Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context : Central and East European Search for Roots 9780754698487, 9781409400073

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Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context Twenty years after the fall of Communism in Central and East Europe is an occasion to reevaluate the cultural and theological contribution from that region to the secularization–post-secularization debate. Czech theologian Ivana Noble develops a Trinitarian theology through a close dialogue with literature, music and film, which formed not only alternatives to totalitarian ideologies, but also followed the loss and reappearance of belief in God. Noble explains that, by listening to the artists, the churches and theologians can deal with questions about the nature of the world, memory and ultimate fulfilment in a more nuanced way. Then, as partakers in the search undertaken by their secular and post-secular contemporaries, theologians can penetrate a new depth of meaning, sending out shoots from the stump of Christian symbolism. Drawing on the rich cultures of Central and East Europe and both Western and Eastern theological traditions, this book presents a theological reading of contemporary culture which is important not just for post-Communist countries but for all who are engaged in the debate on the boundaries between theology, politics and arts.

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Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context Central and East European Search for Roots

Ivana Noble Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic

First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Ivana Noble 2010 Ivana Noble has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Noble, Ivana. Theological interpretation of culture in post-communist context: Central and East European search for roots. 1. Popular culture – Religious aspects. 2. Popular culture – Europe, Central. 3. Popular culture – Europe, Eastern. 4. Religion and culture – Europe, Central. 5. Religion and culture – Europe, Eastern. I. Title 201.7’0943–dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Noble, Ivana. Theological interpretation of culture in post-communist context: Central and East European search for roots / Ivana Noble. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-0007-3 (hardcover: alk. paper) 1. Christianity and culture – Europe, Eastern. 2. Christianity and the arts – Europe, Eastern. 3. Theology, Doctrinal – Europe, Eastern. 4. Christianity and culture – Former communist countrires. 5. Christianity and the arts – Former communist countries. 6. Theology, Doctrinal – Former communist countries. I. Title. BR738.6.N63 2009 261.0947’09049–dc22 2009032340 This book has been written as a part of the project ‘The Hermeneutics of Christian Tradition, in particular the Czech Protestant one, in the Cultural History of Europe’ (MSM 0021620802).

ISBN 9781409400073 (hbk)

Contents Preface   Introduction: Culture as a Theological Theme  

vii 1

Part I: The World 1

2

Images of the World in Karel Čapek and Isaac Bashevis Singer  

15

The Transcendent in the Ordinary   A Vanished Past in the Mosaic of the Present   Concluding Remarks  

16 29 42

Theologies of the World  

45

What Lies beyond Secularization?   The World as a Gift   The World as a Task   Concluding Remarks  

46 50 61 73

Part II: Memory 3

Heritage of Totalitarian Cultures in Folk Music   

79

Vladimir Vysotsky: Interplay of the Historical and the Archetypal   80 Jaromír Nohavica: Breaking and Healing in Retrospect   94 Concluding Remarks   109 4 Redemptive Memory in Theology  

111

Victimhood as a Positive Identity   Remembering God   Giving Back the Past    Concluding Remarks  

112 116 128 138

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Part III: The Ultimate Fulfilment 5

Figuring the Ultimate Fulfilment in Central European Cinema  

145

Guiding Desires in extremis according to István Szabó and Vladimír Michálek   146 Kieślowski’s Journey towards what is Real    155 Concluding Remarks   162 6

Love as the Ultimate Fulfilment in Theology  

165

Estrangement of Love or Ambiguity of Conversion?   The Spirit as the Giver of Love   The Spirit as the Giver of Conversion   Concluding Remarks  

166 168 182 194

Conclusion    Bibliography   Index  

197 203 219

Preface The idea for this book arose from conversations with my Central and Eastern European students over the last decade. One theme kept coming up: how to do our own theology, something that would be a gift to others, just as we have received gifts from them during our theological studies, usually in the West. There has been a long-term plea for a theology that would reflect our specific historical experience and our different contexts, how the search for God and experiences of God were expressed in that context, what sort of language helped in sharing them, what symbols helped to preserve and cultivate them. So it was that I decided first to give courses on theology in a dialogue with various cultural mediations of meaning amidst the meaninglessness of our world, our memory and our desires for the ultimate fulfilment, and later to write this book. My own theological studies, first in the former Czechoslovakia and then in Switzerland and in Britain, gave me an experience of disproportion. I remember visiting a western theological library for the first time and being completely overwhelmed by it, thinking: where do I start to catch up, to fill the gaps in my knowledge? It was 1988, when our Communist government occasionally allowed students to go abroad on scholarships. At that time I was convinced that it would be the only such opportunity I would have in my life: hence the long night hours of reading, the smuggling back of suitcases full of books, less than a year before the Velvet Revolution. Before, at home, I had experienced both official as well as underground theology. Both focused on the interpretation of western theologians. In the seminary it was usually great names from when my teachers had studied, or even the great names from when their own teachers had studied. This meant that in some theological subjects in the 1980s we seminarians were introduced to the pre-war theological debate, mediated first by relatively gifted theologians who read the relevant books, and then to us by much less gifted theologians, whom the Communist regime tolerated, through the notes they took during their classes in the 1950s or 1960s. These notes they either read out during the classes or commented on what they remembered from them. The underground seminars were of much better quality. There were attempts to initiate dialogue with the theological discourse of our time through occasional visits or through the literature that managed to get through to our side of the Iron Curtain, and also to relate theology to our situation. Yet even there, the core of the theological debate to which we were invited came from a different context, from different intellectual and spiritual traditions, and the contributions from our own setting, our own part of the dialogue with others, often remained underdeveloped. Our own theology was largely done by means of translation from the medium of western theological language to our own languages.

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In order to avoid misunderstanding, I would like to underline that I am very grateful for having received western theological education after 1989. I am grateful for the fact that, owing to different scholarship programmes and a number of generous people and organizations, those of my generation who teach and write theology in our part of Europe were in general able to study abroad and cross the ideological and political divides that separate Europe. I am grateful not only for the improvement of our education, but also for the friendships and contacts that we took home with us, and that have helped us not only to survive the difficult decades after the fall of Communism, but also to be part of a larger world than that portrayed in the small, often sectarian images presented in our churches or theological institutions of that time. I am grateful for the fact that the first contacts grew into a net of relationships to which it is now more normal to belong than not to belong. Because of all these good gifts it is possible to offer what could be now a perhaps more nuanced and more specific Central and Eastern European theological contribution, a creative gift making use of all that was given to the givers. Looking back over the post-war period, it has to be admitted that in Communist Europe there were not many great theologians with an impact outside their own country, perhaps with a few exceptions such as Dumitru Stăniloae or Alexandr Men, or Pope John Paul II. However, there have been numerous cultural contributions by artists who succeeded in mediating theologically relevant issues in their own languages of literature, music, fine art, theatre or film, and these have penetrated our cultures. These languages may not seem at first sight explicitly theological, and some degree of translation between them and the language of theology is needed. Nevertheless, they absorbed and creatively developed the symbolism with which the majority Christian tradition used to pass on its experience of God, and which Christian churches and their theologians in the minority counter-cultures sometimes seem either to have forgotten or to have preserved in categories culturally alien to their largely secular contemporaries. Thus, with a certain degree of simplification, it is possible to say that, while most of the Central and Eastern European theologians of my generation have our primary theological language embedded in western theological frameworks, at the same time we have been at home with the cultural mediations of the ultimate, overlapping with the explicitly theological themes and reaching beyond what we later expressed in western theological categories. Therefore I am grateful to my students from Central and Eastern Europe for inspiring me in this theological study, following the experience highlighted above. The study starts with the cultural images of the world, memory and the ultimate fulfilment, drawing on the languages of literature, music and film, and from there it returns to the domain of theology, initiating a dialogue between two distinct but not wholly separate discourses. I hope that it can be at least a small gift in return to my western teachers and colleagues, who let me feed on the best of their theological and spiritual food.

Preface

ix

Special thanks are due to the Protestant Theological Faculty in Prague and to the International Baptist Theological Seminary, which supported me during this project; to the Free University of Amsterdam, which offered me a research fellowship during the final stages of the writing; to Heythrop College, whose library I could use; to the Clapham Jesuit Community and to the Community of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in west London, where I was a frequent visitor while undertaking the research. Many thanks to Jan Šulc for his consultations concerning the cultural examples used in this book, and to Marc Beaudinet for reading the whole manuscript and for his helpful comments. Most of all, a big thank you to my husband Tim, who was my inspiring, critical and loving discussion partner throughout the research, but also a patient language corrector with a passion to defend his native language from the violence committed against it. The dedication of the book takes me back to where I started, to my Central and Eastern European students, past and present. Ivana Noble Prague, May 2009

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Underground sources The sun has painted on my face A million dots A river is flowing among the trees And I walk, I ramble like a silent river Among all the people, Looking to the ground, trying to understand What awaits me when I lie in the earth. Underground sources, Unknown streams. Words are signs Whose meaning we don’t know. We search for roots, Knowing nothing of them. We ramble under the earth, Under the earth we ramble, Hopelessly, yet we still do. Which one of my loves Managed to break me And who will hold me now? Who will again offer me an arm? I look into a shop window, Seeing my own outline, Glassy and dull. I am neither good nor bad, I am both good and bad. Underground sources, Unknown streams. Words are signs Whose meaning we don’t know. We search for roots, Knowing nothing of them. We ramble under the earth, Under the earth we ramble Hopelessly, yet we still do. Jaromír Nohavica, Divné století [Strange Century], Monitor, 1996.

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Introduction

Culture as a Theological Theme The starting point of this book is expressed in the poetry of the song ‘Underground Sources’, composed by a well-known Czech folk musician Jaromír Nohavica. We live in a culture that longs to understand the deep sources from which it renews its life, and yet at the same time is hesitant to name them in any language that would sound too definite. Nohavica speaks of the ‘underground sources’, of ‘unknown streams’, of ‘searching for roots’ – it is a phrase that I have borrowed for the sub-title of my book. He states that in the ways we use words we already operate with worlds of meaning to which we have lost the key, a key that we seem simultaneously to want and not to want to find. He, like many of his contemporaries, has a love–hate relationship with the traditions in which meaning was ascribed to words less problematically, and for him Christianity belongs to these traditions. Paradoxically, though, he points out that longing for goodness, for transcendence and even for some forms of holiness belongs to a search that is open, incomplete, sometimes hopeless, and yet still has to be done. In this book I examine this paradox and show that Christian symbolism at its roots does not stand against this free and open search. The search that Nohavica sings about is an inseparable part of Christian spiritual life and liturgy, from where it also flows into theology. The openness of this search, however, does not involve giving up on the tradition of the doctrine of God, without which the symbolism would be made unintelligible. It is important, however, to remind ourselves that this doctrine, which Christian theologians have formulated over the centuries, is expressed in a plurality of forms. Moreover, it is an open-ended plurality. As such it safeguards the understanding of God as a mystery in which we participate against attempts to master the mystery. As I will show in this book, the surrounding culture can remind us of this struggle. It can stimulate us to go deeper into Christian tradition and discover there underground sources, streams of life. The benefits, then, can be mutual. Theology can uncover areas that would otherwise remain inaccessible to culture, as culture has a less direct relationship to religious practice in which the ‘underground sources’ and ‘unknown streams’ of life are opened by the keys of symbolic traditions.

 See Rowan Williams, Grace and Necessity: Reflections on Art and Love, Continuum, London; Morehouse, Harrisburg, PA, 2005, 169.   For the open-ended plurality of meaning, see Paul Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning, Texas Christian University Press, Fort Worth, TX, 1976, 45. 



Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context

This book has a particular focus on life in the societies in Central and Eastern Europe that have lived through two world wars, Communism, its fall and the subsequent struggles to rediscover their equal place in the heritage and the future of the European Union. The examples from literature, music and films with which I work are drawn mainly from this context. Yet I hope that the issues I shall be dealing with in the context I know best will also speak to others in their different settings, and inspire their contextualized reflection. My particular attention is directed to the changes with regard to religion, which call into question whether the post-Communist societies and cultures of Central and Eastern Europe can still be called secular. In this context I note that secularization, understood in European modernity as a process of emancipation from religion, in which religious thinking, practices and institutions lost social significance, no longer seems to apply here. The contemporary debate about secularization and post-secularization is a complex one, involving historians, sociologists, and political scientists as well as philosophers and theologians. Furthermore, it has to take on board regional differences since the time of the Enlightenment.

   The word ‘secularization’ comes from the Latin saeculum, meaning ‘human age’, ‘century’, but also the temporal and the terrestrial realm. Social and cultural changes associated with the process of secularization include the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, but also the religious wars of the seventeenth century and subsequently also the French Revolution. The new political and legal settlements of Europe arising from these phenomena, as well as the rise of modern science and technology, with their emphases on rationality, human experience and human potential, contributed to what was seen as the ‘modern world’. In that world, religion became unwanted.    There is a vast amount of literature dedicated to the changes in the process of secularization, to its political and economical implications, as well as to the link between secularization and de-Christianization or de-ecclesialization. However, they are usually seen from a western perspective. See, e.g., David Martin, On Secularization: Towards a Revised General Theory, Ashgate, Aldershot–Burlington, VT, 2005; S. Bruce, God is Dead: Secularization in the West, Blackwell, Oxford, 2002; René Rémond, Religion and Society in Modern Europe, Blackwell, Oxford, 1999; José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1994; Thomas Luckmann, The Changing Face of Religion, Sage, London, 1989; Peter L. Berger, The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics, Ethics and Public Policy Center, Washington, DC; Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1999; Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, 1997; Grace Davie, Predicting Religion: Christian, Secular, and Alternative Futures, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2002 and id., Religion in Modern Europe: A Memory Mutates, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000. In Central and Eastern European scholarship we find several translations of these works or interpretations of the local situation employing the western paradigms. Besides that, there is a renewed interest in the theme of secularization as it has emerged and developed in each of the countries. For studies concentrating on the specificity of the situation of the regions, see, e.g., Miklós Tomka, Church and Religious Life in Post-Communist Societies, Pázmány

Introduction



Here it is important to emphasize that the Berlin Wall was not and is not a useful dividing line for speaking about religiosity and secularization in Europe. Pre-Communist history and sociology may help us to understand that there are more similarities between, on the one hand, predominantly agricultural and, on the other hand, predominantly industrial societies and cultures across Europe. The non-secular/secular/post-secular context is not identical with the post-Communist context. To start with, some of the post-Communist countries, such as Poland, Romania or perhaps even Slovakia, did not undergo the same secularization process as the Czech Republic, Estonia, Bulgaria, or former Eastern Germany. Thus it would not be surprising if there are big regional differences in regard to institutionalized religion. In the countries of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, secularization went hand in hand with urbanization. Moreover, during the Enlightenment secularization was already part of the official political ideology. It did not start with Communism, even if it was further reinforced and peaked during that time, and now, even if our societies have retained some of the features of secularization, we have moved beyond the peak. Religion plays a more significant role in our societies and cultures than it did forty or even twenty years ago. In this sense, it is a different starting point than in the countries where churches participated in the social sphere until recently, whether west or east of the Berlin Wall. It is also worth mentioning that there is, nevertheless, one common feature discernible in societies and cultures where secularization was part of the enforced Marxist–Leninist ideology and practice, namely the discrediting of secularization as a part of that ideology and practice. During the Enlightenment secularization was not only about taking over church property and loosening the influence of dominant religions, but at its best it was also liberating. It gave a better standing to minorities and made space for human autonomy. At its worst it created new forms of injustice and violence. People living under the Communist dictatorships experienced secularization to a different degree, as an openly violent process demonizing religion and persecuting it as such. Although the majority of the population were silent in the face of this persecution when it happened, society at large gradually came to dislike these processes. As an effect, religion was paradoxically purified and rehabilitated even in the minds of those who would

Társadalomtudomány, Budapest, 2007; Paul M. Zulehner and Miklós Tomka, Religion im gesellschaftlichen Kontext Ost(Mittel)Europas, Schwabenverlag, Ostfildern, 2000.    There were both differences among different states of the Communist camp and differences with regard to historical periods, ranging from massive imprisonment or even killing, usually of clergy and the religious, to having their representatives as part of the government. See I. Noble, ‘Memory and Remembering in the Post-Communist Context’, Political Theology 4 (2008), 455–475; ‘Czech Churches in Transition’, in Die Kirchen und das Erbe des Kommunismus, eds K. Kunter and J.H. Schjørring, Martin Luther Verlag, Erlangen, 2007, 67–81.



Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context

otherwise share the ideals of Enlightenment secularization. During the events that brought down the Communist systems, it became apparent that religion had regained credibility as the persecuted other that had not entirely been denuded of its inner power. Now, in the post-Communist countries, the lapsed Christians are being outnumbered by the lapsed atheists. In both traditionally religious and traditionally secular countries, a growing percentage of the population expects that religion can bring something important to their lives. Usually, however, they do not expect it from traditional religious institutions. The new quests for religious meaning, as I will show in this book, have a complicated relationship with the memory of symbolic traditions, often both despising it and needing its help. With regard to culture, I take its basic definition from the Latin meaning of the word cultūra. It comes from colere, an agricultural concept meaning ‘to till’ or ‘to cultivate the earth’. From here it is extended to cultivating human interior life, relationships with other people, with the divine, but also to looking after the heritage received from the previous generations. Thus culture has a primarily positive meaning for me, derived from its ‘cultivating’ role. This is a different standpoint from that of modern cultural anthropology, which concentrates on the factual content of cultures, regardless of their impact on human lives and the places where they are lived. According to E.B. Tylor’s classic definition, culture includes: ‘knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by a man as a member of society’. Although I find the descriptive approach of cultural anthropology insufficient, I take from Tylor’s definition the need to talk about the factual content of culture. For the theological grounding of a primarily positive reading of culture – in its cultivating role – I need to go to pre-modern times. In the book I shall make use of Justin Martyr’s concept of Logos spermatikos, as the seed of wisdom given to the whole human race in creation. This was not lost, even after the fall, and, even if now in a fragmented form, in each culture and in each human being it still grounds and configures the understanding of what is true, for rational thinking, contemplation, and a right choice of action. Reference to Logos spermatikos supports the assumption that human culture in its positive meaning should cultivate the world and cultivate human beings in each given time and place. Thus culture in its many forms participates in God’s    This will be clearly visible in the attitudes of Vladimir Vysotsky and Jaromír Nohavica, discussed in Chapter 3.   E.B. Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Language, Art and Custom, vol. 1, Henry Holt, New York, 1874, 1.   See Justin Martyr, First Apology 27–31, 67; Second Apology 78; in The Writings of Justin Martyr and Athenagoras, T&T Clark, Edinburgh, 1867.   According to Paul Evdokimov, culture came out of a commandment to ‘cultivate’ the Garden of Eden. See Paul Evdokimov, ‘La culture et l’eschatologie’, Semeur 50 (mars 1947), 363; L’Art de l’icône. Théologie de la beauté, Desclée de Brouwer, Paris, 1970, 54.

Introduction



creative activity, while remaining an iconic body in which the divine mystery, which transcends culture, is revealed. When filled by the Holy Spirit, culture fulfils this iconic call. Without the Spirit it becomes empty or governed by the unholy and unredeemed forces within itself. 10 When speaking about culture here and now, I need a vocabulary to disclose its plurality and its ambiguity. Hence I speak about cultures as collective bodies taking place in human history, where their ‘cultivating role’ is both fulfilled and betrayed. Here I make use of Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between cultures being iconic (opening themselves to life-giving sources and relationships that lie beyond themselves); and idolatrous (placing themselves as the ultimate, and thus becoming self-referential).11 There is ambiguity in all the cultures and subcultures,12 and iconic and idolatrous movements can be discerned in all of them. There are further problems whenever any one of these cultures (or, for example, thinking of ideologies extolling the Nordic Race or Working Class, even any of the subcultures) claims to be representative of the whole, and therefore makes claims over the whole. In that case we need to speak about the other cultures as ‘counter-cultures’,13 providing alternatives to the dominant ideology that wants to control society by cultural means. I use the specific vocabulary and the plural forms in the book only when I need to refer to particular instances, where the distinctions have a special meaning that needs to be highlighted. Otherwise I use culture in its singular form, implying the plural life of all cultures, subcultures and counter-cultures participating in a common call to cultivate, and a common need to be cultivated. I use the pairs theology–theologies, tradition–traditions, church–churches in a similar way; except when following the forms employed by authors I quote or paraphrase, I use the singular when I mean common general characteristics beneath the plurality or when I mean one specific instance, and I use the plural if it is important to emphasize the plurality as such. My method in this book is influenced by Paul Tillich’s method of correlation. He claimed that religious symbolism gives foundations to culture and culture in

10  See P.C. Phan, Culture and Eschatology: The Iconographical Vision of Paul Evdokimov, Peter Lang, New York–Frankfurt, 1985, 60, 68. 11  For the distinction between icon and idol, see Jean-Luc Marion, God without Being, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL–London, 1991, 20. See also Tim Noble, ‘JeanLuc Marion, Idols and Liberation Theology’, Communio Viatorum 2 (2006), 131–154; Keeping the Window Open: The Theological Method of Clodovis Boff and the Problem of the Alterity of the Poor, IBTS Publishing, Prague, 2009, 187–200. 12  Here I mean a plurality in which each one of us participates, which is ‘constituted by age, race, ethnicity, gender, etc.’, a plurality that co-exists as ‘subcultures’ within a majority culture and is capable of opposing its domination. See Kelton Cobb, The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 2005, 44. 13  See, e.g., Michael C. Elliot, Freedom, Justice & Christian Counter-Culture, SCM, London; Trinity Press International, Philadelphia, PA, 1990.

Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context



return offers to religion new forms of expression in each new situation.14 Thus they are co-related. This is valid even in those situations where culture becomes more a protest against religion than its expression. As long as it mirrors the situation of people of its time and asks existential questions, it remains related to the same sources of being as religious symbols, in which essential answers are revealed.15 I partially disagree with this point. As will be shown in the following chapters, the questions and the symbolic answers come from both sides, but in a different manner, as will be seen when I consider criteria for a genuinely reciprocal dialogue between theology and culture. However, Tillich’s insistence that both theology and culture are in their ‘ultimate concern’ related to the ‘Ultimate Reality’16 is very helpful. It moves the dialogue between theology and culture to its particular aims, be they liberation from totalitarian ways of thinking, speaking and acting, the revitalization of human creativity, the empowering of truly human and loving relationships or gratitude and responsibility to the transcendent Giver of life. In these shared particular aims of the dialogue, the ‘ultimate concern’ and the ‘Ultimate Reality’ are in play, but, as Nohavica reminded us, they appear to our contemporaries as the ‘underground sources’ and ‘unknown streams’. According to Tillich, the Church is a body where symbolic religious traditions are practised and guarded. However, and this I take as inspirational for my own methodology, the Church and culture are within each other and not alongside each other, and the Kingdom of God includes both while transcending both.17 This means that as a Christian theologian I do not look at culture from the outside, but from within, as a part of it. Participating in the symbolic language of religious traditions and their theological expressions, as well as of the present culture (and subcultures), as a theologian I interpret the texture of one with the help of the other. Assuming that both are in their different ways manifestations of the work of the Holy Spirit, I need to make each contribution explicit and specify the basic rules safeguarding their reciprocity. First, rules of translation between the two domains were needed. For a translation to be possible, it is important to know both the language from which one translates and the language one translates into, which in ideal circumstances is one’s mother tongue. As I said earlier, we are immersed in cultures in which 14

  Although I agree with Tillich’s basic insight, I find his Aristotelian language of substance and form problematic. He says that ‘religion is the substance of culture, culture is a form of religion’. Paul Tillich, Theology and Culture, Oxford University Press, New York, 1959, 42. 15  See Paul Tillich, ‘Philosophy and Theology’, ‘The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion’, ‘The Problem of Theological Method’, ‘Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality’, in Main Works IV, De Gruyter, Berlin; Evangelisches Verlag, New York, 1987, 279–288; 289–300; 301–312; 357–388. 16  See Tillich, Theology and Culture, 42; ‘Biblical Religion and the Search for Ultimate Reality’, 357. 17   Tillich, Theology and Culture, 51.

Introduction



we live. However, this does not necessarily mean that we sufficiently know the languages of arts, for example, by which the culture is cultivated and cultivates. Here an extra effort is needed to understand the particular artistic medium from within, to learn its language, even if for a theologian it may be a second, third or fourth language. Without it we would be in the realm of guessing and fabricating, not translating. Second, the fact that I know one language (e.g. the theological language) better does not mean that it is a better language. In other words, it does not give it a position of superiority. Competition between the languages would be at the expense of the quality of the translation. The main concern would be directed to self-affirmation rather than to the ‘Ultimate Reality’ glimpsed through what is being translated from one symbolic language to another. 18 Third, I need to specify my moves in both the language domains in which I am operating. For example, when focusing on the artistic–cultural domain as a theologian, I need to say that I am working with human experiences, worries or dreams that in their primary mediation are not easily identifiable in traditional theological categories. I should not force such categories into the primary mediation where other symbolic categories are preferred. When Nohavica sings about the underground sources and unknown streams, I should not rush to say that he really means the life-giving energies of the Holy Spirit bringing us through Christ to the Father, the foundation of our being. He may not mean this and I need to respect it. However, I may legitimately claim that in my world of meaning cultivated by a Christian faith and by theology, the symbolic image of the underground sources and unknown streams can be translated in these terms. At the same time, however, as theologians we need to learn to be at ease with the artists translating our symbols into their languages, exercising the analogical freedom of using their own symbolic categories in their own domain. Fourth, interpretation of cultural symbols by means of theological language – and vice versa, interpreting theological symbols by means of cultural languages – presupposes not only knowledge of the other language but also the ability to engage in the world of meaning of what is being interpreted, and creatively represent it. This is difficult for a theologian, since we are so used to thinking of theology as a science, and here the languages from which a theologian translates requires her or him to rediscover theology as an art, to reinvigorate the aesthetic dimension of theological language. Fifth, for a dialogue and cooperation on the common aims to succeed, the entry into the world of meaning of the other domain cannot be violent. A theologian needs to learn to respect the inner rules of the other discourses, and continue respecting them even when interpreting the artistic symbols as theology. Analogical requirements are placed upon those who interpret theological symbols outside the 18

  Tillich reminds us that neither of the languages is the ultimate language, while both can symbolically express the ultimate. See Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith, World Perspectives Series, vol. 10, Harper Torchbooks, New York, 1958, 41, 44.



Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context

theological domain. However, there is a problem in that neither art nor theology has fixed sets of rules that need to be respected. In each discipline and even subdiscipline of the arts and of theology, there are different schools disagreeing on what are the core rules that need to be respected even by those within the discourse. This makes any judgement on what is an appropriate theological insight within a cultural domain very difficult. It brings the participants of the mutual learning between theology and arts as the cultivating side of culture into a position that cannot be described in legal terms. People would be asked to respect sets of rules that cannot be specified or agreed upon, and would be put in the position of possibly being permanently guilty. Instead, I propose that the participants of the mutual learning processes should cultivate sensitivity to the pluralistic and evolving self-understanding of the other realm while focusing on the common aims of theology and culture, as specified above. In this sense, they avoid the trap of a dialogue for dialogue’s sake or for the sake of self-affirmation or mutual affirmation, and, to use Tillich’s expressions, allow the ‘Ultimate Reality’ to shine through their ‘ultimate concern’. Having sketched the criteria for a genuinely reciprocal dialogue between theology and culture, I want to turn to the question of how I can theologically justify the need for such dialogue. Returning to Justin Martyr, I can say that culture, from which I am taking examples of literature, music and film, has been marked by Logos spermatikos. Nevertheless, in the post-Christian societies, it has also absorbed into itself the memory of Christianity and in our part of the world that of Judaism, and their symbolism remains imprinted on it. When it is not continually renewed from its sources, to which culture has only a secondary access (through forms of religious practice that live in the given culture), the symbolism becomes fragmented, and its meaning hazy. Culture, searching for its roots, merges this symbolism with other forms in which Logos spermatikos is embedded. The memory of Christ, of a Christian faith, hope and love, is an ambiguous memory in the majority culture in which I live. It includes also all that has exploited Christ, all that has used Christian symbolism for other interests. Thus, sometimes, resisting non-liberating faith, untrustworthy hope or inauthentic love, the culture feels obliged to distance itself from the images and mediations of God that were supposed to guard and guarantee the harmful order. In opposing such an order, the culture (even if explicitly non-Christian or even anti-Christian) uncovers something liberating, trustworthy and authentic, provided its opposition has not been motivated by other power-interests just as inauthentic as those that are being criticized. In such positive instances, culture can reach deeper into the sources of life, and thus also of Christian faith, hope and love than churches do, if they are tied to fallen or fossilized practices, and than theology, if its reflection is in the service of those practices. The culture does not have a derived, but a direct access to the sources of life, despite the fact that it has only derived access to religious symbolism in which the meaning of these sources is ultimately carried.

Introduction



The theological interpretation I am offering in this book does not assume that a Christian theologian understands the symbolism present in our culture better than anyone else. But he or she has a distinct contribution to make. Having a more direct access to traditions of religious practice, he or she can become a reminder of lost connections. He or she can reopen lost access to the symbolic worlds of meaning in which faith, hope and love make bonds between people and God, transform their relationships to each other and to the world in which they live. In this book I do not offer a historical study of the development of the relationship between theology and culture, or an analysis of the classic works on the subject.19 Likewise, I do not examine different theories of culture, cultural plurality, cultural change, and the inculturation of Christianity.20 This work has been done by other authors. My book is a case study of how a theology of creation, redemption and deification can enrich and be enriched by Central and East European literature, music and film, from the pre-war period up to now. In this sense it is closer to projects aimed at teaching theology through the arts.21 But while they often aim at providing foundations for a contemporary theological aesthetics,22 my aim is to provide an example of a theological interpretation of culture, in which communication between our cultural and theological belonging is renewed. The focus on the effects of totalitarianism on Central and Eastern 19  See Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture, Harper & Row, New York, 1951; Tillich, Dynamics of Faith; id., Theology and Culture; Lesslie Newbigin, Foolishness to the Greeks: The Gospel and Western Culture, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1986; Timothy Gorringe, Furthering Humanity: A Theology of Culture, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004. 20  For these, see, e.g., Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York, 1973; Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture, Augsburg Fortress, Minneapolis, MN, 1997; David Tracy, The Analogical Imagination: Christian Theology & the Culture of Pluralism, Crossroad, New York, 1981; Graham Ward, Cultural Transformation and Religious Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004; on inculturation, see Jesús Espeja (ed.), Inculturación y Teologia Indígena, Editorial San Esteban, Salamanca, 1993; for popular culture, see Conrad Ostwalt, Secular Steeples: Popular Culture and the Religious Imagination, Continuum International, London, 2003; Gordon Lynch, Understanding Theology and Popular Culture, Blackwell, Malden, MA–Oxford–Victoria, 2005; Cobb, The Blackwell Guide to Theology and Popular Culture. 21   There is a vast amount of literature dealing with different aspects of the theme. See, e.g., Neil P. Hurley, Theology Through Film, Harper & Row, New York, 1970; Richard Viladesau, Theology and the Arts: Encountering God through Music, Art, and Rhetoric, Paulist Press, New York–Mahwah, NJ, 2000; William Dyrness, Visual Faith: Art, Theology, and Worship in Dialogue, Baker Academic, Grand Rapids, MI, 2001; Jeremy Begbie, Sounding the Depths: Theology through the Arts, SCM, London, 2002. 22  See Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action: Toward a Christian Aesthetic, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 1980; Richard Viladesau, Theological Aesthetics: God in Imagination, Beauty, and Art, Oxford University Press, New York–Oxford, 1999; Natasha Duquette (ed.), Sublimer Aspects: Interfaces between Literature, Aesthetics, and Theology, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Cambridge, 2007.

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Europe may also interest political theorists. However, my own contribution in this area is limited to articulating the broadly understood religious dimension of the move of the post-Communist societies and cultures beyond the totalitarian regimes. Moreover, when I rethink the role of religion in the public sphere, I choose to follow the cultural domain, and in it the impact of artistic expressions of the search for revitalizing religious symbols as bearers of meaning in situations where people feel uprooted. The book follows the course of Trinitarian theology, on the basis of which my particular themes of interest are chosen. It is divided into three parts: The World, Memory, and the Ultimate Fulfilment. Each part starts with a case study, in which I research cultural approaches to the themes, carried by respectively literature, music and film. Then, taking the insights and challenges found in these case studies back to theology, I first contextualize the theological investigation by stating some of the vital social and political challenges in the Central and Eastern European countries. Only then, and with them, do I initiate a dialogue between the cultural insights and patristic as well as contemporary teaching on creation, redemption and deification.23 In the first part I explore various understandings of what the world can be and become, and of our place in the world, of the relationships that make us who we are. In Chapter 1, I explore images of the world in literature, following how Karel Čapek24 and Isaac Bashevis Singer,25 in their stories and novels, depict the world before and after World War II as endangered, a place plundered by Nazism and Communism, but also a place where we are nurtured and shaped, where we live our relationships with each other and with God. From here I move to Chapter 2: Theologies of the World, where I seek for parallels to the insights from literature, such as seeing nature primarily as good or as fallen, presuming or challenging divisions between the higher and the lower world, seeing the world as static or dynamic, its destiny as decided or as open. I investigate how the implicit theological themes from the previous chapter are explicitly dealt with in theologies of creation, where the world is seen both as a gift and as a task, and how their insights can be brought back to a culture that has largely lost contact with religious symbolic traditions. In the second part I work with the problem of memory and remembering. I ask how we can understand the presence and activity of God in the difficult memories of the past, which are both passed on and denied their voice in our cultures. How 23   Instead of the classical concept of Sanctification, common in theology and developed from Latin sources, I use the Orthodox concept of deification, stemming from the Greek sources. As will be explained in Chapter 2, it offers a better possibility for speaking about unity and communion with God. 24   Karel Čapek (1890–1938) was a leading Czech writer of the period between the two world wars. 25  Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) was a Polish-American Jewish writer, Nobel prize winner from 1978.

Introduction

11

can working with these memories become redemptive, and in revealing who we have been, how can it open up a genuinely new future? In Chapter 3, I examine memories of totalitarian cultures in music, while offering a contextual analysis of poem-songs by Vladimir Vysotsky26 and Jaromír Nohavica.27 It is a case study of two interwoven ways of dealing with the war and our Communist heritage, one stressing the ever-present conflict between truth and lies, between life and death, the other understanding our inheritance as a history written from below by ordinary people with whom we can identify and in whose struggles and joys we can recognize our own. Both Vysotsky’s and Nohavica’s songs show in miniature the arguments against God’s providence, and, despite that, a thirst for wholeness and for hope. In Chapter 4: Redemptive Memory in Theology I present ways of dealing with difficult memories that are alternative or complementary to the emphasis on providence. These I find in the reflection of the liturgical movement of anamnesis and epiclesis, as well as in the dynamism of the relation between utopic and eschatological hopes spelled out by political theologies. Again, my final question is how remembering God with whom our memories are safe and receiving the past back as reconciled can be communicated in our post-secular cultures. Finally, in the third part I examine various cultural and theological mediations of the ultimate fulfilment and their impact on human life. Here I combine Tillich’s emphasis on the ‘ultimate concern’ with notions of human fulfilment, so strongly stressed in our present cultures. In Chapter 5, I look at ways of figuring the ultimate in Central European Cinema, concentrating on contrasting examples in limit situations, as offered by the Hungarian film Mephisto (István Szabó, 1981), where the ultimate fulfilment is designed by the person for their own best interests, and a Czech film Forgotten Light (Vladimír Michálek, 1996), where the ultimate fulfilment comes through giving oneself up in love for the sake of others. Then in Three Colours (1993–1994), by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski, I seek to uncover how love as the ultimate fulfilment transforms human life. Chapter 6: Love as the Ultimate Fulfilment in Theology returns to the questions and challenges from the previous chapter. With the help of the Christian teaching on the Holy Spirit, it examines what sort of spiritual powers operate in the process of attaining love and to what ends, how we know that what is making claims on our lives is not destructive, and how love as the ultimate fulfilment is related to the sources of life, and to what conversion it calls us, so that a non-sacrificial communion with others, with all that is good in the world and with God, can be restored. In the Conclusion I come back to the initial statement, that theology can uncover areas that would otherwise remain inaccessible to culture, as well as culture being 26

 A popular Russian singer, song-writer, poet, and actor, who lived from 1938 to 1980. Suppressed by the official Soviet cultural establishment, he had a lasting influence on counter-culture in Russia as well as in other Communist countries. 27   Jaromír Nohavica (*1953), one of the most popular Czech folk musicians, was heavily influenced by Vysotsky, and like him is an iconic figure in alternative culture.

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able to stimulate theology to return to the forgotten depths of the ‘underground sources’ and ‘unknown streams’28 of life opened by the keys of symbolic traditions. I end by spelling out what each part of my book, ‘The World’, ‘Memory’, and ‘The Ultimate Fulfilment’, has contributed to a theological interpretation of culture in a post-secular context.

28

 See Nohavica, ‘Underground Sources’, as quoted at the opening of this book.

Part I The World Culture is always located in the world. It is not a place, but exists in a place, sustained by the world it inhabits. In exchange, culture influences what the world is in its becoming. When faithful to its original call and meaning, culture cultivates the world. It ruins the world when it abandons its serving role and becomes an end in itself. In their multiple forms of life, cultures do both, but only in their original call do they participate in the creative activity of God. My first topic in this part will be how cultures understand the world, not by means of definitions, but by the imaginative interpretation of human experience that flows into cultures through the arts. In particular, I shall investigate literary images of the world before and after the Second World War. With the help of Karel Čapek and Isaac Bashevis Singer I shall look at the world both as an endangered place that can be lost and as a gift with a germinating power to sustain and renew life, observable like a garden after a long winter. My second topic will be how theology, enriched by literature, can also make a valuable contribution to our common culture by the creative interpretation of faith-experiences that face the memories of destruction as literature did, and by recollecting the symbolic wealth in the creation narratives and their interpretation within Christian traditions.



 See Evdokimov, ‘La culture et l’eschatologie’, 363.  Here I make use of Terry Eagleton’s insights from ‘The deathly rationalism of evil. A book review Dostoevsky: language, faith and fiction by Rowan Williams’, at http:// thetablet.co.uk/review/418 (accessed 30 October 2008). 

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Chapter 1

Images of the World in Karel Čapek and Isaac Bashevis Singer

A poem comes into being when the inner landscape of … [the human] soul encounters a similarly ordered rhythm of the outer nature. In this process a new inner landscape is created. And similarly to an outer landscape shaped by outer forces, also in the inner landscape we find ‘instress’ or a plastic force that causes the shape of the outer landscape to be imprinted into the shape of the soul.

Recalling the primary, earth-bound, understanding of culture, I have chosen this quotation by geologist Václav Cílek to illustrate the relationship between the world as nature and the world as embodied in culture. While Cílek examines how the long-term changes of our environment correspond to the developments of human interior life and vice versa, my interest is in tracing how they influence culture and how culture stimulates them in return. With Cílek we can say that while they mark each other, in them both there is an instress of outer forces to which both are open. When ‘a similarly ordered rhythm’ is encountered by both, ‘a poem is born’, a new creation brings back a sense of a once-possessed unity and transcendence. I want to address two questions in this chapter. First, what kind of understanding of culture is included in our images of the world? And, secondly, how do these images go on being mediated by culture? The images of the world that I am going to examine grow from the earth as much as from historically conditioned cultures. They are bound up with notions of human identity and of God, bearing within themselves hopes and fears reflecting the inner and the outer landscapes of Central and Eastern Europe before and after the Second World War. As we have moved into the twenty-first century, facing new threats to the world we inhabit, I believe it is useful to deal with their modern pre-history. There we find both a clear grasp of the dangers and inspiring possibilities for their subversion. Karel Čapek (1890–1938), a leading Czech novelist, playwright, storywriter and columnist, will take us to the period between the two world wars. Isaac    Václav Cílek, ‘Chraňte svoji duši. Krajina jako obraz lidí, kteří ji obývají’ [Preserve your Soul. Landscape as an Image of People who Inhabit It], in Krajiny vnitřní a vnější [Landscapes Internal and External], Dokořán, Praha, 2005, 5–6, here 5.   See the original agricultural meaning of the Latin colere, to cultivate the earth, to which I referred in ascribing a cultivating role to the culture in the Introduction; see also Evdokimov’s notion of culture as coming out of a commandment to ‘cultivate’ the Garden of Eden. See Evdokimov, ‘La culture et l’eschatologie’, 363; L’Art de l’icône, 54.

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Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) a Polish-American Jewish writer and holder of the Nobel Prize for literature, will return to that world in retrospect, while reflecting on the new conditions of belonging in post-war Europe and of emigration. Both writers address the suffering brought by Nazism and by Communism, both see the world as an endangered place, and yet in some irreducible sense, also as a gift. Čapek’s images of the world include those of its fragility and its dependence on human care, but also its beauty and bounty, through which we discover who we are, and who God might be. These images of the world take us freely to their roots in religious symbolism and also to their limit, to what transcends the world, and, when encountered, resists figurative mediation. Čapek raises theological questions, but in order to do so, he has to use theological language, something he is hesitant to do. As I will show, he tries to get round this problem by means of playing with semantic plans, using the religious key in a non-religious realm and using the non-religious key in the religious realm. Singer recovers memories of a world of East European Jewry, ‘such as it was lived in cities and villages, in poverty and persecution, and imbued with sincere piety and rites combined with blind faith and superstition’. He writes about a world in Poland and Eastern Galicia that is gone, a world destroyed, but whose past presence and wisdom, whose passions, bestiality and heroism, whose humour and whose poetry – as well as whose destruction – remain at the roots of who we, as Central Europeans, are, how we experience hope or agony, how we see the transcendent flickering through our human experience, or how we are restless at its absence. The Transcendent in the Ordinary Questions of how to understand the world in which we live and how to understand ourselves and our culture appear in many of Čapek’s writings in various forms. But there are common features. Čapek sees the world as an endangered place, for

  Sylvie Rychterová uses the concept of semantic plans for the open symbolic structures underlying particular types of narratives, giving them identifiable ways of ascribing meaning to things, communicable beliefs, convictions, values, and other things that belong to their context. With the help of semantic plans, Rychterová shows how Čapek, moving between different contexts, uses their open symbolic structures to shed new light on each other. See Sylvie Rychterová, ‘Karel Čapek – Zahradník Boží’, in Místo domova, Host, Brno, 2004, 88–104, here 102–103.    ‘Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘The Nobel Prize in Literature 1978, Biography’, in Nobel Lectures, Literature 1968–1980, eds Tore Frängsmyr and Sture Allén, World Scientific Publishing Co., Singapore, 1993, at http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/1978/singer-bio.html (accessed 1 November 2008).

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the maintenance and cultivation of which one has to struggle. It is also a poetic place in which we can discover our roots and the fact that reality always reveals and imprints in us more than we can understand. In this chapter I will examine his three ways of depicting the world, as a factory, as a garden and as an open horizon, drawing on Rossum’s Universal Robots (R.U.R.), The Gardener’s Year, and his trilogy Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life. The World as a Factory This subheading indicates that we are going to deal with an image of the world where human manufacturing is given priority over nature. The dominant culture appears here not as a participant in the divine creative activity through cultivating the earth, but as a slave to the world of technological progress, ultimately turning the world into somewhere uninhabitable. Čapek follows the process of the gradual illness of a culture, from its beginnings in the visions, beliefs, values or morals that keep the ruling ideology in power, to the catastrophic outcome. He chooses the genre of dystopia, developed by modern literature for these purposes. Dystopia is a counterpart to utopia, coming from Greek ouk-topos (no place) and eu-topos (good place). This double etymology captures the tension between the real and the non-real present in the human desire for happiness. Dystopia comes from dys-topos, which can be translated as a distorted place, disfigured place, a negation of a place through its destruction. Culture plays a double role in dystopic writings. As a body of mechanisms it safeguards the dominant ideology. As the excluded and often persecuted memory it provides possibilities of subverting the   In his own country as well as abroad he was known as a campaigner against war and social injustice, a sharp opponent of Nazism and of Communism. Karel Čapek almost received the Nobel Prize for literature. In November 1936 the Norwegian press nominated him, but in the end the Nobel Commission in Sweden did not think it wise to award a Nobel Prize to an anti-fascist and to risk Hitler’s reaction. See Olga Scheinpflugová, Český román, Fr. Borový, Praha–Cheb, 1946, 411. In 1938 Čapek tried to persuade the allies to stand with the endangered Czechoslovakia and, if necessary, fight the Germans. This failed. When, on 30 September, Germany took the border regions of Czechoslovakia, Čapek wrote the Czech writers’ memorandum ‘To the Consciousness of the World’. He refused to go into exile, and died on 25 December 1938, at the age of forty-eight. For Čapek’s biography in English see Ivan Klíma, Karel Čapek: Life and Work, Catbird Press, North Haven, CT, 2002.    The modern dystopia has its origins at the end of the eighteenth century. Apart from Čapek’s R.U.R., among the best-known dystopic works are H.G. Wells’s A Story of the Days to Come (1899) and Yevgeny Zamiatin’s We (1924), the first totalitarian dystopia based on the experience of the growing totalitarianism in the USSR that greatly inspired both Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954) or P.D. James’s Children of Men (1992).   For a detailed analysis, see João Batista Libânio, ‘Hope, Utopia, Resurrection’, in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, eds Jon Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría, SCM, London, 1996, 279–290.

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dominant ideology. In so doing, it reminds the dominant culture of the excluded visions, beliefs, values or morals, in which the world is not a place to be exploited, and which do not reduce relationships to utility. Čapek was equipped with extensive knowledge of the European literary and artistic scene. It is not accidental that his R.U.R. challenges the vision of the world proclaimed eleven years before by the Manifesto of Futurism, so influential for dystopian visions of the world in the following decades. The concluding exclamation of the manifesto said: ‘Erect on the summit of the world, once again we hurl defiance to the stars!’ Čapek writes in R.U.R.: It is night again. If I could only sleep. Sleep, dream, see human beings. – What, are the stars still there? What is the use of stars if there are no human beings? … Ah, can I sleep? Dare I sleep? Before life has been renewed … The machines, always these machines. Robots, stop them. The secret of the factory is lost – lost for ever. Stop these raging machines. Do you think you’ll force life out of them? … No, no, you must search. If only I were not so old.. Oh, miserable counterfeit. Effigy of the last man. Show yourself, show yourself, it is so long since I saw a human countenance – a human smile. What, is that a smile? These yellow, chattering teeth. So this is the last man.

With these words Alquist, a clerk in the Rossum’s Universal Robots10 factory, opens the epilogue of the play, which summarizes the threat to the modern world as Čapek sees it. Dehumanized reason and the struggle for progress have become the world’s worst enemies. Alquist is the last man left after the putsch in which the Robots kill all other people. Radius, the revolution’s leader, justifies it as follows: The world belongs to the stronger. He who would live must rule. The Robots have gained the mastery. They have gained the possession of life. We are masters of life. We are masters of the world. … The rule over oceans and lands. The rule over stars. The rule over the universe. Room, room, more room for the Robots.11



  See F.T. Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, at http://www. unknown.nu/futurism/manifesto.html (accessed 1 November 2008, p. 5 of 5).    Karel Čapek, R.U.R. and The Insect Play, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1961, 91. 10   This gave modern languages the neologism ‘robot’ – an artificial slave that has some outer human features but no human emotions, human care or responsibility. The word ‘robot’ is an invention of Karel Čapek’s brother, Josef. Karel initially wanted to use the word ‘labor’, with an obvious connotation in English. ‘Robot’ comes etymologically from an older Czech word ‘robota’, which means indenture. 11   Čapek, R.U.R., 90.

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Paradoxically, people are punished for not being able to live in a human manner themselves and for having given too little life to Robots. They made them as semi-human machines that would work, obey commands, be manipulated through feeling pain, but would not be able to love. ‘A man of different substance from ours’, ‘this artificial living matter … [with] a raging thirst for life’.12 This is how Harry Domain, the general manager of the factory, characterizes a Robot for an unexpected visitor to the factory, Miss Helena Glory, daughter of an Oxbridge University professor.13 Domain did not invent Robots himself. In order to explain the origins of the world’s catastrophe, Čapek inserts here a symbolic narrative about the old Rossum, the atheist, who ‘wanted to become a sort of scientific substitute for God’.14 Rossum suggests the Czech word rozum, ‘reason’, hence an obvious critique of the Enlightenment. But there is a less obvious addition. Čapek distinguishes between the old and the young Rossum. While the old Rossum wanted to make people exactly like us, it was the young Rossum, an engineer, the nephew of the old Rossum, who criticized the impossibility of the old Rossum’s task and decided not to make people like us, but ‘living and intelligent working machines’.15 The two Rossums used to have dreadful rows, we are told, and the young one got rid of the old. His mind was no longer occupied by an artificial man,16 but by an artificial worker, made as cheaply as possible, directed to the single progress of work, a living machine, with an enormously developed strength and intelligence, but no soul. Only pain is left and fear of the stamping-mill that exists to keep Robots in their place. Čapek’s plot develops on two levels. Besides the dystopic narrative bearing traces of modern European history, there is a biblical creation narrative playing its counterpart. The latter accuses the former of its evil ways, uncovers its violent outcomes, but in the end, also renders it a promise of salvation. At a dystopic level the act of idolatrous creation, of creation in one’s own image, took place within the manufacturing of Robots. It is a negative image. Robots are made to work, but also to hate and kill to order, with no mercy, whether for people or fellow Robots. Later they were organized into different nations, made of different colours and languages, of different factory marks.17 But then, there is a fatal error. Radius, the Robot with the largest brain in the world, starts   Čapek, R.U.R., 6.   The play started with Helena’s investigations of the secret process of manufacturing artificial people that were being ordered in their thousands by different countries. ‘Europe’s talking about nothing else’, Čapek, R.U.R., 3. 14   Čapek, R.U.R.,7. 15   Čapek, R.U.R., 8. 16   ‘A man is something that, for instance, feels happy, plays the fiddle, likes going for walks, and, in fact, wants to do a whole lot of things that are really unnecessary.’ Čapek, R.U.R., 8. 17   See Čapek, R.U.R., 57. 12

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a revolt. With the biggest capacity to think, he is also the best hater. He wants to be a master, not to be mastered. And interestingly, here the question of the soul returns: ‘Doctor, has Radius a soul?’ Helena asks the head of the Physiological Department, and gets the following answer: ‘I don’t know. He’s got something nasty.’ Helena ends by suggesting: ‘Perhaps this hatred is more like human beings too?’18 In the image of the factory we see a world reduced to production, and, in the image of a Robot, a human person reduced to a force of production. According to Čapek, these reductions lead to the final catastrophe enacted in his play. Neither the old Rossum, who ‘only thought of his godless tricks’, nor the young Rossum, interested in his millions, was capable of foreseeing it.19 Neither blind atheism, nor blind rationalism, nor blind science and technology, apprehend the pitfalls in their progress, Čapek says in 1920. After the Robots’ revolution, all humans are dead but Alquist, the clerk, the one most similar to Robots in his labours. But he is also the most dissimilar, as he does not hate and does not kill. In dialogue with Radius he says: ‘Nothing is stranger to a man than his own image.’20 Alquist thirsts to see other people. Robots hunger to multiply, as the secret of their making was lost in the battle. ‘Teach us to have children so that we may love them,’21 demands Radius. Yet how can Alquist, the last human being, teach something that humankind itself has lost? Love was put aside as something unnecessary, alongside playfulness and beauty, happiness and rest. What was left of the world – the factory – remained without hope, and therefore also without children. This is the end of the dystopia, but not of the play. Čapek uses the genre of dystopia but breaks with it in the Epilogue. There Alquist becomes a witness of a growing love between two Robots. The creation-narrative breaks in again, as we learn that something else was left in the image of man, a trace of love that no idolatry could subvert. For that Alquist praises the blessed day when God created human life, man and woman, and concludes the play with the Nunc dimittis, a canticle praising God’s salvation: ‘Now, Lord, lettest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, according to Thy will, for mine eyes have seen Thy salvation.’22 It is interesting that in R.U.R. the forgotten religious culture subverts the modern atheist and utilitarian culture. In this it is unlike Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, where the death of God is proclaimed as good news bringing freedom to people – news that only the old man in the forest who is slave to the past has   Čapek, R.U.R., 47. Only after her death is an answer given to her questions, when Radius explains to Alquist: ‘We were machines, sir. But terror and pain have turned us into souls.’ 95. 19   See Čapek, R.U.R., 66. 20   Čapek, R.U.R., 95; here the English translation was corrected according to the original. 21   Čapek, R.U.R., 95. 22   Čapek, R.U.R., 104. See Lk 2:29–30. 18

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not heard.23 The old servant in Čapek’s R.U.R. has heard all the modern ideas, but remained unconvinced that they would lead to freedom. Čapek, siding with Alquist, makes a move, so to speak, ‘forward to the roots’,24 i.e. to religion, which has become a counter-culture and in which we are rooted in a deeper sense than modern atheism or pragmatism recognized. And precisely from here at least shy hope springs when most needed. The World as a Garden A figurative counterpart to the understanding of the world as a factory is found in Čapek’s short work The Gardener’s Year.25 It was originally a collection of notes and columns that Čapek started to write when he was beginning his own garden in Prague. Unlike in R.U.R., here the world is perceived through its miniature, a garden, where unexpected fullness of life can be encountered. In the natural order and beauty a different order and different beauty is breaking through. Čapek’s garden was a practical as well as a symbolic reality. In 1923, during a time of great personal crisis,26 he discovered the beauty of monastic gardens in Italy.27 Later, together with his brother Josef, he built a garden in the Prague suburb of Vinohrady. There he organized Friday meetings of artists, intellectuals, politicians and economists, and introduced different rules that were intended somehow to resemble the rules of a monastic community. Finally, he also cultivated a garden in Stará Huť near Dobříš, where he moved together with Olga Scheinpflugová after their marriage in 1935. Sylvie Rychterová points out that the Czech word for garden, ‘zahrada’, comes ultimately from the Old Persian pairiadaeza. In Latin this became paradisus, and derivative forms are found in many modern European languages, such as ‘paradise’ in English. Čapek makes use of different meanings of the word, from its original  See Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, T.N. Foulis, Edinburgh–London, 1909, 6. 24  I have borrowed the phrase from the concluding remarks of Christoph Schwöbel, at the XIVth Academic Consultation of Societas Oecumenica in Prague on 26 August 2006. 25   The individual columns started to be published in the Lidové noviny newspaper from 1925 and were collected into a book in 1929. In the next ten years it had six more Czech editions. Today it has been translated into about twenty languages. 26  He was diagnosed with a rare illness of the spine that could lead to paralysis, and under this influence he broke off his engagement with the actress Olga Scheinpflugová. He subsequently married her in 1935, when his health had stabilized for a while. 27  Enchanted by them, he wrote: ‘If there were any monastery without religion I would go there immediately’, and a little later he says: ‘After all the distraction I am probably a rather monastic type; all the time I think of a strict (towards myself) and pure life, where one does not work for success but for the “glory of God”, i.e. from reasons of morals and knowledge.’ K. Čapek, Listy Olze [Letters to Olga; from Naples and Rome, 15 and 19 May 1923], Odeon, Prague, 1971, 141–143. 23

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physical meaning, an ‘enclosed space’, ‘a place protected by a wall or a fence’,28 to the symbolic meanings, particularly in religious narratives. Some of his columns employ religious symbols while incorporating them into modern thinking29 in a similar manner to R.U.R. Here, too, we start with a creation narrative, with ‘a garden which is brown and bare, as it was on the first day of the creation of the world’.30 This time, however, humanity is not at the centre. Instead there is a place that heals human egocentricity and establishes new modes of relationships. In looking after the earth and its plants, people show a likeness to God, the great Gardener, in whose image we were created: ‘Your attitude towards things has changed. If it rains, you say that it is raining on the garden. If the sun shines, it is not just shining any old how but shining on the garden. If it is night-time, you are pleased that the garden is resting.’31 Čapek’s account of how a gardener comes into being can be read and understood both as a source of gardening instruction, and also at a symbolic level, as a story of redemption. But first the fall narrative is retold: When I was little, I had a rebellious, why even malicious, attitude towards my father’s garden because I was forbidden from treading on the flowerbeds and plucking the unripe fruit. Likewise, in the Garden of Eden, Adam was prohibited from treading on the borders and plucking the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge because it was not yet ripe, except that Adam – just like us children – did pluck the unripe fruit and, as a result, was expelled from Paradise; from which time on, the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge has been, and always will be, unripe.32

Čapek works with the image of a garden as a mirror of God’s work. The unceasing care for the earth and for the plants in it, then, is a way of maturing in knowledge, a way of perceiving the transcendent, a way of waiting, of accepting the order of things that are not controlled by one’s desires, but by much larger processes of nature. There one can discover and, with awe, watch how plants respond to care, but also how much more mysterious is the gift of life present even in a single bud. 28

  See Rychterová, ‘Karel Čapek – Zahradník Boží’, 89. She refers also to G. Filoramo, ‘Introducction’, in P.A. Bernheim and G. Stavrides, Paradiso paradisi, Einaudi, Turin, 1994, xvi. 29   Rychterová states that with regard to religion, ‘Čapek considered himself a layman, and he included religious symbols into his thinking in order to return their meaning down to the earth. Therefore in R.U.R. he develops a modern plot in a biblical key, while in his Apocrypha he tells biblical stories in a modern key. As a writer he is aware of the fact that a plurality of semantic plans has always belonged to literature.’ Rychterová, ‘Karel Čapek – Zahradník Boží’, 102–103. 30   Karel Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, Continuum, London–New York, 2003, 9. 31   Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 12. 32   Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 13.

