious value of suffering, without which there can be no absolution and no salvation. Even Jesus Christ, who was innocent, wore the guise of a criminal and died on the Cross - like a criminal. The Crucifixion is a symbol of the ultimate compassionate embrace extended to the world.
The main character in Shukshin’s Kalina Krasnaya is the epitome of the "Russian Soul,” exemplifying Russia in one of its most typical manifestations. We find in him neither the prefect "verticality” of a humanless God, nor the perfect "horizontality” of a godless human being. The entire antinomy of the "Russian Idea” is that it strives to unite, not separate, the Human and the Divine, the East and the West. The Russian Soul will not settle for Man without God, but it won’t submit to God without Man, either. Hence this dogged, restless passion to put "God’s spark” into every fibrillation of being, however minuscule. Andrei Bely wrote, ironically, that there is nothing trite or routine in our life, everything is "sacred.” On the flip side of this "Godless sanctity” we find some of the Karamazov brothers, Oblomov, the "dispossessed” people, the drinking, the reluctance to work and all the other facets of this typical "Russian” outlook - if this "whole thing” (human life, the "human condition,” this world) is worth anything at all, its entire worth is inferior to the joy of discarding it all (this is more or less what Peter Bezukhov is thinking in War and Peace). In ecclesiastic or philosophic terms, the dark, nocturnal countenance of Russia is kenosis -the propensity to denigrate, extenuate the Divine Light in order to "test” it with its opposite. Long ago it was said that the Devil fears nothing as much as he fears humility, and that is why the Son of God came here as a slave. The Soul of Russia does not manifest itself solely in great leaders, great ascetics or geniuses; it has its "God’s freaks,” "beatific villains” and its
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"meek.” Egor Prokudin is one of the latter. He is the "scum of the earth.” He is one of the human building blocks of which the Divine Kremlin is built.
Russia comes from the "Eastern” Christian tradition, but is in a league by itself, being Russian Orthodox. Russia was baptized into Orthodox Christianity, which means that the Christian Faith came here unburdened by the shackles of the one-sided, "rationalistic/legalistic” Roman mentality. The Christian ecclesiastical, moral and esthetic tradition of Conciliarity and Truth formed a sustainable civilizational core (Faith and Language) in Russia, around which the outer civilizational strata were formed (culture, statehood and the economy). Ecclesiastically, culturally and historically, Russia exists not in the realm of "necessity” or "law,” but in the realm of free choice of values. In theosophical terms, Russia as a spiritual reality is in the niche between the physical world and non-physical "fullness” (the Saint, the Peasant and the Robber are the star actors of our history and modernity). Loyalty to God, the Czar and Homeland - not by law - has always been the foundation of the Russian Orthodox civilization, communist or capitalist. Militant godlessness, criminal usurpation (the dictatorship of force) and omnipotence of wealth are all strange incarnations of the Russian eschatological paradigm. There is as much affinity as there is conflict between Russian "communism” and Russian "capitalism” as they are essentially different personae of the same national "symphonic character” (Aliosha Karamazov, Mareus the Peasant, Fedka Katorzhny, Smerdiakov).
If we were to try and formulate a philosophical definition of Russian civilization, we would probably say that it is a Christian civilization with a sharply pronounced antagonism between the mystical-ascetic "top” and the daemonic-individualistic "bottom.” On an empirical plane, this antagonism is manifested in the juxtaposition of Asian "nothingness” and a European "form” or guise. In any case, with those juxtapositions and antagonisms Russia emerges as some kind of a "pivot of the universe,” where the principal forces of the universe collide unmasked. And it is a "high risk” zone where a human being is never protected, literally, from anything. No "secularization” of culture has ever happened in Russia. All the shifts and oscillations notwithstanding, the image of Holy Russia is still ingrained deeply in the collective superconscious of the Russian people as opposed to the concept of a country as a "financial corporation” (United States), a set of barracks (Germany) or a fashion salon (France). There can be no "Christian capitalism” in Russia or "Christian democracy” - Russia has embraced the Orthodox Christian message too deeply for that. Russians have an "Orthodox,” not "Protestant” concept of money, work, profit and time: we view those values as gifts, not our property. Since time
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immemorial, the concept of property as a gift from God ("the land is God’s”) was at the root of the inner conflict that plagued Russian merchants and entrepreneurs. It was that inner struggle that induced wealthy Russians to throw decadently extravagant parties or donate millions to monasteries or -suicidally - to the revolution. Deep in their heart, even the newly affluent Russians today know they are crooks: few, if any, of them have the intention to build "civilized capitalism” or a democracy in Russia, and they keep their money in Western banks. Metaphysically speaking, Russia’s national bourgeoisie is in a moral never-never land between Monastic Vows, Racketeering and Prison. At least until recently, capital (serious money) was viewed as an “untruth" - a crime or a sin - in Russia. It is widely believed that honest work can never bring one great wealth.
Whether we like it or not, Russia never fully experienced the Reformation or the Enlightenment, unlike the Romano-Germanic civilization. The hallmark of the Russian Orthodox historic cultural “character” is the absence of a compromise between the ecclesiastical “opposites” of human life. As a “collective” soul, Russia wants to live off saintliness, not sin. Unlike the West, Russia’s spiritual thought divides the world not in three (this world, heaven and hell), but in two: heaven and hell, and everything on Earth, particularly, wealth, power and culture, is forever stretched between the Divine and the Daemonic. That is the reason why the spiritual “verticality” and, for that matter, also the Euro-Asian “horizontality” of a Russian mind always has some kind of a “dark doppelganger” stalking it, manifesting itself in the rough, messy, neglected mosaic of daily life, making sure Russia is never happy in its earthly life, making sure it remains restless, unwilling and unable to “settle down,” doomed to continue its pilgrimage. “Gospel of Prosperity” sounds obscene in Russian, kind of like “Christian whoredom.” Russian “capitalists” from Chichikov and Stolz to present-day moguls always conceptualized wealth as an agent of universal lechery, craving bodily possession of God’s Universe.
Now that the third millennium is upon us, Russia is once again torn between the Spirit, the Sword and the Pot of Gold. But at least we have a choice, which means that our national history is not yet over. Whatever choice Russia makes, it will be a statement made in the gleams of eschatological fire: Russia simply does not know any other way of doing it. If Russia chooses the Gold, it will perish from cynicism and it will drag the whole geopolitical construct along with it (mobsters with nukes). If Russia chooses the Sword (whether of a red or yellow hue), it runs the risk of repeating the fate of Germany’s “Occult Reich,” which mystified force and materialized joyless, graceless, cold mysticism.
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Man needs bread to live, but no man can live by bread alone. Society needs money to work, but nothing is more dangerous for Russia than the omnipotence of money. Russia has to have a chance to be itself, the way God conceived it. It cannot be “extinguished.” If it is, no manner of EuroAtlantic technology will save it, and the whole world will come crashing down with it.
Placing the above remarks in the context of education and, particularly, our pedagogical and “andragogical” thought and practice, it is important to keep in mind those moral paradoxes and how they shape Russia’s civilizational paradigm. Otherwise we risk losing everything and gaining nothing. See more on this in: Казин А. Л. Великая Россия. Религия. Культура. Политика. СПб.: Петрополис, 2007. Personal webpage URL: http://lib.ru/ - Moshkov’s Library - Modern Literature.
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