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Today, 30th March, at ten o’clock in the morning, the first little Forsythia flower opened out behind my back. For three days I had been keeping a watch … so as not to miss this historic moment; it happened as I was looking at the sky to see if it was going to rain.33

This enclosed world has its own kairos, its own ‘“Now!” which will breathe from the earth or the sky; and at that moment all the buds will unfurl and it will be there.’34 And, as Čapek recommends later, such a time should also be celebrated as an achievement of all the labour invested. He assumes a synergy of human labour and the labour of a greater Gardener, whom we imitate. Čapek shifts between different semantic plans, here speaking about the garden, and a few lines later about God’s creation or joking about metaphysics. In the world as a garden there is an omnipresent sense of awe that both requires and resists explanation.35 A love affair, a mystery, a battle, a garden, according to Čapek, is ‘like the human world and all human undertakings … never finished’.36 In the process the garden humanizes those who care about it. In its mundane reality, transcendence breaking through reveals the future that ‘is not ahead of us, for it is already here in the shape of a shoot, it is already among us’, says Čapek, ‘and what is not among us now will not be in the future either’.37 He continues, summarizing the sense in which an experience with the garden can help us to see, to hope and to grow: We do not see the shoots because they are underground, we do not know the future, because it is within us. It sometimes seems to us as though we reek of decay, littered with dry remnants of the past, but if we could only see what fat, white shoots are blazing a trail though this old cultivated soil which we call today, what seeds are secretly sprouting, what old seedlings are rallying themselves and concentrating themselves into a living shoot which will one day sprout into a flowering life, if we could see the secret bustling of the future among us, we would certainly say that our nostalgia and our misgivings are a load of rot, and that best of all is to be a living person, that is, a person who grows.38

  Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 51.   Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 51. 35   Čapek says: ‘What the mystery resides in, I will not tell you. Mystery simply has to be acknowledged so that we can find it and pay homage to it.’ Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 116. 36   Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 138. 37   Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 153; compare with the conclusion of the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:29: ‘For to all those who have, more will be given, and they will have an abundance; but from those who have nothing, even what they have will be taken away.’ 38   Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 153–154. 33 34

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Here, standing on the earth with both feet, we feel the ground that we are made of. We can learn what the world is at its deepest and most ordinary level, and who we are. Čapek’s garden utopia does not lead to a non-place, ouk-topos, but reminds us of a good place, eu-topos. It takes us to the sources that make this world a good place in which we can see the glimpses of its created glory. The World as an Open Horizon Čapek’s dystopic and utopic images of the world further develop in his trilogy Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life.39 He wrote these three novellas in 1933–1934, when Hitler had just come into power in Germany. At this time Čapek needed different tools for dealing with the problem of domination by the other, of people and nations being impoverished and their identity being ridiculed and taken away from them. For this purpose he revisited earlier philosophical themes inspired by vitalism40 and perspectivism.41 In them he searched for noetic alternatives to dictatorship. In the trilogy Čapek deals with questions of human and terrestrial identity, of unity and plurality, of conflict and reconciliation, of transcendence and of hope. Hordubal, the first part, named after its main protagonist, has a dystopic character. Here the world is a place of exploitation, a scene in which all the actors end up on the losing side. Čapek based his novella on the true story of a farmer, Juraj Hordubal,42 who returned from America to his home village of Krivá. He is an archetypal victim – or loser; the other that does not belong. While on the train home, Hordubal tells how he worked as a miner in Johnstown for eight years, sending all the money he saved to his wife and daughter, how later he lost his only mate, was robbed by the bank, and was fired from his job. The story of loss continues as he returns to his farm and finds out that his family have betrayed him. His beloved wife Polana lives with a farm worker Manya, whom his daughter Haifa adores. Manya has started to behave like the master of the house. Juraj Hordubal’s dignity is further stripped away by his neighbours, who reject him. 39   See also Ivana Noble, ‘Člověk a svět jako mnohohlas: Exkurs do filosofické prózy Karla Čapka’ [The Human Being and the World as a Polyphony: An Excursus to the Philosophical Prose of Karel Čapek], Teologie a Společnost 4 (2006), 23–26. 40  Vitalism as a philosophical stream of the beginning of the twentieth century, associated with Henry Bergson, was inspired by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century biologists, and claimed that the dynamics of life cannot be fully explained by any scientific laws. 41   José Ortega y Gasset suggested an approach to conflicting truths where each of them is a product of a different perspective from which life is seen. Karl Mannheim named this ‘perspectivism’. 42   The names of the figures are slightly changed; in the real story it was Juraj Hardubej, and his murderer Vasil Manak. See Karel Čapek, ‘Afterword’ to Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life, Catbird Press, North Haven, CT, 1990, 466.

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Finally, he is murdered. But even that is insufficient: ‘his most bitter lot’, Čapek writes, ‘comes only with what happens to him after his death’,43 when, during the investigation his world is artificially constructed solely from the outside. There he is deprived of the rest of his humanity, or as Čapek puts it, his heart is lost, without being ever buried.44 In this objectified artificial world any meaning visible from within his life is ridiculed and twisted, as if it were a second killing. Čapek writes of how we are left: With the way his story becomes coarse in the hands of men; the way the events, which he lived in his way and according to his inner law, become hazy and cumbrous when policemen reconstruct them by means of objective detection; the way it all becomes corrupted and entangled and contorted into another, hopelessly ugly picture of life.45

Thus the reader is confronted with a world where wrong remains unreconciled, and there is no dismissal in peace even after death. Only questions remain: What is the actual truth of Hordubal, but also of Polana, who is imprisoned for twelve years; of Stephan Manya, who receives a life sentence? Did he murder for money or kill out of love? Was Polana as beautiful as a lady or ugly and worn as an old washerwoman? Were they frivolous or desperate?46 Čapek points out that each one of us has a tendency to restrict our knowledge of people to what fits into ‘our life systems’.47 But the same people and the same facts might appear differently in Hordubal’s, Polana’s or Manya’s version, or in the eyes of policemen or judges. Real answers to our questions do not come from attempts to harmonize different voices, or from creating an objectivized record, a meta-structure that would give each voice its place and exclude what does not fit. The answers do not come from taking God’s place and passing sentence on ‘something graver than crime’.48 Against such a dehumanized, artificially constructed world, Čapek allows the silenced stories of each person to be told. Everyone – the farmer, but also the murderer or the adulteress – must have the same right to be heard. The tragedy of the first novel is that no one is listening, that the inner life of a person seems to have no value. And, as Čapek says, we must strive to do more justice to the ‘hidden aspects of the true individual … – or at least to respect more fully what

43

  Čapek, ‘Afterword’, 465.   The final sentence of the novel is: ‘The heart of Juraj Hordubal was lost somewhere, and was never buried.’ Karel Čapek, Horduba, Povětroň, Obyčejný život, Československý spisovatel, Praha, 1965, 149. 45   Čapek, ‘Afterword’, 465. 46   See Čapek, ‘Afterword’, 467. 47   See Čapek, ‘Afterword’, 466. 48   Čapek, Hordubal, 148. 44

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we do not know of him’. Otherwise the world would remain a place of ‘dreadful and common injustice’.49 The understanding of the world in Meteor, the second part of the trilogy, seems like an inverted picture. Čapek employs some of the utopic features we have seen in the garden image, like the care and basic goodwill of those who, again in their multiple ways, reconstruct the life-story of the main character. The story starts in a hospital: Over the white cover a feverish hand wanders. Poor restless hand, what do you want to clutch? What would you like to throw away? Is there no one to hold you? Well, I’m here, don’t be frightened, don’t grope about, there is no dreadful solitude to frighten you.50

There are a doctor and nurse, two different fellow patients, a clairvoyant and a poet. Each one of them in some sense holds the hand of a mortally wounded man, who fell down from the sky. He does not have any identification documents or name, or even a face or a voice, as all was destroyed in the plane crash. In the hospital there is a body, and those who encounter it desperately try to fit it into a corresponding life, to give it its missing humanity, to find its lost heart. In this sense, Meteor complements what was missing in Hordubal. Each person, by trying to create a corresponding life-story for the wounded man, involves his or her own ‘life systems’.51 But this time, Čapek points out, the outcome is entirely different. There is no dehumanizing effort to create one objectified account of the missing face, one life-story, one identity. The acceptance of the impossibility of this makes room for an exchange of gifts, of what each of the people can bring into the situation from their own inner life. From there they give only what they have, the doctor his skill, the nurse her love and her own unfulfilled dreams, the clairvoyant a kind of distant compassion stemming from his intuition, the poet his creativity. Čapek shows that they themselves might be pitiable figures, but in their acts of giving they gain a new beauty. In this movement the chaos that Čapek depicted in Hordubal becomes a polyphony. Words and gestures are filled with power, because they struggle for the humanity of the other. ‘In extremis’, something of the angelic, of the celestial comfort breaks through the voices of different people.52 In Meteor the world is seen as a place where clear borderlines between ‘me’ and ‘the other’ cease to count. We become part of each other, yet without losing our individuality. In the third part, An Ordinary Life, Čapek takes the parallel between the open horizons of the outer and the inner world still further. The theme of a limitsituation remains, but this time it is a man who prepares himself for a peaceful 49

    51   52   50

See Čapek, ‘Afterword’, 466. Čapek, Meteor, 154. See Čapek, ‘Afterword’, 466. See Čapek, Meteor, 154.

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death. As a former civil servant who has always liked order, he tries to make accounts of memories of his life, of different worlds he inhabited or escaped, and so he sets out to write his biography. Čapek does not give this man a name. He is ‘an ordinary man’, a type of us all, living a most ordinary life.53 Those who after his death are left with his biography, Mr Popel and a doctor, both know him as a neighbour,and, significantly for Čapek, as a gardener. Now they embark on the journey of discovering how a much more bountiful life breaks in, even through the most ordered and regular person’s span of days and years. The ordinary man’s story is told from the point of view of a coming end. Čapek lets him kneel in the garden, and be overcome by ‘a terribly strong and certain FEELING OF DEATH’.54 As we learn later, it is also the death of a singular and simple plan of an ordinary world. In this moment, there is an overwhelming experience of the beauty of the ordinary world, as well as an awareness of a continuity being lost. As we read further, we find that the ordinary man’s small audience is also transformed. Towards the end, Mr Popel speaks of the new sense of consciousness he has gained in the process. The doctor cannot admit to that, but he finishes the tasks in the garden, which, in the sad beatific vision in the book he had read, remained undone. The ordinary man is gone and everything is left in order.55 But what sort of order? The biography starts simply, with a narrative revealing that everything in life has its place and its reason. We move from a happy childhood in a carpenter’s yard, through painful growth into maturity, to working for over forty years for the Railways. The ordinary life, if not happy, has a sense of completion, seeing ‘that in everything that happened some kind of order was realized, or ...’56 There are things that do not fit, like his childhood memory of his first friend, a gypsy girl, whom he visited one Sunday, discovering her being raped by her father: the dark realm of sex and evil he feared all his life. Or there is his ambition, showing that he also could have sharp elbows; his health worries; his loneliness even in marriage. After some heart problems, he comes back to writing and discerns different inner voices fighting, ‘as if two people were tugging in opposite directions over my past, and each wanted to appropriate the biggest bit’.57 He asks: What is the whole truth? Now Čapek lets his hero read the same events differently, from an unhappy careerist point of view, a hypochondriac one, a romantic one, one of lost innocence, a poet’s one, filling in missing bits, while realizing that he is never finished. Each situation, each person, each thing has left a trace of the other. The biography is no longer only his, but theirs too. He is connected to the others, discovering further and further links, till he discovers that he is of the same stuff as the plurality of the world. And it is only there that Čapek lets his hero rest, at 53

    55   56   57   54

See Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 315–316. Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 318. See Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 464. Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 391. Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 396.

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home in the world, and the world at home in him. Here he raises again the question of God: Perhaps even God is quite an ordinary life, only to perceive him and know. I might find him perhaps in the others, since I have not found him and known him in me; he might be met perhaps among the people, he might perhaps have quite an ordinary face like us all. He might reveal himself … [but we] wouldn’t see anything particular; it would be quite an ordinary life, and at the same time such an immense, amazing glory.58

The ordinary face of God might be found not only in the safety of the carpenter’s yard, but also in the strangest, the hardest and the most forgotten places: Or would it be in the wooden hut, shut with a hasp and smelling like a beast; such a darkness with light only coming in through chink, and then everything would begin to stand out in a radiance strange and dazzling, all that muck and that misery. Or the last station in the world, the rusty line grown over with shepherd’s-purse and hair-grass, nothing beyond, and the end of everything; and that end of everything would just be God. Or the lines running into space, and meeting at infinity … It might be that it was there, that EVEN THAT was in my life, but I missed it. Perhaps it’s night, a night with little red and green lights, and in the station the last train is standing; no international express, but quite an ordinary little train … that stops at every station; why shouldn’t an ordinary train like that go into infinity? … Wait, but there are plenty of people, Mr. Martinek sits there, the drunken captain sleeps in the corner like a log, the little dark girl presses her nose to the window and sticks out her tongue, and from the van of the last carriage the guard greets with his flag. Wait, I am coming with you!59

Although the religious dimension of Čapek’s concept of the world has been more often overlooked than recognized,60 without reference to God and without his   Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 462. Compare with Levinas’s claim that the faces of the others we meet bear traces of God as the Other. See Emmanuel Levinas, De Dieu qui vient à l’idée, Vrin, Paris, 1992, 115. 59   Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 462–463. 60   F.X. Šalda counts Čapek among the utopic thinkers who take us away from real problems. See F.X. Šalda, ‘Karel Čapek, novinář politický a sociální’, Šaldův zápisník, 4 June 1932; Kritické glosy k nové poezii české, Melantrich, Praha, 1939, 286; Jan Král claims that his perspectivism is only a different form of pragmatism, see Jan Král, Československá filosofie, Melantrich, Praha, 1937, 58; František Buriánek includes him among the relativists; see František Buriánek, Česká literatura 20. století, Orbis, Praha, 1968, 197. All this is paradoxical, because Čapek himself rejected relativism (see Karel Čapek, ‘Téměř kus noetiky’, Přítomnost 11 [1934], 25). For Jan Zouhar, Čapek is closest to vitalism, where a human being ‘is always the fundamental measure of all values, things, 58

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eschatological vision mentioned at the end of the trilogy, his humanism would remain incomplete. Čapek’s images of the world count with a religious counterculture that stands in opposition to that of production and progress, of dehumanized objectified science, of militarism, and of utilitarianism or of agnosticism. In Čapek such a religious counter-culture is playful, non-dogmatic, noninstitutional, but has not lost its fundamental symbols and a spiritual depth. We have already encountered this counter-culture in R.U.R. It subverted the dystopic image of the world as a factory. The last man who prayed and struggled to believe, hope and love bore that culture within him. In the garden utopias we have been invited to acknowledge the mystery present in the beauty and the order of nature revealing God’s glory and cultivating those who cared for the earth. Such culture still lives in our world. Even if marginalized, it cultivates the world, while participating in the creative activity of God the Creator, to whom we find plentiful passing references throughout Čapek’s works. Moreover, in the trilogy Čapek places this religious culture, with its symbolic traditions of meaning, into a wider context. He shows that the world, as well as we ourselves, is an open plurality, both good and bad. We can discern a cultivating voice calling us to decide between what is unjust and what is just, what annihilates and what rehabilitates the humanity of the individual as well as of the world at large. In this process, Čapek proposes, God reveals his ordinary glory, and in this light transfigures who we are. A Vanished Past in the Mosaic of the Present Culture is not a place; it is located in the world. What happens, then, if the location vanishes, in this instance, the world in which the amalgam of pre-war European cultures lived? In this section we shall investigate whether, and if so how, cultures that have been dislocated can find different forms of meaningful life in other places. With the help of Isaac Bashevis Singer, a Jewish-American writer of Polish origin, we shall try to understand what of the vanished past can re-emerge in the mosaics of present cultures. At the same time, we shall examine what happens when the memories of the survivors hold such sway that they both prevent new life forming and remain unable to restore the lost past. Singer perceives the relationship between culture and the world from a different perspective than Čapek. Unlike the latter, who died just before the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Nazi Germany, Singer, writing after the war, has to face the phenomena and processes’. Jan Zouhar, ‘Filozofie Karla Čapka’, in Zouhar, Studie k dějinám českého myšlení 20. století, Masarykova univerzita, Brno, 1999, 48–63, here 52. A stress on democratic humanism is found in William Harkins, ‘Introduction’, in Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life, Catbird Press, North Haven, CT, 1990, 1–7, here 3. The role of transcendence and the question of God are examined closely by, e.g., Jakub Češka, Čapkovo hledání Boha, nebo literatura?, Edice TVARy, vols 18–19 (1999); or Rychterová, ‘Karel Čapek – Zahradník Boží’, 88–104.

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painful question: ‘In a world where human beings are burned in gas ovens, what point is there in art?’61 Culture in its positive meaning can no longer be taken for granted. And yet the world continued after the pre-war and war periods and it still needs to be cultivated even if neither culture nor art is able to save human lives from the war atrocities. For Singer, one way to do art after Auschwitz is to depict a world that is no longer here, and to bear testimony to why this world has disappeared. Singer writes about the physical and mental environment of the Jewish communities in Poland and Eastern Galicia. He invokes memories of places where mystical Hasidism merged with the teaching of the Talmud, superstition with holiness, different fears and harmful habits with gratitude for what there was. Thus, in the narrative memory, he holds on to a culture where people chatted with God as with a friend, shared houses with angels, as well as with their dead ancestors, not to mention different spectres, ghosts, and all kinds of demons who inhabited not only their imagination but also their physical presence. Singer wants to preserve the imprint of the disappeared Jewish villages and towns through telling their stories. Singer had a great gift for dealing with difficult themes in a tragi-comic manner, uncovering the rich scope of human experience. This is perhaps most apparent in his short stories that bring to us so vividly the vanished world of Eastern and Central European Jews, or that speak of the lives of those who emigrated and survived, but without the physical and mental world that used to be theirs. In the following pages I shall examine how images of vanished parts of the world go on living within cultures that survived. I focus on three stories: ‘The Egotist’ from A Crown of Feathers, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’ and ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, both from the collection also called The Spinoza of Market Street. Roots That Were Moved Singer, himself a refugee from Poland, endangered by Hitler’s Germany, was sensitive to the attempts of others to integrate the past worlds they no longer inhabited, but which shaped who they were, into the new contexts, new worlds and new cultures in which they had to redefine their belonging with others – or the reasons for their isolation from others. The first story we shall look at in detail does not speak about the vanished Jewish world, at least not at first sight, but about pre-Bolshevik Russia, now present in the memories and unfulfilled dreams of a small circle of famous emigrants from Russia in post-war New York. The narrator is a neighbour of one Maria 61  In ‘The Captive’, Isaac Bashevis Singer puts these words into the mouth of the painter Tobias Anfang, who fled first from Poland to Paris, then to America, and finally to Israel, and who talks about his fellow Pole from Paris, Zorach Kreiter, who refused to leave for America to save himself from a concentration camp. See Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘The Captive’, in A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, 44–59, here 46.

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Davidovna, once a revolutionary close to all the Menshevik leaders. In her flat the narrator also encountered her friends. There was Popov – a former leader of a faction in the Russian Duma. He still dressed in the same way as forty years before, trying to keep the same expression, though now busy with shopping and cooking for his new wife, who was ill. At the same time, he was one of the few capable of appreciating the new culture. In a good-natured way he would repeat during conversation that ‘we should be grateful that we were living in a free country’.62 Then there was Professor Bulov – author of a history of the Russian Revolution from the Decembrists to Stalin, originally from Siberia. Following years of solitary confinement in a Russian prison, he was unused to speaking much, but he still hated the Bolsheviks with a passion. And finally there was a count, Kuzensky, who in his youth had played an important part in the nine months of Kerensky’s regime. Unlike the others, he enjoyed his present life and made jokes about the past, at which others were unable to laugh.63 Both Bulov and Kuzensky competed for Maria Davidovna’s love, but neither of them was allowed to have what belonged only to the Revolution. The title of the story refers to Kuzensky, or, more precisely, to Maria Davidovna’s description of him: ‘An egotist – the greatest egotist I have ever met. He has hidden from reality his whole life. All that remains of that carnival is a heap of rubbish, but for him it is still a holiday – the private holiday of a hedonist.’64 Yet throughout the story this characterization is questioned: is it selfish to go on enjoying life when the past cannot be revived and none of the lives that were lost can be returned – or is it more selfish to demand from others faithfulness to one’s dreams, even though they will remain forever unfulfilled? Kuzensky’s refusal to allow his mind to be frozen in the past makes him guilty in the eyes of his fellow expatriates, guilty of living in the present. As we learn as the narrative develops, this is precisely what Maria Davidovna cannot do. For her, living in the present would feel like betraying the memories of the past, like a forbidden escape from the prolonged mourning for the unfulfilled outcomes of the dreams she once had. Singer takes issue with this and, as the narrative develops, he shows that the choice of burying oneself in the past usually has a whole range of motivations linked to a fear of failure to belong anywhere real, especially since we would not have full control over what such belonging might bring. The world that is dead, or more often artificial right from the beginning, does not confront us with such challenges. In Maria Davidovna’s case such a fabricated world became her idol, and kept her as ‘a living corpse’,65 as she says in a moment of confession.

62  Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘The Egotist’, in A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1977, 236–245, here 237. 63  See Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 236–237. 64  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 240. 65  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 240.

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Maria Davidovna is a woman of indiscernible age, with glasses, always dressed in dark clothes, but still charming, reminiscent ‘of the revolutionary women in Russia who lived in attic rooms and printed illegal pamphlets by hand or put together bombs to throw on the czar’s henchmen’.66 Her life had finished with the defeat in Russia, and since then she has lived in a state of permanent melancholy. Or was it really since then? When we go deeper, Singer questions such determination by just one external event. He leads us to the plurality of events, fears and desires that preceded and followed, from the death of her mother to the ways in which she shut herself off from any possibility of being in love, or allowing others to know more of her inner life. The death of her happiness after the October Revolution is now seen as one of many deaths in her life: ‘This wasn’t just caprice. I always had a strong desire to die. I envied the dead. I used to go to the Greek Orthodox cemetery and stand for hours gazing at the photographs on the headstones’, she says.67 The February Revolution and Kerensky’s government was the only moment of discontinuity in a life desiring death: ‘Every day of the year was full of surprises. That was a year without winter, because the Revolution began in the spring and ended in the fall, when the Communists took over.’68 Therefore, after this time was over, life was stripped of meaning, and this loss became the strongest reason for remaining in the realm of death forever, for creating a subculture that would be reminiscent of this most beautiful of all deaths. The circle of emigrants that met regularly in her flat belonged to this subculture and, in a way, gave Maria Davidovna’s idol the illusion of being ‘real’. The relationships were not illusory, but they all shared the same problem. Their past worlds, whether real or desired, were more captivating than the present one. Perhaps, with the exception of Popov, they seemed to belong more to the past. They felt that, through their sacrifices to the past, the no longer existent Russia was still living. Yet there was still the painful question: what would happen to that Russia when they died? Kuzensky’s illness and sudden death are seen by his friends as his final betrayal. Maria Davidovna’s reaction is the strongest: ‘He lived like an egotist and now he has deserted us like an egotist. What shall I do? Every second will be hell.’69 Kuzensky’s body is laid out on Maria Davidovna’s wide bed, where he could be only now, after he collapsed while playing chess with her – which he always lost – and drinking tea. There is a congealed smile in his eyes. This is a sign of life even in his death, his final victory, which Maria Davidovna minds the most, as it sums up his attitude:

66

 Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 236.  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 240. 68  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 239. 69  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 243. 67

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It was all selfishness. His going to the people, his imprisonment – all of it. He was a squire to the last second of his life. He never gave anything that wasn’t an alm – even his love. He was too proud to see a doctor. As for me, I wasted my years for nothing.70

The remaining emigrants at his death-bed feel even more strongly that they are dying out. But their real tragedy is a different death, the identification of their lives with the mother Russia of their dreams, now even more often than their memories, a Russia that never existed as such, but that is a void or a monster taking away their real lives. ‘This is against all rules, Count. This is not the way to behave’,71 says Bulov, who did not speak to Kuzensky while he was alive. Popov asks: ‘Who can take his place?’ And he answers to himself: ‘No one. ... We are passing away; soon no one will be left; Eternity claims us – the great mystery. Russia will forget us.’ While numerous speeches and arguments went on, all ‘perplexed, grieved, full of reproach, full of forgiveness ... [t]he wrinkles at the corners of Kuzensky’s eyes seemed to laugh. Maria Davidovna covered her face with both hands and began to cry in a hoarse voice.’ 72 In her tears, there is a new awareness competing with the old habit. At Kuzensky’s death Maria Davidovna names another disappeared aspect of her life, another vanished world: ‘I forgot that I was a Jewish daughter. The other day I read in my Bible about the Israelites serving idols. I said to myself, ‘My idol was the Revolution, and therefore I am punished by God.’73 Yet she cannot let her idol go, and condemns anyone else who would have such freedom. For her letting go is an act of selfishness, of egoism. She repeats, Kuzensky was an egoist who did not live for Russia, but only for himself! Unlike Čapek’s R.U.R., and perhaps more similarly to Hordubal, the end of the story does not provide a way out. Accusations and forgiveness merge, and only the dead, free of idols, retain life. Others continue to be the living dead. In ‘The Egotist’, Singer shows a type of cultural continuation, where the idealized world that is past makes no room for the present world that is alive and therefore imperfect. People who had to leave their lands and resettle elsewhere lost the unity of the physical and the mental world of their origin, and were faced with a dilemma: should they go on living in the old mental world divorced of its physical roots – or should they allow themselves to be cultivated by and contribute to the cultivation of the new worlds they were forced to inhabit? How to integrate the old and the new? Singer’s voice has the authority of experience, as someone who was at one point a victim of the twentieth-century ideologies, but who also had to decide whether to remain a victim forever or allow a new life to develop, for himself and for others. 70

 Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 243.  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 244. 72  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 245. 73  Singer, ‘The Egotist’, 243. 71

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Forces Playing in the Universe As the previous story showed, Singer is aware that the pre-war Jewish world is not the only world that has been lost, and whose culture is endangered by forgetfulness. Yet it is the world where his roots lay. Therefore, in capturing the pre-war Poland as well as the villages and towns that vanished after the majority of the Jewish population of Eastern and Central Europe were gone, he touches on very personal themes. Embracing the paradoxes of life, he allows strange little details to reveal a forgotten understanding of forces at play in the universe. He does not expect, as Čapek did, that the similar would speak to the similar, but rather that the other in its entire strangeness would make claims on our apprehension of who we are and which forces are at play within our world. This happens, for example, when we read the story of the chimney sweep, Moshe, looked after by angels, just like Abraham,74 who can see in an old dead beggar ‘one of the Thirty-Six Righteous Men who, living out their days in obscurity, were keeping the world from destruction by the strength of their virtues’.75 In the following two sections I shall look at two frequent struggles presented in Singer’s works: first, between the higher and the lower world; and second, between the blind and the seeing will. In both cases it is not always clear which is which or whether they do not overlap. As we shall see in the two stories I now examine, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’ and ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, both from the collection The Spinoza of Market Street, Singer speaks about the vanished past, this time against the background of post-Enlightenment Jewish philosophy. The title story, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, tells of Nahum Fischelson, Doctor of Philosophy, an old man who studied Spinoza’s Ethics76 from beginning to end for thirty years. He discerns two worlds: one vastly extended, partaking in the endless divine substance, indestructible; the other full of chaos, petty human affairs, smallness and violence. The first appears before his eyes when he looks up at the skies, thinks of God and the universe guided by the rational laws in the ways the Amsterdam philosopher has taught him.77 The other is there when he looks down from the window to the Market Street and sees the barbaric world with its

 See Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘The Beggar Said So’, in The Spinoza of Market Street, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981, 99–109, here 106. 75  Singer, ‘The Beggar Said So’, 108. 76  See Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; compare also with Spinoza’s Short Treatise on God, Man and Human Welfare, Open Court, Chicago, IL, 1909; for commentary see Theo Verbeek, Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise: Exploring ‘The Will of God’, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003. 77   ‘In such moments, Dr. Fischelson experienced the Amor Dei Intellectualis, which is, according to the philosopher of Amsterdam, the highest perfection of the mind.’ Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, in The Spinoza of Market Street, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981, 7–25, here 10. 74

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confused emotions, unworthy of those who walk in the path of reason.78 For most of his life these two worlds remain apart, with a clear division between the higher and the lower. Yet, after an Austrian prince is shot in Serbia and Warsaw starts war preparations, Dr Fischelson becomes ill and thinks he is dying. Instead of taking him from this world, the eternal laws seem to play a game with Dr Fischelson. Or is it the absence of such laws that turns his life upside down? The reader must make his or her own conclusion as the story goes on. There is a neighbour in Market Street, called Black Dobbe. She is unmarried, old, ugly, the incarnation of the low world. Moved by compassion and also by curiosity, she checks if Dr Fischelson is still alive, makes his bed, cooks a bowl of soup, and sweeps the floor. Dr Fischelson is getting ready for death, but death does not come. Unnoticed, something else starts dying, the separation of the two worlds. They start communicating with each other, as Dr Fischelson listens to Dobbe’s chaotic life, and talks to her. ‘Well, do you believe in God?’ he finally asked her. ‘I don’t know’, she answered. ‘Do you?’ ‘Yes, I believe.’ ‘Then why don’t you go to the synagogue?’ she asked. ‘God is everywhere,’ he replied. ‘In the synagogue. In the market place. In this very room. We ourselves are parts of God.’79

The two worlds, one of the endless divine substance and the other of petty human affairs, meet. And they temporarily merge into one. In the story this change is expressed in a surprising event: Dr Fischelson marries Black Dobbe. At first, this unusual union appears to other people as pure madness, and it arouses questions and laughter. Yet for Dr Fischelson it is the first time he has a possibility of finding rest. We are told that he does not recognize himself on the wedding night, being drunk with love, sleeping like a youth. But this stage does not last. Singer prefaces the final monologue by remarking that when Fischelson wakes early, there is a deep silence in Market Street, fresh wind plays with the colours of the stars on the dark sky, green, red, yellow, blue. ‘In the higher sphere, apparently, little notice was taken of the fact that a certain Dr Fischelson had in his declining years married someone called Black Dobbe.’ Likewise, as Singer points out: ‘Seen from above, even the Great War was nothing but a temporary play of modes.’ While ‘[t]he myriads of fixed stars continued to travel their destined courses in unbound space’, worlds ‘were born and died in cosmic upheavals’. Dr Fischelson sees his ‘unavoidable fate’ as a part of it all, a small, unimportant part of the divine substance without beginning or end, ‘absolute, indivisible, eternal, without duration, infinite in its attributes’, whose ‘waves and bubbles danced in the universal cauldron, seething with change, following the unbroken chain of causes and effects’. He closes his 78

 See Singer, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, 11–12.  Singer, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, 21.

79

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eyes, lets the wind cool his head, he breathes the night air deeply and with shaking hands whispers: ‘Divine Spinoza, forgive me. I have become a fool.’80 There is no other conclusion to the narrative. Singer’s stories usually lack a good ending in terms of conflict resolution and of reaffirming the world as a good place, or in the case of ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, as a place where both divine rational laws and human undertakings contribute to one world as a whole. It is madness, we are told, perhaps a similar madness to expecting that God would interfere and protect the world from wars and their atrocities, to think that those sub specie aeternitatis are more than ‘a temporary play of modes’ 81 deprived of human pains and fears. Yet as we learn from the next story, this foolishness might be an attractive alternative in comparison with a complete scepticism. Shadows of Hope For ‘The Shadow of a Crib’ Singer chooses a different philosophical underpinning from that of Jewish religious thought. He moves from Spinoza’s divinely guided rational universe to Schopenhauer’s pessimistic notion of the world as the representation of the blind will.82 The main protagonist of the story, Dr Yaretzky, a doctor of medicine and an admirer of Schopenhauer, brings alive not only Schopenhauer’s philosophy but also his contempt for petit bourgeois manners. Dr Yaretzky is depicted as a sceptic, a cynic, and someone who does not allow others to tame him according to their images. He does not practise medicine primarily to earn money or the respect of the powerful. The story starts with his arrival in a small unnamed town. It could be any town. He arrived in a hired wagon, with a basket of possessions, a stack of books bound with a thong, a parrot in a cage and a poodle.83 In his thirties, short, swarthy, with black eyes and moustache, he might have looked Jewish, if his nose had not had its Polish tilt. He wore an elegant, old-fashioned fur-lined overcoat, gaiters, and a broad-brimmed hat like those of gypsies, magicians and tinkers. Standing amid his things in the center of the market place, he addressed the Jews in the halting Yiddish a gentile occasionally acquires: ‘Hey there, Jews, I want to live here. Me, Doctor. Doctor Yaretzky … Head hurt, eh? See tongue!’84

80

 Singer, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, 25.  Singer, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, 25. 82  See Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, I–II, Dover Publications, New York, 1966, 1969; for commentary see Gerard Mannion, Schopenhauer, Religion and Morality: The Humble Path to Ethics, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2003. 83   This is a reference to Schopenhauer, who always lived with poodles, often his only company. 84  Isaac Bashevis Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, in The Spinoza of Market Street, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1981, 58–82, here 58. 81

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He settled in, and only much later we learn that his choice of place was an attempt to prove Schopenhauer’s point that the world is governed by a blind will. He had sought to demonstrate the arbitrariness of all our decisions by choosing his destination by writing the names of individual places on pieces of paper and drawing one at random from a hat. In the town Yaretzky first earned the soubriquet ‘the mad doctor’. The rich and the influential avoided him if they could. If they could not, he was very rude to them. He spoke to the officials in Yiddish, as if they were Jews, let the ladies take their clothes off even before they said what troubled them, and breathed smoke into their faces. But the poor came gladly because Yaretzky did not ask for more than they could pay, and he joked with them: ‘Mother Russia is a pig, no? She stinks!’85 He was ruthless about the rich collaborating with the Russians; he even taught his parrot rude words about them. One year, when he was helping the military doctor, a drunk from Lublin, most of the Jewish young men from the town were ‘sold’ a blue book exempting them from the military service. The poor were even given a reduction in the bribe.86 We read that Yaretzky proved to be a competent doctor, even in difficult deliveries and surgeries, and this gradually brought all the town to his door, despite the fact that he was not married, slept with a deaf servant and flirted with many women, did not have friends, did not go to church, and the priest thought that this non-believer was maybe a Tatar, maybe a pagan, maybe a witch doctor. After the death of his rival doctor, the rich and the influential tried to flatter their way into his favour, and one of them even tried to arrange for him a marriage with a noblewoman, Helena. This led to a strong exchange of opinions: ‘Who sent you?’ he asked her after she’d finished, ‘the mother or a daughter?’ ‘For the love of Jesus, neither of them even suspects.’ ‘Why bring Jesus into this?’ Dr Yaretzky said. ‘Jesus was nothing but a lousy Jew.’ Mrs Woychehovska’s face immediately flooded with tears. ‘Kind sir, what are you saying? May God forgive you!’ ‘There is no God! ‘Then what is there?’ ‘Worms.’87

From now on the story takes its reader to Yaretzky’s struggle with doubt. Yaretzky’s certainty that the world is governed by blind will is challenged by another representation of the world where love is not an utter absurdity. This alternative view casts a shadow not only on his scepticism, but also on his ways of holding life strictly under his control. 85

 Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 60.  See ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 60. 87  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 61. 86

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As the plot develops, Helena and Dr Yaretzky are overwhelmed by larger forces and their mutual refusal is transformed into love. Helena, seeking revenge against Dr Yaretzky, kisses his hand at a ball. She is shamed, and in a petit bourgeois manner she exaggerates its social impact and wants to die. She digs a tomb in the orchard and drinks half a bottle of iodine to poison herself. Dr Yaretzky is confused. He leaves his house, lights a petrol lamp and goes out walking to reconsider his life, starting with the basics: family life is a trap to swallow the foolish. The blind desire to multiply only prolongs human suffering, and this is the eternal human tragedy. ‘Why give in to the will if one were aware of its blindness?’88 He cannot sleep. He needs to go for a walk, but does not know where to go. Helena’s kiss has disturbed him and given him a strange strength, he thinks. He reflects on chance, remembering how, many years ago, he drew from the hat a paper with a name of this town to demonstrate the arbitrariness of choice. But this time his thoughts take him further: But what, actually, was chance? If everything was predetermined, no such thing as chance existed. And then again, if causality was nothing but a category of reason, then there certainly was no such thing as chance. The thought swiftly went further. Conceding that Schopenhauer was right, then that which Kant called ‘The thing in itself’, was will. But how did it follow that the will was blind? If the world-will could bring out Schopenhauer’s intellect, why couldn’t the world-will itself be endowed with intelligence? 89

He tries to suppress his doubts, and convince himself that he must return to studying Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation. Meanwhile his feet take him to the rabbi’s house. The window is partly open; the old rabbi also does not sleep. He studies. He has what Dr Yaretzky does not have. Everything, it seemed, was precisely where it should be. … Did the rabbi keep such late hours, or had he already risen for the day? And what in that book engrossed him so much? The rabbi seemed withdrawn from the world. The Doctor knew the old man. He had treated him for catarrh and hemorrhoids. He, Yaretzky, had handled the rabbi with more respect than the other patients … The Jews of the town deified their rabbi, spoke of his erudition. His large grey eyes, his high forehead, his entire appearance suggested knowledge, understanding, character – and yet something else, reminiscent of an alien, impenetrable culture. It was too bad that the rabbi knew neither Polish nor Russian, for Yaretzky, while he had learned a little Yiddish in his youth, did not understand it sufficiently to converse with the rabbi. The old man seemed more spiritual than ever now.90

88

 Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 70.  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 70–71. 90  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 71. 89

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Yaretzky’s curiosity grows and he asks himself, how could a genius like this rise in a world governed by dogma? ‘And how could he have made peace with a world full of sorrow?’91 What does he read? He is convinced that the old rabbi lives outside of time and space, that he does not have a clue what is happening around him, not to mention tonight’s ball. He desires more than ever to talk to him, to knock on the window and go in, but he knows that the rabbi would not understand. Yet communication across their ‘isolation’92 happens. He becomes a witness to a kind of love ritual between the old rabbi and his wife: She woke up in the middle of the night to check the pieces of coal in the rabbi’s samovar. He, the rabbi, did not dare to break his holy studying, but he was aware of her closeness and rewarded her with his silent gratitude. And all was so different! So oriental!93

Dr Yaretzky asks if their behaviour is hereditary or if it grows from deep faith, and how they can be certain about their truth. Instead of doubting their certainty, however, he doubts his scepticism: Well, and what of me? How can I guarantee that the world is blind will? Let us say, for the sake of argument that ‘The thing in itself’ is not blind will, but a seeing will. Then the whole concept of the cosmos changes. Because, if the universal powers are capable of seeing, then they see all – every person, every worm, every atom, every thought. Then the slip of paper that I ostensibly chose by pure chance was not chosen by chance at all but was simply part of a plan, a decree that I experience everything that I’ve experienced here.94

In his meditation he shifts from one extreme, blind will, to another extreme, predestination, as if no other solutions were available. In his mind he comes back to Helena and asks himself: ‘Was I destined to become a father?’95 And at this point the revelation ends. While he was lost in philosophizing, someone closed the curtain. He had been seen. Hurrying away, his thoughts run with his feet:

91

 Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 72.   Yaretzky says to himself, ‘Who knows? Perhaps it was their desire to remain apart that kept them from learning other languages. Judaism could be summed up in one word: isolation. If not driven into a ghetto, Jews formed a ghetto voluntarily; if not compelled to display a yellow patch, they wore clothes that their neighbors found odd. On the other hand, the Jews who did learn other languages and mingled with the Christians were boring.’ Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 72. 93  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 73. 94  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 73. 95  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 73. 92

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But, conceding that the world-will is not blind – this opens innumerable possibilities. An all-seeing Will – is God. The rabbi, this would mean, is no fanatic at all … Assuming this to be true, what must I do? Return to the church? Become a Jew? Stop seducing my patients? Because if the cosmos sees all, it can also punish … No, I must put all this nonsense out of my head. From here on, it’s but one more step to religious positivism. – But why am I running like this? And where?96

The story continues with Yaretzky finding himself in the estate of Helena’s family. He finds her in a ditch, saves her life, and asks her to marry him. While the great wedding is being prepared in the town, Yaretzky loses his peace. Singer now describes the final battle between faithfulness to Schopenhauer’s scepticism and the scene at the rabbi’s house that led him to compassion for Helena and to love. In the end, ‘logics, mocking, blasphemy’ beat the less tangible world of faith, hope and love.97 Dr Yaretzky secretly leaves the town. Three months later Helena enters the religious life. Her mother dies, and the estate manager defrauds a good deal of the property. There is a typical lack of a happy conclusion. But we are not at the end yet. Fourteen years later the ghost of Dr Yaretzky returns to this town, searching for something. First his face is reflected in the mirror of the new rabbi’s house. But this rabbi is not a wise holy man like his predecessor, and cannot understand or help. Then the ghost starts appearing in other places, in the orchard, under an apple tree in Yaretzky’s former residence. Also Helena’s ghost starts appearing at night; in the half-broken estate house, a voice is singing a lullaby to a shadow of a cradle on the wall. Singer concludes that as the people of the town were disturbed, they tried to root out all that belonged to the past. They demolished the house, even cut down the apple trees. The story ends: ‘Only the dreamers, who dream while awake, call back the shadows of the past and braid from unspun threads they tangle – unwoven nets.’98 Singer questions what madness really is. Is it odd and sometimes desperate attempts to find love, to reconcile the lower and the higher world, or a scepticism that reduces the world to blind will? He shows that the last type of madness is more severe. In rejecting the world as a place where people eat, make noise, multiply and suffer, one is refused a place of rest, even after death. Singer points out that Dr Yaretzky’s ultimate search can be understood only by people of faith. To those who go on defending scepticism it is hysteria and superstition. When it comes to rooting out the reminders of the past world that feed such illusions, we are confronted with an opposite problem to the one addressed in ‘The Egotist’, where the culture that refused to adapt and to change died. Here the 96

 Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 74.  See Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 78. 98  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 82. 97

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culture that cuts its memory off moves to the realm of ghosts where a place of rest is unavailable. Coming back to dystopic and utopic images of the world, in Singer, as in Čapek, we find both, but they play a slightly different role – not a projection, an image towards which we are moving, but an image that can be found in how we live. In ‘The Egotist’ the world as a distorted place (dystopia) comes through Maria Davidovna’s attitude to any other form of its representation than the Russia of Kerensky’s government, or more exactly, the Menshevik Russia of her unfulfilled dreams. At the same time, however, we could argue that her dream is not dystopic at all. It can be read as utopia, both as a good place (eu-topos) and as a nonexistent place (ouk-topos). Yet this utopia does not contribute to improving the existing place, to subverting its bad practices by proposing alternatives.99 In ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’ we get a different image, not torn between dystopia and utopia, but between a lower and a higher world. The lower, despised world consists of the petty human affairs observable in a market from a window, while the higher admired world of divine rational laws guiding the universe can be seen written in the sky. There is a moment of foolishness, the story tells us, in which the higher and lower worlds are united. At the same time, it is a moment of openness to love, unavailable otherwise. This theme is taken further in ‘The Shadow of a Crib’. There is a single view of the world, a negative one, but two notions of ‘madness’. The first one is described by the protagonist as religious positivism, the second as scepticism. Faithful to Schopenhauer, Dr Yaretzky sees the world as blind will. In his moment of doubt, as he tries to come to terms with the beauty of the old rabbi’s faith and the love the rabbi shares with his wife, Yaretzky constructs the world as being fully determined by all-seeing will. However, the inversion of the picture does not seem to be a kind of radical transformation one can live with. In his speculation Yaretzky excludes accidents, meaninglessness, and fits all there is into a higher plan. But is this the rabbi’s faith? Or is it the faith of the Church? In the final struggle the world as all-seeing will, the world with God as he imagines him, is not more real to Dr Yaretzky than the world as blind will described by Schopenhauer. At the end of the story we learn that Yaretzky did not find rest in either of these worlds, and that his search must go on. Singer mentions in passing that, perhaps, people of deep faith might understand that search.100

  Compare with Ernst Bloch’s function of utopia in The Principle of Hope III, MIT, Cambridge, MA, 1996, 1374–1376. 100   See Singer’s comments on the new rabbi, who did diligently what the old rabbi did, but without the depth of the old man’s faith it was not the same. ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 79–80. 99

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Concluding Remarks At the beginning of this chapter I raised two questions: What kind of understanding of culture is included in our images of the world? And how do these images go on being mediated by culture? In response to the first question I showed how Čapek’s dystopic images of the world portrayed a dominant utilitarian culture. Against this background, Čapek sketched alternatives. These drew on the forgotten agricultural and religious culture or on a pluralist culture in which the desire for truth and for the well-being of the other reintroduced questions about God and the final end of humankind. But these alternatives also presupposed a different way of seeing the world. In Čapek this possibility consisted of two strands, a symbolic figurative one – where the world was seen as a garden; and a non-figurative one – reflecting transcendence as an open horizon. These minor images occasionally break through the dominant culture, as loathed alternatives belonging to strange people, like Alquist in R.U.R. But through them new life can spring forth in times of crisis. In his trilogy Čapek emphasized that the heart of each single person needs to be found, like that of Hordubal, if we are to regain hope for this world. He traced a journey from chaos to polyphony and from polyphony to a symphony of human life, in which God is at the centre and all the many different facets – and the relationships to which they lead – are included. In that movement Čapek reached beyond secular humanism. He spoke of God as ever-present glory in the ordinariness of the world, a glory so simple that it could be easily overlooked, so faithful that it always came back to bring us along, even beyond death.101 Yet Čapek, in his search for transcendence and for God, is a thinker for whom questions of religious belonging were at least as complex as for contemporary post-secular people. He used symbolism from the Christian tradition, but did not take part in Christian religious practice. He did not distance himself from God-language, but employed it with a playful twist, in which he showed the limits of a Christian dogmaticism as well as of modern rationalism and agnosticism. In my discussion on Singer I tried to give a longer answer to the second question, as I traced his negative and positive examples of how the mental world of Central and Eastern European Jewry – or of pre-Bolshevik Russia – was transposed into the cultural identity of people who had survived the destruction of these physical worlds. First I sketched two negative alternatives, one idolizing memories of the past and refusing to engage with the present world and its culture, the other rooting out the memories of the past as reminders of an undesirable culture. Then I showed that there was both discontinuity and continuity, provided people wanted to overcome death, go on living, and thus changing, integrating both the old and the new mental worlds and their cultures into the web of life. Ways in which that could be done were examined in the other two stories, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’ and ‘The Shadow of a Crib’. Yet the main characters of these stories did not quite manage to integrate both the good coming from the   Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 462–463.

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memories of where their roots used to be and the good coming from the challenges they encountered. Dr Fischelson and Dr Yaretzky faced a process of conversion, which in neither case was integrative of their past, and in neither case brought rest. The first, in undergoing the process, found himself a foolish traitor; the other, in stepping back, lost both his previous world and his peace of mind. Their worlds, at once luminous and obscure, remained essentially tragic. Singer masterfully depicted how close the illusory worlds were to the real one. Or, perhaps, it is the case that that here and now the real world is always entwined with the illusory one, and in uprooting all that looks illusory we may lose the good that comes with it.102 Our knowledge of the difference rarely comes before the experience of both. Our own experience, however, is informed and enriched by the experience mediated by present and past cultures. In a narrative cultural memory, we can see what ends the idolatrous and the iconic images of the world have reached. The question how God is related to our world was asked only in passing. As for Dr Fischelson, so perhaps for Singer, God was everywhere; God belonged to life. In the world that Singer struggles to preserve in literature, people knew that. Singer kept reminding us that they had a direct relationship to God, to good and evil spirits, as if they lived with them under one roof. Occasionally he remarked that if we kept such knowledge at least in our memory, it could continue to cultivate our present culture, affording us options unavailable otherwise. It would not be a less messy world, but one where holiness and love would still be possible. Singer was aware that for those who survived the Holocaust it was necessary to recognize that there was both a connection and a painful disconnection between the past and present world, that it was both present and absent to its heirs. His stories exemplified the fact that meaning does not come without someone searching for it, that meaning is revealed, if at all, in the midst of absurdities, that it does not play down meaninglessness. He showed that meaning, if it appears as anything, does so as a smaller, crazier and more vulnerable alternative. There were three areas that need further attention. First, whether and, if so, when is it helpful to keep notions of a higher and a lower world, a higher and a lower culture. Or, if we were to do away with this distinction completely, would we not lose something important? Second, various notions of utopia and dystopia lead me to ask how the goodness of the world (and of culture) can be maintained against our experience of evil in the world and in ourselves. Here, while Čapek’s utopia was a search for sources that helped to restore this world as a good place that revealed the transcendent in the ordinary, in Singer a further problem appeared, namely a desire to keep some utopian image of the world in place of real life. This was a desire that ultimately led to a shadowy existence dominated by death. Third, whether and, if so, how a life-giving relationship between the world and God can be maintained when there is more discontinuity than continuity with the traditions of religious practice. I shall return to these areas in the second chapter, dedicated to theologies of the world. 102

 See Mt 13:24–30.

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Chapter 2

Theologies of the World

[I]n embracing God, [Jesus] embraced the whole world and all its spiritual interests – truth of feeling, truth of conduct, truth of knowledge; that forced Him into conflict with evil, reckless of reward or success, by the mere impetus, the imperative necessity of the Divine Nature – ‘driven by the Spirit.’

The world reveals and hides God. As George Tyrrell emphasizes in the initial quotation, Jesus encountered such a world as much as we do, and was aware both of its positive qualities, and of its fall. When I am among some Christian pessimists, I feel that the first truth must be emphasized: there is a lot of goodness in the world, in cultures, in human relationships, attitudes and desires. ‘In embracing God’, Jesus embraced all that. And likewise, all that is good has to feature somehow in our following Jesus into the embrace of God. All that is good belongs there. When I am outside the church walls, among optimists who see all as pure, I realize the second truth: the goodness has been perverted, and there is no way of following Jesus into God’s embrace that does not lead through the conflict with all that is evil. The two truths come together, but in this order. The world is good. The fall marks, but does not diminish, its initial goodness. Alongside this, further questions will interest me in this chapter. Where it is lacking, how is it possible to progress from embracing God to embracing all that is good in the world? And is it possible to progress from embracing all that is good in the world to embracing God? When we speak about the relationship between the world and God to our contemporaries, we have to take into account that, while they are largely no longer   George Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, Longmans, Green, and Co., London, 1909, 261–262.    The concept of evil has a slightly different meaning in different theological works I refer to in this book. It ranges from the Augustinian–Thomist definition of evil as the absence of the good (as in Tyrrell) to understanding it as a negative spiritual agency or a personal being (as in Anselm). While referring to different authors, I shall work with their understanding of evil. My own understanding is closest to that of Stăniloae, which recognizes a negative activity in the perverted course of the world, weakening the world and thus making it vulnerable to natural catastrophes and illnesses, a human perversion affecting all relationships like an illness, as well as perverted spiritual forces operating within creation. In none of these cases, however, is evil seen as a personal being, whether created or divine. It is a parasitic state taking hold of personal beings and of the world, a state of having fallen away from God, which, however, does not ultimately represent a negative alternative to God.

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atheists, nor are they believers in terms of the traditional religions. Perhaps, like Israel in the Babylonian exile, when the belief in God creating the entire universe found its expression, we have to ask how our God is related to other people and how we expand the meaning of Christian tradition, so that it can reach them and include them, if they wish. I shall start this chapter with a sketch of the main features of the secularization– post-secularization shifts. After this excursion I move to the main body of the chapter, where I explore what it could mean to understand the world as a gift and as a task. For that I make use of both patristic and contemporary theologies, and try to complement the cultural images of the world that I have explored in the first chapter. What Lies beyond Secularization? European secularization came with the new political and legal settlements of Europe arising from such phenomena as the Reformation, the religious wars of the seventeenth century, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment, as well as the rise of modern science and technology. Their emphases on rationality and human autonomy contributed to what was seen as the ‘modern world’, the world in which religion became rationalized, reduced to morality or simply unwanted. Modern societies and cultures became largely emancipated from religious thinking, practices and institutions. As was pointed out in the Introduction, Central and Eastern European societies and cultures greatly varied with regard to secularization before the Communist period, and it influenced the process during that time and after. Yet there was a common experience that as the Communists used the secularization process for their benefit, they deprived it of what was previously liberating. Notions of civic society, of human rights, including religious freedom, were not wanted by the new totalitarian regimes, which created new forms of injustice. The gargoyles that had glared out from the sides of cathedrals now turned their malevolent gaze inside the temples. Thus here secularization attempted to demonize religion, and as such to persecute it. In these conditions, however, the inner power of religion was not always destroyed; as in all previous persecutions, it was also testified as indestructible. With exceptions like Poland, Romania or Slovakia, it is possible to say that Central European societies have largely moved outside of traditions of religious practice and yet remained inextricably linked to religious questions. As I have   See, e.g., Sekularizace Českých zemí v letech 1848–1914, eds L. Fasora, J. Hanuš and J. Malíř, CDK, Brno, 2007; compare with H. McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe 1848–1914, Macmillan, Basingstoke; St Martin’s Press, New York, 2000; Thomas Luckmann, Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa. Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. H. Lehmann, Vandenhoek &

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already noted in the Introduction, secularization understood as a process of emancipation from religion no longer applies here, and theologians need to adjust themselves to the new situation, while appropriating the positive contribution of a dialogue with secular societies and cultures. Where Christian theologians moved beyond condemnation of secularization, it helped them to rediscover that the rejection or even a passive resistance to the ‘world outside’ runs counter to commandments about caring for the needy, for the outcast, even for one’s enemies, and to the basic tenets of the Jewish and Christian traditions. The separation of the ‘world outside’ and the ‘world inside’ ceased to have meaning. The world once again became one, even if approached from different sides. The place outside of the temple, the profanum, contributed to their understanding of the world but also of God. As theologians finally became accustomed to appreciating secular society and culture, as they became confident, comfortable, and settled in talking about them as dialogue partners, they were slow to spot that the partners have changed too, and are no longer predominantly secular, at least not in the same way they were even twenty years ago. Religious thinking and practices have started to have a social significance again. Thus we have to ask in which sense the societies and culture of Central and Eastern Europe remained secular and in which aspects of their life they have largely left secularization behind and embraced new forms of religiosity. With regard to the economic and political aspects of secularization, the Communist systems took away the property of the churches and at least temporarily succeeded in gaining political influence over them and in isolating them socially. After the fall of Communism, the processes of restitution of church property, as well as the political engagement of explicitly Christian parties, often confirmed our contemporaries’ mistrust of religious institutions. Yet, surprisingly, when we compare the current sociological data with those of neighbouring countries, it is not significant whether the societies used to belong to the Communist camp or not. The situation in the formerly most secular countries, like the Czech Republic, Estonia, Bulgaria, Slovenia or former Eastern Germany, is remarkably similar to that of Austria, for example. According to the large-scale European Values Study of 1999, even in the Czech Republic, where less then a third of the population claims to have a religious affiliation, and people trust churches even less than elsewhere, only about 8 per cent of the population would claim to be convinced atheists. Both the lapsed atheists and those who left the churches are moving to new types of non-institutional religiosity. Thus we could say that the spiritual–intellectual side of secularization, which is of most interest to me here, is behind us. Yet the new religiosity emerging Ruprecht, Göttingen, 1997; O. Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the 19th Century, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1975.    See, e.g., Nonka Bogomilova, ‘Reflections on the Contemporary Religious “Revival”’, Religion in Eastern Europe XXIV, 4 (August 2004), 1–10.    See J. Spousta, ‘České církve očima sociologických výzkumů’, in Náboženství v době společenských změn, ed. Jiří Hanuš, Masarykova Univerzita, Brno, 1999, 73–90.

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in our societies does not lead to a re-Christianization of our region, or to largescale embrace of any other traditional religion. It is a privatized and syncretistic religiosity, coexisting with the fact that religion is largely separated from political and economic life (even if it is at times used for decorative purposes in both areas of life), and with low regard for institutional religions as such. A Czech sociologist, Jan Spousta, makes the following distinction. He finds various types of former atheists. There are, for example, the ‘life after life’ type, i.e. those who do not believe in a personal God, may not pray or worship anywhere, but are convinced that there is some spiritual power of life, and that there is something like sin as well as life after death. This type is complemented by what Spousta calls the ‘meditative’ type, which recruits from lapsed traditional believers. Similarly to ex-atheists, these people do not believe in a personal God, but in the spiritual power of life, but instead of emphasizing some form of afterlife, which most of them do not believe in, they stress some form of contact with the divine Spirit here and now, some form of prayer or meditation. Belief in a personal God is on the decrease; belief in something that is above us, in some form of spiritual power, on the increase. Issues of retribution, life after death, as well as of whether it is possible to communicate with this spiritual power, are back in circulation, but they do not usually come with a desire to know religious doctrine, to observe traditional rituals, or even with a correspondence between religious convictions and daily behaviour. Yet, as Bogomilova says, Of course, contained in the sum total of people with increased religiousness, there is a percentage of people for whom the change in religious behaviour stems from a deep personal change, from spiritual growth, and is closely connected with a specific religious experience of the sacred. But such change and growth, which arrange the entire life world of a person around God and the sacred, are usually slow and painful; they are accessible only to a few.

The revival of religious thinking, and spiritual practices, in the majority culture remains ambiguous, not only because of the distance from the traditional religious institutions, but because of the absence of a tradition that would cultivate the new religious images and behaviour. Going through the religion or mind and body sections in our bookstores is just one of many ways in which we can see how

  For these reasons a number of sociologists still speak about increasing secularization, even if it no longer involves intellectual and spiritual emancipation from all forms of religion. See, e.g., Dušan Lužný and Jolana Navrátilová, ‘Náboženství a sekularizace v České Republice’, Sociální studia 6 (2001), 111–125.    See Jan Spousta, ‘Náboženská typologie v ČR’, manuscript of a lecture at the Institute of Ecumenical Studies in Prague, autumn 1999, 1–8.    Bogomilova, ‘Reflections on the Contemporary Religious “Revival”’, 6–7.

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unclear a border there is between religious convictions and superstition, and likewise between religious and occult practices. Another example would be how the notion of religion is used in political speeches. Most politicians and journalists no longer know the rules of religious symbolism intimately, because they no longer participate in it, and yet they keep using fragments of its language as if to strengthen their arguments. It is not uncommon that before elections some of the candidates of the parties that have nothing to do with Christianity claim at least formal commitment to Christianity, seeing in it plus points for their political career. Or Christianity would be invoked as a shield against Islam by those who do not share Christian beliefs and practices, and do not even know what these are. At the same time, besides these parasitic views on what religion is and what it can bring to people’s lives, there is a great deal of newly opened space given to a genuine search for meaning amidst meaninglessness, one that takes religious questions seriously. Despite the distance from the traditional forms of institutional Christianity, here are also new opportunities for theology to engage in dialogue. Examples from the previous chapter proved that such a shift away from intellectual or spiritual secularization is not so new. Already in Čapek’s pre-war notions of the world and of God, we found attempts to bring the profane and the religious into a new mutually enriching relationship. Like our contemporaries, he was suspicious of institutional religiosity, but he drew on the Scriptures as well as on other religious texts, and throughout his work employed religious symbols. Čapek’s underlying philosophy was perspectivist, but not relativist. It stressed the ordinary things in life, and through them discovered their mysterious nature and transcendence. To use Spousta’s typology, Čapek is closer to the ‘life after life’ type. His metaphorical language displayed some form of belief in God, in retribution, and also in a more complete life after this one, but there was more searching than finding, more labour than resting in prayer or contemplation. For that we have to move to Singer, who, on the other hand, resembles the ‘meditative type’. In the post-war period Singer searched for ways in which we could still participate in the religious culture of places that were swept away, and where the divine was so close that people chatted with God as with a friend, where they knew angels and even dead ancestors and demons as members of their household. Within his stories we encounter this type of inner communication that could subvert and heal scepticism, if we dared to risk it.10 For Singer, the split between a higher and a lower world was an illusion. He ‘married’ them, but also showed how impossible a task this was, even if all other options in extremis failed to bring life. Of his two protagonists, Dr Fischelson, the follower of Spinoza, is convinced that he has become mad, while Dr Yaretzky, the follower of Schopenhauer, in order to keep his ‘sanity’, reduces his life to a ghostly existence. 

 

See Spousta, ‘Náboženská typologie v ČR’, 8.  See Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 73.

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Both Čapek and Singer provided us with reinterpretations of the relationship between the world and God that came out of a context where emancipation from religious thinking and practices was seen as positive. Now I shall attempt to expand these post-secular insights with the help of theology as I interpret the world as a gift and as a task. The World as a Gift Speaking about the world as a gift assumes its basic goodness, and also some form of relationship to the giver, a communication that has begun since the gift emerged. As we shall see in this section, Christian as well as earlier Jewish accounts of the beginning of the world emphasize that its gift was preceded and necessitated by nothing but God’s love. In this sense the given life, with all its possibilities of growing and changing, of forming relationships within, is seen as a response to the Giver. In order to re-state this theological vision in present circumstances, we have also to take into account some of the difficult areas that arose in the previous section. Thus, when I explore theological accounts of what the world is and what it can become, I also have to take seriously the pain and suffering present in it, and ask in which sense the utopic images of the future are threatened by the dystopic ones. I approach the question of what the world consists of in two ways. First I concentrate on the complementarity of the spiritual and material world, then I elaborate the relationship between cosmic nature and humanity. With the help of the Church Fathers and, from modern theology, especially Jürgen Moltmann and Dumitru Stăniloae, I return to the problem of whether the relational unity within creation is hierarchical. In other words, is it justified and helpful to speak about a higher and a lower world as Singer’s Dr Fischelson did?11 In interpreting the creation narratives and the doctrine of the image of God, I explore the nature of the relationship to the Giver of the gift of the world. I ask whether a life-giving relationship between the world and God can be maintained when there is more discontinuity than continuity with the traditions of religious practice. This question becomes even more difficult when I move to the doctrine of the fall and redemption, without which a Christian theology of the world remains incomplete. I ask how well in our present culture they can complement the initial emphasis on the goodness of all creation, and how well they can grasp our experience of living in a world where evil weakens and at times overshadows the initial goodness of the gift of the world. At the end of this section I sketch how the doctrine of the renewal develops the initial goodness of creation in ways that involve opposing evil and offering healing.

11

 See Singer, ‘The Spinoza of Market Street’, 9–12.

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All that is Seen and Unseen In order to grasp the Jewish and early Christian understanding of the world as a whole, we need to remind ourselves of the background against which their doctrines were formulated. The Israelites were dissatisfied with the myths of the surrounding nations, especially with the Babylonian Enuma Elish, according to which the universe came about through the fighting of the gods. The visible material world was made from the dead body of Tiamat, the mother of the underworld, by Marduk, who was held to be the wisest among the gods, and who killed Tiamat.12 Such a narrative did not correspond to the inherited experience of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who liberated the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. Therefore they had to seek to understand the beginning of the world, which would reveal their God not only as a tribal or national god but as the One who is related to all, from the beginning until the end. In this context their content of faith expanded for ‘the generations of the heavens and the earth’,13 as the older creation myth says, and for the hymnic narrative of the seven days of creation, as the younger one proposes.14 Christians inherited the Jewish scriptural accounts of creation, but these gained a new importance when the Early Church was confronted with pagan polytheism, Gnostic emanationism and Marcionite dualism, all of which demonized some parts of creation whilst sacralizing others.15 The Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed responded to this in its summary of the first article of Christian faith: I believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.16

In the Jewish and the early Christian doctrine of creation, the spiritual world was seen as something generally accepted, while the material world needed to be defended as good. When we say the words of the Creed today, different emphases may come to the fore. After secularization’s attempts to rationalize religion or to reduce it to morality, we need to rehabilitate the dignity of the spiritual world. For a critically minded theologian, who is still filled with the desire to get rid of the mythical images of heavenly voices, of angels and demons, belief in the invisible  See L.W. King (ed.), The Seven Tablets of Creation: The Babylonian and Assyrian Legends concerning the Creation of the World and of Mankind, Kessinger Publishing, Whitefish, MA, 2004. 13  See Gn 2:4. 14  See Gn 1:1–2:3. 15  See J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, Continuum, London–New York, 2003, 87–90. 16  See DS 125. 12

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creation is a challenge. Paradoxically, this aspect of Christian belief might be less strange to contemporary post-secular people, who were brought up in materialism, but found that it did not do justice to the whole of their experience. The question remains open, however, of how to approach these other parts of experience. After the project of demythologization came to a dead end, we need to ask whether it is not precisely through myths and symbols that a multilayered participatory meaning is conveyed. The literary examples from the previous chapter point in this direction. I shall examine this area in detail in the final chapter, where I explore the possibilities of participating in and communicating what is seen as the ultimate. Here, for the time being, it is perhaps sufficient to note that belief in God creating all that is seen and unseen has more to do with symbolic and mythical knowledge than with rational explanations. The credal faith in God who made all that is seen and unseen17 is a summary of biblical accounts of the beginnings of heaven and earth. Jürgen Moltmann mentions that the ‘world’ as a concept is seldom used in the biblical traditions. They prefer the dual expression ‘heaven and earth’.18 But in order to avoid dividing the world between the lower and the higher, as Singer’s Dr Fischelson initially did, we need to return to the polemics directed towards the degradation of the material aspects of life, which create a context against which the belief in Creator’s gift was formulated. Hebrew knows ‘the higher and the lower’ distinction, but not the division. Heaven is seen as ‘the heights’, and the earth as ‘the lower regions, what is below’.19 Both concepts have a direct as well as symbolic meaning. The direct meaning involves the intrinsic relations between the sky and the ground, as we see them. But here instead of two, the creation narratives prefer three spheres: heaven, earth and sea.20 Each is a home to different elements and different animals, or plants. The earth has a special position. It is our home; but in order to live, we also need water and air. At a symbolic level, there is a distinction between the visible and the invisible world. Here the notion of heaven is used for the higher world beyond this one. But as Moltmann points out, the ‘higher’ is a symbolic spatial expression, emphasizing its otherness. The higher world, which is the home of angels, ‘is invisible and beyond our reach, and … is the space of God’s throne and his indwelling glory’.21 At this symbolic level all three previous spheres, the heavenly sky, the earth and 17  It is interesting that the Apostles’ Creed, which did not rise out of polemics but as a baptismal creed positively summarizing the foundations of Christian faith, did not use this distinction of the seen and unseen world. 18  See Jürgen Moltmann, God in Creation: A New Theology of Creation and the Spirit of God, Fortress, Minneapolis, MN, 1993, 158. 19  Moltmann, God in Creation, 158 20  See Gn 1:7–19 or Psalm 104. 21  Moltmann refers here to both Catholic and Reformed dogmatic traditions; see God in Creation, 158. Interestingly, a more nuanced position can be found in the Orthodox

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the sea, are included under the visible world. The symbolic duality, however, does not establish a talk of ‘other-worldliness’ but of transcendence, that is, of the sphere of reality that is inaccessible to our senses and unknowable to our reason. This sphere is neither God nor divine, but a part of the created world, distinct from the visible world.22 Thus transcendence is also a part of God’s creation. Transcendence in this sense is not God alone. It involves a great variety of incorporeal powers, archangels, thrones, dominions, principalities, transcending our time and space, but not divine, mediating between God and our visible world, immortal but not co-eternal with God. This created transcendence is endlessly plural.23 Moltmann speaks of it as ‘God’s creative potentialities’ that testify to God’s glory and demonstrate that God’s creation is not a closed system, an endless repetition of the same, but a dynamic gift that involves genuinely new possibilities, even if only some of them find material expression.24 Having pleaded for the transcendence of the invisible heaven of God’s potentialities, it is important to re-state that the materiality of the earth is not of secondary importance or dignity. Dumitru Stăniloae points out that both the material and the spiritual creation are called to take part in the exchange of gifts, as both participate in divine goodness.25 Making use of the Dionysian doctrine of hierarchies, Stăniloae explains the unity within creation as a dynamic and interrelated ascent to God: ‘All are in motion in their passage through purification, illumination, and perfection.’26 Explaining the web of mutual relationships, Stăniloae finds no division of the world into a higher and lower. The whole world with all its diversity has been set on a journey towards greater participation in God and with each other. This is expressed both in Dionysius and in Stăniloae by a circular movement, not in order to emphasize repetition, but in order to stress the perichoretic nature of relationships that are the image of the perichoresis of the Holy Trinity.27 Dionysius uses the metaphor of a ‘round dance’ in which all tradition: see Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God: The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology II: The World: Creation and Deification, Holy Cross, Brookline, MA, 2005, 119–155. 22  See Moltmann, God in Creation, 158–159. 23  See Dt 10:14; 1 Kings 8:27; Neh 9:6, 2 Cor 12:2 or Eph 1:21. 24  See Moltmann, God in Creation, 163. 25   See Stăniloae, The World, 18–19; compare with Dionysius the Aeropagite, The Divine Names 4.1,2,4. 26   Stăniloae, The World, 150. He refers to Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy. Paraphrase of Pachymeres 7.3. 27   The Greek concept of perichórésis comes from peri – around; and choros – dance, assembly, choir. It can be translated both as dancing around and assembling or sitting round in a choir. Athanasius used the concept for the full mutual indwelling of the three persons in the one being of God, and this idea was further developed by John of Damascus. See Robert Letham, The Holy Trinity: In Scripture, History, Theology, and Worship, P&R Publishing, Phillipsburg, NJ, 2004, 178–179.

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participants partake both with each other and through each other, while also having direct access to the Lord of the dance.28 Stăniloae explains: Indeed, the whole of created existence moves in a continuously circular way around God, straining towards its cause. Strictly speaking, an infinite ascent could not take place on an ascending straight line, because those on a lower level would always be looking at those above them, and not directly to God. Between these three phases that succeed one another continuously [purification, illumination, and perfection] there is no opposition, only continuity and development.29

With this movement in mind he states that the invisible and the visible world are not only to move towards God, but to move towards God in a way that is also beneficial for each other. He says that angels are sent to help and strengthen people in knowledge and in spiritual and ethical growth, so that people raise both themselves and the world into ‘a time overwhelmed by eternity’; but angels too can gain from people, the ‘incarnate spirits’, who can communicate to them sense experiences of God that only embodied creatures can have.30 This, as we shall see in the next section, continues as a task even after the fall. Moltmann represents a much more critical voice in relation to the use of hierarchy for explaining the structures of kinship within creation. Thus he looks at a different aspect of the notion of hierarchy than Stăniloae. In opposing the division between the higher and the lower creation, Moltmann rejects hierarchical doctrines of creation that speak of ‘Father Heaven’ ruling over ‘Mother Earth’, or apply the analogy of the relationship between soul and body. Instead he returns to the triadic expressions of the Hebrew Bible, where the earth comes as a third term, and is placed between the heaven and the sea. It is a dwelling place of us people, and also of the incarnated Logos. By the work of the Holy Spirit, through Christ, the earth is being transformed, but not annihilated, filled by God’s glory, reunited with heaven, without losing its body.31 It is interesting to notice that while Stăniloae, referring to Dionysius, expresses the movement of all creation towards God with the help of the trinitarian metaphor of a perichoretic dance, Moltmann, offering a different reading of the hierarchies, finds a similar need for a trinitarian conclusion. He even returns to the metaphor of the dance, yet one difference remains. For Moltmann the perichoresis of the Trinity can be seen as an eternal circle dance that echoes in rhythms in which creatures penetrate each other’s lives. But it can be so only in a world that is healed of destruction. It can only be a messianic dance of eternal life.32  See Dionysius, The Celestial Hierarchy. Paraphrase of Pachymeres 7.4.   Stăniloae, The World, 151. 30   See Stăniloae, The World, 123. 31  See Moltmann, God in Creation, 158; 162; 298–302. 32  See Moltmann, God in Creation, 304–307. 28 29

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After highlighting the interest in keeping together the dignity of both the visible material and the invisible spiritual world, present in the contexts in which both Jewish creation narratives and the Christian Creed were formulated, let us move to a more detailed investigation of the second problem. This asked how the goodness of the gift of the world can be maintained against our experience of evil in the world and in ourselves. Keeping in mind that the visible creation is not the only one, that it is correlated with the immaterial spiritual world, here I shall concentrate on another distinction, namely between cosmic nature and humanity within it. Cosmic Nature and Humanity As we have seen in Čapek’s Gardener’s Year, it is easier to ascribe goodness to nature than to the realm of human affairs. For Čapek the garden taught people about the mysterious rhythms of nature. It taught them how to participate in them, but also in its mundane reality it pointed beyond itself, for it mirrored God’s work, and witnessed to God as the great Gardener.33 When it came to society and culture, the link with evil was much more readily at hand. To use the biblical metaphor, while nature provides us still with the fruits to live, even if now not eternally, in our societies and cultures we are left with the experience that ‘the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge has been, and always will be, unripe’.34 Although in Čapek we did not find the type of ontological pessimism, according to which society and culture are radically evil, there was a contrast between the garden utopia and the dystopia of civilization. Čapek remained unconvinced that modern ideas of emancipation as he characterized them in R.U.R. led to freedom. But he did not plead for a different golden age to be re-established instead. Rather, he pointed out that we need to take along all the experiences from the past, and try to mature with them. This is especially visible in his trilogy, where, at the end the metaphor of the garden as the world in miniature returns. His ordinary man, having discovered the endless plurality of his life and the desire to care for it as for a garden, and to allow others to care, can die without losing his heart. Čapek’s ongoing emphasis that we are made of the same plurality as the world, bearing the same possibilities of journeying towards God with all that belongs to this plurality of relationships and our actual and possible selves, bears in itself possibilities of transformation and gives us positive images of the renewed relationality.35 In this section I shall elaborate these images theologically as I trace how the mutual relationships within the visible world are included into the relationship to the Creator throughout the whole movement of their existence.   See Čapek, Gardener’s Year, 51, 61–62.   Čapek, Gardener’s Year, 13. 35   See Čapek, ‘Afterword’ to Three Novels: Hordubal, Meteor, An Ordinary Life, 468. 33 34

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Contemporary theology has learnt from the Scriptures and from the Church Fathers that relationality belongs to our ontology, that we are attached to each other and to God in a network of relationships.36 Thus neither cosmic nature nor people are ‘ends in themselves’.37 They carry within themselves a dialogical meaning that is realized in the exchange of gifts, and we are dependent on each other’s generosity. With Čapek we may say that in the work of maintaining and transforming nature, as well as in care for each other, we learn how to reach beyond ourselves, how to give. A dialogue of the exchange of the gifts begins there. In the joy and the gratitude of being overwhelmed by the other, and yet as someone distinct from the other, we are overwhelmed by the Spirit, and yet distinct from the Spirit. In that, we are moved and we move towards the fulfilling of our Godgiven meaning.38 In the previous section on the invisible and the visible world, I suggested that the exchange of the gifts in creation is not to be reduced to the human–divine relationship. There are other participants in it as well, the spiritual world, but also cosmic nature. The movement of human growth is not a movement of exclusion, of overcoming nature in order to embrace the spiritual life, but a movement of deeper and deeper inclusion. As Stăniloae states, people will not progress in their spiritual growth if separated from nature. Nature must come into all our relationships; it is a gift to us and we are bound to it reciprocally. We cannot become God’s partners without nature. We cannot even become each other’s partners without nature.39 But the mutuality also has another side – can we be partners of nature and of each other without God? Both nature and people were created as something out of nothing, with a beginning and an end. Moreover, people as conscious beings were given a responsibility to the Creator, responsibility in terms of a requirement of response to God’s gifts by returning the gift to God with our ‘own valuable stamp on the gifts received and thereby … [making] of them human gifts as well’.40 Reciprocity is required, so that the world could be and become what it was meant to be, a place where God’s glory dwells. The Image of God Dr Yaretzky from Singer’s ‘The Shadow of a Crib’ once saw the image of God in the old rabbi studying at night, when he passed by his window.41 His belief that   See Stăniloae, The World, 37.  Compare with Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals, Liberal Arts, New York, 1959, 424. 38   See Stăniloae, The World, 21–22.25, 87. Compare with Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 12. 39   See Stăniloae, The World, 198. 40   Stăniloae, The World, 25. 41  Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 71. 36

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the universe was governed by a blind will was challenged by a less tangible hope, that, perhaps, it is the seeing will that reaches deeper than all arbitrariness and absurdity in the world. But when the image disappeared, outside of the presence of the holy man, his new hope was not sustained. The inner and the outer world reflected nothing but themselves. The Christian doctrine of the image of God expresses the nature of the iconic life that mirrors the glory of God, and the image in which we were created. It refers to the younger account of creation in Genesis.42 There are two interesting emphases in this text. First, the image of God gives people lordship over all else that is created. This reverses the experience that nature often rules over people, and it opposes the sacralization of nature. Yet if human ‘domination’ of the rest of creation is to mirror God, it ought to be good for the whole of creation. While nature sustains people, and thus mediates God’s care and goodness to them, people are to mirror back the goodness of God to nature. Stăniloae insists that people are inseparable from nature, and goes so far as to say that through them nature participates even in the image of God.43 Second, in the text from Genesis the image of God involves both genders, male and female; it has two versions, not one. It is dialogical through and through. The mutual exchange of gifts is also necessary at a human level. No single individual, whether male or female, can wholly own the image. Not even the question of hierarchy is posed, whether one would participate in the image more than the other. Instead, there is a kind of perichoretic sharing established in the image, where love subverts borders and leads into a communion in which there is space for offspring. But this would not be enough. The movement of love has to be allinclusive, not just moving from the selfishness of one to the selfishness of a couple or of a family. The duality of the image of God expresses the incompleteness of any ‘I’ or of any ‘we’ identified by an exclusion of the third, of ‘they’. It is a liberating incompleteness that returns us to the circle of love, in which we experience different ways of sharing gifts, and into which we are commanded to include the strangers and the needy, and, indeed, nature as well. The empty space that the ‘I’ or the ‘limited we’ cannot fill, that allows itself to be overwhelmed by the others, is a place of the Spirit that vivifies the image in which we were created. The Fall and Renewal In his book The World Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, John Milbank argues against what he sees as the modern tendencies in theology of perceiving the world and people in it as primarily good. He says that such concepts forget to take

42

 See Gn 1:26–31.   See Stăniloae, The World, 118.

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into account the full impact of the doctrine on original sin.44 Heavily indebted to Augustinian teaching on the subject, Milbank asserts: For the Christian, a realistic apprehension of the world does not consist in factual survey and surmise, but in an evaluative reading of its signs as clues to ultimate meaning and causes. Thus the world is constructed as gift and promise, and we construct the narrative picture of a Creator God. But also the world is constructed as in some way already, before any traceable historical action, involved in a refusal or wrong apprehension of this gift.45

It is helpful to emphasize that we are thrown into the world, which both rightly and wrongly understands and projects itself, that while recognizing the original goodness of the gift, we must not minimize the perversions of its apprehension. The full impact of the doctrine of original sin, as Milbank interprets it, leads to ontological pessimism: the fall has pre-experiential, and also pre-historical, causal consequences.46 Moreover, he claims exclusive truth for his, as he calls it, entirely self-enclosed Christian world view. It is the only one that gives remedy to the broken world.47 Although I agree with his critique that there is no independently available ‘real world’ against which we must test our Christian convictions, and with the fact that the split between the secular and the non-secular is artificial, as I examine the scriptural and the patristic notions of the fall and renewal, I disagree with the type of Christian reflection that sees its convictions as the ultimate accounts of reality. In my view, neither Augustine nor Aquinas, whose disciple Milbank claims to be,48 hold this. Now, if we understand the gift of the world from the given, from our being thrown into the world,49 and if when we understand that we already participate in both good and evil present in the world, how can we hold the superiority of its goodness over evil? In order to search for answers to this question, let us return to a time before Augustine and Aquinas, where the split between nature and grace gradually developed,50 to the scriptural accounts of creation and fall, and their early patristic interpretation.

44   John Milbank, The World Made Strange: Theology, Language, Culture, Blackwell, Oxford, 1997, 243–245. 45  Milbank, The World Made Strange, 244. 46  Milbank pleads for a return to the doctrine of ontology, preferably of Augustinian– Thomist, but definitely of pre-Enlightenment, provenance. See Milbank, The World Made Strange, 244–246. 47  See Milbank, The World Made Strange, 250. 48  See Milbank, The World Made Strange, 246. 49  See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, Blackwell, London, 1962, §31.144–145. 50  See, e.g., Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World: Sacraments and Orthodoxy, St Vladimir’s Theological Press, Crestwood, NY, 1998, 115, 135–136, 144.

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The second, but older mythical account of creation deals more directly with the questions of why it is that in a world that was created good and was destined for eternal rest in God, evil takes over, people compete and are filled with envy, and brothers kill each other. To use a later theological language, why is it that the icon of God is turned into an idol? The text, however, does not use the notion of the image of God, but speaks about the two living in one body.51 Here one is formed of dust from the ground and the breath of life is breathed into him; the other is formed from his rib as a helper equal to him. They are to be companions for each other’s joy, but instead they compete; they want to become God. This is expressed in the myth by their relation to the two trees that grew in the Garden of Eden: ‘The tree of life was in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.’52 According to Irenaeus, Adam and Eve were created as children who were to grow towards maturity, responsibility and perfection. For this purpose they were given time as a gift.53 While eating from the Tree of Life to sustain their life, at the beginning, they were not ready to eat from the Tree of Knowledge. For Irenaeus, it was not the fruit that was unripe, as Čapek suggests,54 but our first ancestors. They did not yet have the freedom of the Spirit to cope with such difficult knowledge, and God warned them that if they ate the solid food they were not ready for, they would die.55 Basil, taking on the Irenaean developmental understanding of the human person, gives the following account of the fall: Adam got ‘outside paradise, outside that happy way of life, not evil from necessity, but by the lack of wisdom. Thus he sinned because of a wicked choice and died because of sin.’56 And in Stăniloae we find the following explanation of how a human person through disobedience detached himself/herself from a positive dialogue with God: ‘Reckoning on becoming his own lord, he became his own slave’, not knowing that the ‘human person is free only if he is free also from himself for the sake of others in love, and if he is free

51   See Gn 2:24. The notion of the image of God returns after the flood, as a distinguishing sign between people and animals, that forbids murder, see Gn 8:6. In the New Testament the image of God is made visible by the Spirit in Christ, as is emphasized particularly by the Johannine account of creation through the Logos (J 1:1–4), and of incarnation, where in the Logos incarnate we can see the glory of the Father (J 1:14); or the Pauline emphasis that Christ is the visible image of the invisible Father, and that we as Christians are being changed to this image. See Rom 8:29; 1 Cor 15:49; 2 Cor 3:18; 4:4 or Col 1:15; 3:10. 52  Gn 2:9. 53  See Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses III.22; IV.38. 54   See Čapek, The Gardener’s Year, 13. 55  See Gn 2:15–17. 56  Basil the Great, God is Not the Author of Evil 7, in Stăniloae, The World, 178. Stăniloae interprets Basil’s concept of aboulia (the lack of wisdom) as ‘imprudence and partly lack of will, or laziness of will’. The World, 178.

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for God who is the source of freedom because he is the source of love.’57 Stăniloae, combining the patristic interpretation with the historical experience,58 saw that ‘the human person was left with the knowledge of evil in himself but overwhelmed by it. He [the human person] continued to be opposed to evil but could not succeed in bringing his struggle to a victorious conclusion.’59 The estrangement from God, the loss of paradise and mortality, were not punishments of God, but consequences of the weakening of the spirit that gave way to disobedience, pride and all selfish appetites. The myth of the fall is followed by Cain’s murder of Abel, by the foundation of the cities as a means of protection, by the flood and the new call to a responsible life, by the story about the Tower of Babel, and by the recognition that if all people spoke one language, there would be no limit to the damage they could do.60 The myths name what we know from our experience, that the world both reveals and hides God. Participation in God and alienation from God remain so close together, like wheat and weeds, until the harvest in the Gospel parable.61 But the fall narrative reminds us that we did not get to such a situation out of necessity. It was not the original intention of our being, and it will not be its final stage. As in the parable, the good seed was sown first, and its harvest will be gathered in the barns. The initial goodness of the world as a whole is not completely lost even after the fall, and at the end of times it will be fully restored. Yet, until then, there is this ambiguity of the mixed field: both helpful and unhelpful ways of caring for the world, some supporting it in its self-sufficiency and rejection of God or in exploiting other people or nature for the benefit of some; others strengthening its relationality, mutual solidarity and goodness, in which the Creator is praised. The early Church Fathers, as well as Stăniloae, however, offer us a way of not linking evil with the essence of reality. The world is willed by God, loved by God, and as such dynamically participates in God’s goodness. ‘God is in relation with the entire movement of the world’,62 and that involves all the stages of the world after it has been weakened by the fall. ‘Through the multiplication of human beings as factors of good and evil, always original but endowed with memory of the past, God is leading the world toward ever new phases.’63 Stăniloae speaks about ‘further creative work of God’ in every generation, in every new life that is brought into existence, and through which God leads the world towards perfection,   Stăniloae, The World, 179.   Stăniloae himself experienced the radicality of the human fall while in one of the most brutal communist prisons in Romania in 1958–1963. I have written more on the subject in Ivana Noble, ‘Doctrine of Creation within the Theological Project of Dumitru Stăniloae’, Communio Viatorum 2 (2007), 185–209. 59   Stăniloae, The World, 183. 60  See Gn 9:4–7 and 11:69. 61  See Mt 13:24–30. 62   Stăniloae, The World, 12. 63   Stăniloae, The World, 206. 57 58

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i.e. toward communion with him. It does not mean that God perfectly knows and guides the course of the world, but that God responds to each new path on which the world and its inhabitants embark. The course of the world is open. It moves ‘toward ever new phases’.64 This involves both progress in evil and progress in good: ‘Inasmuch as evil is not a factor that operates always in the same fashion in order to keep the world steadily within that weakened state that was introduced within it, so neither is the providence that preserves the world merely a constant countervailing action that keeps the world going with all its enduring erosion.’65 It liberates, protects and strengthens the good, and constantly moves the world towards communion with God. Thus the doctrine of creation cannot be separated from the doctrine of salvation and of deification.66 With Irenaeus, we can say that the journey and its aim stand higher than the beginning: the glory of God is a human person fully alive.67 A human person filled by the Spirit, as well as the world as a whole filled by the Spirit, are the foundational images of plenitude in patristic theology. We learn in Christ what it means to be full of the Spirit, fully alive. He not only brings us back to the Father, but also shows us how to live an adult authentic human life. Thus we can say that Christ in his humanity demonstrates how it is when the image and the likeness of God coincide. But Christ’s death on the cross uncovers yet another truth, namely, that it is not possible to live such a life without coming into deadly conflict with the sinful structures in this world.68 Only in Christ’s resurrection is the conflict settled as God the Father, standing on the side of the just, raises him from death, and by sending the Holy Spirit, renews and fulfils the initial goodness of his creation. This new gift comes to us from the future towards which we journey and grow, but also, we, as fellow workers with God,69 bring about this future, give it a particular shape by deciding what we cultivate, how we respond to God’s gift. In the following section I shall concentrate on how Christian theology understands the human contribution to what the world can be and become. The World as a Task The world filled by the Spirit is not only a gift, but also a task. Orthodox theologians speak about this double-sidedness by means of two doctrines, salvation and deification, while both the gift of salvation and the task of deification are needed for a full spiritual growth towards the fullness of life   Stăniloae, The World, 206–207.   Stăniloae, The World, 203. 66   Stăniloae, The World, 208. 67   ‘Gloria Dei vivens homo’; Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses IV, 20, 7. 68  See Alexander Schmemann, ‘Ecclesiological notes’, St. Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly, 1 (1967), 35–39, note 2. 69  See 1 Cor 3:9. 64 65

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in God.70 Western theologians usually emphasize much more the doctrine of salvation. At the risk of over-simplifying, it could be said that the Catholic tradition brings the mutuality of gift and task within this doctrine, building on the Pauline notion of synergy. For its part, the Protestant tradition, with its antipathy to any sense in which salvation can be merited by human actions, opposes the Pauline notion of synergy altogether, while retaining his stress on not receiving grace in vain.71 In what follows I do not aim to offer a comparative study or seek how far different traditions can go in agreement with each other, but rather I try to present a possible position that can be helpful in interpreting present cultural images of the world, while drawing on different aspects of all these traditions. After some initial remarks on divine–human cooperation, I examine two different ways of figuring the world’s transformation: utopia and deification. Divine–Human Cooperation Hordubal’s lost heart as well as the dystopic images of the world, as they were presented in the previous chapter, remind us of what the world could become if people completely ceased to be what they were created for, if we cut off love, mutual solidarity and goodness, any memory of God. As Čapek warned in R.U.R., the world might turn into a place distorted by exploitation, wars and revolutions, a place of destruction mediating visions and morals that keep it that way; a factory manufacturing Robots to work, but also to feel pain, to hate and to kill to order. Or to use Singer’s insights, it could be simply a dead place, an idol, in which people buried themselves alive, like Maria Davidovna, who was afraid to belong anywhere real, anywhere she would not have all relationships under her control. Both Čapek and Singer saw relationships as the wellsprings of life. But they were also aware that not all relationships are life-affirming, and probably not even a majority of them, but only those that were cultivated by the experience that it was destructive to want to own others, that this was the exact opposite of love. Čapek’s Alquist, the only man who did not forget how to serve, and who stands as a reminder of the lost love, hope and faith that humankind once had, became a mediator and a witness of their recovery – of salvation. Singer’s Count Kuzensky, a known sceptic, humorist and womanizer who refused to live in the idealized past, is not a captive of any form of life, and even after his death his face shows signs of laughter. Alquist and Kuzensky both represented counter-cultures within their world. They used their memory for living and moving towards the future, and they brought something genuine to their relationships. With that they subverted the dystopias, at least for those who wanted to move out of them, but did not know   See Stăniloae, The World, 206.   The concept of synergy comes from 1 Cor 3:9, where Paul uses for the ‘fellow workers’ for God the word synergoi. Compare with 2 Cor 6:1, where Paul speaks about working together with Christ as a sign of not accepting grace in vain. 70 71

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how. Similarly, we can say that a salvific recovery of human dignity is found in the latter parts of Čapek’s trilogy. In Meteor the good-willed doctor, nurse, clairvoyant and poet each try to give something of their life to the man who fell from the skies. In An Ordinary Life Mr Popel and the doctor, the ordinary man’s neighbours, are transformed by the dignity of his story, and begin to feel responsible beyond themselves, for his garden and his life. To ask, though, whose actions succeed in making the world a better place, divine or human, is a typically western question. It has rightly been criticized for the fact that, in the way it is posed, it already indicates a situation of crisis, in which the separating of ‘what is mine’ and ‘what is yours’ happens as a preparation for divorce – or at least a situation in which the foundational relationality of being is forgotten. Discontinuity between the world and God, given by the fall, became the dominant interpretative key for theology. With that key, the earlier distinctions within creation became fundamental oppositions. Placing the supernatural against the natural, the spiritual against the material, the sacred against the profane, led to removing God from parts of his creation, and thus to a gradual secularization within western theology.72 Or else the relationality given by God within the creation was broken by trying to isolate the ‘soli’: solus Christus, sola fide, sola gratia, sola scriptura. The Church was seen as a completely new starting point, and in these theological outlooks it became opposed to and isolated from the world. As in the time of Cyprian and Augustine the question about the True Church reduced the ‘graced’ exception to the fallen even more. With further and further radicalization of the criteria for belonging to the ‘non-world’, the island of grace grew ever smaller. Moreover, experiences that God did not interfere when his faithful were hit by wars or by persecution, that he let the innocent suffer, gave rise to modern atheism, and with it to the rehabilitation of the aspects of the world previously seen as inferior: the natural, the material, and the profane. Secularization overreacted to theological claims that only divine action could bring out something genuinely good, and especially to the self-confidence of religious institutions in identifying their superiority and power with the message by which they were established. But in claiming superiority for the profane it failed to heal the fragmented universe. In fact it added to its wounds, and brought further disillusion. In the quest to re-establish the complementarity between nature and grace, between the material and the spiritual, the profane and the sacred, different 72

 Schmemann claims that Feuerbach’s reduction of religion to anthropology which inspired Marx stems from the same fundamental opposition of the spiritual and the material we have found in Christian religious thinking since Augustine through Aquinas up to modernity. Thus Feuerbach, with all his materialism, was in fact a natural heir of Christian ‘idealism’ and ‘spiritualism’. See Alexander Schmemann, The World as Sacrament, Darton, Longman & Todd, London, 1966, 14; compare with L. Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, Harper & Row, London–New York, 1957, 14, 32.

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problems arise. When we claim, as I wish to, that human actions and divine grace do not need to be in an ‘either–or’ relationship, we need to ask: can the world be made truly a better place, if only one component is in play? Or is the life-giving relationship between the world and God always active even if the inhabitants of the world have lost the ways to engage in it? An understanding of grace as God’s primary gift already given in creation can preserve a relationality that does not divide between the higher and the lower, and does not separate the world from God. In our present cultures such a view is perhaps more easily understood than when the process of emancipation from religion and from God dominated. Yet we need to ask how far the newly religious people really left deism behind. We can ask especially about what Spousta defines as ‘life after life’ religiosity. Do these people, with their belief in some form of spiritual power, though not a personal God, who, though convinced of our ultimate accountability for our actions, do not find it meaningful to pray or worship – do not these people in fact retreat to some form of deism? God or some form of infinite divinity is still there, but passive. In this respect the ‘meditative’ type of religiosity that assumes and practises some form of contact with the divine here and now has more in common with the dynamic understanding of grace as highlighted above. According to the Scriptures as well as their traditional interpretations, God does not leave the world to run its course, like a watchmaker, who set it in motion and then did not interfere further. Instead, God has made his world and its inhabitants to participate in divine goodness, which is greater than the paradise lost after the fall, and which responds to all the movements of this world, always leads it towards new phases.73 It cannot be proved, but it can be experienced, and indeed, it has been experienced and testified by generations and generations of Christians. From them as well as from our life experience we can learn that God’s original gift is always original. It operates through the goodness and the loving relationships that are fruits of this gift; and it is always complemented by what cannot come through creation alone. God liberates and sanctifies in unexpected ways, so that the journey for which the world was made remains possible. But it needs some form of human consensual participation, recognition that reaching out to others in love is not at all separated from being reached by God’s love. The symbolic traditions are present in our longer-term memory, and in them the memory of God is preserved. In remembering, we, like Čapek’s Alquist or those who are left to care for what remained of the fallen and the ordinary man, do not go backwards, but forwards. We seek where our experiences can be filled with meaning. From within the traditions we learn that our experiences are given by the Spirit, that their meaning is mediated through the Logos in these traditions. But what about outside these traditions: can a Christian tradition and experience of God be meaningful there?74 Or are people only ‘outside’ of religions that for   Stăniloae, The World, 12.  For an interesting interreligious discussion, see Paul F. Knitter, One Earth, Many Religions: Multifaith Dialogue & Global Responsibility, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY, 1996, 73 74

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centuries formed their cultures? Are they not at least to some degree ‘inside’ as well? It is more realistic to recognize that a complete discontinuity with traditions of religious practice is only a theoretical presupposition (perhaps in a similar way as a complete continuity). In practice our cultures display either a rejection of the traditions, but usually with the help of some fragments of meaning taken from them, or forgetting the traditions, which again, is not complete, even if the world of meaning that remains might be much smaller than what is lost. Forgetting may involve ways of distinguishing between good and bad, understanding symbols and with their help ascribing meaning to the world that encircles us as given. It may be forgetting how to be grateful for the world as a gift, and how to be generous. Each of the losses has a different impact on how a life-giving relationship between the world and God can be maintained. Thus the question as to whether a life-giving relationship between the world and God can be maintained when there is more discontinuity than continuity with traditions of religious practice is multi-faceted. For further exploration I shall need to go deeper into the issues of memory and forgetting, which I shall do in the next two chapters, and also to the symbolic mediation of memory, which will be dealt with in the final two chapters. Here, as I move to examining the notions of the world as a task, I look more closely at how the divine–human relationship can be developed in a non-fragmentary manner, how theology can help to preserve a genuine mutuality in the divine–human cooperation, and its original – i.e. always new – manner. These emphases are vital as we explore the world not only as a place that is given, but also as one where we leave our mark and make it our gift to others and to the Creator. The world as a given place has two meanings. First, as was stated earlier, it is a gift, a good gift given out of love by the creator. Second, as we were reminded by Martin Heidegger, it is a given. We are thrown into a world that we did not choose, in which we have to find direction, to understand ourselves and our possibilities, make our life projects.75 Both the world as gift and the world as given need to be understood dynamically. The first employs a utopic imagination; the second interprets the journey of deification in such a manner that the world participates in the ascent towards God. Now I shall examine these two distinct possibilities, and ask in which sense they can be made compatible and mutually enriching. Utopia as a Symbolic Mediation of Hope Utopias, like myths, have their symbolic function, through which people participate in the world of meaning they convey. They are not retrospective, like myths narrating stories of the ‘beginnings’ of the archetypal structures of our being. Instead, gazing to the future, they ask how the new world coming from the eschatological future can transform the world that is here, striving and 181–182. 75  See Heidegger, Being and Time, §31.144–145.

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straining for healing and peace. Endowed with the memory of the past, utopias express alternative futures to what is causally obvious. They subvert the chain of causalities presented by dominant ideologies by their imagination and by their call to action. In relation to absolutizing ideologies, they proclaim the supremacy of transcendence, and the openness of the future; but the same transcendence and open-endedness of what is coming also relativizes all their projects. This is important to keep in mind in looking at utopias as projects giving identity to their followers. As with myths, it is a participatory identity, but always only a provisional one that could move people to a common action, but could never be a complete or final expression of who they are. Like the identity rendered by myth, the utopian identity involves both knowledge and non-knowledge of who we are and what we are to do. It needs to be permanently relativized by the encounters with others and with otherness that does not fit into its grasp, and through these encounters to expand its meaning and refocus its course of action. If we keep this vulnerability of utopias in mind, we could also say that utopias have a revelatory power. They too can come out of the experiences given by the Spirit, grasped through Logos. As we shall see with some of the scriptural utopias, they too can be symbolic mediations of God’s providential plan for the world. But before I move to that area, let me show how utopia entered into modern theology, and through that into re-reading the Scriptures. The concept of utopia is ascribed to the English humanist Thomas More, who used it as a title for his political satire first published in 1516. It expressed human aspiration for a better world; human imagination of how a just social order might look, of how decent human relationships within society might function, of how the dynamics of work, responsibility and sharing of economic goods could operate. The concept of utopia was revived and applied to reading the Scriptures and to tradition by liberation theology. Its use, however, has been different from the humanist one, as the human agency has not been divided from the divine. It stresses how the expectations of the Kingdom of God promised and revealed in the Gospels move people to live in particular ways, and how they imagine the eschatological justice and mercy, peace and love. Utopia mobilizes them. It asks of them to do their very best to make the Reign of God come true; it moves history towards eschatology. And we cannot ignore perhaps the most important but also the most controversial issue: it may be inspired by God. João Batista Libanio shows that there is a twofold etymology: utopia as ouk topos – no place; and as eu topos – a good place. The first root of the word refers to the non-materialized, non-materializable, imaginary character of utopia as a place that does not exist anywhere, indeed cannot exist exactly as imagined. Yet an image of such a place, a figurative expression of a good world, as the second root of the word suggests, gives a horizon and a guideline for a real historical project. Utopia is anticipatory. As a vision of a good place it offers alternatives to the status quo, it demonstrates that these alternatives are plausible, that new things can happen, that we can make the world a better place. But in doing so, it subverts what exists. Utopia as non-realized place accuses this world of not permitting it

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to exist.76 And utopia as a non-realizable place reminds us of the eschatological reserve. It asserts that the future is open, that it cannot be ultimately controlled by ideologies, that it is not a projection of even our very best intentions.77 It is necessary to keep all these fundamental levels of meaning together if we want to use utopia as a way of responding to divine goodness by leaving a good mark on the gifts we share and which we return in thanksgiving to the Creator. Such desire generally is divinely inspired – it comes out of a potential present in the image of God to which we were created that waits in us to be redeemed and vivified. But it does not follow that any of our dreams and plans, that any realization of our best intentions, that any fruit of such divinely given desire, comes from God, and even less that it could claim divine authority. We have a great ability to deceive ourselves and to ascribe to God things that do not come from him. Knowledge and experience of such weakness, however, should not silence our good intentions, plans and dreams, but encourage us to scrutinize them, to learn what good and what evil lies within them, and how God talks to us as we plan such plans and dream such dreams. Discernment of the spirits is permanently needed, and even then, we can never be sure that we are doing the ultimate good. We have to make do, instead, with judging according to the fruits, always believing that God works within and among us, within and among other people in order to make the world a better place, where his glory is revealed. Understanding utopia as a good place, we gather our experiences and memories of good topoi in our lives, in history, in the Scriptures, and use them as an inspiration for what the seeds of the Kingdom of God might mean. Or else we use the experiences and memories of the absence of good that, healed and filled by the Holy Spirit, made us search and strive for alternatives. This undertaking keeps the plural nature of utopia, and its dynamic life. Both were well expressed in Čapek’s garden utopia, inspired by the biblical images of paradise. But there are more utopic figures in the Old Testament, more models of how Israel should live when God intervenes and puts the distortions of our world to an end.78 They have a unifying material expression: a promised land. There are various ways of developing it: agricultural utopias focusing on the different relationships between people and nations as they will live in a promised land, ‘a land flowing with milk and honey’.79 Having beaten ‘their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks’,80 ‘they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees’,81 we read. The agricultural utopias combining prosperity 76

 See Libânio, ‘Hope, Utopia, Resurrection’, 281–282.  See Jon Sobrino, ‘Central Position of the Reign of God in Liberation Theology’, in Systematic Theology: Perspectives from Liberation Theology, eds Sobrino and Ignacio Ellacuría, SCM, London, 1996, 38–74; here 68–69. 78  See Libânio, ‘Hope, Utopia, Resurrection’, 285–289. 79  See Ex 3:8,17; 13:5; 33:3. 80  See Is 2:4; Mich 4:3. 81  See Mich 4:4; Zech 3:10. 77

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of the earth with the vision of peace are complemented by political utopias of a beneficent king82 or of a wise law and docile people,83 and by religious utopias concerned with the return of God’s glory and with the renewal of the relationship with God. In the New Testament, the central concept, the Kingdom of God, is topos as well as utopia and the mystery of eschatological transformation of the world and ourselves into glory. Jesus proclaims the Kingdom of God as an eschatological reality coming from the future when the time is fulfilled. But he also is the presence of the Kingdom of God, in which ‘the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, the poor have good news brought to them’ (L 7:22). After Pentecost the Church, formed by the Son, vivified by the Spirit, is to embody the Kingdom. The beginnings of the Church are marked by radically new ways of life, giving inspiration to further social utopias by the equal sharing of material goods and spiritual gifts,84 until the Lord comes again. But we should not idealize even the very early Church. Like the world, the Church bears the marks of grace it was given and the marks of the fall. It is a mediation of God’s presence as well as an instance of God’s absence. It bears witness to the Kingdom of God, and when faithful to the Son and filled with the Spirit, the Church embodies the Kingdom, which, however, is always greater than the Church – always here and not here. Like the world, the Church in all its historical and cultural forms is challenged and accused by utopias. They present the Church with the images of better forms of life which the Church did not allow to materialize. And they remind the Church that the hope of the world is not in the Church, but together with the Church in the Kingdom of God. Utopias played a significant formative role for the ways of life of radical Christian movements, whether monastic or lay, as well as later for liberation theology, to which it gave a language to criticize the assimilation of oppression into Christianity: Those who are absent from history are becoming present in it. The poor are passing to the centre stage in society and in the Latin American church. As they do so, they provoke fear and hostility among the oppressors and arouse hope among the dispossessed.85

Among the mendicant orders like the Franciscans or Dominicans, among the Waldensians, Hussites, Moravian Brothers, Anabaptists, and many other groups, we can see a counter-culture that attempts to re-centre itself according to their reading of Kingdom values. While learning to rely completely on God’s grace, 82

 See Ps 72; 101:1–8; Is 11:1–5.  See Jer 31:31–34; Ez 36:24–32; Is 2:2–4. 84  See Acts 4:32–35; 3:17–21; 1 Cor 12:12–13; 7:21–24. 85  Gustavo Gutiérrez, The Power of the Poor in History, Orbis, Maryknoll, NY, 1983, 83

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they work and strive for the new reality to come nearer by imitating the Christ the King. ‘Utopias are born at the moments of crisis and transition’, says Libânio.86 But we have to add, they die when their non-realized and the non-realizable elements are excluded, and when their advocates start expressing fear and hostility towards alternative views of better worlds, and thus gradually take on the position of oppressors.87 In R.U.R. Čapek prophetically uncovered a movement typical for Central European history, namely how utopia, when it is ‘realized’, is turned into a dystopia, a distorted place, where violence and destruction spread throughout. Singer in ‘The Egotist’ pointed out how one dream of a better future could become an imprisoning past. The totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century could teach us about the death of utopia by means of its final ‘realization’, the definitive step from utopia to science. Nazism killed the National Socialist utopia by which it gained support. It claimed not only a vision of a perfect society without unemployment, without controversies, but also to be the exclusive and definitive expression of such a vision. This does not mean that the utopia it exploited was innocent, but it was one partial figure among many, not yet with the racial doctrine, not yet with war plans. The death of utopia, and the birth of National Socialist ‘science’, was accompanied by the elimination of adherents to alternative visions and hopes. Communism exploited the image of a socially just world, where liberty, equality and fraternity governed. Enforcing so-called scientific Marxism–Communism as a world view, it also declared the death of utopia. No other hope was needed or tolerated for those who were given the perfect future already. Due to these features of history, perhaps Central Europeans are less able to move beyond individualism or a self-enclosed circle of family and friends and to share in any wider communal vision of a better world. But the anti-utopian mentality is not reduced to the post-Communist countries or to those who bought into Nazism. The American–European ‘be happy’ – pretend you have all you want or need already, and do not care for the rest – is an example of utopia, but it is precisely what Franz Hinkelammert criticizes in modern utopianism, since it offers a non-achievable utopia.88 But like any totalitarian ideology, this neo-liberal 86

 See Libânio, ‘Hope, Utopia, Resurrection’, 282.  Libânio safeguards this incompleteness of utopia by differentiating between utopia and a Christian eschatological hope. He says that while all of the utopias point toward a possible change in human history, they are not identical with Christian eschatological hope that is directed toward God. At best they can be closely linked with it, but not identified. See Libânio, ‘Hope, Utopia, Resurrection’, 282. 88  See Franz Hinkelammert, Crítica de la Razón Utópica, Desclée de Brouwer, Bilbao, 2002; ‘Liberation Theology in the Economic and Social Context of Latin America: Economy and Theology, or the Irrationality of the Rationalized’, Liberation Theologies, Postmodernity and the Americas, eds David Batstone et al., Routledge, London–New York, 1997, 25–52. 87

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market ideology also exploits what it uses: human individuality, the uniqueness and value of people, who are reduced to consumers and manipulated by market strategies through their mimetic desires; or else as a sub-human working force, whose poverty could be further exploited. The post-secular cultures that are open to some form of religious mystery are perhaps also more vulnerable when the presence of such mystery is claimed, but in fact substituted for a human creation, an idol, controlled and ‘distributed’ by new ideologies. Here we need to be taught by liberation theologians about the dark sides the advocates of such ideologies ignore, about different forms of injustice built into the structures of our societies. And besides the assertions that the future is open, that it cannot be known or even less organized by absolutizing ideologies, our present theology needs to rediscover how hope is mediated. The Journey of Deification In the Orthodox tradition the journey of deification, in which the world is also transfigured, represents an alternative way to western utopian thinking. The emphasis on being brought to a radical unity with God can be found already in Athanasius, who saw it as a consequence of the incarnation. He wrote: ‘The Son of God became man so as to deify us in Himself.’89 He further explained this notion of our transformation as participation in the Spirit: ‘The Word became flesh in order both to offer this sacrifice and that we, participating in His Spirit, might be deified.’90 It is important to note that, for him, this radical unity was brought about by God’s activity. Probably for this reason he preferred the term theopoiésis to theósis. But as the Christian East was not so heavily influenced by Roman legal mentality, and as there was not such a division between nature and grace, or between what were the results of divine grace and what of human effort, the gradual shift from theopoiésis to theósis did not play as significant a role as a western theologian might assume.91 The underlying emphasis remained that God in the creation willed human beings and their world to participate in divine goodness, and responded to every new situation always with new grace to achieve this aim. If we follow Dumitru Stăniloae’s path, we shall find that the meaning of the world is bound up with the meaning of God – it is dialogical; it signifies an exchange of gifts out of love. And in this process divine glory becomes manifested.92 There are two major patristic themes that Stăniloae takes further: deification as an aim of creation, and a gradual revelation of divine glory in it. Both of them are interpreted

 Athanasius, De incarn. 54; or Ad Adelph. 4.  Athanasius, De decret. 14. 91  See Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2004, 167, 338, 341. 92   Stăniloae, The World, 3, 37. 89

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to imply recognizing the priority of the divine gift, but within it also a space fully open to the exercise of human freedom. In his earlier work, Jesus Christ or the Restoration of Man (1943), Stăniloae gave the following account of the process of deification: the Word of God became flesh not only so that we could become deified, but also so that we could become human. In his later works he repeated and strengthened the earlier emphasis that, to mirror the glory of God, we must become human beings fully alive. He spoke about ‘humanization’ as a gift of salvation, but also as a task of deification, of full spiritual growth towards the fullness of life in God.93 Deification, for him, involved not only people, but the whole world, consisting of both humanity and cosmic nature. It was impossible to separate the two. Both were designed for divine glory; each contributed something unique. Cosmic nature sustained human life and was a medium through which one could receive divine grace, but which could also mirror fallen human freedom. People as personal reality were capable of exercising freedom, and also of becoming ‘witnesses’ of divine glory and goodness, of the reciprocity of love. They took nature with them to the fall, but carried it with themselves also in redemption and towards deification.94 The transformation of the world thus happened through both divine and human agency. It was willed and granted as possible by God, but it had to be received and appropriated by people, as they grew in their freedom from selfishness to solidarity. This developmental understanding of deification echoes the two patristic notions of fall and renewal I looked at in the previous section, one developed by Irenaeus, the other by Basil. And, indeed, there is a common foundation in a developmental anthropology, which influences understanding of the creation, of the fall, as well as of deification. Now, we move to examine accounts of how the world can be transformed to a place mirroring God’s glory. In patristic theology the process of transformation is well documented by Gregory of Nyssa, who refers to the Pauline notion of epektasis, of ‘straining forward to what lies ahead’ (Phil 3:13). Gregory employs it in order to explain the constant striving and straining of humankind on the never‑ending journey towards God, which does not end even after resurrection, but enters into a new phase.95 And for Stăniloae this notion of epektasis helps to introduce his dynamic understanding of divine providence, where the course of the world is open. It involves both progress in evil and progress in good. Evil changes, bringing always new tricks, new ways to attach itself parasitically to the good – but God in his providence responds in ever new ways to liberate, strengthen and protect the good, to preserve the world and move it towards communion with God, towards deification.96   See Stăniloae, The World, 206; Compare with Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. IV, 20, 7.   See Stăniloae, The World, 20. 95  See Gregory of Nyssa, In Cant. 8. 96   See Stăniloae, The World, 206. 93

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As Orthodox theology does not have the same teaching on original sin as the western theologies, heavily influenced by Augustine, God’s perpetual action is accompanied by the perpetual originality of the possibilities of the world coming through the exercise of human freedom. So the human contribution is indispensable, but it is not separated from divine grace. According to Stăniloae, grace operates both through opening genuinely new possibilities and through having memory as a means of continuity with the past. While the multitude of the utopian images of a good world stressed the positive role of human imagination in breaking through non-liveable situations, the journey of deification stresses more the mysterious character of transfiguration. The journey of deification includes and relativizes the memory of the past within the perpetual newness of life. In that, paradoxically, it includes and also relativizes the Christian tradition of interpreting the world. In subjecting this tradition to the notion of epektasis, we can also say that this tradition is ‘a stability that is simultaneously motion’.97 This does not protect us from the newness or the strangeness of the world, but remains a source for growth and regeneration, a ‘pneumatic anamnesis’ that takes us to the present and calls us to be bold and prophetic in the present world.98 Yet experience testifies how much easier it is to be a prophet or a missionary of a particular vision or a system that promises certainty than of a sovereign God who moves the whole universe by his love in ever new mysterious ways. As Singer’s ‘The Egotist’ showed so well, the certainty of systems can be misleading. It can imprison people in what they thought they knew and loved, and prevent them from openness to life. Maria Davidovna in a moment of insight realizes that she has worshipped an idol of the idealized past, the short-lived Menshevik revolution. This has made her a living corpse, a shadow existence moving in no-land.99 On the other hand, as we have seen with Singer’s old rabbi in ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, or Čapek’s Alquist, a faith that reached beyond certainties, even if embodied in the lives of people, only occasionally found adequate means of communication. Perhaps it did so only when it could speak from experience to experience, and in that exchange found a common language. In this light, Dr Yaretzky’s unfulfilled desire to communicate with the rabbi, as he did not speak his language, can also be read as suggesting that he was not able to trust the experience that made the rabbi the man of God he was. He could observe the embodied experience of God ‘through the open window’, but wanting to translate it into the language of certainties, remained torn between two irreconcilable movements: to convert to some religious system, whether Christian or Jewish, and accept its demands   Stăniloae, The World, 209; Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses 2.235 [233], 239.   Ware states that in this light we can sometimes see what was in a previous generation considered as progress, as worn out and anachronistic. See Kallistos Ware, ‘Foreword’ to Dumitru Stăniloae, The Experience of God: The Orthodox Dogmatic Theology I: Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, Holy Cross, Brookline, MA, 1998, ix–xxvii, here xvii. 99  See Singer, ‘Egotist’, 240. 97

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on reason and lifestyle – or to remain true to the rest of his life experience and convictions. In his case the certainties became obstacles to the less tangible world of faith, hope and love, which, as Singer tells us, was beaten by logics, mockery and blasphemy.100 Alquist finds the language of praise, as he experiences something new as well as old and forgotten, a growing love, this time between two Robots. He can depart in peace because he has seen God at work, he has seen divine salvation. So can Čapek’s ordinary man. He left behind caring neighbours, forming a world in which Hordubal’s heart is re-found, and God’s glory shines through ordinary human generosity and care, as we travel along with our world in the train towards infinity.101 But in all these cases, the religious culture that subverts the modern atheist and utilitarian culture is much less certain of itself. It is not a secure system; rather it is the last link with the life we have, the ultimate hope, however much it lacks its figurative expression, an uncertain hope despite all evidence to the contrary. Yet again, a question that is hard to avoid: can this ungrounded hope be lived by anyone less than a holy man? And another one: are not having everything (Alquist, the ordinary man and the old rabbi) or having nothing (Hordubal, the fallen man in Meteor and Dr Yaretzky) dangerously close to each other on this journey towards radical communion with God? I shall return to these hard questions as I further explore the nature of memory and of the ultimate fulfilment in the following two parts. Concluding Remarks Coming to the end of the first part of the book, let me re-state the questions and insights that contemporary theology can take from the literary images of the world, and those that theology can ask and offer from its own sources. In the first chapter we saw that our understanding of the world and of our place in it is entwined with the basic orientation of the culture whose mediation we appropriate. I say basic orientation because each culture contains a plurality of voices, which are part, too, of every person who participates in that culture.102 Whether cultures destroy the world and its inhabitants or build the world up depends on which voices are allowed to dominate. Against cultures that idolize their own short-term profit, alternative cultures are put in place, rooted somewhere else than in themselves, plural, but not relativist, consisting of a web of relationships and values that cultivate humankind. With the help of the literary images of the world, I have also identified three areas that need further investigation: (i) Is a distinction between a higher and a 100

 See Singer, ‘The Shadow of a Crib’, 74, 78.   Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 462–463. 102   Compare Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 462–463. 101

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lower world helpful for maintaining that there are cultures that destroy and cultures that build up? (ii) How can the goodness of the world be upheld without ignoring or trivializing the experience of evil? (iii) Can a life-giving relationship between the world and God be maintained when there is more discontinuity than continuity with traditions of religious practice? In the next chapter I shall explore how we can deal helpfully with the difficult moments in our memory. Here, for the time being, I want to conclude by arguing that the goodness of the world cannot be proved or disproved. We experience and remember the world both as good and as fallen. With the eyes of faith we can see the world as a gift, and other characteristics of this gift follow, among them the trust in the primary and ultimate goodness and meaningfulness of the world, even as we experience the opposite. This view, at least as a possibility, comes through Christian theology as a given, one that cannot be grounded differently than by its occurrences and their fruits. The last question that arose from the previous chapter, whether a life-giving relationship between the world and God can be maintained when there is more discontinuity than continuity with traditions of religious practice, proved the most complicated. Thus, instead of offering any answer at this stage, let me make the following remarks. As I showed in the previous chapter, both Čapek and Singer provided us with post-secular reinterpretations of the relationship between the world and God. To return to the introductory quotation of this chapter,103 I can say that they saw a possible progress both ways, from embracing God to embracing all that is good in the world, as well as from embracing all that is good in the world to embracing God, even if they were more at home with the second option. They provided alternatives for people who, seeing emancipation from religious thinking and practices as positive, still had some, even if often inadequate, religious education. In contrast, our generation has largely lost even the basics of this education, while it has regained interest in relational transcendence, some form of spiritual power that is often so kenotic that it cannot even be called God. Furthermore, there is no new coherent position from which the impact of this spiritual power on one’s way of relating to ‘it’, to others and to the world as a whole could be interpreted. The bond with traditions embodying such thinking and practices has been broken. So it seems that only the passage from embracing all that is good in the world to embracing God who transcends the world, or even any symbol and any name from the world, remains open. Against this conclusion we can say that there might also be events whose meaning is caught in fragments of religious systems, whether Christian, Jewish, Buddhist or other, or in metaphors that are close to what Wittgenstein called a private language,104 that uses concepts in such a manner that their meaning is inaccessible to anyone else. It names, but it does not  See Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 261–262.  See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Blackwell, Oxford, 1958, § 23, 199, 421. 103 104

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communicate. Čapek’s and Singer’s interpretations of the world were successful, because they found new ways of relating to the old traditions, and with their help they grasped new experiences. Thus the realms of meaning they unlocked were unbounded, yet rooted.105 This to me seems a condition for any long-term lifegiving account of the relationship between the world and its transcending power, in Christian theology called the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. While I would not want to deny the possibility of being involved in such a relationship in an unreflected manner, I would see great difficulties in opening up such a relationship to someone else, to passing it on as a tradition. In starting my investigation of the world as a task, I looked at different facets of the problem, of the times when, so it seems, the gift of the Spirit is not accompanied by the gift of Logos. I have stated that if we take seriously that grace goes beyond its rational expression (Logos alone) and is given to the entire movement of the world, not to a graced exception to a natural order, we must not ask whether, but how, the life-giving network of relationships is maintained among those who seem to have lost the Logos of Christian tradition, but are open to the Spirit. As was apparent from this chapter, I do not want to argue that if our contemporaries do not share our explicit Trinitarian faith, they cannot be filled with the Holy Spirit either. According to the theological traditions I have embraced, nobody is completely outside of God’s reach, outside of grace and the gifts that grace implants. As a theologian, I need to learn how to discern the spirits both within and without my community and tradition, and how to recognize the works of the Holy Spirit where they are. This task belongs to my struggle to interpret the Scripture and tradition faithfully. Without this, I would be locking myself within a very small circle of meaning. Furthermore, if I excluded the realm of my experience, I would be making Scripture and tradition self-referential. On the other hand, divine–human cooperation also involves human consent and human creative participation. Otherwise people would be included into the graced universe like potatoes or stones. To cooperate with God presupposes some form of conscious relationship with God – not only an intellectual kenosis, but a conscious and responsible relationship to the rest of creation. Both of these relationships are necessary. This brings me back to the need to keep both passages open even now, in the post-secular (and to a great degree religiously post-literate) culture: to progress from embracing all that is good in the world to embracing God, as well as from embracing God to embracing all that is good in the world, and to continue, to paraphrase Tyrrell, while in conflict with all that is evil.106 The utopian imagination and the journey of deification as two ways of making the world a better place will come up again in the next chapter, where I analyze the role of memory in culture more closely. When I return to questions of remembering and forgetting religious traditions, I shall ask what else in people’s memory helps 105  See Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1984, 70. 106  See Tyrrell, Christianity at the Cross-Roads, 261–262.

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them to struggle for their ideals and cultivate their relationships, and how it figures in our traditions. From this chapter I shall take the idea that as we journey towards an open future with each other and with God, we are ‘endowed with a memory of the past’,107 as Stăniloae pointed out. That memory, vivified by the Spirit, holds together who we have been and who we shall become. It involves not only what has happened to us and what we did, but also our dreams and visions, what happened to them and through them, and also our relationships, and what happened with them and through them.

  See Stăniloae, The World, 206.

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Part II Memory Memory is inseparable from culture, but at the same time never fully within it. There are parts of memory neglected or unwanted by various cultures, other parts that have not yet been articulated, and still other parts that resist articulation. Despite, or maybe also because of, that, there is a symbiotic relationship between them. Memory lives in the body of culture, where it is passed on, but also transformed and betrayed. We could almost say that memory remembers culture, but then we have to be careful not to reify memory – or not to give it other than metaphorical subjectivity. Memory is neither a thing nor a person. Thus, when we speak about personal memory, social memory or indeed cultural memory, we have to bear in mind that we are not saying to whom some ‘thing’ called memory belongs. Memory is always someone’s memory; it does not have its own subjectivity. In this book I look at memory as a capacity and a phenomenon. Memory as an active and passive capacity interrelates various different subjects whom we express in our inevitably objectifying language as ‘me’ – ‘you’ – ‘her’ – ‘him’ – ‘it’, ‘us’ – ‘you’ – ‘them’. It endows all involved with ways to integrate the past into who we are and who we shall be. It enables us to be remembered by other subjects. And at the same time, with the exception of God, memory transcends all with whom it forms associations: individual people, families, societies, cultures, churches, nations etc. Memory as a multidimensional phenomenon witnesses to the need to ask how things really were. This question is valid even if we (the subjects endowed with memory and prone to forgetting) know that answers to it are not absolute, that we cannot stand outside of culture and have a direct, unmediated access to the past. Still, we need to remember. More, we need to remember, against the cultural flow, that which was excluded, that which remained unnamed because it was too dangerous, that which was pushed away from conversations, or even from consciousness. But the need to remember is not sufficient in itself for human and cultural well-being. For culture to function in a healthy manner, it is not enough to remember, and to try to remember what was the case; we need to learn to ‘remember rightly’. Especially when memories of injustice, violence or abuse are involved, it is important to seek forgiveness and healing in remembering, and to avoid further   See Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI–Cambridge, 2006, 10–11.

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harm either on the side of the wronged or on the side of the wrongdoers or of the larger community involved. Moving to the post-Communist context, ‘remembering rightly’ involves not only the memories of hardships that so often dominate, but also memories of rebuilding, of healing, of becoming alive, that helped people to live through the hard times, and that open new horizons for the future. In this part I shall explore how dealing with different dimensions of memory in culture can contribute, first, to overcoming the burdens of the past, so that the horrors present in them would not be repeated, and second, to making sure that being a victim would not become a permanent identity. The Central and Eastern European context is one where people had to deal with the memories of two totalitarian regimes, in which they participated, and that most of them hated and some of them opposed. From this context I have decided to use examples from folk music, in particular the poem-songs of Vladimir Vysotsky and Jaromír Nohavica. There are several reasons for this. First, because of its fragile power of communication, music seemed a good choice for speaking about memories of the difficult past that are themselves fragile, but exercise a large influence over those who are involved in them. Second, the genre of folk music or of protest-song music was very influential in the former Communist countries. Third, my choice of the authors and performers of the poem-songs in Chapter 3 was informed by the fact that both Vysotsky and Nohavica not only influenced the alternative cultures, but found voices that became heard also in the main cultures, where they reopened the themes of remembering the unwanted past as well as remembering God. Vysotsky and Nohavica were inspirational for another reason, too. Both in different ways had to deal with how they themselves were caught in the nets of the Communist systems, and thus their remembering of the past gained an extra dimension of a personal struggle with the unwanted memories. Chapter 4, as in the previous part, is a theological complement to the dimensions of memory, remembering and being remembered, which will come out of Chapter 3. I look there at two redemptive aspects of memory: one revealing that in our remembering God, God is active, and re-members us first; the other stemming from the belief that in God the Redeemer the past is also returned in ways that make conversion and reconciliation possible.

  Music is a medium of communication in which the meaning is perhaps the most difficult to pin down. Together with dance, it is the least tangible of arts. Its meaning is unique in each performance, and scores or records of such art are but attempts to capture the transient. Music does not have one fixed material expression. It lives in performance, like memory, and in each interpreter and each performance. For these insights I am indebted to my brother-in-law, Anthony Noble.    For a good description of the genre of folk music, see Z.R. Nešpor, Děkuji za bolest: Náboženské prvky v české folkové hudbě 60.a 80. let, CDK, Brno, 2006, 46–47. In this area of research I have also relied on the expertise of Jan Šulc, to whom I am grateful for consultations.

Chapter 3

Heritage of Totalitarian Cultures in Folk Music

‘How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags! What is’t you do? – A deed without a name.’

As long as deeds do not have names, they can operate like ghostly magic. As long as we do not learn to handle what lies within our memory, we remain prisoners to it. But how can we handle what we find so hard to name? And how can we name things without causing further injustice? Working with music and lyrics in this chapter will help us to understand the nature and the limits of giving names to deeds. Music does this by means of creating tones and rhythms, and in and through them a world of significations in which we can understand the names without betraying the multi-layered nature of what they testify. Lyrics take us to the realm of symbolic meaning, where the figurative images are accompanied by their non-figurative counterparts, and both include an open-ended plurality of significations – with the help of which the authors and performers make truth-claims about the past, about our life and about God. I concentrate on two figures in this chapter. Vladimir Vysotsky (1938–1980), a popular Russian singer, song-writer, poet and actor, was suppressed by the official Soviet cultural establishment, but had a lasting influence on counter-culture in Russia as well as in other Communist countries. Jaromír Nohavica (*1953), one of the most significant Czech folk musicians, was also censored by the Communist regime, then later accused of cooperating with it, and is one of the few who found a new voice after 1989. Both Vysotsky and Nohavica came out of an alternative culture, musically represented by protest-songs and by folk music. Folk music has grown as part of an alternative music culture that claimed to have longer roots in the history of our countries. The majority culture was orchestrated by the Communists, politically loyal and at times almost comically thoughtless, schematic and emotionally flat. As such, it followed from and creatively developed the heritage of folk songs, especially ballads. But there were other equally important   William Shakespeare, Macbeth, line 50, Methuen & Co., London, 1979, 109.  For a very good summary of the dominant cultures in the Communist countries, see Heather Lynn Miller, ‘Socialist Realism as Cultural Policy and Aesthetic System’, in ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’: Identity and Russianness in the Music of Vladimir Vysotsky, PhD dissertation, University of Maryland, 2006, 103–133.  

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influences, especially the American folk revival, in the 1950s a marginal stream in music, and in the first half of 1960s a growing movement of protest songs against political and social ideologies of the majority culture, whether it was the Vietnam War, racism or the American dream. Chansons were another source of inspiration. There the music captured the atmosphere of street life in which the folk artists, prostitutes, criminals and alcoholics lived and dreamt. Their lyrics revealed this world with the utmost truthfulness, emotional depth, and brutality. The performance was powerful in its stylized simplicity of the portrayal of a life where one had to struggle for everything and had little to lose. Thus singers like Edith Piaf did not proclaim their social or political standing. Instead, they embodied its results. Performance, the music and the lyrics created a single whole. Vladimir Vysotsky was born and died in a totalitarian culture. This influenced his notion of memory, remembering and forgetting. In what follows, I concentrate on how he expanded the official canon of Soviet history by giving his voice to the losers silenced by the regime. I look at what kind of order he discovered in this wider plurality of narratives, how he uncovered the archetypically tragic human condition: even when we know the truth, we are incapable of acting on it. I shall also ask whether he found any cure for this condition. Vysotsky uses religious symbolism in that search. He raises questions about theologies of salvation that exploit human fear of death, and that downplay human bravery. Jaromír Nohavica, almost a generation younger, experienced Communism both from within and, after its fall, as a heritage that was difficult to cope with truthfully and non-schematically. I concentrate on his post-Communist works. These show the burdensome memories of a totalitarian culture that did not disappear overnight with the collapse of Communism, but only slowly ceased to exercise control over its victims. I trace how God was present in these memories for Nohavica, and in particular in the shift from hopelessness to breakings-in of new life and new hopes. There is a more explicit language about conversion, about healing, about the rebuilding of one’s world, but also a more pointed criticism of redemption mediated by the same institutions that participated in human enslavement. Vladimir Vysotsky: Interplay of the Historical and the Archetypal Vysotsky’s songs represent the endangered parts of our memory. The interplay between the historical and archetypal experience of life offers an alternative to the official Russian culture dominated by the Communist ideology. Thus he expanded culture, as well as opening a way to it for his audience by means of a conversation. Memory is not approached via recollecting only events, but also emotions, relationships and values, dreams and fears that are enacted in ways   See Nešpor, Děkuji za bolest, 49–50.



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people recognize as their own. This is a hopeful act, especially in a socio-political situation that does not give much hope for change otherwise. Inspired by the Moscow Georgian poet and singer Bulat Okudzhava (1924– 1997), Vysotsky developed his songs into a specific genre, which are called ‘author songs’ or ‘poems on a rhythmical base’, or also ‘Bard songs’. They stood in opposition to the mass songs that were claimed to represent Soviet culture, played by professionals as well as amateurs during the official ceremonies, but also in the media, at the factories or farms, and taught at schools in order to penetrate the society. The author-songs melodies deliberately remained simple, so that nothing would interfere with the perception of the text, so that its meaning could unite thought and emotions and ‘penetrate deeply into the soul’, and also so that people who wanted to sing his songs would be able to do so easily. Loser’s Point of View In Vysotsky’s songs from the 1960s, memory is approached from what I call the ‘loser’s point of view’. There are two aspects of this. First, together with social realist aesthetic values, it represents a protest against the high culture, and concentrates on the ordinary, usually working-class, people. This aspect is traceable especially in Vysotsky’s performances, where most of the songs, despite being in a traditionally Russian minor key, are played energetically, with a guitar sounding slightly out of tune, a voice that appears untrained, and harsh vocal timbres. The second aspect runs against the official propaganda. The ‘loser’ is no longer a worker exploited by a bourgeois, but a man or woman being stamped upon by the newly powerful. The new losers or outlaws are people who have been prosecuted by the Moscow Criminal Investigation Office. Vysotsky sings about those who have experienced the injustices of the Soviet trials, and the horrors of    ‘Bard songs’ are performed by one singer accompanying himself alone on a guitar, and usually it is he or she who wrote the song (hence the name avtorskaya pesnya or ‘author song’). The songs are focused primarily on the lyrics; chord progressions tend to be very simple and similar from song to song, without instrumental solos. Performances of bard songs had an intimate character to them; the bards would consider their performances as ‘conversations’ with the audience. George Selinsky, ‘Russian Bards: The voice and guitar is mightier than the sword’ at http://www.stseraphimschurch.org/we-magazine/statyi2005/ russianbards.html (accessed 16 November 2008), 1; see also Vladimir Vysotsky, ‘Speeches at Concerts: A Mosaic’, in Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, eds Yuri Andreyev and Iosif Boguslavsky, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1990, 201–218, here 201; Milan Dvořák, Vladimír Vysockij, Pravda a lež, Votobia, Praha, 41.   See Vysotsky, ‘Speeches at Concerts: A Mosaic’, 202.   See a summary of Maxim Gorky’s principles of art in Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 107.   In this sense his standpoint represents an ‘alternative realism’ as opposed to ‘socialist realism’. It opts for the actual existential realities instead of displaying political ideology. See Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 131.

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the Soviet concentration camps, as well as those who opted for emigration. The style of these songs allows the audience not only to learn about a part of their own history that was supposed to remain hidden from the public, but also to identify with the feelings of horror, helplessness and injustice. Now they too can learn to sing their songs, and to think about what these events, twisted relationships and dark emotions have done to their ‘motherland’. In the song ‘Convict Vasiliev and Petrov, Convict’ (1962), Vysotsky tells a story of how after four years of preparation two concentration-camp prisoners tried to escape from Gulag, having been victimized by the criminals interred with them, and sexually abused by their doctor, and how they were beaten when caught and put back to their place.10 In ‘It’s All Behind, the KPZ and Trial’ (1963), a man sentenced to the concentration camp thinks of his grieving mother, who, like many, does not know where her son has been taken and is deprived of any contact with or information about him.11 Perhaps the best-known song on the theme is ‘My Friend has Left for Magadan’ (1965), where Vysotsky shows his sense of the tragicomic in life, and his art of double meaning. Magadan was a secret major transit point for other concentration camps that was supposed to be hidden from the public. The song is dedicated to Vysotsky’s friend, the journalist Igor Kukhanovsky, who left to work as a journalist in Magadan, whose courageous and costly act, as well as what he had seen, had to be remembered.12 Besides concentration-camp internment, there was another widespread option in the USSR for eliminating political opponents of the regime or religious representatives, namely lunatic asylums, where victims were systematically drugged and tortured. This theme emerged in Vysotsky’s song, ‘A Letter from a Lunatic Asylum’ (1965–1966), sometimes also known as ‘I Told Myself: I Must Stop Writing’. I told myself: I must stop writing! But hands are insisting, Oh, help me mother! Favourite friends! I lie in bed – they stare at me,

   See, e.g., Vysotsky, ‘Before Leaving Abroad’ (1965). Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 102.    Vysotsky, like many of his contemporaries, sharply distinguished between Russia, which he patriotically loved, and the Soviet Union, whose authorities exploited his motherland. See Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 102. 10  See Vysotsky, ‘Zeka Vasil’ev i Petrov Zeka’, at www.kulichki.com/vv/pesni/ sgoreli-my-ponedorazumeniyu.html (accessed 16 November 2008). 11  See Vysotsky, ‘Vse pozadi – i KPZ, i sud …’, at www.kulichki.com/vv/pesni/vsepozadi-i-kpz.html (accessed 16 November 2008). 12  See Selinsky, ‘Russian Bards’, 9.

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I don’t sleep, they might attack me, Next to me are noiseless, hopeless freaks.13

There follows a description of life in a lunatic asylum: people unwanted by the regime are ‘treated’, so as to lose their minds by starvation, beating, and different forms of torture, by being among psychos who are let free to do to them what they like. Vysotsky gives voice to a man who has witnessed the destruction of many people and is hopelessly writing to his friends and relatives to take him home, while recognizing that it is in vain, for the only thing that lies ahead for him is to become crazy, and now this future is becoming real. These political songs, recollecting what was pushed out of the official history, provoked the Communist authorities. In the beginning Vysotsky was protected from direct persecution by his parents, who were loyal Communists, but as Brezhnev’s politics got harder, all cultural activities were forced to conform to the single state ideology, and alternative expressions, like the criminal songs, were forbidden.14 Vysotsky refused to be silenced, although the historical themes of his songs in the second part of the 1960s and in the 1970s concentrate more on the war than on direct Communist persecution. Even here, Vysotsky’s performances opposed both in form and content the official war songs. His minor key, a guitar apparently a bit out of tune, and the accusing, slightly blurred voice, contrasted with the mass songs, with ‘the hymns and marches espousing the glories of the Soviet state and culture’.15 As he pointed to the issues of nepotism, favouritism and corruption, he contradicted the standards of social realism, according to which art had to serve the masses by strengthening their loyalty to the regime, controlling the memory of the past to the last detail, prescribing which emotions are to be displayed. Vysotsky’s war songs run against a tendency to twist or to cover up the uncomfortable past with the image of a fair, healthy, and happy Soviet society. He sang about the death of simple people, about their empty places at home, about invalids, always emphasizing the memories from below: Explosion, bang, the hero is torn into pieces, Blood, mutilation, death. The mission has been accomplished: Fear has been imprinted into the enemy’s every cell. But where is the reward?16 13  Vysotsky, ‘A Letter from a Lunatic Asylum’; the translation is taken from Selinsky, ‘Russian Bards’, 12. 14  See Gary Saum Morson, ‘Socialist Realism and Literary Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 38 (1979), 121–133, here 122. While socialist realism was abandoned by a number of Russian writers in the 1960s, it was reinforced in the 1970s. 15  See Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 84. 16  Vysotsky, ‘Inferno’; the translation is taken from Tatyana Tanika, ‘Channeling Vysotsky: A Poet’s Journey From Limbo Into The Light’, at www.tanika.com/CV-excerpt01.

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Most of his anti-war songs are in the ‘I-form’, as he takes on the role of the storyteller.17 He emphasizes that, like plays in the theatre, their truth does not have to lie in his direct experiencing of what he sings about. Rather, he collects stories, tries to capture their atmosphere, the emotions involved. He makes associations that would be recognized by those who were affected by the war, and could speak to those for whom the war is a remote past, helping them not to forget the memories that have woven their culture. Vysotsky attempts to save the particularity of each story. Not forgetting for him means also not giving way to simplifications of the past, to the official doctrine representing the past unfaithfully. Thus we can speak about his preferential option for the losers. This we can see, for example, in the song ‘For Serezhka Fomin’ (1964), where a nameless working-class man, who was the ideological hero of social realism, is exploited by the new powerful, in this case by Serezhka Fomin, the son of a Marxist professor. Serezhka Fomin was helped out of military service by his father. He learned about the hardship of the war by visiting movie theatres, and thus worked on the falsification of memory that resulted in him being given a Hero of the Soviet Union medal.18 From the same time there is a song called ‘Penal Battalions’ (1964), the unit of soldiers punished, usually for political reasons, who were not only given the worst assignments and the most dangerous tasks, but for whom it was less clear who was the ally and who the enemy, as they also suffered inhuman treatment from their commanders.19 The ‘loser’s point of view’ remains even in the ‘Song about a Friend’, which Vysotsky wrote two years later, in 1966, and where he says: ‘Nobody takes losers to the top – and here, / Nobody sings about them.’20 But Vysotsky does. The losers to whom he gives his voice, whose lives he enacts during his performances, are the heroically dying unrecognized ordinary people, .

htm (accessed 16 November 2008, p. 2 of 8). 17  Miller says: ‘An important element in the lyrics of Vysotsky’s songs was that he often spoke in the first person, but not as himself. ... Due to this method, additional myths about Vysotsky’s background emerged. Some believed that he actually served in the army during the war (though he was born in 1938, making him far too young), that he also served time in a Soviet labour-camp, that he had been a mountain climber, and a pilot ...’. See ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 181. See also Christopher Lazarski, ‘Vladimir Vysotsky and His Cult’, Russian Review 51 (1992), 58–71, here 62. 18  See Vysotsky, ‘For Serezhka Fomin’, at www.kulichki.com. A similar theme is taken up in ‘The Stars’ (1964), where a simple soldier died in a battle while his commander, who remained in safety, was awarded a medal for bravery. For a Russian version, see Vysotsky, ‘Zvezdy’, at www.kulichki.com/vv/pesni/mne-etot-boj-ne.html (accessed 16 November 2008). 19  See Vysotsky, ‘Shtrafnie batalioni’, in the Russian original Vysotskij, Soczinenia v dvuch tomach, I, 47–48, www.kulichki.com; for comments, see Selinsky, ‘Russian Bards’, 3–4. 20  Vysotsky, ‘Song about a Friend’, translated by Nellie Tkach, at www.kulichki.com/ vv/eng/songs/tkach.html#song_about_a_friend (accessed 16 November 2008).

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the ones left behind broken by the empty places in their homes, those mutilated by war, or those who experienced the double edge of enmity, German as well as Soviet. He feels obliged to pass on their point of view, too, to make the picture more complete, to cover the white places of the collectively guarded memory. This is something he sings about in the ‘White Silence’ (1972), For so long we have dreamt only white Other shades of snow do not exist We’ve been blinded by this brilliant light But the black line of earth can be seen through the mist.21

Why such memory is important, or even necessary, is not a question for Vysotsky. Keeping it is vital for, to use Václav Havel’s later phrase, ‘living in the truth’.22 This is not for Vysotsky one option among many, but a necessity, without which a person or a nation loses itself. And as we shall see, this theme is more closely addressed in his later ballads, where remembering also includes archetypal values and attitudes. Vysotsky stresses there the good that will always be good and the human archetypal tragedy that lies in achieving the knowledge of what is good, but not the ability to practise it. The Tragic Human Condition In the polyphonic notion of history Vysotsky arrived at and in which he also participated, conflicts could not be erased or harmonized. Moreover, it was impossible to find any guiding principles. For these, Vysotsky had to dig deeper. This led him to examine with precision not only the individual events as he did in the earlier songs, but to seek for the typical figures present in them, figures previously named by literary as well as religious symbolic tradition. His notion of memory was expanded in this direction. It included cultural mediations of the archetypal truth and justice that were expelled from the Soviet establishment culture. At the same time, however, he became more aware of the split between knowing the truth and acting upon it. This split, too, was mediated by literature or drama, creatively embodying older religious traditions of speaking about the archetypically tragic human condition. I shall return to his complicated relationship to religion in the final section. Here I concentrate on the process by which the tragic human condition started to dominate. At this stage it was already influenced by his experience as an actor, the hardening of Soviet cultural politics, and his own experiences of breaking identity, of delusions and the nearness of death caused by alcoholism. 21

 Vysotsky, ‘White Silence’, translated by Alex Lvovsky, quoted from www.kulichki. com/vv/eng/songs/lvovsky.html#white_silence (accessed 16 November 2008). 22  See Václav Havel, The Power of the Powerless, M.E. Sharpe, Armonk, NY, 1985, 31; compare Vadim Tumanov, ‘Life without Lying’, in Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 301–314, here 301.

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As I said in the introduction to Vysotsky’s life and work, Hamlet was the main archetypal role in his life. In Vysotsky’s interpretation, Hamlet, who knew what would happen to him, who knew what was happening to his country, wanted to find and save the memory of a good king. He is looking for a proof of his innocence, wants to convince himself that the king is not a murderer, that he did not kill his beloved father. He wants blood not to have been shed. But there is a tortuous struggle in his mind, as he encounters the unappeased spirit of his father, as he understands that while he was trained to reign in his country, the throne has been seized by a regicide, so that he feels the obligation to seek revenge, although he is against murder.23 Hamlet’s tragedy, his need and simultaneous inability to find a good straightforward solution to a violent and twisted situation, finds its way back into Vysotsky’s songs, to express his anguish, his knowledge and his feelings about what is happening to his country, and his unfulfilled desire for things to be otherwise. In his poem–song ‘My Hamlet’ (1972), Vysotsky sets out the links between the tragedy of Hamlet and that of his own life and time,24 emphasizing Hamlet’s growing awareness of his tragic circumstances, and the ultimate impossibility of abstaining from revenge: Into a weak alloy, I’ve melted with each day, And barely cool, it started to diffuse. Like others, I’ve spilled blood and just like they I was incapable my vengeance to refuse.25

The tragedy of Hamlet, as well as the tragedy of Vysotsky’s own time, is denied resolution. The last message of Shakespeare’s Hamlet before he dies is: ‘Tell him [Fortinbras] with th’occurents, more and less, which have solicited – the rest is silence.’26 Nevertheless, remembering the tragic has its value, as, despite the play of fate, there is a difference between good and evil. Even if remembering the good as good and the evil as evil does not guarantee a good outcome, it is necessary for human dignity. To remember well is to remember the difference. This is made clear in one of Vysotsky’s more positive songs, ‘The Ballad of the Time’ (1975), where he attempts to unite the historical and the archetypal in praise of examples 23

 See Vysotsky, ‘Speeches at Concerts: A Mosaic’, 213.  It repeats some of the themes expressed in his earlier song, ‘I Have Two Selves in Me’ (1969). 25  Vysotsky, ‘My Hamlet’, translated by Andrey Kneller, quoted from www.kulichki. com/vv/eng/songs/kneller.html#my_hamlet (accessed 16 November 2008). 26  Shakespeare, Hamlet, line 350, quoted from T.J.B. Spencer’s edition, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1980, 202. In one of his concerts Vysotsky took up this theme again, and in the song ‘My Funeral’ identified himself with his hero’s death: ‘Had I but time, as this fell sergeant, Death, / Is strict in his arrest – O, I could tell you – …The rest is silence …’, Alla Demidova, ‘He Wrote the Way He Lived’, in Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 327–338, here 331. 24

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of human dignity and bravery. The message of this song subverts the ‘eternal’ validity of the subverted values proclaimed by the mass Soviet culture. Vysotsky sings: Time has not wiped heroic deeds out. Just unveil what is hidden from view, Take the time by the throat and, no doubt, It will open its secrets to you. Be prepared to listen to tunes you’ve heard of, Look attentively, with comprehension, After all, love is love and will always be love, Even there, at your destination.27

He speaks about ‘an unwritten law’, valid from the beginning, where notions of cowardice, betrayal, animosity and war, as well as of freedom, friendship, love and sacrifice, retain their referential meaning. Moreover, that meaning can be rediscovered: Time has not washed away all these notions. Just remove the top layer of mud, And a flood of eternal emotions Will gush out upon us like blood. Plainness, purity come from the ancients to us, From the past we take fables and legends For the good will be always the good: in the past, And in future, as well as at present.28

One of Vysotsky’s most famous songs, ‘The Story of the Truth and the Lie’ (1977), dedicated to Bulat Okudzhava, takes the difference even further. The Lie has stolen the Truth’s clothes and walks in them through the world, gaining support by her tricks to ridicule, wound and exile the Truth, fooling people that the Truth would win only if ‘it plays the treacherous tricks the lie always plays’.29 For Vysotsky, typically, it is a ballad with a bitter, sarcastic ending, showing that despite, and maybe because of, the nasty characteristics of the liars, they always tend to win, at least in the course of our lifetime:

27  Vysotsky, ‘The Ballad of the Time’, translated by Alec Vagapov, at http://vagalecs. narod.ru/Vysotsk.htm#the_ballad_of_the_time (accessed 16 November 2008). 28  Vysotsky, ‘The Ballad of the Time’, translated by Vagapov, at http://vagalecs.narod. ru/Vysotsk.htm#the_ballad_of_the_time (accessed 16 November 2008). 29  Vysotsky, ‘The Story of the Truth and the Lie’, translated by Alec Vagapov, from www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/vagapov.html#the_story_of_the_truth_and_the_lie (accessed 16 November 2008).

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Sitting at table with friends, drinking wine or whatever, you never know if you’ll manage to really get by. You’ll be relieved of your clothing, as sure as ever. Look at your trousers worn by insidious Lie. Look at your watch on the wrist of insidious Lie. Look at your horse ridden by the insidious Lie.30

As ‘My Hamlet’ as well as the earlier ‘I Have Two Selves in Me’ had already made clear, the struggle between the truth and the lie, between taking and not taking part in the chain of violence, is not only external, but also internal, cutting through every human person. Remembering the difference is vital for human dignity, but, as Vysotsky confesses, at times unachievable.31 The tragic human condition dominates. To break its closed cycle, some form of a messianic perspective is needed. Tell Me Where Is the Land Lit with Icon-Lamp Light 32 While it is possible to say that Vysotsky’s earlier songs treat religious themes not unlike the Stalinist propaganda, i.e. caricaturing Christian symbolism as oppressive from the position of disbelief, the same does not apply to his later production. There we can trace, if not some form of search for God, then at least nostalgia for the unbroken world that was held together by religious practices, as well as a desire to participate in such a world. These two approaches to religion, the critical and the receptive, remain beside each other, as Vysotsky criticized and accepted different aspects of religion. At the beginning of the 1960s, when Vysotsky sings his criminal songs, priests and monks occasionally figure among the ‘losers’, whose perspective Vysotsky remembers against the official propaganda. But religious themes as such start to emerge in the second part of the 1960s and then grow in frequency. In a number of songs throughout Vysotsky’s work, memories of religion come through with an emotional distance, and with irony, as we can see, for example, in ‘About the Devil’ (1965–1966), where the dark forces are at least some companions in drunken loneliness.33 In the ‘Song about Carpenter Joseph, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the Immaculate Conception’ (1967), Vysotsky takes a step further. 30

 Vysotsky, ‘The Story of the Truth and the Lie’.   The timeless insight from ‘My Hamlet’ is valid for Vysotsky: ‘Like others, I’ve spilled blood and just like they – I was incapable my vengeance to refuse.’ Translated by Kneller, quoted from www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/kneller.html#my_hamlet (accessed 16 November 2008). 32  Vysotsky, ‘Those Big Dark Eyes’ (1974), translated by Sergei Roy, Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 137–143, here 143. 33  See Vysotsky, ‘About the Devil’, translated by Adrian J. Erlinger, at www.kulichki. com/vv/eng/songs/erlinger.html#about_the_devil (accessed 16 November 2008). 31

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He caricatures the biblical narrative, and gives religious symbols an opposite meaning – the holy appears as demonic, as destructive of human lives.34 This harsh tone moves into the background as Vysotsky rediscovers Russian cultural identity through its main religious themes, like the soul, destiny and the land. But there is a development in how much Christian meaning he is willing to ascribe to these key symbols. The Russian ‘dusha’ signifies the essence of personhood, the reflected self, as well as the transcendent desire within the self, or, to use Christian language, a desire for God. At the same time ‘dusha’ is a centre of empathy, compassion and solidarity with others.35 The theme of the ‘soul’ was so strongly rooted that not even Soviet propaganda could dispense with it. Thus, instead of being rooted out, ‘dusha’ was reduced to the moral and psychological aspects of a person.36 In Vysotsky’s songs, however, the meaning of ‘dusha’ also took on the excluded meanings. Although he kept his distance from institutional dogmatic religiosity, at the same time he enacted the connection between the mundane and the religious dimension of human interior life, including the search for God. A double play of the mundane and the religious meaning can be traced in the cry of people sinking in the water and calling SOS to the shore in ‘Save our Souls’ (1967). In ‘In my Soul’ (1967–68), which is a love song as well as a quasi-religious song, Vysotsky names his alienation from religious meaning, his lack of healing, and he questions whether this stage is final: My soul has roads without destinations, Just search it, and you’ll find for once Some phrases and unfinished conversations, The rest is taken up by Paris, France.37

34  See Vysotsky, ‘Song about Carpenter Joseph, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the Immaculate Conception’, translated by Erlinger, www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/ erlinger.html#song_about_carpenter_joseph_the_virgin_mary_the_holy_spirit_and_the_ immaculate_conception (accessed 16 November 2008). 35  As Miller points out, the fullness of meaning does not translate into English by one idiom, but by several, such as ‘soul’, ‘heart’, ‘feeling’ or ‘inspiration’. See Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 99–100; see also Dale Pesmen, Russia and Soul: An Exploration, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY, 2000. 36  See Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 100; Anna Wierzbicka, ‘Soul and Mind: Linguistic Evidence for Ethnopsychology and Cultural History’, American Anthropologist 91 (1989), 41–58; here especially 45. 37  Vysotsky, ‘In my Soul’, translated by Vagapov, from www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/ songs/vagapov.html# in_my_soul (accessed 16 November 2008).

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A search for a transcendent partner is expressed in ‘Bath-hut’ (1968), where we hear a cry ‘Sucking down rotgut and bitter teats, / We tattooed next to our heart those profiles / That the breaking of hearts He might hear …’.38 The theme of the soul is connected here with the second constitutive element of Russian religious–cultural identity, namely destiny. While Vysotsky accords with the existentialists when it comes to the description of the experiences of darkness and sickness and in criticizing hypocrisy, he differs from them in ascribing a much bigger role to a human destiny that is essentially tragic.39 This belief strengthens his understanding of the vanity of our undertakings but also his desire to break this vicious circle, at least after our death.40 Questions as to whether or not God hears the cry of the broken-hearted, or whether religion helps to keep or to break the oppressive values and structures, need to be placed in the context of the eastern notion of destiny. The notion of destiny is weakened in some of Vysotsky’s songs from the 1970s, where he uses more of the classical Christian scriptural and theological symbolism to address the archetypal human longings and fears. Thus we find an image of the fall in his ‘Aborted Flight’ (1973): Someone spotted a fruit still young Shook the trunk of the tree – it fell I’ll sing of the one who left songs unsung Never learned if his voice would excel.41

It is, however, apparent that he uses religious symbolism rather as someone who occasionally visits its tradition and employs and creatively develops its fragments, rather than someone who would be at home in its wealth and plurality. This can be seen in ‘In the Beginning there was the Word’ (1974), where Vysotsky plays with the notion of God’s creation through the Word, with the Flood and with the gift of the Law, as he sings about the alternative views to those of the Marxist ‘scientists’. But the tragic notion of destiny returns to his poetic interpretation: the

38  Vysotsky, ‘Bath-hut’ (1968), translated by Sergei Roy, in Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 105–107, here 107. 39   The theme re-emerges in different periods of Vysotsky’s production. See, e.g., ‘The Icy World’ (1966), translated by Vagapov, at www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/vagapov. htmo#the_icy_world (accessed 13 November 2009) or ‘It’s my Fate, to Fight on till the End, to the Cross’ (1978), translated by Sergei Roy, at www.wysotsky.com/1033.htm?682 (accessed 13 November 2009). 40  Vysotsky uses different notions of life after death – from a Buddhist notion of reincarnation (‘The Reincarnation Song’, 1969) to the Christian idea of the last judgement (‘I Freeze Between’, 1980). 41  Vysotsky, ‘Aborted Flight’, translated by Boris Gendelev, at www.kulichki.com/vv/ eng/songs/gendelev.html#aborted_flight (accessed 16 November 2008).

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Word through which the world was created was the Word of grief.42 The chosen religious fragments strengthen the tragic status quo, rather than develop the messianic subversion and healing. Thus the tragic human destiny is not overcome. It can be embraced, according to Vysotsky, and through its acceptance one can learn to be grateful for all the gifts that were given. As we shall see, this theme is developed further in his last songs, after he included the third cultural–religious symbol of Russian identity, the land. Unlike a western search for a privatized spirituality, for believing without belonging, Vysostky’s religious questions have a strong relationship to the land. It is both Mother Earth, and Russia as Motherland. The symbol of the land has perhaps the strongest tie to a pagan heritage included in myths and beliefs that were reshaped and cultivated by the adoption of Orthodox Christianity, but not uprooted or overcome.43 In ‘Those Big Dark Eyes’ (1974), from where I have taken the heading for this part, ‘Tell me where is the land lit with icon-lamp light’,44 Vysotsky sings about the lost memory of such a land, that for him is connected with a loss of ability to judge between right and wrong, and with the loss of transcendence: We have never heard Of a place like that And we’ve always lived In the dark, like rats. Tell me where is that place, where’s that spot on the earth, Where they sing and not howl, and where wrong is not right? We have always known That the good’s no good, All our icons are black with greasy soot.45

This lost memory is recovered in another poem–song, ‘The Domes’ (1975). While the absent religion in the previous song had a germinating power to cultivate positive values, here, looking at the golden church towers, the ambivalence of religion returns: Over countless domes of churches blue skies hover. Copper bells are pealing, over, over and over … 42

 Vysotsky, ‘In the Beginning there was the Word’, translated by George Tokarev, at www.wysotsky.com/1033.htm?532 (accessed 16 November 2008). 43  See Miller, ‘Vysotsky’s Soul Packaged in Tapes’, 264. 44  Vysotsky, ‘Those Big Dark Eyes’ (1974), translated by Sergei Roy, Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 137–143, here 143. 45  Vysotsky, ‘Those Big Dark Eyes’.

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Hard to say if it’s in anger or in joy. Here in Russia, domes of purest gold are covered – That they oftener may catch the Lord’s eye.46

The questions, whether the Orthodox Mother Russia who is set to catch the Lord’s eye more often is a symbol of a desired timeless world, or a symbol of a nationalist and exploitative realization of religion in time, remain open. Yet it is interesting that the strongest criticism of the Church siding with the powerful and ignoring human suffering is not addressed to Orthodoxy, but to the Roman Catholic Church, on the occasion of John Paul II’s election as pope.47 Towards the end of his life, Vysotsky returned to the theme of destiny. He developed the two positive aspects of it present in the previous songs: a personal journey in which a person needs to face up to what he or she has lived; and a gratitude for the gift of life, that, if not a conversion to God, rehabilitates a conversation with God. The first aspect comes across in ‘It’s my Fate, to Fight on to the End, to the Cross’ (1978), where Vysotsky uses the symbol of a cup and Jesus’ Gethsemane struggle. Reading his life through this prism, he concludes: If I do drain the cup – after all, it’s my fate – If my songs aren’t too crude, and the tunes do not grate, I shall froth at the mouth, but I shall not complain; I shall go – but I’ll prove that not all is in vain!48

This attitude stands in Vysotsky against a sentimentalized notion of salvation that is motivated by fear of death.49 Here Vysotsky makes a very important theological point, namely that inviting God into one’s life out of fear is destructive of human integrity. Such a messianic perspective is closed for Vysotsky. With that, we could say, he gives away too much. He does not have a constructive notion of conversion, of breaking away from the tragic human condition. If we find any implicit notion of grace at all in his works, it is not as a help in times of need or as a response to

 Vysotsky, ‘The Domes’ (1975), translated by Sergei Roy, Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 147–149, here 147. 47  In ‘A Lecture on the International Situation in 1979’ (1978), he sarcastically commented on the election of ‘his guy … a Slav, our relative – a Pole!’ as pope, and the Vatican’s distance from human suffering. Translated by Tokarov, www.wysotsky.com/1033. htm?505. 48   ‘It’s my Fate, to Fight on to the End, to the Cross’ (1978), translated by Sergei Roy, Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 121–123, here 123. 49   This notion is developed in one of his last songs, ‘In Honour of Dorian Gray and Faustus’ (1980). For Vagapov’s translation see www.kulichki.com/vv/eng/songs/vagapov. html#i_honor_dorian_gray_and_faustus (accessed 16 November 2008). 46

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our weakness – both absent in Vysotsky – but in the embracing of the tragic and in his notion of gratitude. The latter is expressed in his very last poem sent to Marina Vlady a couple of weeks before his death, ‘I Freeze Between’ (1980): I’m half my age – a little way past forty. I’m living, thanks to God and you, my wife. I have a lot to sing to the Almighty. I have my songs to justify my life.50

This echoes his earlier poem ‘Be Thankful’ (1969), which ends: ‘It’s true. I only have a single worry: To whom should I give thanks that I’m alive?’51 In ‘I Freeze Between’, however, he names the one to whom he expresses gratitude. Vysotsky’s conversation with the Almighty is a confident one. It stresses the continuity of one’s life, in which even the tragic finds its place, and which is not justified from outside, by the Messiah, but from inside, by the one who has accepted the gift of life with gratitude. If we take seriously Alexander Schmemann’s comment that: ‘Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy’,52 we are facing a theological challenge here. Vysotsky’s unorthodox arrival at gratitude raises questions about the Christian memory of salvation, stressing the necessity of divine aid. In the next chapter I shall try to take this challenge seriously, without taking the easy option of saying that, although Vysotsky explicitly denied messianic aid, implicitly he must have accepted it at least to a degree, otherwise he would not have been capable of gratitude. Vysotsky’s rehabilitation of a grateful communication with God has to be seen from within the complex ways of remembering religion and employing religious symbols. As I have pointed out, it encompassed a wide range of past events, stories, emotions, thoughts and attitudes. It ranged from remembering the Church as a wealthy and influential oppressor, to remembering priests and monks in labour camps and mental hospitals together with other losers suffering injustly, as those 50  Vysotsky, ‘I Freeze Between’, translated by Roy, Vladimir Vysotsky: Hamlet with a Guitar, 189. Compare also with Vysotsky’s earlier work ‘The Prayer of a Sinner’, where he says: ‘I am a blasphemer; I angered Father, … I’d better say, “Show mercy, Almighty. I repent my insatiable greed.” … But no! My fingers run over the strings of my guitar And I am singing again. … Thank you, Father, for my temper and stubbornness. Thank you for letting me sing my songs, Thank you for Marina, Alla, Tatyana, Judge me, if you have to, but don’t take it amiss!’ taken from www.tanika.com/CV-excerpt01.htm (accessed 16 November 2008). 51  Vysotsky, ‘Be Thankful’, translated by Serge Elnitsky, from www.kulichki.com/vv/ eng/songs/elnitskij.html#be_thankful (accessed 16 November 2008). 52   Alexander Schmemann’s last homily, ‘Thank You, O Lord!’, at www.schmemann. org/byhim/thankyoulord.html (accessed 16 November 2008).

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to whom Vysotsky lent his voice so that they could be heard. His position included ironic attacks on the type of institutional religiosity that made a good living out of exploiting the empty place of God by knowing how to profit from human weakness and fears, without bringing healing to the broken-hearted. It caricatured beliefs in grace or salvation, as well as expectations expressed by such beliefs. At the same time, Vysotsky reinterpreted these beliefs existentially, and despite arguments with Soviet nationalism, he appropriated the religious aspects of Russian patriotism. God is included into the veneration of the soil and the Motherland, into struggling with one’s destiny and into the inner life of the soul. Thus, despite Vysotsky’s Russianness, his songs, and his ways of remembering, including the religious aspects of remembering, also spoke to audiences outside the Soviet Union, including the countries of the Soviet bloc, where those who did not support the establishment had no desire to be Russophiles. One of the musicians heavily influenced by Vysotsky was the Czech singer, Jaromír Nohavica, whose work I explore in the next section. Jaromír Nohavica: Breaking and Healing in Retrospect The theme of memory is multi-layered in Nohavica, as it was in Vysotsky. It is partly due to the direct influence of Vysotsky’s songs on Nohavica, and partly to the fact that both wrote their songs against the background of a totalitarian regime, or in Nohavica’s later works, against the background of a society struggling with the totalitarian past. The historical and the archetypal approaches to memory played a similar role for both. With the help of these approaches, both tried to name the memories excluded from official versions of history. Both reminded their audience about the intangible nature of truth as something that could not be reduced to any single expression, but could still be desired, struggled for and lived out. In this section I shall concentrate mainly on Nohavica’s later work where he deals with the memory of totalitarianism in retrospective reflection. I shall look at where the personal and the larger-scale political, social and cultural past overlap, conflict and feed each other, and how the memory of God shifts to the memories of God’s absence and then opens a way to memories of healing. Nohavica’s melodies were distinctly Slavic, displaying Russian, but also Balkan, influences, alongside debts to French chanson and to blues. Music as well as performance helped the text to come alive, to gain emotional depth and stick in the memory. Nohavica had a wide range of themes and styles, from protest songs to poetic stories from ordinary lives, historical songs, war songs, love songs, festive songs and, importantly, translations or adaptations of poetry. A number of Nohavica’s early songs were translations of Vysotsky into Czech,53 or his own creative development of Vysotsky’s themes and style. 53

 See, e.g., ‘Lass Happiness, Lad Misery’, ‘Natasha, My Love’, ‘Truth and Lie’.

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Memory as a Burden Walter Benjamin in ‘On the Concept of History’ says that ‘only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments’.54 But the question remains as to what to do with those memories that cannot be forgotten, when redemption seems to be unreachable. Memory as a burden features in Nohavica’s songs from the 1980s, which reflect both the political situation and his personal experience of carrying the ‘non-citable’ moments. Nohavica soon became a prime interpreter of folk music in Czechoslovakia, and also a kind of musical spokesman of his generation, because his inner truthfulness resonated with the alternative-culture audiences. At the same time, however, his public performances were often prohibited, his possibilities to record limited. Moreover, direct encounters with the secret police gradually led to Nohavica being forced to collaborate. Like a number of people in a similar situation, he thought that it was possible to play a double game without hurting anyone.55 This burden was publicly exposed after the fall of Communism. It is perhaps, then, no wonder that the theme of memory is so present in his songs. Nohavica’s song from 1984, ‘The Wastrel’, personifies memory in the figure of a nameless vagabond, going from door to door, selling needles for sewing and dictionaries for understanding, always a stranger, bearing our pain, entering our dreams, but unable to shape our days.56 Nohavica dedicated this song to Karel Štikanc, whose poem clarifies the relevance of the wounded vagabond to memory: ‘Being nothing, being no one / But fear of oneself ... Touching under my dress / I cannot run away ... Being my grace! My cross! My shadow!’57 To ignore the vagabond/memory is impossible because of the hymn he plays, awaking conscience:   Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, in Selected Writings, Vol 4, 1938– 1940, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA–London, 2003, 389–400, 390. 55   The secret police started to be interested in Nohavica in 1984, because of information from his friend, Josef Streichl, whom they had broken and forced to collaborate under the threat of imprisonment for his own offences against the Communist regime. He supplied the secret police with information about Nohavica’s illegal activities, and after two years of tapping his phone and following his steps, interrogations, limiting his public performances, and finally threats that they would hurt his family, especially his aged mother, in 1986 Nohavica agreed to collaborate. See Jaroslav Spurný, ‘Tajemství Jaromíra Nohavici’, Respekt 22 (2006), taken from www.nohavica.cz/cz/jn/clanky/cl_cz_09.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). 56   The song displays several influences: Viktor Dyk’s Rat-Catcher, Karel Kryl’s ‘Strange Prince’, and Karel Štikanc’s poem, ‘A Prayer to Goddess Memory’, where the title ‘The Wastrel’ comes from. 57   Karel Štikanc, ‘A Prayer to Goddess Memory’, in Czech ‘Modlitba k bohyni paměti’, at www.fi.muni.cz/usr/prokes/folk/folk004.htm (accessed 17 November 2008, p. 3 of 27). 54

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And on a whistle he played a hymn Like a chime in sacred domes And the sorrow lay within That everlasting tone … He was trembling from fear When I walked along by his side And the whistle he held dear Was once Hieronymus Bosch’s pride The moon stood above the night Like silver in the rain Like my conscience holding tight Before it hurls down the drain When I realized, it was my Wastrel I sensed his pain I sensed his pain.58

To catch the Wastrel is to find him dying, and to play ourselves his song. In this way we embody the vagabond /memory, with all its vulnerability: Last night a man was walking He walked from door to door Last night a man was walking Blood was spilt, he walks no more On his whistle I played a hymn Like a chime in sacred domes And the sorrow lay within That everlasting tone When I realized that I was him, You should have known You should have known.59

The everlasting tone of the Wastrel is the only way of going beyond our time that Nohavica is willing to accept in this period. He refuses to lighten the burden of living with the past by belief in eternity to relativize the pain of presence. The difficult aspect of remembering is further developed after the fall of Communism. At that time Nohavica refused to speak about his collaboration with the secret police, for which he was reproached by a number of his admirers and

  The Wastrel was used as a title song for two of Nohavica’s later albums, The Wastrel (Darmoděj, Panton, 1988); and The Wastrel and Others (Darmoděj a další, Monitor, 1995). 59  Nohavica, ‘The Wastrel’. 58

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fellow singers.60 Nohavica’s album from 1990, In That Stupid Year, can be seen as the first reflection of his being caught by the memory of the past even after the fall of the totalitarian regime. In this album, Nohavica struggles with two forms of harmful remembering. One has to do with a desire for ‘justice’ understood as a repayment of the evil done on others. But this allows further victories to evil. The other perceives reality through those events that magnify the share of the guilt in the victim, his or her partaking in the evil. Thus it continues to be harmful for the one who remembers.61 The first disordered form of remembering can be traced in the title song of the album, ‘In That Stupid Year’. It starts with the list of wrongs done by those who did not want to change themselves, and who were seeking for new ways of parasitic existence after 1989. ‘Drunken hirelings’, the main ‘heroes’ of the song, can no longer openly exercise their talents of living from destroying the lives of other people, and so they act in such a way as to be pitied and helped in their uncomfortable circumstances. They have, though, not changed: ‘You, lamb, blood’s dropping from your hand’. Nohavica goes on to suggest that they are ‘cursed forever’. From here the song moves to a vindictive ending. The best these ‘drunken hirelings’ could do would be to kill each other. And if this happened, we should drink to that.62 The last verse summarized the difficulty of finding a lifegiving outcome while the evildoing went on. In the Czechoslovakia of 1990 the ‘drunken hirelings’ evoke secret policemen and other supporters of the Communist regime who managed to change their coats overnight, and continued to exercise power over their past victims through shifting the blame for the corrupted, inhuman regime onto their shoulders. But would the fulfilment of the desire to catch these evildoers in their own nets, however understandable, bring the missing healing? Could evil be killed by violence addressed from one evildoer to another? And could the audience drinking to such a victory remain outside evil? A different song from the same album, ‘We Sail on the Same Boat’, which originally comes from the mid-1980s, proposes another form of disordered remembering, a continuous sailing of the one who remembers towards destruction. Nohavica uses the old theme in a new context when he sings: 60   This included Karel Kryl, for whose return to the new Czechoslovakia Nohavica composed a song, ‘Be Welcome’. Kryl was disappointed when he learned about Nohavica’s incident with the secret police, and commented on it as follows: ‘Nohavica is class, but I mind that he refuses to speak about his past’ (Spurný, ‘Tajemství Jaromíra Nohavici’, 4). This did not stop their cooperation, though. After Kryl’s sudden death in 1994, Nohavica organized concerts of Kryl’s works at Helfštýn Castle and later in Ostrava. 61  Miroslav Volf speaks about ‘remembering sadistically’ and ‘remembering masochistically’, which he contrasts with ‘remembering rightly’, i.e. meaning what is right for the wronged individuals, but also for those who have wronged and for the larger community. See The End of Memory, 11. 62  See Jaromír Nohavica, ‘In That Stupid Year’ (V tom roce pitomém, in the album of the same title, Panton, 1990).

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We sail on the same boat On the same deck And even if not rowing We’re carried by the water To meet the same destruction.63

Here we are confronted with the attitude that even if one did not actively contribute to creating inhuman conditions in society, going along with it took both the active and the passive participant to the same misery. Now, getting drunk or feeling sick does not help. There is no way out in the song: And somewhere beyond reason There is a tow rope For those who still live For those who did not fall out.64

The direction already taken in the past leads only to further violence and further victimization: Pirate’s flag up And knives to the teeth For sharks a bit of nosh Not to go hungry.65

The self-destruction continues, and with it the destruction of one’s surrounding and relationships, including what has remained of the relationship with God: To stab at the blue sky If you were there, God Your shift is up Now we are at the helm.66

Nohavica’s metaphors at this stage, for the missing victory of justice, for the missing healing, reject religious or any other consolation. The burden of memory continues to do harm, and the existentialist themes such as nothingness or nausea seem to be the closest ways of grasping how it is to live with such a burden. Even in Mikymauzoleum, which opened Nohavica’s comeback after treatment for

63

  Jaromír Nohavica, ‘We Sail on the Same Boat’ (Na jedné lodi plujem).  Nohavica, ‘We Sail on the Same Boat’. 65  Nohavica, ‘We Sail on the Same Boat’. 66  Nohavica, ‘We Sail on the Same Boat’. 64

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alcoholism in 1993,67 the second form of harmful remembering continues, the ‘I’ is still a victim of the past in which failures are seen as dominating. In ‘Mikymauz’, the title song of the album, the hopelessness of a dying relationship, in which we can also hear a dying dream about the new Czechoslovakia, is expressed as ‘waking up into nothingness’, ‘cancelling mornings’, ‘cancelling love’.68 Although these emphases on the hopelessness of our situation and futility of our breakthroughs never completely disappear,69 there is a change in the second half of the 1990s. As we shall see in the following section, in The Strange Century (1996) Nohavica’s search for remembering the difficult events of twentiethcentury Europe without causing further harm goes deeper than before. It opens the wounds carried by memory in order to clean them, but does so gently and aware that besides unspeakable suffering, there is a consolation to be found in the life that goes on, in gifts such as beauty, love, friendship and humour. Special attention is given to the question of God, or rather to how remembered historical events influenced the faith and hopes of ordinary people who had to live through them. God, Where Have You Been? Religious themes do not appear in The Strange Century for the first time. They have a prehistory in Nohavica’s earlier work. His demonstrative distance from the God of Christian tradition, from the consolations ascribed to belief in him, and particularly from institutions claiming to mediate such belief, can already be found in the themes he takes over from Vysotsky. While Nohavica admired in Vysotsky how someone who lived in a similarly corrupted setting held on to the impossible dream about human freedom, he did not share his quasi-religious sense for the soul, destiny and the land.70 In ‘The Wastrel’, as well as in ‘In That Stupid Year’, he saw God as a human invention, or as a false consolation leading away from responsibility for our choices and lives.71 Later, while appreciating some of

67  He came back also with a simple statement for the media concerning his past: ‘I was with a whore, but we sat only in a café, I did not go to her room.’ See Spurný, ‘Tajemství Jaromíra Nohavici’, 1. 68   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘Mikymauz’, in Mikymauzoleum, Monitor, 1993; the Czech text can be found at www.nohavica.cz/cz/tvorba/texty/mikymauz.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). 69  See, e.g., Nohavica’s album Babel (2003). 70  In ‘For Little Lenka’ Nohavica sings: ‘My Fairy was blind when she told me, what she did’, Songs for V.V., Panton, 1988, at www.nohavica.cz/cz/tvorba/texty/pro_malou_ lenku.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). 71   See Jaromír Nohavica and Zdeněk Zapletal, Poslední mejdan. Kecy. Rozhovor Zdeňka Zapletala s Jaromírem Nohavicou, KBKP, Kroměříž, 1992, 21–38; M.C. Putna, ‘O jednom současném ateismu (zamyšlení nad texty J. Nohavicy), Souvislosti 1 (1990), at http://www.souvislosti.cz /archiv/putna1-90.htm (accessed 5 May 2009).

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the positive ethical aspects of Christian tradition, he pleaded for the paradox of an ethical humanity, for ‘not believing in God, but behaving as if you believed’.72 Thus, when we approach questions of God in The Strange Century, the development of the theme is not straightforward. Is it a confirmation of his previous positions – or are we entering with Nohavica into a new territory, what Paul Ricoeur would call the death of an idol, so that the symbol of God might speak?73 What would be the place of God in the memory of those who could no longer believe in the same way as their grandparents at the beginning of the century? Would they experience not only loss but also an opening of a new horizon for something else? Or, to return to Ricoeur, is it ‘a type of faith that might be called … a postreligious faith or a faith for a postreligious age ... [that] looks back toward what it denies and forward toward what it makes possible’?74 And if so, would it lift the burdens in memory without betraying what is remembered? In this section I shall concentrate on the composition of stories of ordinary Central Europeans included in The Strange Century. From them I will choose those with direct reference to the memory of God as the chequered world these people used to belong to disintegrates, as their hopes and dreams are swallowed up by larger events such as two world wars, the Holocaust, and the totalitarian ‘liberations’. It is also worth noting that the musical side is given much greater attention in this album than previously. The Slavic, Jewish, German and Balkan influences come through a rich spectrum of musical arrangements. Nohavica entrusted the main arrangement to Vít Sázavský, who helped him to expand the musical side. At times the lyrics seem almost to take a back seat, with the atmosphere created by a jazz trumpet, a swing band, different types of drums, bells and not least by Nohavica’s own 1920s helicon, and even his father’s violin.75 Nohavica’s singing changes more in style, as both the music and the lyrics shift between the internalized historical themes, the love songs, his spiritual searching and questioning of human ideas about God, and his black comedic tones. The introductory song, ‘Wild Horses’, dedicated to Vysotsky, sets the position from which the strange century will be remembered: the man dreaming of freedom, of kicking the horse traders out the door, and like a wild horse ‘running without a bridle, without a saddle’ beyond the horizon, not knowing, and not caring what desire leads that way, whether ‘the world above this world’ or ‘a ticket for eternity’ or some other strong love.76 72   Jaromír Nohavica, Písně Jaromíra Nohavici od A do Ž, ed. Petr Římský, Hitbox, Brno, 1994, 34–59; in Nešpor, Děkuji za bolest, 287. 73  See Paul Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL, 1974, 467. 74  Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, 440. 75   See Jiří Černý, ‘Půl divného století’, Reflex 22 (2003), at http://www.nohavica.cz /cz/jn/clanky/cl_cz_04a.htm (accessed 17 November 2008), 5–6. 76   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘Wild Horses’ (Divocí koně’ in Divné Století [The Strange Century]), Monitor, 1996; this song is from 1980, and Nohavica gives it a new meaning in

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After that we move to ‘The Song of Těšín’, set in Český Těšín, where in 1910 a Jewish man, aged around thirty, spells out his hopes for the continuation of family happiness and the beauty of the simple but miraculously colourful world in which he participates. God belongs to this world in ways that do not need to be explained, like an ‘an ancient melody from Moshe’ that could be heard in the evenings. But there is a bitter irony in this dream of ‘the long beautiful twentieth century’ ahead – ‘It’s just good that you don’t know what lies ahead.’77 Similar indirect references to God being a part of human undertakings and of blessed unknowing are used in the song ‘Sarajevo’. It is a love song. A couple of lovers look over a hill to Sarajevo, where the priest in the church will ‘bind them forever’, and they will live in ‘a house of white stone’ that the bridegroom will build for his bride, so firm that it would ‘stand forever’. But the music, set in minor key, following the rhythm of drums reminding us of enlisting in the army, as well as the rest of the lyrics, reveal, as if from the future, the impossibility of their dream being realized. The assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand remains unexpressed, there is the ‘cruel wind blowing through the planes of Halic’ as an opening metaphor, which betrays the foundations of the hope. There are waters ‘taking away all that we had’, or the blue letters ‘flying through the sky ... as swifts’. All except the love of the two seems to be already breaking, but, ‘the fire is still burning, the wood still crackling ... it is time to go to bed’, Sarajevo is behind the hill, and despite the wrong signals we can still hope for the best.78 After this song we are taken to the side of history where the spectral becomes real. In the following song, ‘A New-Born Babe’, Nohavica employs nativity metaphors, but instead of salvation they mediate destruction. A new-born babe Knows nothing of his name And nothing of the reasons He is simply born And starts his life An endless surprise A naked bundle in bed He does not know of the mark he bears A star or a cross You do not find out that easily Like a kid on hay The new-born babe is sleeping.79

the arrangement of The Strange Century. 77   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘The Song of Těšín’ (Těšínská). 78   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘Sarajevo’. 79   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘A New-Born Babe’ (Novorozeně).

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There is an indirect reference to the mark of belonging to God that spared the houses of the Israelites in Egypt or that was to spare the faithful in the Apocalypse, but here the meaning of the mark runs against its scriptural one. It is not so clear which is the mark of life and which of death. The mark of God could easily be also the mark of the apocalyptic beast.80 Thus Nohavica creates a tension expressive of the disorientation when life itself or destiny leads towards a fatal ending: Then, long queues In front of the gate To the left, to the right Music plays loud Jolly songs And black angels Illuminating our heads Go on, musicians, go on. Play for our dance, So that monstrances may move in the wind. Only those unmarked Will be saved.81

Nohavica asks further where God is now, when the world to which he used to belong is gone. In ‘Danse Macabre’, which completes the picture with further images of harm, of people being watched and abused, alienated even from their own children, Nohavica sings: God got just drunk with a cheap Balkan liqueur, And now sleeps, Otherwise it does not make sense.82

The relaxed atmosphere created by the musical arrangement runs against the cruel scenes present in the lyrics, where human love is the only grace that remains. God’s absence radicalizes demands on people: (i) to be generous to each other; (ii) to live to the full. Six million hearts flew out of the chimney We will forgive each other our little lies We will dance with the farmers On the village square

80

 See Ex 12:13; Rev 7:3; 13:1–18.  See n. 162. 82   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘Danse Macabre’, dedicated to the Canadian folk singer and poet, Leonard Cohen. 81

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We will laugh For the sake of love.83

The darkest song of the album is ‘Litany at the End of the Century’.84 The music includes death bells, like accusing voices from beyond the grave, and sounds like their slow exhausted marching. The prayer increases in its intensity: My Lord in the highest My Lord, don’t you see and hear My Lord, my blind God, … my deaf God, … my dead God.85

To use Chauvet’s terminology, God is here like a presence full of absence,86 or like a reminder of the lost past. But then, what sort of future is open to those who survived the difficult past but have to carry it in their memories – alone, with a dead God? These are the next questions Nohavica engages with. In the last songs of the album, ‘Underground Sources’ and ‘When I Crack’, there is a gentle relief, if not resolution, followed by laughter in the face of death. ‘God, let me be in the same room with Franta ... we could play cards as we did when we fired in the mines ...’87 The words together with the musical arrangement create an atmosphere of getting ready for a party, unlike the one in ‘A New-Born Babe’. When The Strange Century came out, Nohavica commented: ‘I did not want to make a dark album ... I wanted to say it all, but then turn round at the door and smile at people at least a bit.’88 This smile is present in the last two songs. Although different in style, both songs show that it is possible to go on living and hoping at the end of the twentieth century. There is a life-affirming role in the new setting, even if the continuity with the symbolic tradition from which the new shy hope comes might be broken. In the following section I shall look in more detail at ‘Underground Sources’, to open up the discussion concerning redemption and healing present and absent in Nohavica’s work. Glimpses of Redemption Nohavica’s main emphases differ from Vysotsky’s acceptance of self-sufficiency and gratitude. His desire to break from the net of secret-police manipulation or 83

 Nohavica, ‘Danse Macabre’.   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘Litany at the End of the Century’ (Litanie u konce století). 85  Nohavica, ‘Litany at the End of the Century. 86  See L.-M. Chauvet, Symbol and Sacrament: A sacramental reinterpretation of Christian Existence, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1995, 177–178. 87   Nohavica, ‘When I Drop Dead’ (Až to se mnou sekne). 88   Nohavica’s comments in Vladimír Vlasák, ‘Mnoha barvami dýchá Nohavicovo Divné století’, MF DNES 25 November 1996, at www.nohavica.cz/cz/jn/recen_cd/cd_cz_ 01.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). 84

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from alcoholism deepened his awareness that within the continuity of our life, of our attitudes, values and relationships there is also a discontinuity caused by our active or passive betrayal of them. Nohavica is aware that in order to live the continuity we have to break with the discontinuity, and this requires more than one’s own strength. Such awareness is not dogmatically grounded, but gained from experience. It includes the knowledge that, if there are breakthroughs, these are also fragile and reversible. With this as a preface, we can approach Nohavica’s remembering of healing and rebuilding, without reading into it more univocal religious meaning than it includes. First, Nohavica speaks about a feeling of relief. It already comes through his ‘Underground Sources’,89 a song placed towards the end of The Strange Century. As I have quoted the full text at the beginning of this book, let me just say that its music could easily be played as a lullaby, and return to some of its metaphors. The lyrics start very gently: ‘The sun has painted on my face a million dots’,90 evoking a warm restful day, where someone might discover that they can still smile at this gift. There is relief at the painting hand of the sun. The next images, a river flowing among the trees, the underground sources and unknown streams, may somewhere at the back of our memory remind us of the river flowing out of the garden of Eden, giving life to the earth.91 The music creates an atmosphere where we know that life is still given, while the text reminds us that we have forgotten how and why, that we no longer have keys to the worlds of meaning that used to speak about such things. The metaphor of the river flows further, now we are ‘lost like a silent river’, rambling among people, facing the earth as a resting place for the dead, but maybe enlivened by the water of life. And then, the image of ourselves comes back, reflected in the shop window, ‘glassy and dull’,92 ‘both good and bad’, broken, needing to be held by someone’s arms, and is once again related to the underground sources, to the hope despite having lost the structures in which hope used to live and where it died. The second example of redeeming activity is related to the burdensome memories. It is in a song from the next album, My Sad Heart (2000), ‘Each One of Us is Carrying a Burden’, which starts: Each of one of us is carrying a burden Through the summer paths towards winter Each one is carrying what is his As he walks through life  Each one of us dreams of something 89

  The song was written in 1970, and first performed by the Ostrava Radio Orchestra and Girls’ Choir. See Josef Rauvolf, Hledání Jaromíra Nohavici, Daranus, Řitka, 2007, 57. 90   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘Underground Sources’ (Podzemní prameny, in Divné Století). 91  See Gn 2:10. 92  Compare with 1 Cor 13:12.

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Each one is having some troubles And no one knows What tomorrow will reveal.93

This time the new day does not bring another disaster, but there are new, more explicit redeeming images: ‘the watchman opening the gates’, or ‘the wind’ calming wounds after a long night. We are reminded both of the gates of paradise, the gates of the kingdom, and also of a new possibility of approaching the past without desolation. There are perhaps even the gates to the future that one can again look forward to. The usual minor key and a slightly melancholic musical arrangement underline this gentle realization that although we carry burdens from the past, the wounds they caused are being healed. And then, there is a surreal picture of better times, brought by a postman, who had forgotten when he heard it: The evil things will go with the floods And what you dreamt about will come true All that you always wanted.

The approaching morning in the refrain, however, returns us to the good that we cannot predict but to which we can look forward, like children for an approaching comet, as What happens on the earth Was written before the ages In the sky.94

Then, in the song from the same album, ‘As a Deer that Wants to Drink Water’, Nohavica turns to the figure of a redeemer who can heal the past and who can fill the present loneliness. The song is a paraphrase of Psalm 42.95 The music creates a background of a night in the forest, where the loneliness is made loud by sounds like animal noises. The text expresses longing to be with God, a cry in anguish, where the darkness in front of one’s eyes comes from within, when an ‘overreaching pride has built a wall’ and left one’s soul abandoned. The refrain has moved a long way from the accusations in the ‘Litany at the End of the Century’. Here Nohavica sings:

93   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘Each One of Us is Carrying a Burden’ (Každý si nese své břímě’ in Moje smutné srdce [My Sad Heart], BMG, 2000). 94  Nohavica, ‘Each One of Us is Carrying a Burden’. 95   The song is dedicated to Jiří Třanovský, a priest and a teacher, born at the end of the sixteenth century in Český Těšín. His version of the Psalm 42, ‘Jak čerstvých vod jelen žádá’ [A Deer Thirsting for Fresh Waters], inspired Nohavica’s ‘As a Deer that Wants to Drink Water’.

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Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context Help me in my loneliness Help me in my life Help my abandoned soul Every night I call to you Every night I call for help.96

The belief that ‘in spite of everything, … my calling will reach to your ears’ does not give conditions to the other, but to oneself. They are extrapolated again to the realm of the miraculously surreal, as otherwise some things remain impossible: ‘I accept without reserve all that will come, when the leaves of the aspen tree fall down in October.’97 While Nohavica employs religious symbols for seeking and experiencing healing, while he recognizes redemption when he sees it, he goes on refusing an institutional mediation of it via ritual and doctrinal assent.98 Moreover, he stresses the ambivalence of experience. In this respect he keeps the critical line we have seen in songs such as ‘Maybe I am Wrong’, or more recently in ‘Halleluja’, also known as ‘Great Confession’. It starts with a refrain ‘angels in a choir … in white working clothes … playing on trumpets ... that [Mr Nohavica] will not get through the gate to paradise’.99 We learn that these angels are rather suspicious characters who behave in a similar way to the secret police, holding records on people, and that they can use against each one all the information they want. And even heaven is a similarly disturbing place, where St Peter, a type of seemingly just, incorruptible, and undeceivable bureaucrat, leads the personnel department. But again, as part of the heavenly establishment he follows its rules and supports the policy that is basically against people. Then there is the ironic response ‘hallelujah’. In between the refrain we learn more about the ‘heavenly’ practices and about Nohavica’s accusations. These include a list of funny childish crimes, but also the hardships of growing up in the Communist setting, and his problems with alcoholism. After the discovery of his secret-police record, in 2006, Nohavica also decided to speak at length about the reasons why he was included on their list and why he 96   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘As a Deer that Wants to Drink Water’ (Jako jelen, když vodu chce pít). 97  Nohavica, ‘As a Deer that Wants to Drink Water’; a different attitude is expressed in the song ‘God, Blot Out’, from about the same time, which, however, has not appeared on any CD so far. Nohavica sings there: ‘God, blot out my wrongs, Out of a good will I did ill, I accept all your punishments, To your praise till the last of days …’, in Rauvolf, Hledání Jaromíra Nohavici, 305. 98   The critique of church institutions is also seen as an analogy with the Communist Party. See Černý, ‘Půl divného století’, 4. 99  Nohavica, ‘Halleluja’, Česká pálená, Jaromír Nohavica–Internet, 2005. The song ‘Halleluja’, from the mid-1980s, is used in a new context to reflect Nohavica’s own experience with the secret police.

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was unable to comment on these dark memories before. He told of the threats of persecuting his family and interrogating even his ill mother, and about his early conviction that if he was cautious enough, it was possible to stand apart from the network of abuse and to remain unharmed. The response of his large audience was supportive, confirming, and Nohavica’s recent works, like the concert album At Home (2006) and the subsequent debate, suggest that he broke the net of memories that held him captive. Yet two years later, in his album Ikarus (2008), the themes of haunting memories and judgements return. Hope appears here as a non-commodity, as something we do not have. We struggle for it in love and friendships, where we are confronted with our disabilities, failures, wounds and fears. And only in that confrontation can we occasionally glimpse that we have been guarded by angels.100 In Ikarus (2008) Nohavica plays with the Orwellian image of Big Brother,101 which evokes both the Communist secret police, the moral hunters for those who were on the list of the collaborators after 1989, and the ultimate observer and repairer of human affairs, ‘sitting in an easy chair in the very top floor’, thinking that ‘every hole in the roof can be coated with white paint’.102 The album deals once again with hard memories of the past that return when human life is exploited by new ideological forces and by the media, but also with the new stages of one’s interior journey. There is a sharp musical and textual beginning. In the first song we hear: ‘Some wall-shitters moving to my own bedroom claim, the curious farts, that it is for my own good; that they are proud of their honourable job,’103 and in the refrain sung as in a feverish nightmare It was here before With you and without you Don’t I know The shitty secret police I remember that I remember the horror I remember the nights I remember the mornings I remember the prohibitions I remember the lists I remember the people I remember myself   The whole album Ikarus (Jaromír Nohavica, 2008) can be found at www.nohavica. cz/cz/diskografie/alba/disk_ikarus.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). 101  See George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Penguin–Secker & Warburg, Harmondsworth, 1979. 102   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘I Remember That’ (Já si to pamatuju, in Ikarus); see www. nohavica.cz/cz/diskografie/alba/disk_ikarus.htm (accessed 17 November 2008). 103  Nohavica, ‘I Remember That’. 100

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I remember the cowards I remember the heroes I remember the silent I remember you, my love My love, I remember.104

Redemption of the past does not happen for Nohavica here. We are rather caught in the repetition of the same. The song refers to the previous year’s renewed interest from the media in Nohavica’s collaboration with the secret police,105 a campaign in which Nohavica refused to participate by giving an interview. His despair over the tabloid mentality re-dressed as seeking truth and justice is accompanied by a sense of being lost. In ‘I Have Passed through a Deep Forest’ Nohavica sings: ‘Having passed through a deep forest, I’ve got out, but no idea where.’106 The lyrics first seem not to correspond to the gently ringing melody, but towards the end, there is the – for Nohavica – typical ambivalent hope: ‘In a notebook on my chest; I carry the only address I know; written in capitals’,107 and even if it does not change his life here and now, it is there. The last song of the album relates redemption to the struggle for one’s integrity – not with the media, but with the ultimate judge: As I see it, I will pass with difficulty through the eye of the needle108 Running through the forest, not to be caught by wolves, And if some of you ask an angel about me I have a scar on my lip since he has stood beside me.109

Nohavica’s self-sarcasm goes in a different direction than that of the media: he is aware of being a rich man. It is interesting that the religious symbolism he employs here has a solely positive role, even where it challenges us. Despite the growing positive role of Christian symbolism, Nohavica keeps a critical distance from the religion of doctrines and institutions. In the next chapter I shall examine two problems that in my view are associated with such a position, the first of which is the supposed gulf between experience and doctrine. I shall argue that doctrine as an articulation of our experience is always already a part of our understanding. We can see that Nohavica borrowed concepts from what was 104

 Nohavica, ‘I Remember That’.   The media interest was this time provoked by the song of Jaroslav Hutka, ‘The Informer from Těšín’, which was musically and textually poor, morally doubtful, probably motivated by envy of Nohavica’s success. 106   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘I Have Passed through a Deep Forest’ (Prošel jsem hlubokým lesem, in Ikarus). 107  Nohavica, ‘I Have Passed through a Deep Forest’.. 108  See Mt 19:24. 109   Jaromír Nohavica, ‘I Have a Scar on My Lip’ (Mám jizvu na rtu, in Ikarus). Compare with Jacob’s mark of the struggle in Gn 32:24–32. 105

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articulated before him, even while interpreting his experience with an emphasis on values he saw suppressed or twisted in the contexts from which the concepts came. Yet, while we can appreciate when he expanded their symbolic meaning, did he not at times also reduce it? Were there not some experiences that were censored, because they did not fit his canon of acceptable meaning? This takes me to the second point. We can ask whether in refusing one type of what he saw as reductionist doctrine he did not embrace another one, namely that of antiinstitutional and anti-dogmatic provenance, according to which redemption could be encountered anywhere but in the Church. While recognizing that there are problems, however, we should not dismiss Nohavica’s criticisms too quickly. He spelled out the experience of a number of people, namely that the churches, while preaching redemption, practised enslavement. We shall come back to this in the next chapter, where with regard to redemption I shall also re-examine conditions of fruitful mediation. Concluding Remarks Memories of the past in Vysotsky and Nohavica offered a much less organic notion of history. Conflicts were not harmonized, and arriving at any guiding meaning was, if not impossible, then at least incredibly difficult. Perhaps, as in Čapek’s trilogy, we are confronted here with a challenge of how to move from chaos to polyphony and from polyphony to a symphony, when different people with their voices are allowed to enter into a conversation. In Vysotsky there remains a stronger sense of the tragic that is not redeemed, but embraced. He did not voice a need for conversion, except towards the embrace of what there has been in our life with gratitude for all good gifts.110 This is different in Nohavica, where, occasionally, a memory of a messianic interruption of the tragic breaks through. Both Vysotsky’s and Nohavica’s memories of the missing victory of justice presented a challenge, which brought once again to the fore the question of the memory of God. While for Vysotsky this is accessible only indirectly through the symbolism of the land, the soul and destiny, Nohavica becomes more aware that this memory, to which we have lost keys for understanding, gives to people and their cultures continuity in time. He shows that remembering God and being remembered by God has a different place in human life and culture during the different historical stages. In pre-war Central Europe, the Christian as well as the Jewish God belonged to the culture so organically that often, without being named, God was remembered, in rituals like weddings or simply in the ‘ancient melody of Moshe’.111 This was lost with the wars. Belief that God remembers us 110

 See Vysotsky, ‘The Prayer of a Sinner’.   Nohavica, ‘The Song of Těšín’.

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was challenged and often lost by the catastrophes people experienced. Their God must have been ‘drunk with a cheap Balkan liqueur’,112 blind, deaf or dead. The asymmetry between remembering a God who does not remember in return led to the twisted meaning of Christian symbols of God. They turned bitter, accompanied destruction instead of salvation. Yet memory of God in the end was not only a memory of a lost past. For Nohavica it radicalized demands on people to be generous to each other and to live to the full. It also indicated that it was not certain who or what had died with the break of the traditions about God. Was it their idols of God, whose death would give space to the suppressed symbolic richness of God-discourse? Was it the possibility of communication with God as the transcendent Other? Or was it some hope for redeeming intervention? Unlike Vysotsky, Nohavica also worked with memories of healing and rebuilding. His accounts of what might be termed incidents of redemption kept together the priority of experience over doctrine, as well as the ambiguity of experience, so dear to him. The choice of his metaphors always stressed that we did not enter just a different, maybe broader, causal system, where God was now at work again, but rather that there existed an unexpected gift that was there even if we did not know where it came from. There were exceptions to this wide openness, however. It was made clear that it did not come out of bargaining with God, and definitely not through a church mediation. In the end I raised two questions about Nohavica’s keeping the experience apart from doctrine: first, whether it did not ignore the fact that previous articulations of experience created a symbolic background, against which we interpret our own experiences; and second, whether his strong anti-institutional emphasis was not itself more dogmatic than experiential. These questions will be taken further in the next chapter, as well as Nohavica’s criticism that institutions that practise enslavement can hardly credibly mediate redemption.

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 Nohavica, ‘Danse Macabre’.

Chapter 4

Redemptive Memory in Theology

God is the agency that gives us back our memories, because God is the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present.

Human culture can never grasp the whole of reality whether past or present (the future has not happened yet – and in this sense is not yet real). The space that culture gives to memory is thus inevitably limited. Even if we live in several cultures and subcultures simultaneously, and participate in a number of mediations of the past, at the same time, their cumulative memory is always incomplete, always endangered by natural and purposeful forgetting. Theology reminds us that the memory of God is different. But it is hard to grasp how different. We do not see reality through God’s eyes. This ultimate perspective belongs only to God. Yet in our remembering God we include the memory that God remembers. We include the ultimate perspective, even if the content of it remains mysterious to us, and at times even frightening. Yet when Rowan Williams, in the quotation above, speaks about God giving us back the memories of the past, he emphasizes that they are given back not in order to go on wounding us or judging us, but so that we can overcome the deprivations they refer to and live a new liberated and responsible life. To use the Irenaean image, we are given the memories back so as to grow in the freedom of Spirit. In this chapter I shall first explore reasons behind the negative response to the healing of memories, looking at cases where holding on to the deprivation, whether real or imagined, creates victimhood as a kind of a positive identity. My questions will be how such a state and the subculture it creates can be subverted. Referring to the previous chapter, I shall turn to the alternative cultures, and consider which of their dealings with the memories of totalitarianism were more successful, and thus could serve as an inspiration. At the same time I shall question whether our remembering God as the one who remembers, isolated, in Vysotsky’s and Nohavica’s interpretation, from the religion of doctrines and of institutions, can alone cultivate human experience. This will take me to the main theme of the chapter: redemption. I shall concentrate on theological debates concerning Christ’s remembering the Father faithfully unto death, the type of cure such a remembering brings to humankind, and the type of remembering it inspires. Against this background the following questions from the  Rowan Williams, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel, DLT, London, 2003,



23.



 See Chapter 2, under ‘The Fall and Renewal’, 57–61.

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previous chapter will be further explored: Is remembering the past with gratitude already redemptive? Or are regrets and conversion as a discontinuity with the problematic aspects of life required? If we make use of inherited experiences, to what degree can we reasonably abstract them from their spiritual, ritual, doctrinal and institutional roots? Victimhood as a Positive Identity Jaromír Nohavica’s song about the ‘drunken hirelings’ incapable of giving up their parasitic lives already uncovered the abuse of the victim identity. In this case, the former perpetrators of violence acted as victims themselves in order to be pitied and helped to a position where they could once again live at the expense of others. There were no regrets about the past, except that it had ended. There was no change of mind, only of rhetoric. Such attitudes, common in the postCommunist societies, provoked Nohavica’s anger. They should be caught by the evil they perpetuated, and fall victims of their victimizing practices, he sang. This example of vindictive remembering, rare in Nohavica’s work, shows the absence of redemption on both sides. No one yet knows how to remember well, and both sides take refuge in the position of a victim. The memory of the perpetrator is neutralized, or simply ignored. It does not belong to anyone. As we can see in Nohavica’s further musical as well as personal development, transformation is possible only through accepting this unwanted aspect of memory. The images, narratives and rituals that organized experiences of the inability to deal with the past in the post-Communist cultures often abused or at least overemphasized the position of the victim. ‘Victim’ became something like a positive identity, a ticket to priority treatment in the new status quo. While, in some sense, the totalitarian society harmed all its members, including those who actively kept its structures in power and profited from them, it has to be added that their role was never only passive. Being only victims created cultural climates where responsibility for the past was in danger of being erased. Finding a refuge from responsibility towards others in concerns for one’s own wounds and needs and rights often blocked out the transforming hope of redemption. If we exclude the fact that we remember also as victimizers, we lose an important part of the healing process, a transformation of the relationships to our victims, be they other people, ourselves or even God. As Williams stresses, ‘There is no healing of memory until the memory itself is exposed as a wound, a loss.’ This exposure must not be a threat or an acceptance of one’s own condemnation, which both Vysotsky and Nohavica 

 See Nohavica, ‘In That Stupid Year’; discussed in Chapter 3, under ‘Memory as a Burden’, 97.    Williams writes that ‘salvation does not bypass the history and memory of guilt, but rather builds upon and from it’. Resurrection, 6.    Williams, Resurrection, 15.

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rightly detected as crippling. The extreme honesty with which they owned their own actions did not keep them in the prison of victimhood that dominated their surrounding cultures, in which words about acceptance and gratitude were as little at home as forgiveness. In what follows, I shall sketch three forms of refusal to receive back all of our memories that occurred in the post-Communist cultures. I shall also look at one example of living parasitically on the victim identity and one example of forcing the identity of a perpetrator on a victim. Some years ago I visited the Museum of Communism in Prague together with a friend. There were only a few people, and so we watched all the documentaries about the Communist Party meetings and about people involved in the dissent. There was a man sitting in the front row behaving rather oddly. When the films showed everyone putting their hands up to vote at the Party meetings, he was saying, clearly enough to be heard, ‘I was the only one against.’ When I caught sight of his face I felt sure I knew this man. He looked like an officer in the Secret Police who had interrogated my friends. As I doubted that it could really be him, I finally decided to look straight into his eyes. At that, he ran from the building. It seemed as if he was trying to learn there about a past that had never happened, a new role in which he would be a victim. The new fabricated identity could have been used as a proof for the court to rule that he was on the list of secret policemen by mistake or for a job he applied for that required ‘a clean past’. Or maybe he was fulfilling his first task in the new secret services that took him over. In any case, there was a paradoxical situation. The mechanism, where all else, including real memories, had to serve in support of this false identity, made its perpetrator really a victim, but of the net of lies that continued to keep hold of his life. The second form of positive victimhood is less extreme, but more widespread. It involves a selective work with the memories of what really happened, mental work with blind spots and a magnifying glass. But unlike in the previous case, there will be some injustice, some harm suffered, for which people want compensation from a ‘guilty party’ whom they need to find or create. Being victims legitimates their 

 See Vysotsky, ‘A Prayer of a Sinner’ or Nohavica’s ‘Halleluja’.  I have analyzed these examples in more detail in an article, ‘Memory and Remembering in the Post-Communist Context’, Political Theology 4 (2008), 455–475. For an interesting analysis of how Marxism continues to be claimed as a threat in postCommunist Europe, see Tim Noble, ‘In Search of the Bogeyman: A Response to Pavel Hanes’, Journal of European Baptist Studies 8:3 (2008), 35–39.   After 1989 several versions of the lists of collaborators and employees of the Czechoslovak Communist Secret Police were published, and those in higher positions in all state organizations were required to have a certificate to prove that they had no connection to Secret Police. This was not a straightforward task for several reasons: the Secret Police managed to destroy large parts of their archives, so that usually those who were high up in the service were more likely to be missing from them. Another missing category was double agents. Then there were some falsified documents, of people who collaborated under someone else’s name. In case of uncertainty, courts were to decide. But the legal system was filled with former loyal Communist servants, and could be bribed. 

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doing so, and it is also a way of avoiding questions concerning their contribution to making victims of others. The second example takes me back to the 1980s, when I was a seminarian in Prague, and most of the professors who were allowed to teach theology were secretpolice informers. This could mean different things. Some approached the situation as if it were gambling: they would pretend loyalty while sheltering dissidents by employing them as librarians or language teachers. Others occasionally passed on what they saw as useless information. They would not do much for – though definitely nothing against – the regime. Still others followed us to the antiCommunist demonstrations to denounce us. After 1989 one professor from the second group started to claim that he was himself ‘a secret dissident’, a victim of circumstance, who could not say what he really thought and felt, and started to build his new career on this claim. There was no doubt that if he had said in public what he thought and felt about the Communist oppression, about the secret policeman who came to collect information, he could not have held a job as a theology professor, and he would have experienced open persecution. Yet in his choice to be loyal, even if it was not a completely free choice, he also sided with those who kept Communism in power, who created victims. Situations that would call him to take responsibility for this aspect of the past were erased from his memory, or kept there as forbidden zones. In cases like this, victimhood is still embraced for profit, and it is consciously based on at least a partial lie. As in the previous case, it prevents healing, because the person does not want to be healed, does not want to cease to be a victim. Other members of this category, less successful in their new career than the theology professor, have used the identity mark of a victim as a way of justifying their anger and mistrust, often directed at society in general, seen as the guilty party. They view society as an abstract body that excludes ‘us’, the victims, and therefore can be ignored, rejected or abused. This attitude ranges from not feeling responsible for anyone apart from one’s family or friends to an unwillingness to take part in public life, to seeking priority treatment by means of bribes, falsifying documents, not paying taxes or other forms of breaking the law. Thus again the ghosts of the past seem to gain a new foothold. The third example does not use the cover of a victim; neither does it deny or falsify memories of the past. Rather, it plays down both. This can be done by comparing ourselves with other parts of the world in order to affirm that in our still civilized part of the world things really were not so bad. Slavoj Žižek, a contemporary Slovenian thinker, addresses this issue in his essay ‘Where do the Balkans begin?’ For us Czechs, for example, who peacefully said ‘Goodbye’ to Slovakia, who worked hard at rebuilding our economy, proudly entered NATO and the EU, this was a symbol of where the ‘real problems’ started, because there people really had their past unresolved. In his sardonic way, Žižek shows how it is always ‘a little bit more towards the southeast’: for Serbs it is in Kosovo or in Islamic Bosnia, for Croats in backward Orthodox Serbia, for Slovenians in Croatia, for many Italians and Germans among the Slavs in Slovenia, and, we

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could go on, for conservative anti-European Britons, it is the whole of continental Europe. This projection of the real problems elsewhere enables us to assume a false identity, to claim superiority, and to ignore the extent to which reconciliation and healing are needed in our own situations. Paradoxically, playing down the violence present in memories of one’s own personal, cultural, national or even ecclesial setting is also an expression of the fact that the person or the group in question continues to refuse responsibility, and in those acts of refusal continues to exploit the notion of victimhood, as if it were something from which a positive identity superior to other identities could flow. All these three forms of exploiting victimhood as a positive identity had in common not only the refusal to recognize their share in responsibility for the violence perpetuated, but also the fact that what was not assumed could not be saved.10 The cultures of retired victims operated on blame shifted to someone or somewhere else. And in this way they acted out their own judgement, their own condemnation. Reopening questions about who it was who participated in condemned acts remained a forbidden area. Meanwhile, sources of life and renewal were nowhere but there. Nohavica became aware of that, and at the end of The Strange Century he showed that not only the recollection of the faces and the stories of the victims, but also our own faces, scarred and ruined by what we have done or did not manage to do, led to a rediscovery of the non-violent and non-oppressive selves under the layers of guilt.11 The last example of avoiding responsibility I want to mention is the hardest. It does not end up in pretended innocence, but in multiplying the destruction inflicted on the victims by stripping them of their identity and forcing them into the identity of perpetrators. I came across this example during a visit to Romania, where I talked to people whose families experienced perhaps the worst brutality of Communist oppression, the so-called re-education camps.12 Prisoners there were tortured and forced to torture other prisoners, and thus became co-responsible for the violence.    The ‘advantage’ of the Balkans in this case is that their inhabitants are white Europeans, so one can be ‘superior’ without being accused of racism or political incorrectness. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Giving Up the Balkan Ghost’, in The Fragile Absolute, 3–5. 10  See a reinterpretation of the patristic dictum in Jean-Pierre Jossua, The Condition of the Witness, SCM, London, 1985, 33. 11  See Nohavica, ‘Underground Sources’. 12  Re-education, the euphemism for stripping people of their identity, including that of victim, was first practised in 1941 in Siberia, where Stalin deported thousands of Romanian soldiers and officers, who at the beginning of the war had found themselves on the German side. The notion of re-education comes from a Soviet educationalist Anton Makarenko (1888–1939), who in the 1920s devised a method for ‘re-education’ for criminals and thieves (not yet political prisoners). His ‘re-education’ is also better termed a ‘sadistic experiment’, as it involved not only torturing but also creating groups of prisoners who would be authorized to use violence on others and thus create an atmosphere of terror. See Alexandru Popescu, Petre Ţuţea: Between Sacrifice and Suicide, Ashgate, Aldershot, 2004, 68.

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They saw the faces of other victims from the position of perpetrators, and also their own faces as those that bring distortion and pain. These memories were brought as taboos back to Romania after the repatriation of prisoners. Nobody spoke or wrote about them publicly and even in the family circles very little was said. Yet it was known even by the western powers, who, however, failed to address it. This horror was left unattended, unexpressed, unhealed, and so it opened up like a poisoned wound, and the ‘re-education’ practices provided an inspiration for the Communist persecution. There were two waves of the so-called ‘re-education experiment’ in Romania, one in 1949–1952, the other in 1960–1964. During that time hundreds of thousands of people were tortured both physically and mentally, with a similar aim as in the Soviet Gulag, ‘to destroy [human identity – the image and likeness in which God made us] and replace it with a subhuman product: “the new man”, an automaton that would function in a world from which moral values had been eliminated’.13 This sad repetition included also the taboo that forbade talking about ‘re-education’ when the prisoners that survived returned home.14 The very few people from that ageing generation who, in the last decade, have felt the need to bear testimony to these events pointed out the paradox that amidst these inhuman conditions, in the threatening darkness, ‘human dignity and even human holiness were revealed ... in all their transfiguring power’.15 The recovery of the past thus involved a testimony that the violence experienced was not final and irredeemable.16 But how is redemption possible for those who orchestrated such scenarios? What faces and stories have to be returned to them in order for them to be healed? These questions will also come up in the main part of this chapter, where I investigate theological approaches to both the remembering of God and God’s gift of memory. Remembering God Vysotsky as well as Nohavica reminded us that the cultures in which they composed and sung have moved beyond secularization. The authors shared with their audience an implicit religiosity, in which the figure of God was not   R. Mǎrculescu, Pǎtimiri şi Iluminǎri din Captivatea Sovieticǎ, Albatros, Bucharest, 2000, in Popescu, Petre Ţuţea, 63. 14   There are generally very few and often very general accounts of such hard memories. Apart from the works noted above, see also Arthur London, The Confessions, William Morrow and Co., New York, 1970; Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, Arkhipelag Gulag 1918–1956, YMCA, Paris, 1973; or a later work, Elena Constante, The Silent Escape: Three Thousand Days in Romanian Prisons, University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1995. 15   Mǎrculescu, Pǎtimiri şi Iluminǎri din Captivatea Sovieticǎ, in Popescu, Petre Ţuţea, 63. 16  See Williams, Resurrection, 17. 13

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forgotten, but had an existential content rather than a dogmatic one. The intended separation of the two, however, created problems. There were allusions to God as some form of ultimate power which, however, did not fulfil the expectations projected on to it by humans.17 The error of the initial assumption could not be corrected by reference to the far deeper and richer meaning of the doctrine of God, as doctrine was rejected a priori. Moreover, the fragments of the doctrine that remained in the cultural mediation were not the best parts of it, and often these second-class ideas remained in use as interpretative tools of experience. Thus God was seen as a judge, too intolerant and too disengaged, whose judgement we would have to fight against for such values as human integrity, compassion, generosity18 that in fact symbolic traditions about God guard as holy. Finally, God appears as a kind of transcendent conversation partner, someone who could break through our loneliness, to whom we should be grateful for what we have,19 but despite the admirable honesty that comes across, a dialogue is lacking, for only one voice is heard. In this section I attempt to complement the missing doctrinal discussion, and I hope, to correct some prejudices that lie behind the loss or the rejection of God’s self-revelation captured in the Scriptures, interpreted by the tradition. And as we are tracing the redemptive power of memory, the figure of Christ will be at the centre of this search. Christ as the One Who Remembers Nohavica’s songs from the earlier period raise an important question, namely, whether a belief in a redeeming God does not establish a false consolation that takes away the importance of our life-choices and responsibility for them. While we can recollect instances where his suspicion has been fulfilled, it also has to be said that the mission of Jesus Christ as depicted in the Gospels and in large parts of Christian tradition runs counter to such a possibility. In them the figure of the Redeemer would be, perhaps, closer to Nohavica’s Wastrel, the vagabond/memory wandering from house to house, playing a hymn on a whistle, being killed by people for the truth present in the song, only to discover that now they have to play that everlasting tune. Or even more closely it resembles Štikanc’s poem on which Nohavica’s song is based, where the vagabond memory, ‘being nothing, being no one’, is always someone’s memory, wanting to be received, ‘Being my grace! My cross! My shadow!’20

17

 See, e.g., Vysotsky, ‘Bath-hut’; Nohavica, ‘Litany at the End of the Century’.  See Vysotsky, ‘It’s My Fate to Fight Till the End, to the Cross’; Nohavica, ‘Halleluja’. 19  See Vysotsky, ‘In My Soul’; ‘Prayer of a Sinner’ or ‘I Freeze Between’; Nohavica, ‘As a Deer that Wants to Drink Water’. 20   Štikanc, ‘A Prayer to Goddess Memory’. 18

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When John’s Prologue announces Christ’s arrival, it chooses several images that are relevant for an understanding of the Son’s redeeming memory of the Father, and of all that the Father has done. First, Christ is the Logos, the Word that was from the beginning with God, and was God, through whom all things came into being, and without whom nothing at all comes into being. This opening image played an important role for formulating Trinitarian and Christological dogmas, but is not the only one. According to the second image, Christ is life. In Christ life came into being. Third, Christ is the light that shines even in darkness, and darkness has not overcome it.21 And the Prologue repeats: ‘The true light, which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world’ (J 1:9). While during the Arian controversy the image of light found its way into the Creed, and implicitly also the image of Logos, through whom all things came into being, the image of life did not. The first part of the Christological article of the Nicene–Constantinopolitan Creed that sums up and develops the Johannine theme of pre-existence says: We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, The only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, True God from true God, begotten, not made, of one being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

Christ as life, however, and more to the point, as a particular life,22 is vitally important for understanding memory. When the Logos became flesh, there was life and light in the flesh, and they became the visible glory of God.23 John’s Gospel goes on depicting Jesus’ redeeming life as proclaiming and being the remembrance of the Father that, when accepted, takes humanity back to its roots, and enables it to grow and bear good fruits.24 The early Church Fathers spoke about the descent – katabasis – of God in Christ to the ultimate limit of human condition, even unto death, so that a path of ascent – anabasis – to the union of created beings with the Divinity would be possible in the Holy Spirit.25 Redemption was a necessary alteration of the situation in which the whole of creation found itself after the fall, and which prevented it from being fully alive, including taking responsibility for its choices and lives. Redemption 21

 Compare with J 1:1–4.  Raimon Panikkar stresses: ‘Note that I am not saying that Christ is the fullness of life, but that this fullness, effective since the beginning, is the one that the Christian tradition calls Jesus the Christ.’ Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2004, xx. 23  See J 1:14. 24  See the parable about the vine and the vine branches in J 15:1–10. 25  Vladimir Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, Crestwood, NY, 2001, 97. 22

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renewed and improved reciprocity between the world and God, of which human beings were to be mediators. Irenaeus first stated that ‘God made Himself man, so that man might become God.’26 The statement is found again in Athanasius,27 St Gregory of Nazianzus,28 or St Gregory of Nyssa.29 The repeated emphasis that ‘the redemptive kenōsis of the Son of God should take place, so that fallen men might accomplish their vocation of theōsis, the deification of created beings by uncreated grace’30 is found throughout Greek patristic theology. Furthermore, redemption is not an escape from history. Rather, in redemption we are given back all memories of the past, we are enabled to take them along with us, and mature with them. Christ, who in all things remembered the Father, but also what the Father created the world for, could gives us back our memories, because in him both the memory of God and the memory of the world were alive. A careful reading of the Gospels shows that the new beginning in Christ announced there is not a starting out from scratch, but a renewed continuity of the iconic life that mirrors the glory of God, for which we were created. This renewed continuity is not described in the moralistic terms that so strongly provoked the folk singers. It was not a message to avoid alcohol, sex, rude words, and to come to church on Sundays. Instead, as Jean-Pierre Jossua beautifully put it: Brotherhood, gentleness, service, forgiveness, contagious peace, the purity of a tranquil heart, a concern for human dignity and justice, seem to me to represent the better things of this earth – provided that they are not based on the fear of pleasure and the rechanneling of aggression.31

And in Christ the Redeemer our memory of such things became more vivid. We have seen what it meant to be full of the Spirit, fully alive, to live an adult authentic and responsible human life: acceptance of the other as he or she is, no matter what. Here we find pity – an admirable word, degraded by condescension, rejected by wounded pride; but it is the word which expresses total understanding, total solidarity with the suffering of our kin.32

Christ’s remembering of humanity in relationship with each other, with the world and with God cost him his life, because the de-humanized world around him had forgotten what God’s glory looked like. Thus Christ, God and man, was nailed  Irenaeus, Adversus haereses V, preface.  Athanasius, De incarnatione verbi 54. 28  Gregory of Nazianzus, Poema dogmatica 10, 5–9. 29  Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica magna 25. 30  Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 98. 31   Jossua, The Condition of the Witness, 33. 32   Jossua, The Condition of the Wittness, 34. 26 27

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on the cross as an offender against God. As John says, ‘He came to what was his own, and his own people did not accept him’ (1:11). But Paul expresses it even more puzzlingly, identifying Christ’s crucifixion as a substitution sacrifice: ‘For our sake he [God] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God’ (2 Cor 5:21). This interpretation gave rise to the Christian doctrine of atonement, which represents, perhaps, the least understood aspect of theology in present post-secular cultures. Redemptive Re-Membering In ‘The Prayer of a Sinner’ Vysotsky addressed the question of atonement, mediated to him through what was left of it in the culture infiltrated by Stalinist anti-religious propaganda. In Christian theology the doctrine of atonement – ‘atone-ment’ as Brian Davies reminds us – is concerned with the reconciliation of humankind and God despite the presence of sin.33 God’s judgement and mercy are only one part of it. The doctrine looks at how reconciliation is achievable between the two or more parties involved. That is to say, it includes also human judgement of God that needs to be reconciled where the communication has broken down. It also includes reconciliation of the non-human creation, i.e. the spiritual world and cosmic nature that partake in the relationship. Having stated that, I shall now concentrate on the human–divine exchange, as it is the main stumbling block. Vysotsky’s and Nohavica’s reproaches to God for not hearing the brokenhearted, for being blind to evil, even when it was done in his name,34 are a part of the relational understanding of atonement, and so is their preferential option for losers in the violent and twisted world, to whom they gave their voices, and whose cases they allowed to be heard and remembered. Both of these attitudes complement too one-sided a notion of atonement, isolating one insight – that Christ’s cross altered our human condition by taking our sins on himself – from the rest of Christian teaching.35 As we recalled in the previous section, the Gospels depict Jesus as someone standing for others, without violating their choices and reducing their responsibility. This became radicalized in the passion narratives. The event of the cross, in fact, showed that the individual people gathered against Jesus, involved in his rejection and abandonment and in the violence committed against him, were hardly capable of being responsible agents who make their own choices. Luke and Acts spell it out, first while remembering Jesus’ prayer: ‘Father, forgive them, for they do not 33  See David Brown, ‘Anselm on Atonement’, in The Cambridge Companion to Anselm, eds Brian Davies and Brian Leftow, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2004, 279. 34  See Vysotsky, ‘Bath-hut’; Nohavica, ‘Litany at the End of the Century’. 35  See Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 98–99; Raymund Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation: Toward a Biblical Doctrine of Redemption, Herder & Herder, New York, 1999, 191.

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know what they are doing’ (L 23:34). Later, in Peter’s address to the Israelites in the temple, this theme is developed into an explanation that, despite our ignorant participation in evil, God still has the power to overturn the result: I know you acted in ignorance, as did also your rulers. In this way God fulfilled what he had foretold through all the prophets, that his Messiah would suffer. Repent therefore, and turn to God so that your sins may be wiped out. (Acts 3:17–19)

We can just imagine Vysotsky saying: No, thank you, to this invitation. But the reconciliation discourse does not end there. The images of atonement that are used in Paul’s description of Christ as a source of reconciliation perhaps come closer to Vysotsky’s own experience of the brutality of evil, that cannot just be waved away, that we carry along with us, and have to work with and through. The Pauline claim that he ‘was made to be sin for our sake’ (2 Cor 5:21) or ‘he became a curse for us’ (Gal 3:13) rests, however, on the substitution ‘in our place’, ‘for us’ or ‘for our sake’.36 And while Vysotsky and Nohavica express their admiration for Christ’s bravery and personal integrity, any notion of substitution sacrifice is strange to them and runs against their convictions concerning human autonomy and accountability.37 There is a conflict of interests. Nevertheless, Vysotsky moves from accusing God to gratitude, and Nohavica to renewed communication with God, in which memory of the past becomes bearable.38 Lossky pointed out that Paul’s juridical image of redemption has two Old Testament strands. It develops the memory of deliverance,39 and emerges out of the memory of paid ransom.40 Only when we isolate the second strand does substitution sacrifice emerge in isolation from the rest of the symbolic tradition about reconciliation.41 Furthermore, although this Pauline juridical image dominated how the memory of redemption was passed on, it was never the only image of it. Lossky points out that in the Scriptures and in the Church Fathers we find the ‘bucolic’ image of a good shepherd;42 the military image of a strong man being overcome by even a stronger one;43 the biological image of triumph in

 See Raymund Schwager, Must there be Scapegoats? Violence and Redemption in the Bible, Harper & Row, San Francisco, CA, 1987, 204. 37  See Vysotsky, ‘Prayer of a Sinner’; Nohavica, ‘Halleluja’. 38  See Vysotsky’s last poem, ‘I Freeze Between’; Nohavica, ‘Each One is Carrying a Burden’. 39  See Rom 3:24; 8:23; 1 Cor 1:30; Eph 1:7; 14:30; Col 1:14; Hebr 9:15; 11:35. 40  See 1 Tim 2:6; 1 Cor 6:20; 7:22; Gal 3:13. 41  See Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 100. 42  See Mt 18:12–14; L 15:4–7; J 10:1–16. 43  See Mt 12:29; Mk 3:27; L 11:21–22. 36

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nature corrupted by sin;44 the victory over hell,45 a diplomatic image, where divine wisdom deceives cunning evil;46 a medical image, where sickly nature is given salvation as an antidote to poison.47 These images co-exist. Each of them interprets a partial experience and offers a partial vision of renewed relationships with God and with the rest of creation. But none of them is an exhaustive explanation of its mysterious nature. Anselm of Canterbury, in his articulation of ‘how atonement is achievable only through the work of Christ’,48 reduced the number of previous images into a single dominant one. In Anselm’s Cur Deus Homo, says Lossky, ‘Christian horizons are limited by the drama played between God, who is infinitely offended by sin, and man, who is unable to satisfy the impossible demands of vindictive justice.’49 Anselm noted: Something which people are surprised at is that we call this liberation a ‘ransoming’. They say to us, ‘Now, in what captivity, or in what prison or in whose power were you held, from which God could not set you free without ransoming you by so many exertions and, in the end, by his own blood?’50

The ransom is needed, according to him, for delivery from our sin, from God’s own anger, from hell, from the power of devil. God, in order to be just to the devil – and to set humankind free – sacrifices his own Son. Christ pays the debt to divine justice. Only a pure life voluntarily surrendered to death can satisfy. And furthermore the satisfaction is made of infinite worth by the fact that the human being, whose life is taken, is at the same time God. We human beings are, according to Anselm, recipients of the benefit. To receive it, to let it become activated in our lives, we need to make Christ’s story our own cause, to absorb it by ‘chewing’.51  See Athanasius, De incarnatione verbi, 20.  See Athanasius, De incarnatione verbi, 30. 46  See Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio catechetica magna, 22–24. 47   This grew out of the parable of the Good Samaritan, and the image of Christ as the physician of human nature was in this way first interpreted by Origen and further developed by St John of Damascus. See Origen, Homily 34 on St. Luke; Commentary on St. John, 20, 28; John of Damascus, De imaginibus III, 9. 48  Brown, ‘Anselm on Atonement’, 280. 49  Lossky, In the Image and Likeness of God, 99. Brown defends Anselm’s efforts by pointing out the absence of one coherent explanation as a defect. See Brown, ‘Anselm on Atonement’, 280. 50  Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, 2.6 ; the quotation is taken from Anselm of Canterbury, The Major Works, eds Brian Davies and R.R. Evans, Oxford University Press, Oxford–New York, 1998, 270. 51  See Anselm, Cur Deus Homo, 1.9; 2.5–7; 2.14; compare with Brown, ‘Anselm on Atonement’, 280, 293, 294 (the quotation). Against the interpretation placing God to 44

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There are several problems inherent in this position. First, in the drama of redemption, God is on the side of the sacrificer. This presupposes if not a violent God, then a God who in his impassibility cares more for formal principles than for the suffering victim. Furthermore, there is no real interest in Christ’s victory over death. Second, sin is overemphasized. There is an implicit link between original sin and so complete a loss of the initial goodness of the world and of human nature given in creation that God’s further creative work in every generation, in every new life, is left with no place. Third, the Holy Spirit has no part but to assist in redemption, causing us to receive Christ’s expiating merit. 52 Given the fact that this notion of redemption is still widespread in the cultures where people do not believe in it, but identify it as ‘the’ Christian view on reconciliation with God, it is less surprising that Vysotsky and Nohavica searched for ways to confront it or to surpass it. In the next section I shall revisit the conflicting issue of substitution with the emphasis on the Father who remembers his Son in the hour of suffering, stands at his side, and, by the power of the Holy Spirit, raises him from the dead, and in him, fallen humankind, and all creation. God Siding with the Victim The French cultural anthropologist René Girard can help us to uncover what he calls ‘scapegoat mechanisms’53 in the passion narratives, and also the fact that resurrection is God’s saying no to ‘scapegoating’. Thus God sides definitively with the victim, remembering the one who lost out in the conflict with violent human desires, and triumphing over the situation by raising the crucified from the dead. Substitution, where the Father would act, scandalously according to the early Church Fathers,54 as the sacrificer of the Son, to satisfy the devil for our sake is abolished. Instead, the Father is revealed as an ultimate defender of victims. Christ’s saving faithfulness to the Father is thus complemented by the Father’s saving faithfulness to the Son in raising him by the Spirit from the dead.55 the side of the sacrificer, see René Girard’s analysis of mimetic conflicts leading into a sacrificial mechanism, and a Christian God standing outside of that. See Violence and the Sacred, Johns Hopkins University,Press, Baltimore, MD–London, 1977; The Scapegoat, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD, 1985, 115–118; 147; 206–207. 52  Brown defends Anselm’s position, referring to the hierarchical system of reciprocal rights and obligations that maintained social stability, and saying that in that context satisfaction had its legitimate place (Brown, ‘Anselm on Atonement’, 290). Lossky, for his part, criticizes placing all emphasis on the passion, and hardly any on the resurrection (In the Image and Likeness of God, 99). At the same time theology of creation is impoverished. See Stăniloae, The World, 203–208. 53  For a good summary of the ‘scapegoat mechanism’, see Michael Kirwan, Discovering Girard, DLT, London, 2004, 38–62. 54  See, e.g., Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio catechetica magna 45,22. 55  See Girard, The Scapegoat, 206–207.

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Thus, instead of projecting human guilt onto somebody else, instead of letting Christ be a victim, or a scapegoat,56 redemption is concerned with being liberated from the violent mechanism, from the reign of sin. Christ is the victor over violence in our world, not its ultimate victim. The Father is the giver of the victory, not the perpetrator of the sacrifice. The Spirit makes the victory present, bringing eschatological fulfilment into human history. The loser’s perspective that Vysotsky reflected is thus given a hearing. Life is returned. Vysotsky’s ‘not all is in vain’57 is given a particular expression. In the following pages we shall examine in what sense the violence of the perpetrators is liberated and the evil within healed and overcome. To use Nohavica’s poetic language, how can the burdens we carry ‘through the summer paths towards winter’ be laid down when ‘the watchman opening the gates’ arrives and ‘the wind’ calms the wounds after a long night, for us, who are ‘both good and bad’, whose image in the shop window is ‘glassy and dull’?58 To respond to this, we need to seek what other faces and other stories have to be returned to us in order to be healed, and track the divine subversive activity the way it comes. Given that we are not innocent like Christ, but sold to sin, after having laid aside the substitution theory, as theologians we have to ask: in what sense does Christ remain not just an example but a Redeemer? Raymund Schwager, who agrees with Girard that we have to avoid any form of positive divine assent to Christ’s sacrificial killing, and reject any, even if passive, participation in the destruction of the other or of the self, suggests an alternative.59 He goes back to Maximus the Confessor, according to whom Christ on the cross altered the ‘use of death’.60 Instead of a punishment visited on human nature for sin, on the cross death becomes a means of salvation from sin. In our place, with us and for us, Christ reopens the way to the Father, but does not take away the irreducible element of human responsibility.61 At the same time, Schwager attests that ‘[t]he event of the cross shows that individual people are far more victims of evil than responsible agents.’62 They do not know what they are doing, says

56

 See Lev 16:6–22.  Vysotsky, ‘It’s my Fate, to Fight till the End, to the Cross’, Hamlet with a Guitar,

57

123.

58

  See Nohavica, ‘Each One of Us is Carrying a Burden’ and ‘Underground Sources’.   ‘Christ identified himself with sinners insofar as they are victims, but not with them as responsible agents … his identification with those crucifying him (L 23:34) did not include agreement to their killing and his being their sacrifice … For the true understanding of Christ’s sacrifice we must consequently look for a different solution from that of selfdestruction.’ Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation,173, 186. 60  Maximus the Confessor, Thal. 61; see Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 187. 61  Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 191. 62  Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 194. 59

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Schwager, quoting Luke and Acts.63 If both statements are kept together, the stress on human responsibility relativizes claims that we are only victims (something I criticized earlier when talking about victimhood as a positive identity), and the stress on also being victims relativizes a non-relational responsibility. And in this paradoxical balance between the two recognitions lies the hope of salvation. Christ is thus involved ‘in the complex process of human self-judgement’,64 and redemption happens through the recovery of a positive dialogue with God. Doctrine versus Experience? In Vysotsky the process of self-judgement leads to a renewed gratitude ‘to the Almighty’;65 in Nohavica to a recognition that life has a germinating power of renewal reaching deeper than our knowledge, deeper than fear, deeper than the alienation caused by our pride in self-sufficiency.66 Yet despite using some elements of the Christian symbolic tradition of redemption, both place their experiences against doctrinal religion, sharing a popular identification of doctrine and dogmatism. In the last part of this section, I shall therefore look at the relationship between experience and doctrine from a theological perspective that does not support this equation. If doctrine has a permanent place in a religious symbolic tradition, then it is because it succeeded in articulating experiences that touched the depths where people both encounter the transcendent other and understand who they really are – in relation to the other and to human and creaturely others. And if doctrines are seen as normative for religious tradition, it is not because they packaged infinity into finite truth statements. Rather they succeeded in stating what meanings of experience are normal to assume under given circumstances within the given religious symbolic tradition. This is usually stated against some other meanings that are spelled out and marked as harmful. And in this sense the controversy with the defined problematic positions becomes a permanent part of the ‘normal’ position. Thus doctrine does not come from the eschatological future as the promised divine life, but develops in history. As such, it is open-ended, because history is openended, even if – or rather because – God guards its course by interacting with it. At least this is what a doctrine about creation and eschatology may tell us, if we are prepared to listen. Against such an understanding of doctrine it would be hard to claim that doctrines are necessarily dogmatic, i.e. narrow-minded impositions of finite meaning on the infinite variety of experienced reality. The previous chapter, where we could see Vysotsky and Nohavica relying on the fragments of the religious symbolic traditions, while claiming that doctrines as oppressive and illusory need to be left behind, raised the following questions: Which doctrine  See L 23:34; Acts 3:17; Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 194.  Schwager, Jesus in the Drama of Salvation, 196. 65  See Vysotsky, ‘I Freeze Between’. 66  See Nohavica, ‘Each One of Us is Carrying a Burden’. 63 64

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were they referring to primarily? Was it a Communist doctrine projected into the ecclesial past? Or was it a reductionist understanding of doctrine they encountered within Christian circles? Moreover, was their option of leaving religious doctrines behind as oppressive and illusory not motivated by precisely the type of doctrines they criticized, just of a different orientation from the religious doctrines? Now I shall explore these questions and their background from a theological standpoint. Jürgen Moltmann in Theology of Hope attempted to explain the relationship between experience and religious doctrine in relation to a horizon in which what is experienced is named, judged and passed on as meaningful. Drawing on that, we can say two things. First, doctrinal tradition is only one type of horizon in which experience can be meaningfully interpreted. There is also the ‘context of our own experience and our familiarity with the world’. This can provide us with the distance needed for the interpretation of events. Second, although in a particular case the horizon that is formed by a tradition precedes our experience, this does not mean that experience is dispensable. The language of tradition becomes meaningful only in and through the experience of the following generations who appropriate the tradition as their own. These two things, in my view, protect doctrinal traditions from becoming dogmatic. Doctrine in this context remains an articulation of experience. This does not do away with a sort of ‘negative’ normative character within the horizon – for example, within a Christian narrative ‘Christ could not have stayed dead in the tomb’ – but the normativity does not close down the multitude of other possible meanings within the horizon, and it definitely does not assert validity for all the horizons. ‘It is not a closed system, but includes also open questions and anticipations, and therefore is open to the new and the unknown.’ 67 Edith Wyschogrod’s criteria for giving voice to the absent other in history can be applied also to the relationship between doctrine and experience, as the experience caught and interpreted within the web of doctrine is also related to its founding experience, as it is to the absent other on whose behalf it speaks. According to Wyschogrod, ‘the resistance of the other is bound up with revelation’.68 The nonarticulation of the other is thus a necessary part of the articulation, a part that both makes the articulation possible and relativizes it. The one who retrieves the past event is ‘commanded by the absent others … it could not have been thus’.69 We can also say that in doctrine the command of the absent other, of which the doctrine is an articulation, transcends the doctrine’s narrative intention, is in excess of it, exterior. This is an excess that opens up the dimension of an incorporable infinite.70   Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Grounds and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, SCM, London, 1974, 190–191. 68  Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation: Writing the Dead Other’, in Memory and History in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Michael A. Signer, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2001, 19–34, here 30. 69   Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 31. 70  Compare with Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 32. 67

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Moltmann’s notion of the horizon, and Wyschogrod’s placing the narrator under an authority transcending what is narrated, safeguarding the veto of the absent other, are examples of how we can give doctrine a helpful place, and tools for a permanent critique, so that it does not dominate experience, but serves it. A widespread antagonism towards doctrines shows, however, that there has been a breakdown in doctrines that have moved from their ministerial place. The negative attitude towards doctrine is not only common among our postsecular contemporaries, but also among theologians, who saw too much of a wounding subjection of experience to the type of doctrines that not only did not articulate real human experiences, but often opposed their meaning. Experience includes contingency, wherein we can ‘discover the tangential touch between immanence and transcendence’ and realize that we participate in it and are an integral part of the very flux that we call reality. ‘I am the point of the tangent in which those two poles [World and God] meet: I stand in between’, according to Raimon Panikkar.71 This phrase might remind us of Vysotsky’s last song, which is somehow more brutal, ‘I Freeze Between’. An embrace of the tragic reality and of his own tragic condition gave Vysotsky insight into what Panikkar calls the ‘tangential touch between immanence and transcendence’ that finds expression in his final gratitude. Vysotsky’s unorthodox arrival at that point may offend a Christian memory of salvation that stresses the necessity of Christ’s coming, living, dying and rising for us. But the offence would happen only if we allowed the doctrinal side of the Christian narrative to lose its ministerial place. Then our sight would be blocked by his denial of messianic aid, and we would unreasonably doubt whether his gratitude was real and deep enough. In short, we would measure not our own, but someone else’s experience against doctrine, rather than allow the doctrine to interpret what can be interpreted, e.g. that salvation and gratitude live close to each other.72 Raimon Panikkar identified three main reasons why doctrine in Christianity outgrew its given place and ceased to be helpful: (i) it became deaf to the existential situation of the world, and of its people, and thus incapable of uttering any ‘word of God’ into it;73 (ii) it entailed absolutization of a certain logic and extended it to all humanity, destroying the other symbolic universes in order to initiate its dominion;74 (iii) it departed from the mystical interiority of experience.75

71  See Francis D’Sa, ‘Foreword’ to Raimon Panikkar, Christophany: The Fullness of Man, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY, 2004, i–xvii, here xiv. 72  See Schmemann, ‘Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.’ ‘Thank You, O Lord’, at http://www.schmemann.org/byhim/thankyoulord.html. 73   ‘A christology deaf to the cries of men and especially women today would be incapable of uttering any “word of God” whatsoever. The Son of Man was concerned with people. What is his manifestation today?’ Panikkar, Christophany, 5. 74  See Panikkar, Christophany, 7–8. 75  See Panikkar, Christophany, 20–25.

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While much of institutional religion was too concerned with handing down the doctrines, the revelatory power of the other in experience was often decoded outside of the ecclesial boundaries. In Vysotsky’s and Nohavica’s songs, there was an engagement with the existential situation of the world in their time. They uttered words about that situation that had healing power. In that case, would not these words stem from the Word of Life, as we read about it in John’s Prologue: ‘What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it’ (1:4–5) There were protests against absolutizing orders, against excluded memories and values. Would not these acts bear some similarity to defending the right of the orphan or widow or stranger, ascribed as signs of belonging to God for the people of Israel?76 And finally, would not their extreme honesty in the interior life be closer to the mystical experience of God than the dry doctrine from which they distanced themselves? We cannot say that, without their assent to a Christian or other symbolic– doctrinal tradition, their religious search would be defective. This would degrade their experience, and the irreplaceable insights they received from it, as they tried to interpret it in the horizons that came out of the ‘context of our own experience and our familiarity with the world’,77 as Moltmann would say. While honesty in dealing with experience is irreplaceable, we could see that doctrine was dispensable for them. But there was a price attached to it. They felt lost among the symbolic worlds, ‘searching for roots, knowing nothing of them’, forgetting the meaning of the signs of hope.78 I shall return to this last aspect in the following section when looking into God’s giving us back our memories. Giving Back the Past I have already quoted Walter Benjamin’s remark that ‘only for a redeemed mankind has its past become citable in all its moments’.79 Now, when we speak about the return of memory, we have to keep in mind that it is not just any way of remembering that is helpful, but we need to learn how to ‘remember rightly’.80 Remembering rightly, as we shall discuss further, should not cause further violence against others or against ourselves. Instead, it should bring reconciliation and peace, and allow God to be ‘in relation with the entire movement of the world’,81 to restore life, to bring us back into communion with each other and with God. Such remembering, 76

 See Dt 10:17–19; 27:19.  See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 190–191. 78  See Nohavica, ‘Underground Sources’. 79  Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 390. 80  See Volf, The End of Memory, 10–11. 81   Stăniloae, The World, 12. 77

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indeed, needs strength and maturity redeemed from the insecurity, aggression and pity that have crippled our human nature, along with sin. In this section I shall show how the return of memory is passed on in both Jewish and Christian liturgies, as both contributed to the amalgam of the Central European cultures. Then I move to the task of remembering well in history, and finally to how a gift is redeemed and how remembering is bound up with an eschatological horizon. Liturgical Remembering The sound of Moshe’s ancient melody and Christian invocations of God82 were all part of the remembered but vanished world in Nohavica’s The Strange Century. He drew our attention to the fact that the post-secular Central European culture relies on fragments from the amalgam of Christian and Jewish religious cultures that coexisted in our part of the world for centuries, while still being wounded by the events that led to its collapse. Thus, in order to be able to interpret figures in his songs theologically, I need to examine, at least briefly, the liturgical notion of memory in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Here I am not primarily concerned with what liturgy is, namely a celebration of meaning and hope relying on and expanding our experience, but rather with what liturgy does when it comes to redemptive memory. In both Jewish and Christian liturgies, remembering refers both to God as remembered and to God who remembers. According to Jewish understanding, God’s memory as liturgically given might mean that ‘God will never be forgotten. God’s name will live forever’, not because of us, but because of God, because it belongs to being God. The memory of God was ‘equivalent to the name of God or to the reputation of God or even the kingdom of God’, and in this way was linked to seeing God, and in God also human nature and the human world, from an eschatological perspective.83 In Seder Rav Amram,84 the ninth-century Jewish prayer book, God remembers: (i) human ‘merits’, (ii) covenant, (iii) mercy and (iv) transcendence. Remembering merits presupposes grace as God’s foundational gift. For the sake of our ancestors, of Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, or even for the sake of the closeness that used to be between God and the one who prays, all comes within this context of God’s grace. 82

  See Nohavica, ‘The Song of Těšín’, ‘A New-Born Babe’, ‘Litany at the End of the Century’. 83  See Lawrence A. Hoffman, ‘Does God Remember? A Liturgical Theology of Memory’, in Memory and History in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Michael A. Signer, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2001, 41–72, here 46–48. 84  Hoffman draws here on God’s memory as liturgically given in Seder Rav Amram Gaon (SRA), ed. Daniel Goldschmidt, Jerusalem, 1971; further references to this source are given as A or B, according to the quoted parts of SRA, accompanied by the paragraph number.

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Precisely this point has been put under scrutiny in Nohavica’s Strange Century, where God is accused of not remembering the Jewish faithful when it came to the Holocaust. The covenant was seen as broken, mercy as missing. All that remained was an awareness of a transcendence so distant that it had no impact on real human life. In the liturgical remembering in both Jewish and Christian traditions the transcendent element cuts through all other ways of remembering. It keeps and reveals a paradoxical aspect of remembering, where, according to Jewish liturgical language, something eternal (such as mercy) is applied to something transitory that God needs to be reminded of. It must be remembered in order not to be forgotten. The word ‘memory’ breaks down here when applied to the divine. We remind God of something that happened, and yet we cannot own the memory as it belongs to God. Or we remind God that he is present everywhere: Let the memory of us, and the memory of the fathers, and the memory of Jerusalem your city and the memory of the Messiah, the son of David, your servant, and the memory of your people, the whole house of Israel arise before You. ... Remember us, Lord our God, thereby, for good.85

We need to avoid identification between God’s memory and our memory. God’s memory ‘cannot be ‘our memory’, in the sense of a memory that we ourselves own; it cannot be ‘the memory of us’ or ‘of ourselves’ that belongs to God either.86 And since the liturgical memory is an ascent to God, it implies that it is already wherever God is. In this sense it is not a memory as a reminder of what has been forgotten.87 In Christian liturgical understanding the paradoxical nature of remembering God as the transcendent other includes a Trinitarian economy of God, and with the emphasis on incarnation offers different possibilities of understanding divine descent and human ascent.88 With regard to God’s remembering, it includes our return to the past, as we remember it, both the past of our lives and of God’s redeeming activities, but it does not identify with how God remembers it. The sovereignty of the divine other needs to be safeguarded here as well as trust that the loving other communicates with us. Thus liturgy is carried by a double movement: the memory of the past (anamnēsis) is redeemed and returned in the invocation of the Spirit (epiklēsis). We remember God in the blessing, and we are blessed by the

85  A ubiquitous insertion into the grace after meals and the Tefillah for holidays. See, e.g., A79, B44, B77, B105; Hoffman, ‘Does God Remember?’, 53. 86  Hoffman, ‘Does God Remember?’, 53, 54. 87  See Hoffman, ‘Does God Remember?’, 54. 88   See the discussion on deification in Chapter 2, 70–73.

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remembering.89 We invoke the memory of the Paraclete, of the Spirit, to make God present in this memory, to heal it and restore the communion between God and the world, in which we may find a new place. In the Byzantine rite, after the epiclesis and the commemoration of the church triumphant, before the communion rite, there are intercessions for the living and the dead, in which God is asked ‘to remember’ them. Even after communion, there is a further reminder that the mysteries received from the eschatological future do not take away the eschatological paradox. The assembly has participated in the divine feast of redemption, the Kingdom of God has come near, but the Christ has not yet come in glory. The thanksgiving prayer after communion that still asks for salvation as a future gift expresses that clearly: O Lord, you bless those who bless you and you sanctify those who trust in you: save your people and bless your inheritance. Preserve the fullness of your Church, sanctify those who love the beauty of your house; honour them in return by your divine power and do not forsake us who set our hope in you. Grant peace to your world and to your churches, to clergy, to our emperor (or to our king, or to our sovereign authorities), and to all your people. For every good and every perfect gift, being from above, comes down from you, the Father of lights, and we give glory, thanksgiving, and adoration to you, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, now and always and for ever and ever.90

In the Roman Catholic Easter Vigil there is a similar dynamics of the participation in the divine redemptive memory, whose effects are here but not yet fully. The Liturgy of the Light, of the Word, of Baptism, and of the Eucharist gradually take the congregation through the interplay between the historical and the eschatological times to the renewed confidence in God, in which the saving ‘past’ has been made present in order to participate now in the promised future, to remember it by the power of the Holy Spirit, and be blessed in the remembering. The paradox of remembering is not removed and culminates in the Solemn Blessing: May almighty God bless you on this solemn feast of Easter, and may he protect you against all sin. C Amen. Through the resurrection of his Son God granted us healing. May he fulfil his promises, And bless you with eternal life. C Amen. 89   This is made most explicit in offering the gifts, where the priest sings in a loud voice: ‘Offering you your own from what is your own, on account of all and through all.’ ‘Anamnesis’, in Casimir Kucharek, The Byzantine–Slav Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom: Its Origin and Evolution, Alleluia Press, Ontario, 1971, 606. 90   ‘The Thanksgiving after Communion’, in Kucharek, The Byzantine–Slav Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, 723.

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You have mourned for Christ’s sufferings; Now you celebrate the joy of his resurrection. May you come with joy to the feast which lasts for ever. C Amen. May almighty God bless you, The Father, and the Son, + and the Holy Spirit. C Amen.

Despite the inclusion and appreciation of the historical reality in the liturgy as well as in theology following Vatican II,91 we need to recognize that, before they underwent massive secularization, our cultures were more marked by pre-Vatican II theology and liturgical practice. Thus we can still find in the culture accusations that the eschatological reality dominates Christianity, as something supernatural, a higher order of being, so the transient historical reality was impoverished in comparison.92 Although Vatican II theology opposed this view, it still has an impact on popular culture, both Christian and non- or anti-Christian, as we saw, paradoxically, both in Vysotsky, who should be influenced by the fragments of Orthodoxy, different in this aspect, and in Nohavica.93 When they felt that the beautiful symbolism of God’s remembering and deliverance stood against them and against the value of their experience with the world, they perceived it not as holy, but as demonic.94 When the ‘holy’ of Christian symbolism, as they perceived it, was not building up the best they could find in their lives, but weakening and demolishing it, they turned against it, to find it not in religious traditions, but in human relationships and in the interior life of, if not a good, then at least an honest, heart. Nohavica’s move from ‘The Litany at the End of the Century’ to ‘As a Deer that Wants to Drink Water’ is marked by a rediscovery of the need to be remembered, calmed, healed, renewed, by the divine ‘You’, without which the human ‘I’ remains imprisoned within the wall built by pride. But this move is far from embracing the Christian memory of God, a memory that he characterizes as judging and exploitative, as we still see in his ‘Hallelujah’. The loss of tradition admitted in Nohavica’s ‘Underground Sources’, and the not knowing ‘where is the land lit with icon-lamp light’ in Vysotsky’s ‘Those Big Dark Eyes’95 do not represent desires to return to what was rejected

 See Nancey Dallavalle, ‘Fides Trinitatis: Liturgical Practice and the Economy of Salvation’, in Source and Summit: Commemorating Josef A. Jungmann, S.J., eds J.M. Pierce and Michael Downey, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 1999, 91–105, here 95. 92  For a historical treatment of this problem, see Josef A. Jungmann, ‘The Defeat of Teutonic Arianism and the Revolution in Religious Culture in the Early Middle Ages’, in Pastoral Liturgy, Challoner Publications, London, 1962, 1–101, here 62–63. 93  See, e.g., Nohavica, ‘We Sail on the Same Boat’, ‘Dance Macabre’, ‘Litany at the End of the Century’. 94  See Vysotsky, ‘Song about Carpenter Joseph, the Virgin Mary, the Holy Spirit, and the Immaculate Conception’, Nohavica, ‘A New-Born Babe’. 95  See Vysotsky, Hamlet with a Guitar, 143. 91

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earlier. Rather, in moving forward, they look for what needs to be included for life to grow from its roots, to find hope despite hopelessness. Jewish and Christian liturgy gives a symbolic language to the initial intuition of God. It is a celebration of the all-embracing vision of life.96 As such, it is prior to doctrine. It belongs to those experiences that inform doctrine, even if this experience has a journey set by the ritual, in which the individual and the communal, the unique and the archetypal communication, overlap. But it is important to note that it is not the only experience that informs us of God’s gift of memory. As Vysotsky’s and Nohavica’s songs have shown, God’s memory of us and our memory of God, of the world and of ourselves can be found even in a culture that distances itself from formal religions. Yet, as we have also seen, the distance may be more dogmatic than the actual doctrine that grows from liturgy and is continually transformed by the mysterious paradoxical character of our talk about God. A celebration of life does not happen when victims are produced, when injustice is done or even overlooked, when people are deprived of hope. This applies not only to the less traditional ways of celebration of life, but also to liturgy.97 Thus, as liturgical remembering is a challenge for those aspects of our culture that need healing, the prophetic aspects of our culture are a challenge to churches celebrating liturgy without sensitivity to what needs healing. Historical Remembering After the collapse of the modern paradigm, it is difficult to define history positively. We are only too aware that it is not an objective account of the past from the standpoint of a neutral observer. Rather we see it as a complex collection of events narrated and passed on by people with different power-interests, carrying along the silenced voices of the insignificant or the threatening accounts with regard to the dominant ideologies. While the modern concept of history arose as a critique of the type of tradition that emancipated itself from the events that gave rise to its life, we seem to use the concept of memory as a critique of the over-optimistic history that promises to capture an objective picture of worlds that have passed. The notion of memory is, perhaps, seen as a way in between our debt to those whose lives were shaped by past events (including ourselves), a debt to investigate and to tell the events as exactly as possible, and the impossibility of doing justice to such a task. Memory includes the conscious, the semi-conscious as well as the unconscious elements. And even with the best will, it is permanently endangered by forgetting, and by selective remembering, the motives for which we may be more or less aware of. As such, the concept of history as a collective memory seems to be more fitting than the more detached accounts claiming to include into its gaze past events, experiences, and traditions of interpretation, without  See Schmemann, For the Life of the World, 141.  See a distinction between liturgy and anti-liturgy in W.T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, Blackwell, Oxford, 1998, 11–18. 96

97

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recognizing the further ingredients involved in selecting and shaping the accounts of the past. In this light, redemption is not an excuse for covering the uncomfortable memories, but rather a reminder of the messianic perspective from which, and only from which, the past can be told without causing further harm. It is not an independent observer’s view, but an engaged one. Moreover, it is the one where God is engaged in bringing victory over powers of darkness. Traditional mediations of such divine activity largely failed. Their values were destroyed by ‘empathizing with the victor [but not the ultimate victor]’, by taking benefits from the current rulers, and with them over their subjects, by praising their values,98 and thus they must undergo purification. Benjamin says: Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing it ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in a moment of danger. … The danger threatens both the content of the tradition and those who inherit it. For both it is one and the same thing: the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes. Every age must strive anew to wrest tradition from conformism that is working to overpower it. The Messiah comes not only as a redeemer; he comes as the victor over the Antichrist. 99

Benjamin applies the messianic perspective to the reading of history from below. There, in the moments of danger, he identifies ways of embracing memory as ‘cultural treasures’. But such ‘cultural treasures’ have to be viewed with a ‘cautious detachment’, because they have links that we cannot contemplate without horror.100 Benjamin points out that instead of learning how to remember without being wounded by the past violence once again, we tend to exclude these aspects of the past because it is hard to bear them. But, by exclusion, we also allow them to continue. In order to avoid sadistic or masochistic interpretations of the past, we need to put our memory under scrutiny, under the judgement of that which transcends it.101 In the ascent to God, or at least in standing under the Absolute rather than isolating ourselves as the Absolute, we can receive the missing connections that lead towards healing and forgiving, and towards a grateful and generous heart. Our retelling of the past, then, has to include a negative aspect of ‘it could not have been thus’102 and a positive recognition of the plurality of the possible. Without 98

  Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391–392.   Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391. 100   Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391–392. 101   See Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1996, 23. 102   See Edith Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation: Writing the Dead Other’, in Memory and History in Christianity and Judaism, ed. Michael A. Signer, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, IN, 2001, 19–34, here 25. 99

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both of these aspects we would deceive ourselves or others, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Edith Wyschogrod says: Memory’s retrieval of the past ... is governed by a desire to recover the past wie es eigentlich gewesen war, to retrieve the truth of the past. If, on the commonsense view, memory cannot replicate the past, it can at least strive for an accurate approximation of past events. ... If the past is to be retrieved, the ‘not of that which can never be made present,’ the past’s ungroundedness, must be intrinsic to that which is recovered. 103

We simply do not have a single positive transparent language for conveying the truth of a person or an event. The words and images that we use betray us at the same time. When we are involved in ‘truth-telling’, we are caught between ‘the imperative to tell the truth’ and ‘the impossibility of conveying it’.104 Simultaneously, it is a revelatory grounding. The revelatory status is attributed to standing under the authority of that which transcends what is being narrated.105 This applies to doctrine, liturgy, as well as to the historical narratives that are given a privileged place in various religions as revelatory, such as the Exodus of Israel out of Egypt or the life-events of Jesus of Nazareth, or Pentecost. Wyschogrod insists that ‘not only historical narratives that profess revelatory status’, but ‘historical narratives generally should be construed as revelatory texts’, i.e. stand under the authority of what transcends them.106 The revelatory status of ‘it could not have been thus’ is bound up with a fair representation of other people or of past events that cannot speak for themselves, as in the present setting they no longer have a voice. Wyschogrod, concentrating on the remembering of historical events, speaks about the ‘dead others’, but we can expand this to include all those who are absent or deprived of their voices, like Vysotsky’s ‘losers’, or the parts of awareness in Nohavica’s interior life that did not correspond to ‘how things should have been’.107 Wyschogrod gives us a way of letting the past be judged not by the narrator, but by the ‘absent others’, whose resistance to the narration is bound up with revelation. There is not a single true way of how it could have been, but standing under the authority that transcends us, and listening to the commands of the others whose cases we try to represent, we have to take into account that the plurality of ‘it could have been w, x, or y’ is not ‘a free speculative variation’.108 Wyschogrod summarizes: 103

  Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 24.   Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 27–29. 105   Wyschogrod speaks about ‘concentrated revelation’, by which she means ‘the entire narrative standing under the authority of what transcends it’. Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 30. 106   Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 30. 107   See Nohavica’s dealing with the cooperation with the Secret Police, in Spumý, ‘Tajemství Jaromíra Nohavici’, 1–8. 108  See Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 31–32. 104

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Theological Interpretation of Culture in Post-Communist Context [T]he ‘not’ of the past ... situates itself by reference to that which cannot be incorporated into the narrative, the command of the dead others which transcends narrative intention, is in excess of it, exterior ... an excess that opens the dimension of the more, of an incorporable infinite. In Levinas’s terms, ‘judgment is the act of situating by reference to infinity.’ ... The invisible dead undo or un-write the predicative and iterative historical narrative in the blank space that is the placeholder of an infinite transcendence in historical writing.109

Wyschogrod, in placing the memory of history under the scrutiny of the judgement of what infinitely transcends the narrative, finds a way of avoiding the danger that threatens history, according to Benjamin, i.e. that it would become a tool of the ruling classes, without the messianic liberation of the poor and the outcast.110 History is not yet ‘citable in all its moments’,111 but at least the first step has been taken, the verdict of the winners is no longer a substitution for the concept of a ‘historical narrative that stands under judgement’, which assumes that ‘history is judged in accordance with the claims of the Others’.112 Our narrative is not and cannot be all-inclusive, but there is a space for God to ‘[give] us back our memories’, and memories of others, to be ‘the ‘presence’ to which all reality is present.113 As both memory in liturgy and memory worked out in history included an eschatological reference, a closer examination of the two types of eschatological horizon is necessary, one transcending history, the other including it. Two Eschatological Horizons The western theological symbolism of time as counted from the past towards the future, as a passing temporality that is contrasted with an a-temporal eschatology, is greatly influenced by Augustine. According to him, time has a beginning ‘at no time’, and is heading towards its end. It comes from ‘the Eternal Creator of all times’, and testifies that no time and no creature is co-eternal with God. We measure time ‘in passage’, and within this process, marked by the presence of the absent in memory and by the causality of events, Augustine situates his notion of eschatology.114 The eschatological future, or in Augustine, rather the eschatological telos, as it is not a future time, in terms of a created time that is consumed and

109   Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 32; the quotation comes from Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 240. 110  Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 391. 111  Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’, 390. 112  See Wyschogrod, ‘Memory, History, Revelation’, 31. 113   Williams, Resurrection, 23. 114  See Augustine, Confessions XI.14, 26, 30.

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passes, is expressed in terms of a Sabbath rest of creation.115 The Sabbath, the rest in God, is meta-temporal: You, God, who alone are good, have never ceased to be good. Some indeed of our works are good through Your grace, but they are not eternal: after them, we hope that we shall find rest in the greatness of Your sanctification. But You, the Good, who need no good beside, are ever in repose, because You are Your own repose.116

The eschatological hope, thus, is not a hope in ‘a future’, but a hope in God, who is the Lord of the past, present and future, but also a Lord above all time, to whose eternity all times are present, but who transcends all times. A different eschatological perspective is offered by Jürgen Moltmann. According to him, we can discover in time the lost dimension of growing towards fullness that comes from God’s future, open to us in the past, the present and the future: If we look back at these quantitatively different experiences and concepts of time, we can discover continuity in them, inasmuch as in each given case the experience of the coming time fulfils the earlier time and gathers it into itself. So, looking back, we can also say that what was earlier points to what comes afterwards. In the history of God, the different times and the different experiences of time are determined by what happens from God’s side. Whatever happens from God’s side has a certain direction, pointing from creation at the beginning to the eternal kingdom. For God did not create the world for transience and death. He created it for his glory, and therefore for its own eternal life. Augustine evidently did not take this dimension of time into account.117

From this perspective Moltmann reads a Christian eschatological hope that has its foundations in the Easter narratives, where God has made manifest ‘the future of the crucified Christ for the world’.118 Moltmann argues, however, that the span of the future horizon projected by the resurrection of Christ, where the Father stands on the side of the Son, does not entail knowledge of the ‘secrets’ of ‘what awaits world history and the late cosmos at the end of time’. These ‘secrets’ are not ‘disclosed in advance according to a heavenly plan’, not even when ‘the universal future of the lordship of the crucified Christ over all is spotlighted in the Easter appearances’.119 Similarly, the resurrection of Christ is not a resolved riddle about how human unquiet hearts eventually rest in God. ‘The resurrection  See Augustine, Confessions XIII.35.  Augustine, Confessions XIII.38. 117  Moltmann, God in Creation, 124. 118  Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 192–193. 119  Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 193. 115 116

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of Christ goes on being a promissio inquieta until it finds rest in the resurrection of the dead and a totality of new being.’120 The in-breaking of the future time in encounters with the risen Christ does not devalue the specific and open-ended journeys in time each one of us as well as the world as a whole undergoes. But it informs our hope and shapes questions about the promised future. It gives us a direction towards the eternal time of the new and eternal creativity in the glory of the Kingdom of God.121 For Moltmann the centrality of Christ’s resurrection for Christian eschatology helps us not to presume that we can generally foresee the future possibilities of history or unfold the possibilities of human nature. The specific future that is revealed to us in Christ’s resurrection does not stand ‘directly within a cosmological horizon’ (of questions as to the origin, meaning and nature of the world) or ‘an existentialist horizon’ (of questions as to the origin, meaning and nature of human existence) or not even ‘a general theological horizon’ (of questions as to the nature and appearance of the deity), but they stand within an ‘eschatological horizon’ (of prophetic and apocalyptic expectations, hopes and questions about that which according to the promises of this God is to come).122 The other horizons are not irrelevant, but broken through and expanded as their questions are now set within this specific eschatological horizon. Their questions ‘are no longer answered on the basis of experience of the world, of man’s experience of himself, or of the concept of God, but on the basis of the event of the resurrection and within the eschatological horizon of this event.’123 Furthermore, we can say that the other horizons that are brought into the eschatological one are allowed to include other experiences and other understandings of the cosmos, of human nature and of God that have developed during history, without being devalued or absolutized. This includes those of Vysotsky, Nohavica and others, who were led by a desire for truth and authenticity and expressed themselves against Christian symbolic tradition, or at least against those forms of it that they diagnosed as illusory or oppressive. Concluding Remarks In this second part of the book I have dealt with the role of memory, both within culture and as a challenge to culture when certain events, people or qualities of the past were denied a voice in the present. In our case these were respectively  Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 196.  See Moltmann, God in Creation, 124. 122  See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 191–192. Paul Avis criticizes Moltmann for too little content in his eschatological hope. Paul Avis, ‘The Resurrection of Jesus: Asking the Right Questions’, in The Resurrection of Jesus Christ, ed. Avis, DLT, London, 1993, 1–22; here 12–13. 123  Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 192. 120 121

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the crimes of Communism, and the lives and dignity of people who were marginalized, wounded or destroyed by that regime. I sought how to remember such things well, without committing further violence, whether against those singled out as victimizers, against oneself or against God. But I also looked for a way out of subcultures where ‘victimhood’ was exploited, and where it became a positive identity. The previous chapter, where the totalitarian past was remembered through folk music, led me to ask: When does memory become redemptive? With Vysotsky, I saw how people could respond in an overwhelmingly positive way to the recovery of the losers’ memory without the vindictive desire for revenge. At the same time, removing ‘the top layer of mud’,124 bringing into light the hidden, often difficult stories, helped in recovering the forgotten ability of discernment. As Vysotsky put it in his songs, we could understand again the archetypal difference between truth and lie, between justice and injustice. But to understand it and to live it was not the same thing. Vysotsky talked in his songs about the tragic human condition in which we have seen the medicine but have found ourselves unable to take it. For him, however, it remained impossible either to express regret for the past or to be open for conversion towards a new and different future. Instead he proposed learning to accept the past and to be grateful for its every gift. The questions that I asked in this chapter were (i) whether remembering with acceptance and gratitude was not redemptive already; but also (ii) whether it really did not involve regret and conversion, at least with regard to some aspects of one’s life. Nohavica took me to a different territory, where we not only remembered, but also were remembered, by other people, and most of all by God. He was aware that bringing back the forgotten memories could go wrong. If they were not healed and reconciled, they could bring further harm. But the cure also had its negative side-effects. While he moved from a Nietzschean proclamation that God was dead and only we were ultimately responsible for being good and generous to each other, he still saw Christian doctrine as oppressive and placed against it the ‘pure’ experience of God’s liberation and healing. He led me to ask (iii) whether past experiences did not create a symbolic background against which we interpret our present experiences, and took me to a recovery of doctrine that is not dogmatic and divorced from real life as he feared. The first section of this chapter, ‘Victimhood as a Positive Identity’, started with an analysis of cases of the absence of redemptive memory. I gave four examples. The first three showed parasitic attitudes towards difficult memories, including either falsifying the past, selective remembering, or playing down the memories. The fourth example was the hardest, as it went in the opposite direction, showing how the victims were forced to take on the identity of perpetrators. In all the cases where innocence and guilt were manipulated, redemptive potential was deprived of oxygen. The non-violent and non-oppressive selves under the 124

 Vysotsky, ‘The Ballad of the Time’.

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layers of guilt were not returned to life. This was the case whether the actors were ‘left with the knowledge of evil’ in themselves and ‘overwhelmed by it’, as Stăniloae said in his account of the fall,125 or whether they refused to exercise discernment at all. This led me to further considerations on how memory could be redemptive for all participants, and what relationship to the past is needed for individuals and for their common culture, so that alienation from the divine recreative work would not be final. This was not, first, in the sense that Vysotsky and Nohavica objected to, namely, that our responsibility for our life-choices is taken away. Theologies glorifying Jesus as a victim could lead to avoiding human responsibility as well as to an unhealthy downplaying of the brutality of the evil that other people are experiencing, as if it were nothing. A theological support for the contrary position that faith in God as the guardian and giver of memory liberates us for responsibility was found in reciprocity between God and people, which was part of the redemption story as well as of creation. Emphasizing the incarnation rather than the isolation of the sacrifice helped in claiming that all that we have been matters and is included into Christ’s descending into our ill world to make possible our ascent to the Father and free growth in the Spirit. This free growth includes being able in Christ to bear our memories when they are given back. We can be healed with them rather than employing selective amnesia to escape them. Vysotsky and Nohavica were right in sensing that if redemption is to be meaningful, then God has to side with the victim. Their own less orthodox ways towards what theology calls the redemptive inclusion into the memory of God were marked by moving from accusations against God to awareness of one’s own tragic condition, and finally to a renewed communication ‘with the Almighty’.126 Here, perhaps, we could go a step further than Schmemann’s ‘whoever is capable of gratitude is capable of salvation and eternal joy’,127 and add that whoever has the former has in some way also the latter. Acceptance of the past and gratitude are signs of redemption. At the same time, however, some divine aid and some forms of conversion are always included in arriving at that stage, whether recognized or unrecognized. In order to rehabilitate doctrinal approaches to the redemption of memory that would not exclude honest but less orthodox attempts, I needed to search for its sources in liturgical and historical remembering. Both of these ways of working with memory knew the paradoxical nature of talking about God’s deliverance in the world here and now, where the eschatological future time is still to come in creation, even for God, and which will allow for the development of new stages of the relationship with God. Moltmann reminded us that we need to take the world and time into the hopes and questions concerning the redeemed   See Stăniloae, The World, 183.  Vysotsky, ‘I Freeze Between’. 127  See Schmemann, ‘Be Thankful’. 125 126

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rest in God. Only then will receiving back our memories not be restricted to the ‘holy’ memories, but include all we have been and could have been, and all our world has been and could have been.128 This theme will be further developed in the following part of the book, where I look at what counts as the ultimate fulfilment.

 See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 196–197.

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Part III The Ultimate Fulfilment Cultures live in the world and, endowed with the memories of the past, they are open to the future and to the promise of the ultimate fulfilment that comes from the future. But there is a problem. As the future does not yet exist, claims to it are reliant on what can be said about something that is not here. A discourse of hope (or fear – as the future can also be feared) and of promise (or judgement), even more than a discourse of memory, is based on communicating something that can never be fully captured. In this part I call what invites and transcends our imagination of the future ‘ultimate fulfilment’. It combines what Tillich called the ‘ultimate concern’ and a contemporary emphasis on satisfying one’s desires. The latter, however, is put under the scrutiny of the former, as the wanting self may in fact block out a deeper fulfilment on which the long-term well-being of a person depends. For this type of fulfilment I shall use the New Testament concept plērōma, as I track how it disappears from and returns to human lives. I have chosen to approach the theme of the ultimate fulfilment through film, the moving images enabling us to see the narrative in a wider setting and from different perspectives, accompanied by various sensations created by the music, colour, light and shade. A comparison of István Szabó’s Mephisto and Vladimir Michálek’s Forgotten Light in Chapter 5 enables me first to concentrate on the guiding desires that in extreme situations lead a person either towards a selforchestrated fulfilment or towards self-giving. Then, using Krzysztof Kieślowski’s trilogy Three Colours, I look at how love can become the ultimate fulfilment of human life, and in what ways it is hindered or helped by the three slogans of the French Revolution: freedom, equality and fraternity. Chapter 6 then develops the theme of love as the ultimate fulfilment theologically, with the help of the doctrine on the Holy Spirit as the giver of love and conversion. In both sections of the chapter, love as the ultimate fulfilment is seen both as a divine and as a human gift, both a divine and a human self-emptying, putting into life the relational unity that, according to Christian teaching, was broken with the fall and healed in Christ.

 See Tillich, Theology of Culture, 9.  It is usually translated as fullness, and it includes the eschatological perspective. See, e.g., J 1:16; Eph 3:19; Col 1:19; 2:9.  

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Chapter 5

Figuring the Ultimate Fulfilment in Central European Cinema

We still love, even where we have ceased to believe and cannot hope.

This line comes from Jakub Deml’s book Forgotten Light, the literary inspiration for Vladimír Michálek’s film of the same name. Deml wrote it when he was looking after a friend, who once, at least in his dreams, could have been his lover, but was now a mother of five children and dying of tuberculosis. In this context, when Deml fears that the fast-approaching future does not promise anything good, his beliefs and hopes are tested as he needs to find rest in what is most fundamental in his life. He engages with what are the main questions of this chapter: What is of ultimate importance? And what truly feeds and satisfies human life? The two films I shall analyze here, Mephisto (1981) by the Hungarian director István Szabó and Forgotten Light (1996) by the Czech director Vladimír Michálek, bring further problems. Do the answers to my two questions coincide or stand against each other? How, if at all, is it possible to recognize the right answers? How can they be communicated to others in a culture where the religious symbolism that used to speak about the ultimate fulfilment has been fragmented? In this chapter, especially in the first section, I focus on the films and their contexts. They give me material with which I can compare two approaches to what transcends ordinary ways when these are no longer possible. Focusing on the nature and the dynamics of the desires guiding people in opposite directions, I shall develop a theme sketched by Čapek and discussed in Chapter 1. That is to say that, ‘in extremis’ either angelic comfort breaks through the otherwise hidden possibilities of solidarity, the exchange of gifts at the deepest points of human life, or else the demonic absence of care for the other, dehumanizing people and their world, is revealed. In the second section I move beyond the sharp opposition of the ways towards fulfilment as we find it in extreme situations, and concentrate on the gifts we are or are not capable of exchanging with each other as we speak about love as a fulfilment of our ordinary lives. This part utilizes the trilogy Three Colours Blue (1993), Three Colours White (1994) and Three Colours Red (1994), made by the Polish director Krzysztof Kieślowski. It examines how love is given and received, while looking at the conditions in which love manages to surpass a self-destructive   Jakub Deml, Zapomenuté světlo, Nakladatelství Jota a Arca Jimfa, Brno, 1991, 117.



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isolation and the manipulation of others and by others in our different power games, and succeeds in fulfilling human life. Guiding Desires in extremis according to István Szabó and Vladimír Michálek Desires are not the deepest expressions of our uniqueness. As René Girard has reminded us, we learn them from other people by imitation. And yet there is something personal in deciding which examples we are going to follow. Extreme situations, then, show in the sharpest light our choices, even though not all elements of these choices have been available to our conscious mind. In them and through them, we become the people who we are and contribute to the amalgam of the cultures in which we live, accommodating the spirits of the desires that have guided us along the way. As was said earlier, films, with their ability to create an illusion of immediacy, are capable of including in the span of their narrative the beginning, the process and the result of the journey, and to show us the characters involved both from within and from without. Thus we can follow how the guiding desires are understood in the long term and in a plural perspective, and in the films I have chosen to examine, also what sort of ‘ultimate’ horizon they are placed against. Mephisto István Szabó’s film Mephisto (1981) represents the peak of Hungarian post-war cinema. It won several major international prizes, including the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 1982. Mephisto approaches the theme of ultimate fulfilment from a negative point of view, as a ‘drive by ambition and vanity to achieve fame, status, and some degree of power’, where the main protagonist  See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 146.   In the early 1980s Hungary was still firmly among the countries of the Soviet bloc, with the Warsaw Pact troops stationed within its borders and with the painful memories of suppression from 1956. However, as the society started to experience the erosion of its relative economic prosperity, Communist Party control of cultural life loosened. This brought a new wave of experimenting about how far the newly gained freedom could be taken. In the cinemas the screening of Soviet films decreased and was exchanged for Hollywood films. The Hungarian film industry benefited from this situation as co-production with western film producers became possible (this was also the case of Mephisto, a co-production of Mafilm Objektiv and Manfred Durniok Production). At the same time, Hungarian censorship had a relatively lax attitude. For a detailed analysis, see John Cunningham, Hungarian Cinema: From Coffee House to Multiplex, Wallflower Press, London, 2004, 116–141.   See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082736/awards (accessed 21 May 2009) for details of these awards.  

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realizes only too late ‘that in the process he has compromised his integrity and become the victim of political forces that he thought, in his naive self-delusion, he could manipulate to his advantage’. The film is based on a novel of the same name written by Klaus Mann, son of Thomas Mann, in 1936. The novel and the film portray an artist, strikingly resembling Klaus Mann’s former brother-in-law, the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who is willing to sell his soul to the Nazis in order to continue his art. But there is also a common inspirational source to both, namely Goethe’s Faust, to whose Mephistopheles we shall return when examining the main self-identifying role of the leading protagonist. Klaus Mann’s novel was first published in Amsterdam. It became famous in Western Germany in the early 1960s because of the legal case Gründgens’s adopted son brought against it, more than a decade after Mann’s death. The novel was adapted for the screen by István Szabó and Péter Dobai, and the story, portraying a gradual descent into complete personal corruption against the backdrop of Nazi Germany, took on in the time of Communist totalitarianism both a new particular and more universal meaning. Szabó deepens here his interest in limit situations, where he can show that people, swept along both by the streams of history and in their striving to cope with the problems this entails, exercise full personal responsibility for their choices. The film starts in Hamburg in the 1930s, where an ambitious young actor, Hendrik Höfgen (Klaus Maria Brandauer), seeks every possible way to success. The first scenes depict him as a clumsy manipulative person guided by a single strong love, of his image as a star. He cannot bear applause for others, as he feels it should belong to him. An opening remark from an actress, whom Hendrik pretends to adore, because he wants what she has, namely to be the adored centre of attention, sets the tone: ‘You are very talented; I am sure you will be able to show us soon how talented you are.’ The talent that would gradually show in Hendrik, however, has no border between the stage and the rest of his life. This defect becomes central to Szabó’s film, as he shows how a man sick with desire to promote himself falls like a demon and how his story of destruction unfolds against the backdrop of a sick society embracing Nazism.    Tomasz Warchol, ‘Patterns of Central European Experience in István Szabó’s Trilogy and Sunshine’, Social Identities 4 (2001), 659–675; here 661. Szabó may also have had a personal interest in the theme. Like Nohavica, he was listed among the collaborators of the Secret Police. For more details see www.interfilm-akademie.de/04festivalreports/ festivalreports-2006/04budapest.html (downloaded 28 May 2009).    Klaus Mann (1906–1949) became posthumously famous in West Germany because of this scandal. After seven years of legal hearings, the West German Supreme Court banned his book Mephisto. It continued to be available abroad, and, because of the antiwestern propaganda, also in East Germany. The ban was lifted and the novel published in West Germany in 1981. See Angus Wolfe Murray, ‘Movie Review: Mephisto’, in www. eyeforfilm.co.uk/reviews.php?id=4938 (accessed 18 November 2008).

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The name of the film, Mephisto, comes from the role Hendrik Höfgen had desired to play throughout his life, a role ‘for which he has been born’, as a Nazi general will later remark. For Goethe, Mephistopheles is the devil’s representative who seeks to alienate Faust from God by purchasing his soul with the promise of serving him in his desire to understand and thus master the world. For Hendrik, playing the role of Mephistopheles gradually alienates him from the little that still enables him to reach beyond himself. Thus it seems that the relationship between Faust and Mephistopheles is placed within one figure. The two roles are two sides of one person, the actor Hendrik Höfgen, who is selling himself in order to become his role, so suited to his character, and who would become what Goethe’s Faust in the end did not, the devil’s slave. At the beginning of the film Hendrik takes classes from a black dance teacher Juliette (Karin Boyd), whose wild and unconditional love he accepts, while returning much less. There are two obsessions that overlap each other: how he looks, and how capable he is of persuading people to act the way he has orchestrated for them. Next we see Hendrik desperately trying to make contacts with influential people and convincing them that he would make a different theatre, ‘where everyone will be involved, the workers, the dockers …’. The left-wing propaganda serves the first part of his rise above his status. But the audience is not led to believe that Hendrik, when he directs his Revolutionary Theatre, and plays in it, will be guided by convictions, whether Communist convictions this time, or later Nazi convictions. He is guided by his single desire, to which he has sold his soul: to be better than anyone else, to act like an angel, and if need be, like a fallen angel. At this time he meets, charms, and soon marries Barbara (Krystyna Janda), a daughter of the man in charge of the State Theatre, while Juliette remains his mistress. Klaus Maria Brandauer brilliantly performs the role of a man who feeds on all he can get from other people, love and skill from his dance teacher, new position, status and wealth from his wife and her family, support and admiration from his friends. Yet Hendrik does not give the same back. The fulfilment of his life cannot be made dependent on the well-being of others. It is to come from realizing his ambition alone. Theatre spotlights represent the light enlightening Hendrik Höfgen’s life, the only light worth following. Yet they focus not only his success, but also reveal that which he truly is and is to become: his most successful role, Mephistopheles from Goethe’s Faust.

  In Goethe’s ending, Faust, taming the war and forces of nature, experiences a moment of rest and satisfaction, and thus dies, but while Mephistopheles tries to grab Faust’s soul, he cannot make Faust his slave, as the ultimate Lord intervenes, recognizing the value of Faust’s unending striving. See Faust II.11934–11937.   Hendrick tells the story that when he was 12 and sang in a church choir, he thought he could sing better than anyone else, like an angel. This ambition, unfulfilled in his childhood, casts a shadow over his whole life.   Compare with Goethe, Faust I.1806.

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Hendrik has achieved his dream and received the role he had always wanted in the State Theatre in Berlin, while Jews, including his former friends, are beaten on the streets, his mistress is afraid to leave home, and his left-wing colleagues emigrate or move to the underground to prepare for resistance. His wife begs him to leave with the rest of the family, but he sees the rise of Nazism as an opportunity for his star to rise even higher, because he also has the ability ‘to transform himself’, as he explains to his new influential patron and friend, a leading minister of the Third Reich and later a Nazi general (Rolf Hoppe). The General is charmed by this incarnation of Mephistopheles, and uses ‘his Mephisto’, as he calls Hendrik now, even in private, for the wider stage of the Nazi state. Hendrik renounces his former connections, divorces Barbara and marries her former friend, who is now also a Nazi supporter. For the public of the Nazi society, he fully embraces their lifestyle. As a reward, he is put in charge of the State Theatre. At the same time, Mephisto is ascribed to him as a role ‘for which he was born’, and the General does not want him to step out of it into another role, not even in his private life. All else must be stripped away. While Faust in Goethe’s tragedy promises to Mephistopheles that if he finds rest and becomes satisfied at any single moment of his life, it will be his last and he will then become the devil’s slave,10 Hendrik needs to sell all the little that is left from his bonds to other people, and when he reaches perfect isolation, his life is spent. He becomes the devil’s slave. This is expressed in the film both as internal bondage – there is nothing human left under the mask of Mephistopheles but fear – and as external bondage, for the General now has the actor Hendrik Höfgen in his power. Szabó masterfully shows us how theatre and real life are interwoven, and how the first, when it ceases to be art, exercises control over the second. The General even wants his Mephisto to come in full costume to the party meetings. He even sends his men in such costumes to his wedding party. There must be no relationship, no private life outside the role. All else has to be given up. The General confides in his Mephisto first, and claims that he wants to learn his art. At this time, paradoxically, there remains a small part of the life of the man outside the actor, represented by Hendrik’s attempt to protect his Jewish butler, to secure a safe passage out of the country for Juliette, or to investigate where his former colleague Otto Ulrich has disappeared to. But these steps outside irritate the General, who has quickly ceased to be a pupil and become a master of diabolic manipulation. His grip on Hendrik’s fate tightens after each attempt by Hendrik to relate outside his role. Each time the General is less patient with him, and warns him that if he sticks his nose into other people’s business, he will be ‘crushed like a beetle’. When Hendrik gives away even the last links to some form of human solidarity and resolves himself into life in Mephisto’s mask, he has nothing more to give. Hendrik’s life is spent, yet the Nazi theatre wants to rise still higher. One sick lost  See Goethe, Faust I.1700–1706; 1710–1711.

10

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soul is not enough; it must create a sick lost society, a sick lost world; it must shock and it must awaken in people an ease when it comes to mass killing. At the end of the film Szabó removes the dividing line between theatre and real life completely. At an opulent Nazi celebration Hendrik is briskly taken away by the soldiers with the command that the leader wishes to speak to him ‘outside’. However, outside now, there is only death. The film makes us feel that Hendrik’s life has been spent as he cut off the last humanizing links. Now he will have to act Mephisto in the play directed by the General. He is taken by car to the Olympic Stadium. We see him from the top as he is sent into the huge arena. We hear the General’s voice, booming from the loudspeakers, as if from above – as if he were the voice of God and its echo: ‘Here you will perform your Mephisto – to rule Europe.’ Hendrik has to take centre stage with the blinding search lights of a helicopter guiding him to the middle of the arena, while the loud echoing voice asks: ‘How do you enjoy the real light?’ Hendrik wants to run away, but there is nowhere to escape the blinding light. The film ends with his scream: ‘What do you want of me – I am only an actor!’ while the light intensifies and so does his fear.11 Szabó does not offer any hint of final consolation. The diseased desire for fulfilment has eaten up not only all Hendrik’s relationships, but in the end, with them his whole life, while the poison Hendrik’s ambition produced has moved on to a wider stage. We are left with death as the ultimate fulfilment of a journey that leads so radically away from God. The big arena where Hendrik finds himself in the end reminds us of the images of the last judgement. Klaus Maria Brandauer’s stunning performance adds an extra emotional depth to the film, showing the consequences of the Faustian selling of one’s soul to the devil through the inward life of a person at the core of a totalitarian regime in the twentieth century, in the world, as we are told, where the merciful Lord does not interfere.12 11   Warchol, concentrating on the moral and political aspects of the narrative, summarizes the ending revealingly: ‘Lost in the dark and empty arena, dazzled by the tracking lights, Höfgen, now at the peak of his career, is finally realising he has lost control over his act. The spotlight he has been seeking has now found him, his only audience his sardonic, triumphant captors, his “pure” art harnessed to serve Nazi propaganda, his soul claimed by the Mephistopheles he only played but could never be. Disoriented and humiliated, he covers his eyes against the blinding light. Bewildered, as if ignorant of his complicity in his fate and on perpetuating evil, he wonders, “What do they want of me? I’m only an actor”. The film ends with an over-exposed frame of Höfgen’s face, his identity just a “negative”, his image “overexposed”, his true self exposed to the public, his status and role too paralysing to endure.’ Warchol, ‘Patterns of Central European Experience in István Szabó’s Trilogy and Sunshine’, 663. 12   ‘Using that dramatic historical context, Szabó develops themes that are both universal yet very characteristic of the Central European experience, not only during, but especially after the time-frame ... [of the film]: the confrontation between the individual and the oppressive political systems, the price of rebellion and conformity, the dynamics of the precarious relationship between the artist and the state, art and ideology.’ Warchol, ‘Patterns of Central European Experience in István Szabó’s Trilogy and Sunshine’, 660.

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Forgotten Light Vladimír Michálek’s film Forgotten Light offers a different story and a different perspective. The guiding desire here is ultimately good, and despite all the hardships involved in following it, it restores relationships, including the relationship with God. It is interesting that in a country with such a low adherence to religious traditions as the Czech Republic, Forgotten Light was one of the more successful Czech films of the past fifteen years. It was first shown just before Christmas 1996 and was a success both with the cinema-going audience and with critics. It won three awards at the annual Czech Film and TV award ceremony for films from 1996, for best actor, best supporting actress and sound, plus nominations in the categories of best film, best director, music and screenplay.13 Michálek’s film Forgotten Light is based on a motif from a novella of the same name by Jakub Deml (1878–1961), a Czech Catholic priest, poet and writer. Deml’s autobiographical book, which tells the story of a Roman Catholic priest struggling with the authenticity of his vocation and with the church hierarchy of his time, was first published in 1934. However, Vladimír Michálek’s film from 1996 moves the time-frame of the story, which is now about a priest struggling during the Communist persecution to keep his church open and his faith alive. Milena Jelínková, the Czech–American scriptwriter of Michálek’s film Forgotten Light, transformed the surrealist form into a symbolic narrative and attempted to catch the atmosphere through creating an almost completely new story, set over fifty years after the events in Deml’s book. The film script has other inspirational sources, in particular George Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest, a book that is quoted in the film.14 The film concerns a priest, Father Holý (Bolek Polívka), who was originally responsible for a number of rural parishes. Now, due to state and church politics, he has been left with just one, and even that is threatened with closure. The film is set in 1987, when there were no obvious signs that within two years the Communist regime would be toppled, and the Church free from external persecution. The film was shot in a village in Northern Bohemia and in the town of Ústí nad Labem, but could apply to any other place in Czechoslovakia of the time. The first scenes seem to suggest that people in the village do not, with a few exceptions, understand Father Holý’s efforts to save the church, and that they have forgotten the Light of Christ that the church represents. At first sight, unlike the lonely life of Father Holý, their lives seem to be more fulfilled. They have each 13  A list of winners of the Czech Lion awards can be found at www.cfn.cz/ceskylev. For 1996, see www.cfn.cz/ceskylev.php?rocnik=1996 (accessed 5 August 2007). In this section I rely largely on Tim and Ivana Noble, ‘Christ in Contemporary Czech Film’, Journal of Reformed Theology 1 (2007), 84–106. 14  Georges Bernanos, Journal d’un curé de campagne, Pocket, Paris, 2002 (originally published 1936). Various English translations exist, e.g. The Diary of A Country Priest, trans. Pamela Morris, Fount, London, 1977.

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other, families, children, friends. They have a tangible human love, even if they no longer care about religion. The visual richness of the film seems to suggest that even the beauty of the landscape is somehow part of who they are. Father Holý does not belong to their lives. He is different, and therefore isolated. They do not go to church, and do not expect him to enter into their territories either. Initially there are only a few exceptions. Count Kinský (played by Antonín Kinský, a real count) and his family offer at least some support to Father Holý. Although hesitantly, the Count is willing to check with Father Holý the collapsing roof. His wife, who works in a school for the disabled, brings the children to the church. But even to them he is a stranger. It is interesting that none of them call him by his first name.15 Other people who come into contact with Father Holý are even more distant. Marjánka (Veronika Žilková), a mother of three, who is ill with cancer, refuses his help and tells him that he does not know what real life is about. Her husband regards him with suspicion. Her friend Mrs Klímová, who works in the bar and is used to talking to anyone, keeps conversations as short as she can, apart from complaining about her husband, the local Jewish atheist sculptor, Mr Klíma (Jiří Pecha), whom she considers almost equally useless as the priest. In the film the main cause of the external struggle for meaning is the Communist officials who persecute the church. The local policeman, the state secretary in charge of religious affairs, the building inspector Mládek, the Communist leader Vacek, all seem to follow their own interests that have grown out of perspective at the expense of others. Those who persecuted Kinský’s family in the 1950s and who killed Father Holý’s uncle have been succeeded by ‘hunters’ like Vacek, who now take the lives of animals, even if they no longer have the power to shoot people. The local policeman lets us know that for him the life of his dog has a greater value than the life of the priest. The state secretary and the building inspector do not take lives directly; instead, they take the space for life, and, in particular, the space for the life of the church, as they want to use it for their hobby, model airplanes. Unlike the other people, whose lives have love and therefore fullness and meaning, there is no redeeming side to these characters in the film, no meeting point, no genuine human encounter, no story of remorse, and no consolation. Father Holý’s efforts are opposed not only by the relevant state officials but also by the church officials, who collaborate with the Communist regime. This has painful connotations, as the church is supposed to testify and represent the light of Christ, but here they seem to testify and represent more its absence. The collaborating priest, Kubišta, and the vicar general who presides over Pacem in Terris,16 the pro-regime association of priests, manage to have their buildings 15

  His first name is used, paradoxically, only by Father Kubišta, his fellow seminarian, who now collaborates with the regime. 16   Pacem in Terris was established in 1971 as a Catholic alternative to the Christian Peace Conference. Even though this organization was condemned both by the Vatican and by Cardinal František Tomášek of Prague, until 1988, 5 per cent of priests in Bohemia and

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expensively renovated, but at the price of preventing Christ’s light from being seen. They have all the externals that Father Holý is losing, but there is no life in them. The film does not go for the easy generalization that all church hierarchy is corrupt. In fact, Michálek refers to the situation when the dioceses had no bishops, as in order to weaken the Church, the State did not allow any episcopal consecrations. He shows the isolated archbishop, who is watched even by his own driver, but who still succeeds in reopening Holý’s church after it has been closed, and regaining state permission for Holý to practise his ministry. Thus the light is not forgotten by all church officials, only by some, and it is interesting that the church is ultimately not left to their mercy. Father Holý’s life is tested further by the fire, on a literal level burning down the repaired roof of the church, and on a symbolic level, taking away hope for healing of a loved fellow human being. We are led through a process where we have to forget the external ‘lights’ in order to go deeper and to understand the struggle to love and to be truthful to God’s light. In the film, relationships are key to the change in Father Holý’s life. It happens when Marjánka allows him to take her by car to the oncology unit in Ústí, and a loving friendship develops between the two, or when Mr Klíma persuades the local builders to repair Father Holý’s church roof and stands at his side against the policeman who wants to report it. In this developing trust in each other as decent human beings, questions of faith are asked and these people are open to share why they think that the light that shines on everyone had disappeared from their lives. Mr Klíma talks about his devout ancestors who died in the Holocaust, and his puzzlement at what they talked to their God about at that time. There is a moving scene with Marjánka towards the end of the film. She is back home from hospital, lying very ill in bed, dying. Father Holý gets some lard to rub into her chest to help her breathe more easily, and she jokes with him that it might be like the extreme unction from him, but she does not have strength to rub the lard on herself. As he does so, she asks him to tell her one of his dreams. He recounts a dream that he had. Not long ago I went into an abandoned church and I saw God there, praying. He was praying to humanity. He said: ‘Human being, if you exist, show yourself!’ Then he saw me and said ‘Man! A human revelation.’ I said ‘But you created me, why are you surprised?’ And he replied ‘No one’s been in this church for such a long time. I began to doubt, but now I can say with certainty. Man exists. I have seen him.’

Slovakia, and 10 per cent of priests in Moravia were members of it. See S.P. Ramet, Nihil Obstat: Religion, Politics and Social Change in East-Central Europe and Russia, Duke University Press, Durham, NC–London, 1998, 124.

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Marjánka, having heard this account, asks Father Holý, ‘And is there a God?’ Holý looks at her and answers, ‘I have met him in my dream’. This unusual twist, where what is problematic is not the existence of God but of humanity, is revealing. It is not God who has forgotten about us, but we who have forgotten about God. And in forgetting about God, we have also lost sight of what it is to be truly human. But in discovering our own humanity through each other, the question of God returns, and brings, if not healing, then at least consolation that we are not alone, even for the most difficult parts of our journey. Here we find the light that enables us to see God not in certainties, but in a free-floating dream. Yet, as the film seems to suggest, the dream might be more real and more fulfilling than the imagined fixed certainties. The conclusion, however, is given a slightly more positive tone. In the case of Father Holý the kenosis has a counterpart, the process of becoming a man, ‘a human revelation’, as the film puts it. It is an open opportunity for encountering God, God’s love incarnate in human love.17 Part of the struggle that Father Holý faces is to learn to live with loneliness.18 Doubting and struggling with the dark moments of uselessness, with the meaning of his priesthood that involves celibacy and makes him different and separated from others, he follows in Christ’s footsteps as he seeks how Christ’s love can be transformed into something real and tangible for the real people around him. He is frustrated by his limits, and again, perhaps like Deml, realizes that: ‘We still love, even where we have ceased to believe and cannot hope.’19 And love forces us to hope, makes us believe, and if we can no longer do it for ourselves, we can still do it for others. The light that is invisible for us is visible for those whom we love. The security, the visibility of light, as well as the clarity of one’s faith journey, are not given. The moment of glorification is missing in the film as well as in the book. But in the film, at least, we get a gentle confirmation of faith and hope that are reborn through love. After Marjánka’s death we see her husband and sons crossing the frozen snow-covered fields as they go to church. In the final scene, they are together with the rest of the congregation in the church, which is being repaired. Mass has just finished. The congregation stays, because people are afraid that Father Holý wants to leave, that he has no more strength to go on. Their love renews his love and gently changes his decision, enables him to stay, and thus the congregation to go home. We are left with Father Holý standing alone once again when they go, but differently alone than at the beginning of the film.

17

  We can find here echoes of the words of St Irenaeus: ‘The glory of God is a human person fully alive.’ ‘Gloria Dei vivens homo’, Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. IV, 20, 7. 18   I draw here on Tim Noble, ‘Portrét kněze v současném filmu’ (Portrait of the priest in contemporary film), in Teologie a Společnost, 6 (2004), 38–40. 19   Deml, Zapomenuté světlo, 117.

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Kieślowski’s Journey towards what is Real In this section I shall concentrate on a trilogy by the renowned Polish film director Krzysztof Kieślowski Three Colours Blue (1993), White (1994) and Red (1994). The title corresponds to the three colours of the French flag and to the three ideals of the French Revolution: liberty, equality and fraternity. Kieślowski shows in these films that even in our fragmented world, where most often we experience neither liberty, equality nor fraternity, these ideals are not empty or forgotten. And he traces how they can make ordinary human life fulfilled. For this reason I have chosen his Three Colours as a complement to Szabó’s Mephisto and Michálek’s Forgotten Light, films that placed their heroes in the extreme circumstances of totalitarian regimes. Kieślowski speaks about what comes after these regimes have fallen, in the chaotic world we inhabit together, where the borders are no longer external or clearly defined, but rather cut through our hopes and desires and relationships, all of which may or may not make life fulfilled. Liberty The opening film of Kieślowski’s trilogy, Three Colours Blue (1993), is concerned with the value of liberty in the life of Julie de Courcy (Juliette Binoche), a woman who feels she has lost everything when her husband, a leading composer, and her daughter Anna die in a car accident. Kieślowski introduces the theme of liberty via negativa, through Julie’s attempts to deny any place to life, to pay it back for its cruelty. There are, however, different narratives present together in the film. First, there is Julie’s denial. Her first reaction in hospital as the only survivor of the accident is to attempt suicide. But she cannot bring herself to do it. The second best is to eradicate every reminder of her happy past that would trap her in the illusion of life’s goodness. She prepares their beautiful family house for sale, but before leaving it, as if needing to defile the past, she calls Olivier, her faithful friend and also a composer who is in love with her, makes love with him and then lets him go, together with the past. The only ‘souvenir’ she cannot resist taking from her daughter’s room is a lamp with hanging pieces of blue glass. This goes with her to the new, small flat she finds in an anonymous area of Paris. Nobody will find her there, and therefore she reverts to her maiden name, Vignon. The second is a narrative of music and colour. In fact, they are two narratives that often coincide. It is interesting that for Blue, the score was written before the film, and that Kieślowski, who greatly appreciated the work of Zbigniew Preisner, tried to fit the story of the film into the music rather than the other way around.20 Preisner’s music, attributed in the film to Patrice de Courcy, Julie’s dead husband, 20

  Kieślowski described it as ‘the film [being] an illustration of the music’. See Paul Newall (2005), ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’, at http://www.galilean-library.org/ manuscript.php?postid=43845 (accessed 7 August 2007).

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often breaks through Julie’s mind, and when this happens she is usually surrounded by blue light, or she swims in blue water in the swimming pool. She wants to block the music out, as a scene when she lies in the water in a foetal position with her fingers in her ears so powerfully shows,21 or as we see when Julie watches how the scores of Patrice’s unfinished Concert for European Unity are torn by a recycling machine into which she threw it to destroy it. The blue colour, on the other hand, represents an unnoticed bridge between the past and the present life. Julie’s daughter Anna used to live in a blue room. When Lucille, a prostitute whom Julie, by her indifference, saved from being moved out of the apartment block, comes with flowers to thank her and walks through her flat, she stops at the blue lamp, saying: ‘When I was a kid I had a lamp just like this ... and I forgot all about it.’ But this is precisely what Julie cannot do. Life, carried by music and accompanied by the colour blue, is coming back, despite her attempts to consume it and thus to destroy it, like the blue lollipop meant for her daughter that, when she discovered it, she compulsively licked, bit and swallowed. The next mediating figure is a flute player sitting in front of a café where she goes daily. He plays music remarkably similar to that of Patrice.22 It is in that café that she is first discovered by Olivier, a lover empty of lust, free to give Julie time to stop running away from life, something she is not capable of yet. There is a shot focused on Julie dissolving a sugar cube in her coffee, absorbed in the very small world to which she has restricted herself. The third narrative is that of remembering. Julie is panic-stricken when she discovers a rat having babies in her flat. She first wants to move to ‘another place just like this one’, but learning that it may take time, she needs to find a way to cope. At a physical level, her neighbour’s cat and Lucille’s offer to clear up afterwards ‘solve’ the problem. But Julie needs to know whether she was always so afraid of mice and rats. Therefore she goes to visit her mother in a care home. It seems to be the only contact from the past that Julie has not terminated. But her mother suffers from memory loss caused by Alzheimer’s, and does not recognize who Julie is when she turns to her for help. Julie’s little attempt to recollect the past, inconsistent with her denial of the past, is in fact giving us a different thread of the story to follow.23 Her desire to find a freedom from life is also a desire to

21

  See Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’, 1–2.   When she asks him where he heard it, he replies that he makes up all sorts of things. This is an example of a theory of Kieślowski’s that ‘different people, in different places, are thinking the same thing but for different reasons’. See Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’. 23   ‘The subtlety in Blue that can easily be missed, however, is that the process Julie goes through is exactly the reverse of what is superficially occurring. Speaking of the part, Binoche said that “when you’ve lost everything, life is nothing”; but what we see made plain throughout the movie is that she has not lost everything.’ Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’. 22

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find a freedom for life. And, as usual, the colour blue and the music make a bridge between the life lost and found. The plot next develops through music. Olivier has accepted the task of completing Patrice de Courcy’s Concerto, something that Julie learns from TV when she arrives at a night-club after Lucille’s call for help. She is furious, feeling that no one has the right to do so. And if she cannot destroy the music, she wants at least to take control of it. But in the film, neither art nor life is allowed to be either destroyed or controlled. Julie learns this as she finds a former lover of Patrice, who is expecting his child. Incapable of hatred, Julia proposes that the child ‘should have his [Patrice’s] name and his house’, which fortunately has not yet been sold. The only thing that is missing from it is the mattress on which Olivier made love to Julie. Olivier had taken it. Unlike Julie, he needed to remember. And thus, through Julie’s return to Olivier, his memory, his music and his love, we move to the final scene of the film. Olivier’s welcome remains free, which at this stage means that he has to accept Julie without allowing her to dominate. He refuses her finished score, saying: ‘No, the music can be mine. A little heavy and awkward but it can be mine.’ But the memory and love can be theirs. Julie rings again and asks whether Olivier still sleeps on their mattress, and whether he still loves her. She goes to him, and they make love, now both of them committed, and thus the music with its libretto based on 1 Corinthians 13 becomes alive, and Julie is free to let go and to cry. Equality It is interesting to note a change of genre as we come to the second part of the trilogy. The inequality between Blue and Red on the one side, and White on the other, is expressed by a shift from drama to black comedy, a genre traditionally reserved to a lower class of entertainment. Maybe for this reason this film is considered inferior to the other two.24 The via negativa Kieślowski embarked upon in Blue continues now, as he speaks about equality by means of exposing humiliation. The film starts with a scene of a big suitcase moving round on the luggage belt in an airport. Later we learn that there is a man inside the suitcase, a Polish hairdresser Karol Karol (Zbigniew Zamachowski),25 who is coming back from Paris as a complete loser. An earlier part of his story is interspersed with the suitcase scene. He is asking the way to where the court hearing is taking place in Paris, at which his beautiful French wife, Dominique Vidal (Julie Delpy), is going to divorce him. From the time Karol first appears on the screen, we can see that he does not belong to the setting. He is grey, inelegant, moves clumsily, and as he 24

  See, e.g., Cummings (2003), ‘Krzysztof Kieślowski’, at http://www.sensesofcinema. com/contents/directors/03/Kieślowski.html#b18 (accessed 5 August 2007). 25   The name is chosen as a tribute to Charlie Chaplin. See Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’.

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raises his eyes, in a moment of small pleasure while he observes a bird’s flight, the pigeon defecates on him. This sets the scene for the following events. Karol not only loses his marriage, but he is stripped of his dignity. Dominique’s reasons for divorce are that Karol is not capable of satisfying her, of making love, of consummating their marriage. All this has to be translated to Karol, as his French is too poor. And when the judge asks: ‘Is your wife’s testimony faithful to the facts?’ Karol’s reply is translated as follows: ‘In a manner of speaking. But when we met in Poland and even here, at the beginning, I think I gave my wife pleasure. It’s only afterwards. We haven’t made love since we married. We stopped … I stopped being able to. It’s just temporary.’ At this, the judge gestures him to sit down, but Karol protests: ‘Where’s the equality? Is my not speaking French a reason for the court to refuse to hear my case?’ At that moment we see in the background Julie from Blue coming to the courtroom to search for her deceased husband’s lover. And we are led to remember that the following dialogue is equally relevant to Julie’s search for fulfilment as it is to Karol’s, as the judge asks him: ‘What is it that you want?’ And Karol, with his eyes on the happy white wedding scene that he cannot hold on to, replies: ‘I need time, your Honour. I want to save our marriage. I do not believe the love is gone.’ But then the conversation moves back to his inability to perform, Dominique states that she does not love him any more, and in the next scene we see a white toilet and Karol vomiting into it the indigestible remains of love that could not be given and taken. Another theme that runs through the film is related to economic equality. The question arises as to whether, if Karol were to have money, and the confidence, affluence and power that come with it, would Dominique’s love for him be reborn? Is it true that ‘these days you can buy anything’? This theme already comes through the scenes following the divorce, when Karol has to learn that, as he is, he has no standing in this elegant French world and his credit card is confiscated and his account frozen. He even loses the keys of Dominique’s beauty studio, as he tries to spend the night there and once again fails not only to satisfy her, but also to understand that she needs him, and if she cannot have him as a fully equal partner, she must get him out of her system. Dominique is not, however, seeking economic equality, and this is a part of Karol’s not understanding. Love is not consummated when both have equal possibilities to dominate. When Dominique threatens Karol that she will set the studio alight and call the police, he leaves. On the way to the underground he sees something he can love, a small white bust of an innocent girl. But he has no money to buy it. Money becomes the centre of his life, first in the underground, where he plays Polish songs on a comb, earning coins. There he meets another character, also inelegant in comparison to the French, Mikolaj (Janusz Gajos), a Pole who has lost the motivation to live. He sits with Karol for a while, offers to take him back to Poland, even to earn a lot of money, if he is willing to kill a man who wants to die but is incapable of killing himself. But first Karol wants to show him how beautiful his ex-wife is, and ringing her in front of her house, he hears her being

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satisfied by another lover. Moreover, from the little change he earns, the phone machine charges him two francs more, which he furiously fights for. The twofranc coin and the stolen bust are the only two items he takes with him back to Poland, when the next morning Mikolaj smuggles him there in the suitcase. Back home, the suitcase is stolen by a gang of airport thieves. Finding nothing in it, they break the bust and fight for the two francs, which finally Karol manages to keep. So he can start again. Coming back to his friend and colleague Jurek (Jerzy Stuhr), his beaten face and body recover, he glues together the girl’s white head, and starts helping in the hairdressing studio. But this is only a start. We foresee a bit of the future as he walks along the river, spins his two-franc coin in his hand and it sticks to it. At that moment there is a shot of an exhausted Dominique coming to a hotel room. We do not know yet that this is when she came to Poland after the orchestrated funeral of Karol, by then a rich man, fluent in French as well as in making love. The second part of the story follows Karol’s rise to prosperity in the postCommunist Poland, where he quickly learns how to trick and how to move in the underworld, and how to benefit from the coming capitalism. He again meets with Mikolaj, this time agreeing to kill the man who wanted to die, only to discover that the man was Mikolaj himself. Here, however, despite his belief that ‘for money you can buy anything’, he prefers to shoot a blank shot and offers life as well as the money back to Mikolaj. Mikolaj takes the life but not the money, and the next scene we see is the two of them playing like children on a frozen lake, Mikolaj shouting that, now, ‘everything is possible’. Karol and Mikolaj become business partners. When Karol accumulates enough property and his French is passable, he decides to bring Dominique back. The only way he sees of doing this is to fake his own death, attracting his exwife to come because of the inheritance promised to her, while in fact involving her in his fake death so that she will be put to jail. She comes for the funeral. He watches her through binoculars to see her crying. There follows a scene in the hotel, where the now successful Karol awaits her in bed. They make love. The following morning he flies to the Philippines and she is imprisoned. Now she is ridiculed, stripped of her dignity. She needs interpreters. She is found not only guilty, but also mentally imbalanced as she keeps saying that Karol is alive. Thus equality is achieved, but in the form of revenge. Karol is thus able to erase his humiliation only by paying it back to Dominique. But this attitude can lead only to the imprisonment of love. Liberating love, fulfilling both, has to be negotiated differently. The story remains unresolved. In the final scene, Karol, standing outside the prison, watches Dominique’s monologue of love in her prison cell and he cries. The maxim that ‘these days, you can buy anything’ fails. Love is not something one can gain or lose by affluence or manipulate by power. As to love

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and hope, we can say both that if the love is not consummated, and that is much more than a physical act, its hope dies, and where there is love there is hope.26 Fraternity Three Colours Red (1994), the last film of the trilogy, and in fact the last film Kieślowski produced before his sudden death, is often seen as the work in which he concentrated all the basic components of his thought, poetics and style, as well as his search for truth, formulated now more and more as hypotheses on it. It concentrates on the value of fraternity, or, more exactly, fraternity as depicted in the film enables us to ask what Kieślowski saw as the essential question: ‘Is it possible to repair a mistake which was committed somewhere high above?’27 The film shows us that fraternity, unlike liberty or equality, can be found in this world, that ‘in everybody’s life there may appear someone who opens his or her window that has been closed to the world’.28 In this case it emerges in the relationship between a retired judge, Jacob Kern (Jean-Louis Trintignant), and a young model, Valentine Dussaut (Irène Jacob), after both of them are able to distance themselves from the illusion of close communication created by technology. The film starts as if inside a telephone conversation. We see a dialling hand, the signals passed on through wires, but also through rails, through water, through the underground. And then we move to Geneva and see a law student Auguste (JeanPierre Lorit) in his room dialling a number that is engaged, and next Valentine’s home, where a phone rings, as her boyfriend Michel wants to control what she had been doing and with whom. Both Auguste and Valentine surround themselves with red, be it a red jeep, a red ribbon, red tablecloth or a red jumper. They move so close to each other, and yet remain so far apart; always a break of a second prevents them from meeting. First, instead of their encounter, Valentine meets ‘an older version’ of Auguste, Jacob Kern. Tired, driving back from a fashion show,   ‘Indeed, Kieślowski’s real point in White is that the maxim “these days, you can buy anything” is false: love cannot be bought and cannot be described in terms of equality. Moreover, it is much more than consummation, which is hinted at by Dominique early in the film when she tells Karol “you don’t understand that I want you. You don’t understand that I need you.” Only at his funeral does Karol realise that something is wrong with his attempts to achieve parity when he observes that Dominique is genuinely upset. Delpy herself noted that the result of his machinations was that “both characters are locked up in their own prisons – his because people think he is dead. They still love each other, though, and hence there is hope.”’ Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’. 27   In Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’. 28   ‘Fragments of homily given by Rev. Prof. Józef Tischner on March 20, 1996, during the funeral ceremony’, in Tadeusz Miczka, ‘We live in a world lacking idea on itself: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Art of Film’, in Kinema, Spring 1997, http://www.kinema. uwaterloo.ca/micz971.htm (accessed 7 August 2007). 26

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she knocks down his dog Rita, and despite the initial distance and repulsiveness, a friendship develops between the two. Valentine helps the lonely and bitter man to give up his habit of monitoring private telephone conversations, making him realize that he cannot take responsibility for the complex and often broken relationships that surround him, and that he has no right to intervene. With this, he is capable of retracing with Valentine his personal history and she returns him to the moment of his life where it seems he stopped being able to love. For his part, Jacob Kern fills Valentine’s loneliness, as all her other important relationships are indirect and happen in phone conversations, and thus lack physicality. He appears more as an old friend or as a father figure, although it is made clear in the film that they help each other to love again – and to love properly for the first time. It has been suggested that the judge represents God. For example, he asks Valentine to stay, telling her ‘the light is beautiful’ just as he is bathed in it. Yet this ‘God’ undergoes transformation himself. Kern then admits that he had made judgements in the past that he now believes to have been wrong, acquitting a guilty man – a sailor – who has since led a good life. Valentine tells him that he had therefore been saved, but Kern wonders about how many others he might have judged differently, even others who were guilty. ‘Deciding what is true and what isn’t’, he says, ‘now seems to me a lack of modesty.’ This passage is key to understanding the trilogy and Kieślowski’s oeuvre as a whole: all judgements are too early and everyone can be saved by the smallest of gestures. This lesson applies particularly to Kern, whose liberation from the confines of his objectivity is symbolized by the breaking of the glass we see him trapped behind on many occasions.29 There are kids throwing stones at his windows, once as Valentine is visiting. He tells her that, in their place, he would do the same and that this goes for most of the people he has judged. In their circumstances, he would steal, he would kill, he would lie, something he did not know when he judged, but now does. At that moment Valentine asks him,if there is someone he loves. Jacob first replies no, but then, asked if he ever loved, he says: ‘Yesterday I dreamt, I dreamt of you. You were 40 or 50 years old and you were happy’, as if his own life was mended by that dream. Later in the film we learn that he did love a woman who betrayed him with another man. He felt humiliated and could no longer love. He stopped believing in love. But the story did not end there, even if its resolution does not happen in one life-span. There is a parallel narrative inserted between Valentine’s and Jacob’s encounters, namely that of Auguste, their neighbour, a young lawyer by now, who, like Jacob Kern, has lost his girlfriend. Because of the eavesdropping of Jacob Kern and his trial, Karin, Auguste’s girlfriend, meets another man at the court. Auguste, like Jacob a generation before, sees them making love from outside their 29

  Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’.

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bedroom window. He is desperate, and wants to get rid of everything, even of his dog. Yet he is not going to repeat Jacob’s life. Something important is happening with the lives of people as they flow into each other. Valentine feels it, and is both scared and attracted. Maybe she is the woman Jacob Kern never met. But she is also the woman Auguste Bruner meets. It happens on a ferry voyage, in which we encounter the heroes from all three films. Karin and her new boyfriend travel in the same direction but on a separate boat. There is a storm at sea, Karin’s boat sinks, and the two are lost. The ferry sinks too, and there are very few survivors. These include Julie and Olivier from Blue and Karol and Dominique from White, which suggests that the two couples are together, and finally Valentine and Auguste. Watching the news with Jacob Kern, we see them together, looking after each other. The trilogy concludes with the images of love that survived the various storms, and in which people learned to be present to each other.30 And perhaps we can say that, in this saving act, there is hope for the uniting of Europe, as the full circle of the trilogy is made and we listen again to the Concert for the Unification of Europe from Blue and its chorus drawn from 1 Corinthians 13. As Tadeusz Miczka pointed out, in Kieślowski’s films ultimate fulfilment does not take away contingency and ambiguity from life, nor does it absolve people from their decisions and from taking risks in the world that is moving under their feet. In this world, their attitudes matter, their relationships matter. Life cannot be privatized. It does not permit itself to be exchanged for images of life, whether constructive or destructive. The music and the colours of life break through such images, make them crack. They merge into each other. Loss and gain are always surprisingly close to each other. The ultimate goes beyond ideas,31 as much as love reaches beyond faith and hope. Concluding Remarks The first impression that there was a sharp contrast (or even an opposition) between what is of ultimate importance and what satisfies human life in Szabó’s Mephisto and in Michálek’s Forgotten Light gave way to a more profound understanding 30   ‘You can do anything you want, but if you don’t have love, it’s pointless. And you can try to help everyone, but if you’re not there, it’s pointless.’ Newall, ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’, 4. 31  Miczka’s title ‘We live in the world lacking idea on itself’ is a quotation from Krzysztof Kieślowski in Stanislaw Zawiśliński, Kieślowski bez końca (Kieślowski Without End), Wydawnictwo Skorpion, Warsaw, 1994, 31. Compare also with T. Sobolewski, ‘Peace and Rebellion. Some Remarks on the Creative Output of Krzysztof Kieślowski’, in Polish Cinema in Ten Takes, eds E. Nurczyńska-Fidelska and Z. Batko, Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe, Łodz, 1995, 123–138; and with Danusia Stok, ed., Kieślowski On Kieślowski, Faber and Faber, London, 1993, 54.

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that even in the extreme situations these two remain connected. Instead, a gap was revealed between human desires running wild and their ability to sustain the one who desires. In Mephisto Hendrik Höfgen’s desire for self-fulfilment was unmasked as self-destructive, as a human life cannot be fulfilled in isolation from loving relationships. Without them there is nothing noble in Hendrik’s spirit to keep him striving, to lead towards salvation. Fear, humiliation and death become the fulfilment when the selfish ‘I’ is the ultimate. In Forgotten Light Father Holý had to give up all the different ways of fulfilling his life, but these sacrifices are not glorified. His decision for celibacy meant no wife or children, no house of his own and a profession where he would be vulnerable and alone. During the film even his ministry disappears, as he loses his last church and state permission to practise as a priest. He struggles with meaninglessness as he could not save either the church or even a single human life from the forces of death. And yet Father Holý’s kenosis, giving up of self, bore the opposite fruits to Hendrik Höfgen’s selfishness. Here life was renewed. We could, though, see that not every self-emptying is restorative. With Julie or Jacob Kern, giving up fulfilment took on pathological forms, centred on death. With Father Holý kenosis was not a journey of mortifying oneself but of being made alive. He kept asking what was ultimately important and even if he struggled for himself, for others he kept seeing it in his dreams: the community like a boat being held on the stormy waves; remaining human, and keeping the holy ground inhabited by love. Partly as a complement and partly as a contrast to the extreme situations dealt with in the first part, Kieślowski in his trilogy moves away from the externally difficult political territory and shows the multilayered tragi-comedy of the search for fulfilment in the relatively stable societies of Western and Central Europe now seeking some sense of European unity. He used a kind of via negativa. Each of the films started with what the main characters did not have, with the satisfaction that was missing from their lives, and through their lack of fulfilment, the search for love as the ultimate fulfilment started. It often looked more as if love was searching for people than vice versa. In this process Julie in Blue had to learn that true freedom does not come through liberating herself from love, Karol and Dominique were faced with the fruits of mistaking love for equality, or, in practice, for seeking to ensure that they get back from the other at least as much as they give. Jacob Kern’s story offered an extended horizon, where we were invited to see the repercussions of the dead ends of love leading to bitterness and refusal of life. Fraternity had a different place in the films than liberty or equality. It could more directly initiate conversion. Nevertheless, both liberty and equality remained important and they re-emerged in the journey when people underwent a more radical conversion. They gave direction to the human search and enabled people to be discovered by love. Love emerged in the films through confusion. Like a storm, it challenged people’s values, convictions and attitudes, while it opened new possibilities for life that would have remained unopened otherwise.

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This chapter raised a further question concerning ultimate fulfilment: how can genuine fulfilment be discerned while one still has time to do something about it? Plērōma, the fullness grounding human lives, had a particular name in this chapter: love. The appropriation of this fullness, then, could be seen in terms of conversion towards love. This was not, however, a conversion as, for example, Bernard Lonergan would classify it, ‘moving from one set of roots to another’,32 but rather embracing one’s roots at a deeper level, learning to take nourishment from them by finding in them nourishment for others. This takes me to another important area that will need further investigation, namely relationality. In this chapter it seemed that communication of the ultimate fulfilment to others preceded one’s conscious appropriation of it. The ultimate fulfilment could be appropriated only in relationships, through relationships and by relationships, without ever becoming distilled from them as a kind of pure essence. In the following chapter I shall examine how relationships with people and with the rest of creation participate in the in-breaking of the beatific vision and what the role of the Spirit is in this process.

 Bernard Lonergan, Method in Theology, DLT, London, 1971, 271.

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Then love will be the sole translation of the eternal eucharist: abundance of life is abundance of human and creaturely relations, in heartfelt communion with God. Pure abundance, with nothing lacking and no deformations, is expressed – is glorified – as a perfect act of thanksgiving, the praise of the universe. All sacrifice will be abolished, for sacrifice is not the religious act par excellence. It is not the sacrifice of human victims, or of substituting victims, or even the sacrifice of oneself in historical and crucified love, but only a gift, without victims, that constitutes the eschatological eucharist.

Theology approaches the immediate through reflection, and thus, when it comes to love, translates the discourse of love into a discourse about love. Here we need to be aware of the paradoxical nature of such representation: the two seemingly oppositional qualities – the presence and absence of love – both already become part of the single discourse about love. Then, unlike in the eschatological vision sketched by Luíz Carlos Susin in the opening quotation, the translation is always partially also a betrayal of what is translated. There are different forms and degrees of such betrayal, some given by the fact that speech about love, while claiming to be representative of love, can be unfaithful to the actual experiences of love and thus embody the absence of love. Others are given by the idolatrous desires to make speech about love autonomous. Still others come from the very nature of our language, which both tries and refuses to hold on to the endless possibilities of meaning inherent in the experiences it testifies. When theologians are aware of these traps, speech about love becomes fruitful. Together with the limits of our possibilities, theological speech about love reveals also its active quality breaking through our search for what we cannot ultimately own. For Susin, love as an eschatological celebration, thanksgiving, an eternal eucharist, is no longer expressed sacrificially, as giving up something, someone or even oneself, but as an abundance of life and of relationships in God. His understanding of love shows what a return of the created world into the divine plērōma can mean. In this chapter I shall examine theological perspectives in which the gift of love is connected with its giver, the Holy Spirit. I shall investigate where and how, according to them, the Holy Spirit’s gift of non-sacrificial eschatological   Luíz Carlos Susin, Assim na Terra como no Céu: Brevilóquio sobre Escatologia e Criação, Vozes, Petrópolis, 1995, 192.

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love breaks in and initiates a renewal of the relational unity of the creation in communion with God. As in the previous chapter, where ultimate fulfilment was first approached from a negative point of view, as a process of losing integrity, in this chapter I shall start with distorted notions of conversion, where the images of ultimate fulfilment are radically estranged from that Spirit of love. Only then, with the vulnerability of a Christian point of view in mind, will I move to the theological notions of the Spirit as the giver of love and as the giver of conversion. Then I shall return to the problems spelled out in Chapters 2 and 4. In embracing that which is good in the world and opposing that which is evil, does one also embrace God, even if a conscious relationship with God is missing? When we remember the past with acceptance and gratitude, is God’s redemption at work despite the absence of conversion to Christ, or despite a conscious choice to stay outside the Church? I shall ask how such attitudes, found in our present culture, reveal the lost dimension of growing towards fullness and about the nature of that fullness. Estrangement of Love or Ambiguity of Conversion? St Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 reminds us that it is not so simple to have love. He teaches us that prophetic powers, understanding of mysteries, knowledge, even faith, generosity and the courage to stick to one’s hope can be loveless. But as such they have no real value. Then, through a beautiful exposition mostly of what love is not, but also of how love is and what love does, he makes us realize that we do not have love, at least not yet in its fullness. Love requires and gives a dynamic process of conversion. Love is relational from the beginning to the end. It goes beyond ideas. Even more radically, love reaches beyond faith and hope. Now I shall examine a different phenomenon, namely conversions to where it is possible to believe and to hope, but not to love, where love is refused to those who do not conform to the same belief and hope. Here, I shall argue, the pre-ultimate reality has taken the place of the ultimate. In the post-Communist countries the newly gained political and religious liberty attracted, especially at the beginning of the 1990s, numerous foreign missionaries, especially Pentecostal preachers and healers from America and Germany. Some of them proclaimed a type of conversion where one aspect of life was taken out of context with the others, and where loving one’s neighbour was conditioned by the neighbour’s faith. They contributed to the negative image of the churches and of Christianity in Central and East Europe. When people failed to find a new wholeness and meaning in their lives that outlasted the ecstatic experiences at the mass evangelizations, they felt that their openness to religion was a mistake. When they realized that healing or conversion did not come in the ways they were promised, their conclusions served to strengthen the old cultural prejudice that all Christianity is at best a naive superstition.

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In our contemporary culture, conversion is seen as change. We could say with Bernard Lonergan: ‘Conversion is a matter of moving from one set of roots to another.’ And yet there would be a profound difference in the understanding of what that move means. For Lonergan, conversion occurs only inasmuch as people discover what is inauthentic in them and turn away from it, inasmuch as they discover what the fullness of human authenticity can be and embrace it with their whole being. For our post-Christian contemporaries there is at least a latent possibility of changing roots from better to worse. The New Testament concept of metanoia as a change of heart, as a turning away from evil and doing good, something that comes across in Lonergan’s interpretation, does not seem to work in our majority culture. Sensitive to fundamentalism, the culture despises changes in people’s beliefs and conduct if the good emerging from these changes feels either dubious or inaccessible. Lonergan’s emphasis on changing roots, then, presents another difficulty for people who feel uprooted already, namely the lack of continuity in one’s personal life and search. It is true that Lonergan’s definition allows two interpretations. One emphasizes that the shift is a shift of focus and thus sees conversion as an expansion of the possibilities present in the pre-conversion life. The other stresses embracing what is seen as exterior to the former life and former identity, and what operates as its substitute. This is where the problem lies, both when people are incapable of integrating their pre-conversion personal history and mark it as completely godless, and when their new affiliation leads them from a greater to a lesser freedom, and from a wider to a more exclusivist love. In speaking about the new life in Christ, the New Testament and Christian classics emphasize not only continuity, but also discontinuity with the past. Erasing one’s past, however, is a task that ultimately cannot be done, and in the pre-ultimate perspective leads to distortions. A conversion that seeks a total break with the past seems like an attempt to inhabit no time and no place, being bound by no relationships. If a process of integration does not happen at least during the later stages of the conversion, the conversion as a shift from the real to the unreal threatens not only the religious life, but also the social and mental life of the people involved. The discontinuity with the past when one is open to a new depth of meaning and truth becomes an appropriation of the past in the new situation. In  Lonergan, Method in Theology, 271.  I have discussed this problem in Ivana Noble, ‘Conversion and Postmodernism’, in Bekehrung und Identität: Ökumene als Spannung zwischen Fremdem und Vertrautem, ed. D. Heller, Verlag Otto Lembeck, Frankfurt, 2003, 45–68.   See Mt 3:2; 4:17; Mk 1:14–15; Lk 13:3–5; 17:3; Acts 2:38; 3:19; 8:22; 26:20.    In the New Testament we find both emphases, on the need to give space to the new life (Mt 9:16; 26:28; Mk 2:21; 16:17; Lk 5:36; 22:20; J 13:34; 1 Cor 5:7; 11:25; 2 Cor 5:17; Gal 6:15; Eph 4:24; etc.), as well as on embracing both the new and the old (Mt 1:22; 5:17; 13:52; Lk 5:39); but we also have to be aware that the new life has an eschatological dimension (Mt 26:28; Mk 14:25; 2 Cor 5:17; 2 Pt 3:13; Rev 3:12; 21:1–5).  

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the post-Communist countries this means dealing with both religious heteronomy and secular autonomy and their abuses, in order to make possible a meaningful integration of the previous cultural models, and to recognize God at work in them both. The Spirit as the Giver of Love A large part of the Central European population accepts at least the existence of some form of spiritual power, even if they do not hold a belief in a personal God. But what is the spiritual power? In the films discussed in the previous chapter there were different spiritual powers in operation, different guiding lights. Hendrik Höfgen in Mephisto was not a materialist. Rather, he was a religious man worshipping himself, making sacrifices to play the role ‘for which he has been born’, as the Nazi general said. He was the follower of the spot-light that placed him at the centre of attention and that revealed his talent for every audience, even the devil himself. For Szabó the demonic powers were represented by Nazism spreading like a sickness through German society. But again they were not primarily materialistic powers. Their hunt for domination, for being like gods, was deeply spiritual, even though it embodied the fallen spirits. The forgotten light in Michálek revealed to us a Christ-like kenosis, the process of becoming ‘a human revelation’, where divine love became visible in and through human love. It was a counter-story to Mephisto, where a very different spiritual power was operating. The clarity ascribed to extreme situations at first seemed lost in Kieślowski’s accounts of the human search for a love not dominated by any external forces, even political dictatorships. But this was only the first impression. We were led into the worlds of human interiority, where the spiritual and relational sides of life were central. Again we saw spiritualized forms of self-destruction in Julie’s life or in Jacob Kern’s life, and the decomposition of relationships in the case of Karol and Dominique. Then, there was a different Spirit operating in a stream of new chances, new opportunities to allow a genuine love to break into their worlds. In the films, the identification of the ultimate fulfilment as love relied on some aspects of a theological anthropology, but not on an explicit teaching about the Holy Spirit. At least in western theology the association of the Holy Spirit with love is common. Thus we can speak theologically about the ultimate fulfilment as a gift of the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, according to Orthodox teaching, the specific personal contribution of the Spirit is stressed, bringing creation, redemption and deification into relationship, and out of love making people fit to participate in all aspects of this divine gift. In this light the following problems re-emerge and demand attention. First, there is a discrepancy between immature freedom misunderstood as self-indulgence, and freedom grounded by and open to the relational nature of love. Then there is the question of where and how the love that  Compare with Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses IV, 20, 7.



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is the gift of the Holy Spirit is given, and how far an identification of the activity of the Spirit with that of the Son and of the activity of the Son with that of the Church is sustainable. Finally, there are two areas that need closer examination, one being the kenosis of the Spirit and the other the distinct but united missions of the Word and the Spirit. Human Freedom without Love In the previous chapter we saw a modern analogy of the story of the fall. Hendrik Höfgen in Szabó’s Mephisto also desired to reach beyond himself by himself, and instead of becoming his own master he became his own slave, or more precisely a slave of his own choosing. Thus fear, humiliation and death became the fulfilment of a selfish life in which at the end no love was found. Here is the challenge presented by Szabó: nothing noble is left in the spirit of Hendrik Höfgen, nothing that would take him away from the hands of the devil that he played, and with regard to whom he was incapable of differentiating between the stage and real life. His freedom was consumed by his self-care and every trace of love in his life died. No merciful Lord emerged to interfere. The complete human freedom implied in his complicity with his own fate led to his complete bewilderment and destruction, which included not only his soul, but also his country. Theologically we can say that the image of God has turned into an idol of God. Hendrik’s vision of the ultimate fulfilment excluded others as well as the divine Other, for his self filled the empty place reserved to them by the Spirit. Human freedom in its fallen state became a freedom to cut oneself off from relationships, a freedom not to care, a freedom to deprive and destroy. Freedom ceased to be a part of love and love a part of freedom. Thus the alliance between love and freedom, through which God constituted creatures capable of love and freedom, was broken. But, as Szabó showed, there is always someone complying with the breaking, someone co-responsible for its consequences. I say co-responsible as we need to take into account structural sin, the fact that we are born into a broken world in which it is impossible for us, who are thrown into the sinful structures of this world, not to sin. Yet we are responsible wherever our freedom enters and the demand that our love cares and cultivates is not taken away. As Luíz Carlos Susin says, creation is the space of ‘alterity’ in relation to God. An alterity out of which a genuine relationship can grow is, however, also an alterity capable of alienation, of refusing God and of destroying itself and its world from within. In creating humankind with their freedom, God let go of omnipresence and omnipotence, as the fruits of human freedom could not be completely predicted.



  ‘And the creation of humankind presupposes God’s supreme renunciation: in creating freedom, God lets go of his omniscience, his omnipresence and his omnipotence. God renounces knowledge of the future of human freedom.’ Susin, Assim na Terra como no Céu, 190.

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With the gift of freedom, human beings receive responsibility. Responsibility consists of a response, acceptance and appropriation of the divine gift of love, allowing it to guard the given freedom. Otherwise the freedom would be illusory, as in the mythical narrative of Adam and Eve, when they decided that they were free to eat the forbidden fruit, free to alienate themselves from a life-giving dialogue with God and with each other in their world, in which they were meant to grow in freedom. Losing the seed of likeness to God in their image, losing love, their freedom became an illusion of independence. But as the subsequent narrative about Cain and Abel testifies, the illusion of independence that was still dependent on others became violent to others, and prevented God from communicating divine love and care through them. In Cain’s murder the fall is fully consummated. It is not in the act of love between Adam and Eve, from which their offspring came, but in the act of murder, annihilating the other who stands in the way of the illusory freedom of the egoistic self. Olivier Clément puts it like this: When the self turns away from God, it can no longer contain its nature, it becomes an individual – atomos! – in which the nature is broken up. … We are side by side but our faces are closed towards each other, wearing an alien expression that cuts us off from the whole of creation. The impulse of thanksgiving in nature has become a blind force. Instead of working through us to find its fulfilment in God, it plays with our closed and misshapen selves, rattling these ‘atoms’ together … we seek security through mastery of the world – and it becomes our tomb. … Individuals tighten their grasp on freedom, but it is a freedom devoid of meaning, attaching itself to outward things and becoming enslaved to them and to the desire for possession which they arouse. The only thing that can put an end to this impossible and ultimately destructive love is death.

But death as such is not redemptive; it does not bring us back to our sources of life, freedom and love. Freedom in service of the desire to be the absolute is not free. When the absolute is identified with the self, it brings destruction. Here Szabó remained within the pattern of the dominant historical experiences of Central and East Europeans who had lived through Nazism and Communism. Hendrik Höfgen is not redeemed at the point of his capture. Death does not give an absolution, but in death his true self is exposed to the public, ‘his status and role too paralysing to endure’,10 and what goes beyond death remains invisible from our side. Christian teaching about human freedom being free when filled with love has to take into account the negative possibility that Szabó’s Mephisto reminds us of, and not rush into cheap notions of general pardon that would in fact renounce the 

  See Gn 4:1–16.   Olivier Clément, On Being Human: A Spiritual Anthropology, New City Press, London–New York–Manila, 2000, 11–12. 10  See Warchol, ‘Patterns of Central European Experience in István Szabó’s Trilogy and Sunshine’, 663. 

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freedom they want to uphold. Clément offers a theological rephrasing of what we have seen at the end of Mephisto: When God banished humankind from the Tree of Life, it was so that they should not go into eternity while in the state of separation. If they had been thrust just as they stood into the divine Light, that state (which we also share) could have been nothing other than hell, hell beyond recall.11

Christian theology accepts that we do not see what is beyond death,12 yet it holds on to the images of faith testified in the Scriptures, celebrated in the liturgy and interpreted in the tradition. With them it approaches the present time and confirms that every aspect of our life matters. Every relationship, every decision we have taken, or that has been taken with regard to us, every word, every intention or desire, remind us that we live with them facing the loving God, the source of our freedom, whose Spirit calls us to become the daughters and sons of God. If we are to be free, in some form we have to undergo a confrontation with all our loves betrayed, confidences ridiculed, offers of help refused, so that these fruits of our broken identities do not last forever, and a genuinely new life becomes possible. Clément points out that when God took on flesh and died, ‘in order to fill death itself with his love and turn it into resurrection for the human race’,13 not only a physical death as such took place, but a death to our alienation, to the exclusion of the Creator from creation. The problem with Hendrik Höfgen in Szabó’s Mephisto is that he does not face the misery within himself, and he refuses his responsibility. His response is a desire to get out of the situation he cannot bear, to hide, at least behind words, behind excuses. Thus he is at the beginning of the narrative about the expulsion from ‘paradise’ rather than at any stage when an inner conversion of attitude emerges.14 As in the biblical narrative, this does not close his future. It just makes it impossible to remain forever in the harming illusion of his freedom deprived of love. At this stage it exposes the fact that our freedom is not free if it does not involve freedom to reach beyond ourselves in disinterested love, both horizontally – in relationship to our neighbours, and with that to all the created world – and vertically in relation to God.

 Clément, On Being Human, 14.  As Heb 11:1 says: ‘Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.’ 13  Clément, On Being Human, 14. 14  Compare to Gn 3:10–13; for restoration of freedom and love see, e.g., Rom 8:2–4; Gal 5:1; 1 J 4:7–12, 16. Olivier Clément summarizes the position as follows: ‘Sin, which is regression more than transgression, weighs down and disfigures this love, but the fact remains that love is possible and in its humble way can respond to the love of God that sets us free.’ Clément, On Being Human, 57. 11

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Although theology does not see beyond death, in the traditions of hope and faith that it interprets it reaches further than most of our present cultural images. It allows us to complement the story of human self-destruction by other, equally valid narratives, like the restoration of the image of God in us, and the narratives of the sanctifying works of the Spirit. In the image of God, even after the fall when we lost the likeness to God, there are resources for the likeness to be renewed, as the image is relational.15 This means that it is possible for someone else to enter into the solitude and depravity we have created within and around ourselves. There can be other love filling our empty well and helping it to produce love once more. Perhaps this, too, is in St Paul’s mind when he says: Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Rom 8:26–27)

The saints are those who love God, at least eventually like Paul did, those who are called by God, and renewed, because God has entered into the image of God they bore, and made it possible for this image to be conformed to his Son.16 By means of a continuous relationship with God, the likeness becomes renewed and we progress towards deification. Human cooperation is not abolished. God does everything from God’s side and we have to do everything from our side. This includes rediscovering the interpersonal rather than individual nature of our humanity, and with that the association of freedom with love for others and for God. Human nature or any single part of it cannot possess the image on its own. It demands communion with others and the ‘wholesome diversity of love’,17 in which the image is made actual. Only then are humankind and the world as a whole transfigured.18 The creation, redemption and deification narratives complement each other here. God gives and fulfils the promise of a future, a messianic future, where despite our fallings we can be united with and through divine love. By sending his Son to heal fallen human nature and to renew the life of the world, God does not   See Stăniloae, The World, 97.   In Paul’s language, ‘justified and glorified’ by God; see Rom 8:30. Although this passage from Romans has given foundations for Augustine’s and Calvin’s concepts of exclusive predestination, the text from Rom 8:26–30 as such does not give any answer to whether the saints that form a large family include eventually all humankind or not. And thus it leaves the possibility of conversion willed and initiated by God at least latently open to everyone. 17   Stăniloae, The World, 101; here he quotes Vladimir Lossky, Orthodox Theology: An Introduction, St Vladimir’s Seminary, Crestwood, NY, 1978, 67. 18   See Stăniloae, The World, 107. 15

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take away the initial gift of freedom. Rather, as the parable about the prodigal son expresses so vividly,19 the freedom is fulfilled and transformed by love. We could speak about a liberated freedom in which our humanity is reconstituted, as God restores the space of created alterity from within and makes alive in us the image of God through the Holy Spirit. Love outside and inside of the Body of Christ Now I come to the problem of the full identification of the activity of the Spirit with that of the Son and of the activity of the Son with that of the Church. There are two sides to this problem. The first is an unclear relationship between the implicit and the explicit symbolic meaning ascribed to these activities. The second is the exclusivism such identification generates. In Chapter 2 I concluded that whenever our secular or post-secular contemporaries embrace all that is good in the world and oppose all that is destructive or evil, from a Christian point of view, they bear the fruits of the Holy Spirit, even if they do not adhere to our Trinitarian faith. Similarly, in Chapter 4, I came to the conclusion that where there is a grateful acceptance of the past, there is a possibility of salvation and eternal joy. This possibility becomes actualized in what we can call an existential conversion. In our cultures, however, that often does not include a return to religious traditions, their rituals, doctrines and institutions. Again, we can refer to the works of the Holy Spirit that transfigure and vivify humanity lived in loving relationships, in which, however, there is no explicit relationship to a personal God. The human authenticity that is lived here is lacking roots, as are the fragments of symbols speaking about love, conversion and gratitude, which are passed on in the cultures that reject the religious traditions in which the symbolism is rooted. This uprootedness can be used as an argument against recognition of the works of the Holy Spirit outside Christianity. Exclusivists regard the works of the Holy Spirit, including love, as dependent on the correspondence to what they accept as truth-statements about their faith. These are measured against the background of a particular orthodoxy. These positions are usually supported by a particular reading of the text ‘By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.’20 This is part of the Johannine polemic against the Gnostics, which in the exclusivist interpretation becomes decontextualized and generalized. There are also texts by St Cyprian, defending the unity of a church endangered by schismatic tendencies. In an exclusivist interpretation, they are extrapolated to those who are not Christians: ‘He will not arrive at the rewards promised by Christ who deserts the Church of Christ’, or ‘Who has not the Church 19

 See Lk 15:11–32.   1 J 4:2–3a.

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for mother can no longer have God for father.’21 This is then read to imply their separation from any redeeming or deifying activity of God. At first sight, it seems that the exclusivist position could also find support in Irenaeus, who says: ‘For where the Church is, there is the Spirit of God, and where the Spirit of God is, there is the Church and all grace. For the Spirit is the Truth.’22 But his line of argumentation develops the other way round: So without the Spirit there is no seeing of the Word of God, and without the Son there is no approaching the Father; for the Son is knowledge of the Father, and knowledge of the Son is through the Holy Spirit. But the Son, according to the Father’s good pleasure, administers the Spirit charismatically as the Father wills, to those whom he wills.23

Still, we are left with the question whether there is something like an autonomous gift of the Spirit. An answer to this question will shed light on both sides of the problem of the identification of activities. Vladimír Michálek, working in Forgotten Light with an explicit Christian symbolism, offers us an interesting if paradoxical insight. In his narrative, we encounter signs of different gifts of the Spirit both in the lives of the priest, Father Holý, and in the lives of people who are eager to demonstrate that they have nothing to do with the Church and with Christianity. Father Holý has faith and a relationship with God that they do not have. But Marjánka and her family, Mr and Mrs Klíma, the workers who in the end agree to repair the church roof, also have something that Father Holý does not have, a tangible love filling their families, friendships, even the beautiful landscape. Their gifts are specific but not autonomous. Michálek shows that, paradoxically, in its generosity the love of the non-Christians resembles the love of Christ, and thus the light of Christ shines on them. Father Holý believes in this love and recognizes its presence among them, as well as its absence among his church authorities (with the exception of the old cardinal). Without Father Holý, however, the light of Christ would remain unrecognized and still unconnected with the deeper levels of life it brings. If we want to avoid both sides of the problem coming from the identification of the Spirit’s activity with that of the Son and of the Church, we need to loosen the grip without losing relationships. Or, as I would want to propose, by loosening the grip, the relationships can be rediscovered. We can say with Yves Congar that the Spirit ‘remains transcendent to the Church he dwells in’.24 The sovereign activity  Cyprian, On the Unity of the Catholic Church, Manresa Press, London, 1924, VI.  Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses 3.24:1. 23  Irenaeus, The Proof of the Apostolic Preaching I, ACW [Ancient Christian Writers] 7, 52. 24   Yves Congar, ‘Le Saint-Esprit et le corps apostolique, réalisateurs de l’œuvre du Christ’, Revue de sciences philosophiques et théologiques 36 (1952), 613–625; and 37 (1953), 24–48; in English translation, ‘The Holy Spirit and the Apostolic Body: Continuators 21 22

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and freedom of the Spirit then means that the Spirit operates not only in the institutional forms of ministry and sacraments, but also through a variety of gifts and interventions outside these forms, and also outside the ecclesial structures.25 Two generations later, Michálek’s cultural example leads us to a more radical conclusion. We need to say that it is not in the Church alone that the Spirit rests, paradoxically in order to maintain that the Spirit rests in the Church as well. Then, for maintaining the relationship between the activity of the Church, the Son and the Spirit, it is important to uphold that not only the Spirit’s, but also the Son’s activity is delimited by the Church.26 Here I want to maintain that those who have the Spirit have also in some form at least Logos spermatikos. In a postChristian culture that draws on the Christian heritage, with the Logos spermatikos they have in some way also Logos Christos. This theological distinction comes from Justin Martyr. He differentiated between a diffused Logos spermatikos, given to every person and every culture by creation, and the full Logos incarnated, i.e. Logos Christos. Although the diffused Logos is ascribed mainly to pre-Christian cultures, it does not disappear after Christ’s coming, and as Logos spermatikos and Logos Christos are two modes of one Logos, there is a mutual relationship guaranteed. For Justin, for those who belong to Christ, it is still important to appropriate the works of Logos spermatikos, whenever they come across them. And on the other hand, we can say that the light of Christ shines on those who choose the truth and do right.27 In Forgotten Light, when the church institution stands on the side of the oppressors, and practically denies the love of God it should embody, it reveals itself as a parasite on the Logos Christos, whom it should represent, and on the gifts of the Holy Spirit given to the Church. The mediation of divine love through the institutional forms of ministry and sacraments, although valid and at times even fruitful (Father Holý’s ministry or the celebration of the funeral mass by the cardinal),28 remain unwanted, and thus incomplete. Father Holý lives out the of the Work of Christ’, in Congar, The Mystery of the Church, Helicon, Baltimore, MD, 1960, 147–186; here 178. 25  Congar, ‘The Holy Spirit and the Apostolic Body’, 177. A similar position was hold at that time by Walter Kasper; see Dogma unter dem Wort Gottes, Mathias-Grünewald, Mainz, 1965. 26   This position is also held by Dumitru Stăniloae, who, because of a strong pneumatological emphasis, opposes ‘an over-identification of Christ with the Church’. See Calinic Berger, ‘Does the Eucharist Make the Church? An Ecclesiological Comparison of Stăniloae and Zizioulas’, St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 51:1 (2007), 23–70, here 57. 27  See Justin, First Apology First Apology 27, 31, 67; Second Apology 78. 28  Here I make use of Augustine’s distinction between the validity and fruitfulness of sacramental mediation, used in the Donatist controversy. See Augustine De baptismo I.i.2. Compare with B. Leeming, Principles of Sacramental Theology, Longmans, London, 1960, 144–145.

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missing relationship between the Church in its particular inauthentic stage, and the love and human decency he finds in Marjánka and her family or Mr Klíma. Thanks to them he has the strength to stay in the Church, and thanks to what the Church should represent and what lies at its roots, his gift to the others brings something unique: a way back to the love of God. The exchange of the gifts also has its kenotic depth. Father Holý’s care cannot prevent Marjánka from dying of cancer. Mr Klíma’s friendship and artistic ability cannot save Father Holý’s church, and the decency of Kinský’s family cannot change the society all of them are living in. Nevertheless, within their limits and despite their limits, the Spirit of love moves and makes them love. Thus, paradoxically, salvation history finds its missing threads in the secular and the post-secular culture. Is it kenosis, then, that makes the paradoxical exchange possible? And if so, is it human, Christ-like kenosis, or also kenosis of the Spirit? These questions will be examined in the next section. Kenosis of the Spirit When we speak about kenosis in theology, it usually refers to self-giving, primarily to the self-emptying of Christ and those who follow Christ.29 However, if we observe where and how faith and hope return to our culture, Christ’s kenosis is not the only form of divine kenosis in operation. In renewing the bonds of love, making the exchange of the gifts within creation and between creatures and God again desirable and possible, we can also recognize what is theologically described as the kenosis of the Spirit. There is a silence of the revealer of the Father, and a self-emptying humility comparable with that of the Son. When we, creatures, experience the absence of the loving Father in the world, when we cannot find traces of goodness in our broken relationships, the Holy Spirit takes on our spiritual conditions in order to be able to give restoring love. The love of the Spirit says nothing about God, in order to be able to reach into the hearts of creatures for whom God has died. The love of the Spirit may even allow God to be understood as a vague spiritual power in order to gain those who have lost more explicit sources of faith and hope, and are left only with the fragments. In this sense we can say that it operates like Logos spermatikos, except that there are reminders of a lost Christian culture, of a lost Christian faith and hope within the fragments of symbolic understanding of love among our contemporaries. The love of the Spirit works through these fragments, moving creation towards its fulfilment, towards where, even in faith and with hope, we now see only dimly.30 Now I need to show that my interpretation as stated above is sustainable with regard to Christian orthodoxy and that the kenosis of the Spirit complements the 29

 See Phil 2:5–11.  Compare with 1 Cor 13:12.

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kenosis of the Son, and in a late secular or post-secular setting brings love, faith and hope back into a meaningful relationship. The concept of kenosis of the Spirit appears in both eastern and western Christian theology. For Eugraphe Kovalevsky, the love that rests and moves in our relationships comes from the relationships within the Holy Trinity, and already there it is associated with the eclipsing of the self: The character of the hypostasis of the Holy Spirit is to love by eclipsing himself, as the Father by forgetting himself loves the Son in whom he has placed all his joy, and as the Son is beloved because he puts off his own ‘I’ in order that the Father may be made manifest and the Spirit shine forth.31

Taking the centrality from the self and giving it to the other applies also to the relationship between God and creation, even if at a different level, as creation is not divine. God brings it out of nothing, and sustains it even when it becomes selfcentred, and thus opened back to nothingness.32 With regard to the creation, Sergei Bulgakov speaks about a triple kenosis in which the Holy Trinity is involved, about a triple ‘reception of unfullness by Fullness’33 for the sake of love. Susin reminded us of how the Father, as the absolute source of being, renounced a part of his absoluteness by giving freedom to the created other, making the other capable of a genuine relationship, but also, therefore, capable of alienation.34 Bulgakov identifies the self-relativization of the Father with his transcendence: ‘This transcendence of the Father is precisely His kenosis, as if a non-being in creation.’ The kenosis of the Son is, then, associated with his incarnation: ‘he, who is all in creation, diminishes Himself to the human form of being in the Divine incarnation, became the God-Man, entered the world as the lamb of God, sacrificed on Golgotha in the fullness of time’.35 And finally, the kenosis of the Holy Spirit is identified as giving up the fullness and the depth of Divinity in order to be communicable in the space-time conditions of creatures: The Father in sending the Holy Spirit in the creative ‘let there be,’ restrains the Spirit’s force and fullness, as it were – if only by the fact that He manifests them in time, in becoming. … The immeasurableness of Fullness is included in the measure proper to unfullness, which is inevitable for creation with its ‘evolution’ and growth.36  Eugraphe Kovalevsky, ‘Saint Trinité’, in Cahiers de Saint Irénée, 44 (Jan./Feb. 1964), 3, in Stăniloae, Revelation and Knowledge of the Triune God, 279, n. 29. 32  See Gn 3:19. 33  Sergei Bulgakov, The Comforter, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, MI, 2004, 219. 34  See Susin, Assim na Terra como no Céu, 190. 35  Bulgakov, The Comforter, 219. 36  Bulgakov, The Comforter, 220; he refers here to John 3:34 and argues that this is a contrast to the measure of the Spirit otherwise present in creation. 31

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The kenosis of the Holy Spirit lies in giving up the fullness and the depth of the Divinity that the Spirit is. For the sake of creation, the Spirit places the Spirit’s self under the conditions of creation, becoming the force of being and the giver of life that exist only as becoming. The Spirit is the striving towards the fullness that is not yet here and, to the degree that creation opens itself up to the forces of evil, the Spirit is endangered by destruction and emptiness. It is interesting that Bulgakov, writing as a dialogue-partner of Marxism, explains the space-time incompleteness of creation in terms of materiality, or more precisely, love of matter. Bulgakov says: ‘The creaturely eros is the son of Porus and Penia, of abundance and poverty, of fullness and emptiness; the creaturely all is formed out of nothing.’37 The Holy Spirit, by accepting the limits of creation, acts in it to sanctify matter. The placing of imperfection into the materiality of creation rather than into being prone to sin is, in Bulgakov’s case, related more to his context than to his theological sources. In a dialogue with Marxism, precisely what you want is a sanctification of matter. The kenosis of the Holy Spirit may, then, mean different things in different settings. And while Bulgakov tried to spell out its meaning against a Marxist context, it is important to ask how it shifts in a post-Marxist context. Could sanctification of matter be substituted for or at least complemented by the sanctification of a rootless search for spirituality? In what follows I shall try to explore the positive answer to this question. To do so, however, I still need to expand the notion of kenosis of the Spirit towards a greater relationality with regard to creation, too. The emphasis on the Spirit coming into our conditions and taking on our limits has to be complemented by a more positive view of the Spirit respecting our otherness and treating it as a good place out of which love can grow. Such a notion of the kenosis of the Holy Spirit is found in Yves Congar. According to Congar, ‘In order to reveal himself, he [the Spirit] did not, like Yahweh in the Old Testament and Jesus in the New, use the personal pronoun “I”.’38 The Spirit is not associated with words common to human experience, like the Father and the Son,39 and, according to Congar, is not revealed to us directly, but through what he brings about in us. The self-giving of the Spirit, where the Spirit’s self is eclipsed, is revealed to us as the Love of God, the setting and the mover of divine and divine–creaturely communication, but also the divine person by whom this grace is appropriated.40 The Word as divine knowledge and the Spirit  Bulgakov, The Comforter, 219–220.  Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit I, vii–viii; for the kenosis of the Spirit, see also ‘Le Troisième article du symbole. L’Impact de la pneumatologie dans la vie de l’Église’, in Dieu, Église, Société, ed. J. Doré, Cerf, Paris, 1985, 287–309, here 289. 39  Congar’s generation was not too concerned about the gender-determined symbolism. This became an issue a generation later due to the feminist critique. See, e.g., Elisabeth Johnson, ‘Spirit – Sophia’, in She who Is: The Mystery of God in Feminist Theological Discourse, Crossroad, New York, 1994, 124–149, 293–295. 40  Congar speaks about the Spirit as ‘the ecstasy of divine generosity and love’. Congar, Esprit de l’homme, Esprit de Dieu, Cerf, Paris, 1983, 80; for comments, see 37

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as divine love proceed eternally from the Father’s goodness, one giving to creation every concept as well as epistemological structure, the other revealing love as the content of the bond between the Father and the Son, and inspiring and moving creation towards such a bond.41 ‘The Spirit is the one in whom they are united, in whom they receive each other, in whom they communicate with one another, in whom they find rest.’42 Kenosis as the personal invisibility of the Spirit, then, has two sides. First, we can say with Congar that the Spirit remains silent about the Spirit’s own self, in order to reveal the bond of love between Father and Son, between goodness and knowledge. Second, in our own context it seems that the Spirit is at work even while remaining silent about the Father and the Son, about the bond of love between goodness and knowledge. In this sense we can speak about the eclipse of the Spirit’s relations to the divine communion of unity in order to descend to the level of the human world, and seek for what remained there of the image of God, outside the conscious relationship with God, to work through that, to initiate renewal of all relationships through that. Thus love is revealed, sometimes, as we can see in Forgotten Light, but also in Three Colours Blue, despite the nonvisibility of the bond between goodness and knowledge. Here, in my view, we are witnesses of the kenosis of the Spirit, the Spirit’s personal invisibility but also temporary silence with regard to the Father and the Son, with regard to the sources of our faith and hope and their unity. And yet, it is as if only in this invisibility and in this silence a genuine love as the ultimate possibility provoking a new life in the alienated creation could be given. The new life alter Christus does not emerge here as a conscious decision, as believing in the heart and confessing with the lips, as St Paul would say.43 Michálek’s film represents situations where the meaning of one’s life is hidden, its aim unsure, where redemption seems inaccessible, and yet love remains the only secure guide even for Father Holý’s faith. For his non-Christian friends, the Holy Spirit’s relationship with the Word and with the Father, so explicit for Paul and for the early Christians, has become implicit. This is the burden of our present forgetful culture. And the Spirit visits us in this hardened condition, communicating with us in ways we can still understand. Out of this our new life is born, out of fragmentation and loneliness, out of despair, out of the absence of God. This is also another way of saying that this new life is the fruits of the Spirit.

Elisabeth Teresa Groppe, Yves Congar’s Theology of the Holy Spirit, Oxford University Press, Oxford–New York, 2004, 80. 41  According to Augustine, the Spirit is the bond of love between the Father and the Son; see De Trinitate VI.10,11; according to Aquinas, love is the personal name of the Spirit; see Summa Theologica I.37. Similar positions can be found also in the writings of Anselm, Richard of St Victor, or Bonaventure. 42  Congar, I Believe in the Holy Spirit III, 148. 43  See Rom 10:8b–10.

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As we can see in Michálek’s Forgotten Light, with love comes the question of how one passes from non-faith to faith, from non-hope to hope. This is what Marjánka on her death-bed asks Father Holý: ‘And is there a God?’ Holý looks at her and answers, ‘I have met him in my dream.’ Thus the exaltation of the Spirit also happens in the film, but in a minor key. The silence of the Spirit where Marjánka did not allow the word about God to be spoken in her heart turns into a modest communication. Two Hands of the Father With the tentative return of faith and hope on to the scene we need to ask how the uprooted spiritual longings in contemporary culture are brought to some kind of soil from which they could gain lasting sustenance. We can talk about their being sanctified by the Holy Spirit. But does this mean that the Holy Spirit brings them back into contact with the Logos and with the Father? And in what sense would the Logos spermatikos also witness to the Logos Christos in a post-Christian culture? So far in this chapter I have opted for a theology recognizing distinct but not autonomous gifts of the Spirit, arguing that if we loosened the identification of the Spirit’s activity with that of the Son and of the Church, the circulation of life in the latter two might be improved. If we maintained that those who have the Spirit have also in some form at least Logos spermatikos, and are thus not separated from Logos Christos, it would give us a better possibility for interpreting experiences of divine love both as transcendent and as immanent with regard to the ministry and sacramental life of the churches. While speaking about the kenosis of the Spirit, I concentrated more on the first aspect. Now I need to bring both back into relationship. The theology of the Holy Spirit, whom we understand as giver of love but also as a person eternally manifesting the divinity, can help us to keep together the classical paradoxes: the Christ and the Spirit distinct but united, their activities in the world distinct but united, their mutual relationship and relationship with the Father hidden as well as revealed. My main concern now is to trace the symbols of the mutuality and equality between the Son and the Spirit, and their activities in the world. These would help us to understand at a deeper lever that the love of Marjánka or Mr Klíma is not a smaller gift of God than the faith in Christ that Father Holý manifests, but also that, although these are distinct gifts, neither of them is an end in itself. According to Irenaeus, God created the world with ‘his two hands, the Son and the Spirit, the Word and the Wisdom’.44 These two hands signify also two missions45  Irenaeus, Adversus hereses 4.7.4; see also 4.20.1.   The idea about two missions comes from the Scriptures, e.g. Gal 4:4–6; or J 7:37– 39; 14:26; 15:26; 20:21–22. See Kilian McDonnell, The Other Hand of God: The Holy Spirit as the Universal Touch and Goal, Liturgical Press, Collegeville, MN, 2003, 196. There is a variety of ways in which this idea is developed within Orthodoxy. While Vladimir 44 45

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towards the world, cooperating towards one whole, but each in a distinct way. One becomes visible to us in the incarnation, although having in mind Deml’s and Michálek’s contributions, we could say that in our majority culture, Christ, ‘the true light, which enlightens everyone’, that ‘was coming into the world’ (J 1:9) has been forgotten. The other mission, the mission of the Spirit, does not have an incarnated visibility. Being spirit, the Holy Spirit knows the spiritual reality directly, and communicates directly with the Father and the Son. For us, to whom the spiritual reality is not transparent, the Spirit undergoes kenosis. The Spirit adjusts to our level in order not to lose us. The Spirit starts working where we are in order to expand our horizons and possibilities. As St Paul says, ‘for the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. … So also no one comprehends what is truly God’s except the Spirit of God.’46 The Holy Spirit pours divine love into our hearts, and when God – meaning for Paul the Father – searches our heart, the Spirit’s gift, the Spirit’s intercession, is found there. The Holy Spirit’s knowledge of our human situation is, however, disembodied, as the Holy Spirit knows and searches what is spiritual. And this goes deeper than the Pauline symbolic use of the flesh as the attitude of opposition to God. It really means not comprehending our human condition the same way the incarnated Christ does. This is important and we shall come back to it when talking about the discernment of spirits, which does not involve only knowing what is good and what is bad, but also comprehending which of our spiritual insights can be lived in our embodied life. This involves the actual physical condition of our bodies, but also the conditions of the bodies of our relationships, social and ecclesial conditions, political conditions, etc. Here the human particularity of Jesus of Nazareth plays a vital role. He was similar to us. In him, God and man, a full comprehension of our humanity reached God. He was one with the Father both as the divine Logos from all the ages and as a human being, as a creature, a part of the world, knowing the Spirit both immanently as the divine Logos, and economically as a human being. In Jesus of Nazareth God pitched his tent among us, the God-man lived our life and was similar to us in all but sin. Thus he, our high priest, sympathizes with us in our weakness, and knows how to help us in our time of need.47

Lossky develops this idea into a teaching on two distinct but united divine economies, John Zizioulas and Nikos Nissiotis prefer to speak about two moments of one economy, two missions united in one economy. See Vladimir Lossky, Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church, SVS, Crestwood, NY, 1976, 156–173; Orthodox Theology, 55; In the Image and Likeness of God, 153; John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, SVS, Crestwood, NY, 1985, 129; Nikos Nissiotis, ‘Pneumatological Christology as a Presupposition of Ecclesiology’, Oecumenica: Jahrbuch für ökumenische Forschung 2 (1967), 235–251. 46   1 Cor 2:10b–11b; see also Rom 5:5; 8:12–14, 27. 47  See J 10:30; 1:1–5, 14; 2 Cor 5:21; Heb 4:15–16.

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The incarnation is something radically new, and with it the mission of the Son gains a new dimension that the mission of the Spirit does not have. These two missions do not completely overlap, but one is not fulfilled without the other. Going back to our film examples, we can say that as well as the love of Marjánka, of Mr Klíma and of others that helped Father Holý to belong, and to continue in his journey of faith and in his ministry, his faith gives life to the others. It gives them hope in hopeless situations. It uncovers how life with God is lived in human conditions when it is incarnated alter Christus. It points to the light they have forgotten, and tells them that if they raise their heads, they will see it again and will be transformed by it. A post-Christian culture is thus not returned before the incarnation, to Logos spermatikos alone. Rather, it is reminded of the attractive features of Christ that are mirrored in the lives of his authentic witnesses. Through them the light of Christ shines and in its shining the light transcends its every mediation. In the next section I shall explore how the re-rooting process of those who raise their heads and are transformed by the mediated or by the unmediated light can be understood theologically. The Spirit as the Giver of Conversion Love opens in us new possibilities, and as was spelled out in the previous section, the Holy Spirit moves us towards communion with each other, with our world and with God. In this movement, however, we also experience obstacles. As Kieślowski depicted se well in his Three Colours, we encounter our ‘no’ present in our interior life and in our relationships. Like Julie in Blue or Jacob Kern in Red, in our ‘no’ we turn down life in which new love might germinate, or like Karol and Dominique in White we try to take advantage of love. In recognizing our ‘no’ we become aware of the dead-end roads within ourselves. As I shall show in the following pages, this is already a gift, from which change can follow. First, however, I shall explore the context of love in which such recognition is safe, and therefore can lead to further aspects of conversion. Then, complementing love with truth and freedom, other New Testament characteristics of the Spirit’s activity, I shall ask how we recognize that what is making claims on our lives is good and that it comes from God, and not from somewhere else. That will lead me to the problem of the discernment of spirits. And finally I explore the social, the ecclesial and the cosmic dimensions of the gift of conversion, when it restores our different belongings together, and leads towards what Susin, in the initial quotation to this chapter, called ‘the eschatological eucharist’.48

 Susin, Assim na Terra como no Céu, 192.

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Disordered Inclinations in the Light of Love The concept of disordered inclinations comes from the tradition of the Ignatian Spiritual Exercises, where it is used for obstacles on our way to the ultimate fulfilment, obstacles that became appropriated as parts of who we are and how we usually behave.49 At the beginning of the Exercises, when Ignatius outlines the principle and foundation of human life, he says: ‘Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by means of this to save their souls.’50 Part of the aim of the Exercises is to learn how we can rid ourselves of our disordered inclinations. These are not only wrongdoings, but all that distances us from God and from others, all that makes us incapable of realizing what we are meant to be: The other things on the face of the earth are created for the human beings, to help them in working towards the end for which they are created. From this it follows that I should use these things to the extent that they help me toward my end, and rid myself of them to the extent that they hinder me.51

Disordered inclinations, according to Ignatius, grow from a lack of freedom, and the lack of freedom grows from a lack of love. The process of conversion starts when they are recognized as disordered, and when one desires to leave them behind. For such a process to succeed, a context of love is needed. It would seem, though, that through the power of these inclinations love was hidden. Jacob Kern was wounded by the betrayal of his lover, Julie de Courcy by the death of her husband and daughter. Their ‘no’ to life, as Kieślowski reveals, is embedded in these wounds and losses. For Jacob, the crash at the beginning of Three Colours Red, when Valentine knocks down his dog, provides a new opportunity. Because of his dog, he is gradually befriended by Valentine. There are gentle but also painful steps to the stage where Valentine’s good will towards Jacob enables him to let her enter into his closed world. It is a precondition of his conversion. We find a similar precondition even in such a dramatic account of conversion as Paul’s. As Acts testifies, the change of his attitude does not emerge only with the blinding light. There is an attitude of acceptance and good will from Ananias, despite the fear that it may be abused. Ananias, after his inner struggle,52 goes to Saul’s house, lays his hands on him and says: ‘Brother Saul, the Lord Jesus, who 49

  ‘Inclinations, attachments, tendencies, etc. which are not in conformity with the principles which will be given below in the Foundation ([23]).’ Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. George E. Ganss, Paulist Press, New York–Mahwah, NJ, 1991, n.2, p.388. The reference is to Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises §1. 50  Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises §23. 51  Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §23. 52  See Acts 9:3–16.

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appeared to you on your way here, has sent me so that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit’ (Acts 9:17). Only then ‘something like scales fell from his eyes and his sight was restored’ (9:18). He decides to be baptized, regains strength and begins to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying, ‘He is the Son of God’ (9:20) And only then does his conversion becomes visible to those around, who are amazed and say: ‘Is not this the man who made havoc in Jerusalem among those who invoked this name? And has he not come here for the purpose of bringing them bound before the chief priests?’ (9:21). The interest from the risen Lord, his acceptance and good will, which are passed on to Ananias, enable Saul to face who he was, and to become a new man. Not a man without a past, so to say, but a man with a future. In Jacob Kern’s conversion, Kieślowski gives a positive answer to his essential question: yes, it is ‘possible to repair a mistake which was committed somewhere high above’,53 but it cannot happen without love. Without the friendly or even filial love of Valentine, Jacob would not have a mirror in which he could see himself spying on other people, or catch sight of his bitterness and his withdrawal from genuine relationships. The truth about his life after he was betrayed by a lover in his youth is revealed to him. Now it is not a destructive truth, but a liberating one. He can move on, he can still live and love. The process of conversion, in which Jacob loses his self-imprisonment and is restored to a being capable of love, is an open-ended journey. The breaking of the glass behind which we saw him trapped in many of the scenes of the film symbolizes his liberation. The shattering of the glass opens up the landscape of his life. It waits to be inhabited by his response to the revealed truth that in the context of Valentine’s love has brought him back to life. Disordered inclinations as depicted in the figure of Julie reveal even more theological significance. Julie is basically a good person. Her harming is meant to be directed not towards others, but only towards herself, as after the death of her husband and her daughter she feels betrayed and deserted by all worthy of life. To use Ignatius’ terminology, she feels unable to reach the aim for which she was created, and uses all created things to keep her in her estrangement. Is her life despirited? Or are there contradictory spirits operating within it, the holy one and the unholy ones as well? It is worth remembering that the underlying theme of Blue is liberty, or more specifically, how Julie cannot be freed from her resentment of life until she allows love to fill her freedom. Kieślowski shows liberty as something that we do not have. Julie seems to know the truth about her life. She was a wife and a mother, and now she has lost all she was, all that fulfilled her life and gave it meaning. The truth is bitter. Yet she feels obliged to act on it, as anything else would seem to be illusory. There is no love allowed to enter her truth anymore, and it is not the truth that would set her free.54 53

  In Newall ‘Kieślowski’s Three Colours Trilogy’.  See J 8:32.

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If we take on board Paul’s identification of freedom as a distinctive feature of the presence and actions of the Holy Spirit,55 we are faced with the problem that some truth is making claims on human life, but it is not the truth that comes from God. What is it then? In the film there is no answer given to this question. Instead, the question is rephrased as what Julie’s ‘truth’ does. After Julie’s unsuccessful attempt to kill herself, she tries to defile love by having intercourse with Olivier, her faithful friend, without loving him. Then, when she sets out to sell the family house together with her past happiness, she changes her name so that nobody can find her in her new self-imposed loneliness. But Julie’s ‘truth’ is not the only truth in the story. There is also Lucille’s truth, which, despite Lucille’s human vulnerability, initiates freedom. Lucille’s truth for Julie is reconstructive. It reveals as in a mirror Julie’s attitudes as non-free and unliveable, and through small gestures offers alternatives. There is also Olivier’s truth, which gradually wins Julie back to life. Olivier is willing to do anything for Julie, apart from joining her in anything destructive of human dignity.56 His positive attitude to life and his offer to Julie to join him in that have to remain free. Freedom as the only context in which a genuine love can live is not included in 1 Corinthians 13. It has to be added by our human story, and only in such free love does the Holy Spirit rest. It is important, however, to keep in mind that when we need to face our illusions as illusions, and our betrayals of love as betrayals of love, the Spirit who is the Spirit of truth, the liberating Spirit, has visited us first as the Spirit of love. Discernments of the Spirits In theology we still need to ask what it is that makes destructive claims on human life, which, disguised as truth, mediates alienation, the absence of love and freedom, and gradually death. To find answers to these questions in our present culture with its spiritual yearnings but shallow roots is difficult. People relate to all sorts of different spiritual realities, but the relationship remains largely at an unconscious level. It has to do with the fact that our cultures are symbolically impoverished, because people’s personal views and experiences are not nourished by the cumulated wisdom of traditions of religious practice. In order to bridge this gap, I shall turn my attention to the criteria for discernment in the classics of Christian spirituality, in the work Three Methods of Prayer, coming from a Hesychast tradition and in Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises. In both cases spiritual life is seen in terms of a journey. There it is not a single isolated experience on which our attention is focused, but rather a process in which different experiences are interrelated. Yet, unlike in our film examples, with the 55

 See 2 Cor 3:17.   See how Olivier refuses Julie’s proposal to finish the scores of the Concerto on 1 Cor 13 instead of him: ‘No, the music can be mine. A little heavy and awkward but it can be mine.’ 56

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exception of Forgotten Light, there is an explicit movement of intentions towards a personal God, the source of love and of conversion. And, something that is important for our cultural milieu, the relationship to the source of love and of our lives is not abstract. It is both carried by a Christian symbolic system of meaning and it transcends that system. The Hesychasts57 were aware of the fact that spiritual and mental health were at stake, if one loved the divinity in a wrong relationship, or if one loved as divine what was not divine. The wrong way of love could lead either to living in delusion or to living in division. The Three Methods of Prayer is a treatise ascribed to Symeon the New Theologian,58 but comes from the circle of his disciples. It first deals with two types of method of prayer and attention in spiritual life that lead to a deviation from a true experience of God. One tries to reach divine things by human capacities alone and thus human efforts become obstacles to, rather than occasions of, divine illumination. According to the text, human fantasy creates an unreal ‘heavenly’ world and wants to dwell in it, suggests to itself that the soul is filled with divine love, and wants to remain in this stage, thus running the risk that the person loses his or her sanity.59 The other deviation is marked by an effort to guard oneself, but in fact leads to running from one area to another, struggling between guarding one’s senses, examining one’s thoughts, talking to God and wandering off into captivating thought. The problem is when such a stage is regarded with self-esteem, and people imagine they have reached the point where they can teach others without realizing their own blindness.60 Then the author asks why it is impossible to reach a true communion with God by means of the first and second method, and replies to his own question: because people who do it do not respect a ‘proper order’ for spiritual life. ‘Those who want to ascend a ladder do not start at the top and climb down, but start at the bottom and climb up.’61 Instead, they need to start with cleansing the heart. This has two sides, a pure conscience and control over the abuse of material things.62

57   The Greek word hēsychia, from which Hesychasm is derived, means stillness, silence, and peace. Hesychasts followed forms of spiritual life inspired by the Desert Fathers, leading to an unceasing prayer of the heart. For a more detailed contextual analysis, see Ivana Noble, ‘Religious Experience – Reality or Illusion: Insights from Symeon the New Theologian and Ignatius of Loyola’, in Encountering Transcendence: Contributions to a Theology of Christian Religious Experience, eds Lieven Boeve, Hans Geybels and Stijn Van den Bossche, Peeters, Leuven–Paris–Dudley, MA, 2005, 375–393. 58  Symeon the New Theologian (949–1022), a Greek ascetic, mystical writer and founder of monasteries. 59  See The Three Methods of Prayer, Philokalia IV, eds G.E.H. Palmer, P. Sherrard and K. Ware, Faber & Faber, Boston, MA–London, 1998, 67–75, here 67–68. 60  See The Three Methods of Prayer, 68–69. 61   The Three Methods of Prayer, 73. 62  See The Three Methods of Prayer, 70.

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Then they can move to singing Psalms to the Lord. And finally they can embark on contemplation. The text warns against using the methods in the improper order: But if without following the sequence … you raise eyes and intellect to heaven in the hope of envisaging noetic realities you will see fantasies rather than the truth. Because your heart is unpurified … the first and the second method do not promote our progress.63

Furthermore, either of the false methods can lead to idolatry, when what is not God makes claims on human lives as if it were God. Apart from the proper order mentioned above, the third method of prayer and attention, that which leads to an authentic experience of God, also requires obedience to God through a spiritual father. This is supposed to prevent the inexperienced from excesses, but also to decentre the self. Then, after having cleared the ground, the intellect penetrates into the depth of the heart and in prayer encounters the love of Christ. True and unerring attentiveness and prayer mean that the intellect keeps watch over the heart while it prays; it should always be on patrol within the heart, and from within – from the depth of the heart – it should offer up its prayers to God. Once it has tasted within the heart that the Lord is bountiful (cf. Ps 34:8 LXX), then the intellect will have no desire to leave the heart, and will repeat the words of the Apostle Peter, ‘It is good for us to be here’ (Matt 17:4). It will keep watch always within the heart, repulsing and expelling all thoughts sown there by the enemy. … Those who have savoured this delight [of resting in the depth of the heart] proclaim with St Paul, ‘Who will separate us from the love of Christ?’ (Rom 8:35).64

The proposed method of prayer consists of an invocation of Jesus Christ. Olivier Clément stresses that even for Christians ‘the baptismal “enlightenment” is buried in the unconscious’, and thus it is necessary to ‘seek the place of the heart’.65 Hesychast writings concentrate on the conscious encounter with Christ, which we cannot force on our part, but which we can receive when the Holy Spirit enlightens us. Spiritual progress there at a later stage includes what was left behind to be purified: feelings and knowledge, desires and will, all physical and psychical energies. All is now harmonized in prayer.66 Discernment has a different form at different stages. Even a truth one discovers too soon may become an obstacle, as we partake in the drama of a spiritual journey. This journey involves struggle, regress as well as progress, and only gradually,   The Three Methods of Prayer, 75.   The Three Methods of Prayer, 70–71. 65  See Clément, On Being Human, 64–65. 66   See Richard Čemus, Modlitba Ježíšova a modlitba srdce [Jesus’s Prayer and the Prayer of the Heart], Societas, Velehrad, 1993, 24–25. 63 64

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through our free will and through grace, are we transformed to conscious selves, free from idols, stripped away from the dead layers and illusions.67 Growth towards a conscious choice against idols and for God is at the heart of the Ignatian tradition of discernment. As in Hesychasm, a pure heart, generosity and a climate of prayer are needed as preconditions for further progress. Alongside that, Ignatius of Loyola works more creatively with human subconsciousness that, together with human consciousness, speaks though the images in which our dreams and visions of the ultimate fulfilment are carried. There the state of our inner life is revealed. There we encounter also illusions or experiences of evil spirits as real. They belong to the horizon of our life that is to be brought into dialogue with the mysteries of the life of Jesus Christ.68 In his light, and in the power of the Spirit,69 we should bring what is unconscious to the conscious level, to see illusions as illusions, experiences of the evil spirits as experiences of evil spirits, and encounters with the loving God as encounters with the loving God. In this process of making conscious what was unconscious we learn the difference between how God operates in our lives and how other forces operate,70 and seek ways in which our intentions can be purified and ordered in accordance with the aim for which we were created. For further progress a nourishment of our images of the ultimate fulfilment is needed. This comes from the life of Jesus as we find it in the Gospels. Learning the ways of Christ gradually moves from an external imitation to an internal relationship, bringing along a harmony between divine and human activity.71 Only then is contemplation that transcends images safely rooted and the images purified and nourished, and the path back through them leads to action.72 God’s radical transformation of our understanding, which enables us to feel we are new people,  See Clément, On Being Human, 65.  See Ulpiano Vázquez, A Contemplação para Alcançar Amor, Edições Loyola, São Paulo, 2005, 25. 69  In Ignatius, who is explicitly Christocentric, the actions of the Holy Spirit are nevertheless behind the spiritual process, in which the Creator communicates directly with its creature. The closest we get to the Spirit-language is when he discriminates between the works of the good and the evil spirit. See Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §§313–336. 70  See Autobiography in Ignatius of Loyola: Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, ed. G.E. Ganss, Paulist Press, New York–Mahwah, NJ, 1991, §§6–8; 15, 24, or the dynamics of the Spiritual Diary. 71  See Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §1. 72  Parmananda Divarkar points out that ‘opening himself up to the whole strength of God ... he felt a tremendous sense of liberation, of awakening to a new life that was more real and full of possibilities then the one he had spent so far’. This helped him to be ‘aware of God lovingly at work everywhere and inviting him to be always lovingly at work, to be contemplative in action’, so that ‘the sense of mission became the whole horizon of his spiritual vision’. See P.D. Divarkar, The Path of Interior Knowledge: Reflections on the Spiritual Exercises of St Ignatius of Loyola, Gujarat Sahitya Parkash Anand, Gujarat, 1990, 6. 67

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at the same time includes knowledge of who we have been all along: ‘Human beings are created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord’,73 together with our fellow pilgrims. The ultimate aim of human life gradually gains a communal dimension as ‘God lovingly at work everywhere’ invites us to bring his loving care to others.74 But even there the need for discernment does not end, as together with the depth of divine love one also experiences new depths of temptations and deceptions. From his own life-experience Ignatius gives several very practical pieces of advice concerning discernment. In the Spiritual Exercises, when he comes back to his first experience of different movements within himself, he says:75 If the beginning, middle, and end are all good and tend to what is wholly good, it is a sign of the good angel. But if the train of the thought which a spirit causes ends up in something evil or diverting, or in something less good than what the soul was originally proposing to do; or further, if it weakens, disquiets, or disturbs the soul, by robbing it of the peace, tranquillity, and quiet which it enjoyed earlier, all this is a clear sign that it comes from the evil spirit, the enemy of our progress and eternal salvation.76

Evil, then, is not only being led to do a bad or vain thing, but also losing one’s peace of mind and spiritual joy.77 However, while Ignatius speaks about an opposition of the good and evil spirits, the two forces operating both in the soul and in the world,78 he is well aware that it is not a kind of easily visible contradiction. With a few exceptions,79 evaluation of the experiences and drawing conclusions takes time, as one has to relate them to the rest of one’s life experience. The problem is  See Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §23.  See Divarkar, The Path of Interior Knowledge, 4,6. Compare with Ignatius, Autobiography §§11,14; Spiritual Exercises §189. 75  Ignatius of Loyola in his Autobiography recollects how, during a long convalescence after being wounded in the battle of Pamplona, he for the first time experienced different stages of mind, one restless, the other one peaceful, that were connected to the content of his day-dreaming. He did not notice this difference immediately, but retrospectively. See Ignatius, Autobiography §8. 76  Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §333. 77  See Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §334; and also ‘Toward Perceiving and Understanding Scruples and the Enticements of our Enemy the Following Notes are Helpful’, Spiritual Exercises §§ 345–351. 78  See Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §§136–147; 230–237. 79   ‘This is when God Our Lord so moves and attracts the will that without doubting or being able to doubt, such a dedicated soul follows what is shown, just as St. Paul and St. Matthew did when they followed Christ our Lord’. Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §175. Ignatius calls it the first time of election, and emphasizes that it is rare: see the context, Spiritual Exercises §§169–183. 73

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that we are well able to deceive ourselves, and to ascribe to God things that do not come from him and vice versa. Ignatius mentions that there are different effects of the spirits on the human soul, depending on the stage of the journey. If a person runs from one sin to another, the evil spirit is consoling, while the good spirit is disturbing. If that person struggles to purify him- or herself and serve God, the good spirit is encouraging and bringing comfort, while the evil spirit is disturbing and creating obstacles, and if not tempting them to sin, then at least making the soul sad and taking away peace. The movements of the spirits can also vary according to the type of the person’s conscience. More lax people should try to discern where it is the evil spirit who consoles them, whilst more scrupulous people need to learn to oppose the disturbances of the evil spirit. This is Ignatius’ principle of agere contra, a method for making progress in spiritual life.80 These practical methods, however, need the broader background of a symbolic tradition within which they help in working for transformation. Otherwise discernment at its best would be reduced to the limited examples of true, free and loving lives we have seen lived, and that we, with our privatized views, unpurified and unnourished, recognize as true, free and loving. We need to remember that for both the Hesychasts and Ignatius one could not have a non-symbolic access to the ultimate reality without having a symbolic one. Whether expressed as singing Psalms to the Lord or as relating the whole horizon of one’s life to that of Jesus in the Gospels, the symbolic access was carried by a particular tradition of religious meaning and practices aiming at the purification of one’s heart, and of embodying the types of relationships to others, to the world and to God found in the traditions. In our present majority culture we often see that fragments of different symbolic universes are combined together without deep knowledge of their roots, and without being able to feed the temporary insights from the roots. For discernment of what makes destructive claims on human life, and what makes constructive claims on our lives, some level of symbolically rooted consciousness is necessary. It would be an illusion to think that in the time of Symeon the New Theologian or of Ignatius of Loyola, Christianity provided the complete traditional symbolic background. They also had to search for roots, together with the cultures of their times, in which the Christian Logos was revealed and hidden, in which the spirit of Christendom was easily mistaken for the Holy Spirit. A healthy symbolic tradition was not even then something automatically given. In the final section of this chapter I shall examine a theological notion of restored belonging. While seeking to set out what a symbolically rooted life consists in, I shall also ask in what sense discernment between the different forms of ‘transcendence’ that make claims on human lives presupposes and leads to communion with others and with God.  See Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises §§313–327; 328–336; 350.

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Restored Communion One of the problems contemporary culture rightly and vehemently criticizes is a sacrificial understanding of belonging to each other, a communion that produces victims. These criticisms are also relevant when we speak about communion in Christian theology, in particular about belonging to the Church. Previously in this chapter I have argued that the activity of the Holy Spirit cannot be fully identified with the activity of the Son and the Church. Now I want to show that a humbler concept, as I sketch out here, of the Church as a communion with a cosmic meaning, but not as the only communion with cosmic meaning, can give us a model of and locus for a non-sacrificial belonging. But first, let us look at the problem of sacrifices on which enforced belonging is based. In Kieślowski’s White we saw the notion of belonging under scrutiny, as he tried to square equality and love. At the beginning of the film Dominique Vidal is divorcing Karol Karol, because he is incapable of satisfying her. She is not going to sacrifice herself, her fulfilment and happiness in order to stay united in a marriage that has lost what she saw as its essence: the mutual love of equals. Karol feels sacrificed and in his desperate efforts to gain Dominique back, towards the end of the film, he brings her down to his condition, he makes out of her a prisoner of his love. Her freedom and her dignity are sacrificed, so that she can ‘belong’ to Karol. But Karol’s owning Dominique in her imprisonment does not restore communion between the two. Only at the end of the trilogy, when we listen to the completed Concert for the Unification of Europe, based on 1 Corinthians 13, and see Karol and Dominique among the survivors of the sinking of the ferry, are we led to believe that, as they are together, they must have managed to find a way out of their prisons. We are enabled to see that love, as praised in Paul’s hymn, is restorative of relationships, of our belonging with each other. Love that ‘bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things’81 is in Kieślowski’s trilogy ultimately a nonsacrificial love – and that includes not sacrificing oneself at the deepest level of being. Only then is communion possible. Luíz Carlos Susin touched the theme of non-sacrificial love in the introductory quotation to this chapter, in his vision of the ultimate fulfilment. In the ‘eternal eucharist’, he said, ‘[a]ll sacrifice will be abolished’. According to him, any form of sacrifice is a contradiction to the ‘abundance of life’, an ‘abundance of human and creaturely relations, in heartfelt communion with God’, which is ‘a gift, without victims’.82 Similarly, when Stăniloae speaks about the process of the transfiguration of creation into the ‘wholesome diversity of love’,83 it is a non-sacrificial process. According to Stăniloae, it is a process carried on by a mutual exchange of gifts, not 81

  1 Cor 13:7.  Susin, Assim na Terra como no Céu, 192. 83   Stăniloae, The World, 101; here he quotes Lossky, Orthodox Theology, 67. 82

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of sacrifices. It begins with gratitude, and is followed by generosity. The communion of love starts with God’s creation, with the divine plērōma, from whose fullness we have all received grace upon grace. It extends towards deification. Christ’s sacrifice and the sacrifices of those who follow Christ make sense only in relation to a non-sacrificial communion that precedes and follows. Redemption as liberation from the mechanism of violence, from the reign of sin, for the reign of love, entails a ban on sacrificial relationships. The Holy Spirit, who makes Christ’s victory and the Father’s faithfulness present, does not call for the sacrifice of self or of anybody else when calling to conversion. The non-sacrificial communion is re-established when the Father responds to Christ’s saving faithfulness by raising him through the Spirit from the dead. The Holy Spirit opens this eschatological perspective in human history. As our response, in each generation, and even in each stage of life, we need to discover how it can be lived. Thus the eschatological promised future is related to what we might call a pre-eschatological reality. In the pre-eschatological reality, the language of non-sacrificial love needs to be complemented by the language of faith and hope. They are united but distinct languages. As we saw in Michálek’s Forgotten Light, Father Holý had his dreams in which his struggles were given symbolic depth. With his vivid images nourished by Christian tradition, he could reach out to others when they accepted him because of his human authenticity. He could share with others what would remain impossible to share without this fragile figurative language of faith and hope. If he did not live in his dreams, if he did not embody their symbolism in his day-to-day life, the traditional Christian symbolism of faith and hope would not be transformed into something tangible. Instead, as in case of the Vicar General or the collaborating priest Kubišta, it would be embodied in practices where something that is not God takes the place of the absolute. The language of faith and hope would thus be stained by idolatry. Being aware of the fragility and vulnerability of such language, we still need to recognize that without some shared figurative images of faith and hope, love could not come to the dying Marjánka or to her bereaved husband. Likewise, love would not gather those who stayed outside its unusual revelation. Faith and hope returned to the context of love were also necessary for building a community out of isolated individuals. Even if the level of the symbolic meaning to which those remaining outside the Church could relate remained unexpressed, faith and hope nourished their mutual love, and left them to abandon its more possessive and exclusivist forms. Now, let us look in more detail at the Church, and in particular at the nonsacrificial inclusive communion that the Church both mediates and betrays, for it is a candidate for conversion with the rest of the world.84 84

  ‘The church, as visible society and organization, belongs to this world’, vulnerable to the same problems as the rest of the world, yet ‘she is “instituted” to ... stand for the world,’ and to ‘assume ... all the natural forms of human existence in the world ... in order to reveal and manifest the true meaning of creation as fulfilment in Christ, to announce

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As early as the second century Ignatius of Antioch emphasized that the Church gathers where Christ’s eucharist is celebrated.85 He did not see the celebration of the eucharist in sacrificial terms, as later developed in the Latin Church. Rather, the whole of the gathering celebrates a kind of ‘memory of the future’,86 where all is renewed and united, where salvation in the risen Christ is sealed by the Spirit and eternal life in God is open to all creation. The Church, by the invocation of the Spirit – epiklēsis – remembers who she is. In her anamnēsis the history of salvation becomes her story, which orients the Church towards the coming eschatological future. The Church is the ‘sacrament of the Kingdom’, says Alexander Schmemann. In celebrating the eucharist as ‘the passover, from this world into the Kingdom, [the Church] offers in Christ the whole creation to God, seeing it as “heaven and earth full of His glory”, and partakes of Christ’s immortal life at His table in His Kingdom’. In celebrating the eucharist, the Church ‘always becomes what she is, always fulfils herself as the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church, as the Body of Christ and the Temple of the Holy Spirit, as the new life of the new creation’. 87 Yet the Church lives both in the eschatological and in the pre-eschatological reality. Incorruptible and corrupted, indivisible and divided, the Church reveals a figurative meaning of participation in the divine life – and alienation from God. There are two movements discernible in the Church, as there are in the inward human life. There is a eucharistic movement of gratitude and generosity, which continues to gather and uphold people, which enables the Church to re-present Christ’s victory over forces of evil in her loving-kindness as well as in her zeal for justice and peace. But there is also a scattering movement, in which partial human interests, and ultimately injustice, violence and destruction are allowed to dominate. These lead the Church to corruption and division. Where the Church actively participates in violence, it loses continuity with its eucharistic foundations. It becomes a sect which, despite its ritual and doctrine in real life, celebrates a kind of ‘anti-liturgy’ and contributes to the sufferings of the world and of the crucified Son of God.88 Thus we can say that Olivier Clément’s account of disintegration in humanity applies also to the Church. When the Church turns away from God, it can no longer contain its nature, it becomes an individual – atomos – in which nature is broken up. Each fragment, isolated, divided by animosity and seeking mastery, becomes its own tomb. We do not have an uncorrupted holy church or one undivided church in any of the ecclesial bodies that have emerged in history, due to divisions and a lack of continuous to the world its end and the inauguration of the Kingdom.’ Alexander Schmemann, ‘Ecclesiological notes’, note 3. 85  See Ignatius of Antioch, Smyrnians VIII. 86  I have borrowed the term from Zizioulas, Being as Communion, 80. 87  Schmemann, ‘Ecclesiological notes’, note 3. 88  I have borrowed the concept of ‘anti-liturgy’ from Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist, 15, 17–18.

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love and conversion in all parts.89 As Grigorios Papathomas claims, in situations where we are satisfied with superficial solutions, when the churches try to accommodate to the corruption and to the divisions, it is doubtful that eucharist is possible.90 The eucharistic celebration reconstitutes the Church, brings together the gathered community and through it all humankind and all creation in renewed loving relationship with God. If we want to hold that, in the same breath we have to assume that the renewed loving relationship has to include ‘ontological communion of the Churches in Christ’.91 Where any layer of the desired, sought after and celebrated communion is missing, even if it is not impossible, the eucharist remains incomplete. ‘[T]he eschatological way, already traced out by the Resurrection’ is replaced by present interests.92 The Church as a collective body reveals that in a communal life discernment is as necessary as in human interior life. It reveals that, as in human interior life and despite other competing forces, God accomplishes what God started. But unlike human interior life, the Church has a symbolic language to pass this faith and hope on, to allow others to participate in them, to deepen their love, and to convert them towards the ultimate fulfilment in God, even in ways that transcend the Church. The Church in its struggle with idols testifies that the Holy Spirit moves and calls, gathers and enables the relationships to grow into maturity, which at the ultimate horizon means embracing the whole of creation, like the risen Christ. In this sense the Church can be a model of communion, of belonging with each other, with the world, and with God, even if not its guardian. Concluding Remarks In this final chapter I have explored how love as the ultimate fulfilment mediated by our culture can be interpreted theologically. Taking love as the divine plērōma returning to human lives and through them to the whole of creation, I have looked into theologies of the Holy Spirit as giver of love and conversion. I asked what is required of love to be the ultimate fulfilment, in which all human and creaturely relationships are joined together in communion with God, with no more outsiders and no more victims left. The previous chapter left me with the following tasks. I needed to address the challenge that freedom in the service of selfishness allows all that was good in a person and his/her relationships to be destroyed. Then it was necessary to explore 89

 See Archim. Grigorios D. Papathomas, ‘In the age of the Post-Ecclesiality (The emergence of post-ecclesiological modernity)’, Kanon, 19 (2006), 3–21; in Istina, 51:1 (2006), 64–84, in Iré­ni­kon, 79:4 (2006), 491–522; in an English manuscript, p. 2 of 20. 90  See Papathomas, ‘In the age of the Post-Ecclesiality’, 19. 91  Papathomas, ‘In the age of the Post-Ecclesiality’, 16. 92  See Papathomas, ‘In the age of the Post-Ecclesiality’, 20; compare with Rev 22:20.

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in what sense the Holy Spirit restored the ties between love, faith and hope in a culture where people’s spiritual longings were uprooted, and how the light of Christ shines on those who have the Holy Spirit and the Logos spermatikos. Finally, drawing on the images of conversion towards love as restoring relationships, I needed to ask about the roots of that love. What distinguishes such love from a selfish love? How does a conscious relationship to God, absent or implicit in most of the film images, influence the dynamics of conversion towards love as the ultimate fulfilment and of belonging with each other? While exploring the connections between freedom and love as gifts of the Holy Spirit, freedom from self featured in two ways. If people were not free to reach beyond their self-interest in love to others and to God, they closed themselves in a hell that would gradually reveal its destructive potential. This we have already seen in Mephisto. The second way was new. Freedom from self, freedom of the Spirit, also means that the Spirit is ultimately free to love and to liberate even the non-noble selves (like Hendrik Höfgen), and to initiate their transformation towards the likeness of God. This does not mean a cheap general pardon taking away human responsibility. Responding to God’s unceasing love may go through the paralysing death of all that has been inauthentic in one’s life, and it may feel like a death of the self. If we are to be free, with the freedom of the Spirit, we have to undergo such a confrontation. But at the same time, we have hope that God through the love of his Son unto death filled death itself with his love and by the freedom of the Holy Spirit turned it into resurrection.93 The relational reconstitution of the self and of the world as depicted in Forgotten Light rephrased for me questions already present in Chapters 2 and 4: do those who embrace all that is good in the world also embrace God? Is their remembering the past with acceptance and gratitude already a sign of redemption? In order to reach more nuanced answers than in the previous chapters, it was necessary to move beyond a distinction between an explicit conscious relationship and an implicit subconscious or unconscious relationship, and beyond the distinction between sign and fulfilment. Instead I explored the nature of the diversity of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, such as love, faith and hope, and showed that each one is differently co-related to the divine Logos. Thus it was possible to claim that in the true love of people like Marjánka, her husband or Mr Klíma, the Holy Spirit was present and active, even if eclipsed as a person, and more so, even if silent about God the Father and the Son. In giving their love they communicated the life-giving love of God. It did not, however, lead them directly to faith and hope in God. While with regard to love it was easier to say that the Church or even Christ is not the only place where the Holy Spirit rests, it was more complicated with the gift of faith, which although it remains empty without love, together with love grounds and feeds the gift of hope.  Compare with Clément, On Being Human, 14.

93

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In the attitudes of Father Holý’s non-Christian friends we could identify Logos spermatikos, the seed of wisdom, goodness, justice and beauty. But it is interesting that the forgotten light of Christ did not shine through that. The passage from nonfaith to faith and from non-hope to hope does not happen through gathering the fragments of Christian symbols in a post-Christian culture either, but through an exchange of love with their witness. The gifts of faith and hope, fragile as a dream, are given through and by Father Holý. In them what the Spirit gives is more visibly related to Logos Christos and to what the Church should represent. But at the same time, there is a more visible kenotic depth. For discernment and for communication of the roots of the gift of love, reference to kenosis of the Spirit, however, proved insufficient. Kenosis on the part of God needed to be complemented by some form of positive human response, by our ‘yes’ to love and life streaming from God, a ‘yes’ in which we have to encounter and overcome every ‘no’, ideally before its destructive work is accomplished. The Hesychast and Ignatian traditions reminded us that a process of growth towards this ‘yes’ has to include at some stage a conscious relationship with God. ‘Yes’ to some vague spiritual power is insufficient. I concluded that it is not possible to encounter the non-symbolic transcendence without being in some way touched by the symbolic mediation of its meaning. Otherwise one would gaze at the ultimate and at a conscious level remain disowned in one’s fulfilment. Likewise, if relational reconstitution of the self and of the world includes restoration of human wholeness, it also includes a conscious relationship to God. Otherwise one’s consciousness would remain unrestored. Despite the fact that any symbolic mediation carried by a religious community such as the Church is vulnerable to idolatry, the language of faith and hope, united but distinct from the language of love, needs figurative support. Without a language of faith and hope, the communion of love here and now does not have any permanence. It remains open only to the few who share in the private experience. Furthermore, without faith and hope, love does not have tools to challenge sacrificial forms of belonging to each other outside the momentary experience of unity and outside of its bond. At the same time, even if every Church needs discernment as much as human interior life, as a collective body it carries symbolic traditions of faith, hope and love, in which there are sources of conversion for the churches as well as for cultures and bodies outside of the churches. And while the churches cannot predict the positive form of their conversion, since this belongs to the Spirit, they can learn to discern the language of the Spirit, because sensitivity to that language is cultivated in their symbolic traditions.

Conclusion

Really, I can’t express it in any other way; I think that I struggled for breath or something, but the one thing I was conscious of was a tremendous anxiety. When it began to grow less I was still on my knees, but my hands were full of torn leaves. It passed away like a wave, and left me with a sadness that was not unpleasant. I felt my legs trembling beneath me in an absurd fashion, I went cautiously to sit down, and with my eyes shut I said to myself: Well, now you’ve got it, it’s here already. But there was no horror, only surprise, and the consciousness that we have to settle it somehow. Then I had the courage to open my eyes and move my head; Lord, how beautiful that garden seemed to me, like never before, never before; I did not want anything, only to sit like that, and look at the light and shade, at the full flowers of the spiraeas, and at the blackbird who was struggling with an earthworm.

This is how Čapek re-described the ordinary man’s story from the point of view of its coming end. The man, kneeling in the garden, is overcome with the inevitability and closeness of his death and becomes conscious not only of the plurality within him, but also of his roots. Without wanting quite to suggest that the conclusion of a book is a death of what was written, there is a sense of incomplete completion. Čapek strengthens that sense by narrating the doctor’s changing the old aquilegias in the man’s garden, a task that had remained undone. This brings with it a renewed sense of awe, not for one’s achievements, but for the ordinary beauty that opens a way to transcendence, which is still testified by and present in our culture. As in Čapek’s quotation, the beauty of the natural world, as well as that of literature, music and films, which has played so important a part in the search for roots as presented in this book, is most visible when it is endangered and its connections with life are threatened. In this light the beauty asks for a careful handling – think of the doctor and Mr Popel in An Ordinary Life – that allows the new dimensions of consciousness to be appropriated and passed on. In this sense the cultural examples I have been using in the previous chapters needed to be treated with care, as I looked to replace the dead connections between fragmented symbols and their broader meaning. In the Introduction I claimed that the ‘underground sources’ and ‘unknown streams’ of life which Nohavica sings about also have other symbolic names and            

Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 318. Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 318. Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 464. See Nohavica, ‘Underground Sources’, as quoted at the opening of the book.

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are woven into symbolic narratives of Christian spiritual life, liturgy and doctrine. These can still contribute something unique and valuable to the open and free search for meaning in the cultures that left behind not only Christianity, but also the modern ideas of secularization. My initial question, concerning what lost connections between fragmented symbols and their meaning could be recovered by a theological approach, needed to be complemented by another question, namely, how the theological approach would be transformed in the process. The themes of the three parts of my book, following as they do the threefold activity of God, can, I claimed, also be tracked in our world with its uprooted but genuine search for love, hope and faith. Moreover, the artistic images of the world, of memory and of the ultimate fulfilment, which are echoed in Central and East European cultures, also flow into theology, just as in return the theological search for what it means to profess belief in God the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit in Central and East Europe is an undercurrent of our cultures. I began by observing that the views of the world as a given and as a gift already competed with each other in the pre-war cultures. On one side there was the Heideggerian approach: the world is here before us, we are thrown into the given world, with its possibilities and limits. There we undertake our life-projects. On the other side there was Stăniloae’s claim that people as conscious beings were given a responsibility to the Creator, responsibility in terms of a requirement of response to God’s gifts by returning the gift to God with our ‘own valuable stamp on the gifts received and thereby ... [making] of them human gifts as well’. Čapek and Singer helped me to see how pre-war and post-war cultures distinguished between the utilitarian and the altruistic ‘stamps’ imprinted on the landscape of the world, which images communicated the dangers of cultural self-idolatry, and which connected self-rootedness with self-transcendence. Both Čapek and Singer, from their different perspectives, helped me to understand that in the one world in which we live, each one of us mirrors the multitude of the present and the lost worlds. Despite the different sinful structures, different stamping-mills keeping people like ‘Robots’ in their place, each one of us, in our little ways, contributes to the world becoming a factory or a garden, a death-bed or an open horizon towards which we journey, taking the multitude of our inner worlds along. Being the ‘others’ of God, the free partners of God, we can multiply or spoil the goodness of creation. But, not being God, we cannot determine the ultimate outcome of the world or of our life beyond the conditions we can control. This does not make any historical experience of evil less destructive and painful, but at   See Heidegger, Being and Time, §31–32.   Stăniloae, The World, 25; for the discussion, see Chapter 2, under ‘Cosmic Nature

 

and Humanity’, 55–56.    Compare with Cílek, ‘Chraňte svoji duši’, 5.    See Čapek, R.U.R., 57.    See Susin, Assim na Terra como no Céu, 190.

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the same time, it allows space for God acting through and beside such experiences, responding to the new evils with new creative energies, keeping open the journey of maturing into the likeness of God and the communion of all in God.10 From a Christian point of view, whenever people and their cultures (Christian, other religious, atheist, agnostic or post-secular) embrace what is good in the world and oppose what is destructive or evil, they bear fruits of the Holy Spirit. Opposing what is evil gives an opportunity for conversion, and embracing what is good leads to humanization and deification,11 even in cultures that have lost continuity with traditions of religious practice. As I have pointed out, the question remains to what degree this movement involves human consciousness. Now more than during preceding centuries we can see that who we as Central or East Europeans are is a texture woven from the threads of many cultures, but also many religious expressions. In this sense, it would be foolish to search for one symbolic tradition that could interpret the whole plurality. We could not all participate in such a tradition. Yet we share one world in which we live and move. And it remains a task and a challenge to communicate how we understand this world and what we want it to become. In this sense a Christian theology interpreting present culture can be, I hope, a useful contribution, but not the only useful contribution. It is part of my argument that we share one world with the memory of its past, but neither our religions nor our cultures have an unmediated access to this memory. From the point of view of Christian theology it is because none of us is God, ‘the “presence” to which all reality is present’.12 In this light, to claim that any single person or group has an ‘objective’ understanding of the past would be an act of idolatry. These acts, only too common in totalitarian cultures, were based on the identification of the official memory and the exclusion of other memories. The official memory aimed to justify its ideology, awarding a prominent place in the world it so re-described to the dominant culture. Other memories were disregarded, ideally as non-existent, or at least as forced into non-existence. Answers to how their rehabilitation could become healing for all involved were at least partly found in non-violent alternative cultures, which expressed themselves through the arts, and especially through music. The poem-songs of Vladimir Vysotsky and Jaromír Nohavica led their audiences back to the question of how things really were. But instead of presenting a counter-ideology that would claim just a different single objective position, they rehabilitated a referential plurality of memories, which in their views needed to find ways of reconciled coexistence. And the first step in this direction was to name the dark deeds in Communist history, an act that required both courage and generosity of heart. It was important to notice that neither of the singers presented   See Stăniloae, The World, 203.   Compare with Stăniloae, The World, 206; for the discussion, see Chapter 2, under

10 11

‘The Fall and Renewal’, 57–61. 12   Williams, Resurrection, 23.

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himself as an example of such qualities, but rather as someone who was aware of the requirements for human authenticity as well as of his own deficiencies. They proposed different ways of coping with that. Vysotsky opted for the way of integration of one’s whole past, taking responsibility for its destructive moments, and embracing it all with gratitude. Nohavica, who experienced the end of Communism but also being caught in the violent nets of its heritage, both in his personal life and in the new majority culture, was more sceptical and saw a need for conversion. He tentatively linked human responsibility to a messianic hope that the effects of our wrong choices could be mended, and that the transcendent Other, whom one hopes for despite one’s unbelief, would take part in the reconstitution of our relationships. Theology helps provide the missing links among the fragments of Christian symbols, and thus offers a coherent vision of a messianic perspective both within our present cultures and as a challenge to them. To speak meaningfully about God’s remembering and God’s returning us our past, we need to undo the anti-doctrinal prejudices that lie behind reducing God to an ad-hoc existential reference-point, positive or negative. Even when our majority culture is not willing to accept that, theologians need to take the cultural challenge seriously and deconstruct the inauthentic images of redemption that were in the past mediated by Christian theology. It is true that on the one hand these images presented Christian belief as an easy escape from historical conditions. They took away the importance of our life-choices and responsibility for them.13 On the other hand, they assumed that faith could be motivated by fear of a judge, concerned only with the law and uninterested in the joys and sorrows of human life. In order to enjoy values like human integrity, compassion and generosity, it was made to appear that we would have to fight against the judgement.14 Then a Christian teaching on redemption would find its lost dimension of growing towards the fullness that comes from God’s future, where the relational foundations of our life are renewed.15 And, in this light, God who remembers would give us back our memories transformed. I investigated how in the one world where we live with the memories of the past, we joined what is of ultimate importance with what satisfied human life. With the help of my film examples I discovered that, if the connection between the freedom of the self and the freedom from the self that allows love for others is missing, then this could cause one’s spiritual search to go awry. It has emerged here in nuce and then explicitly in the theological reflection that human authenticity is only one aspect of the relational reconstitution of the world and of the self, even if an indispensable one. A pneumatological approach to transformation helped me to see the following things. The Holy Spirit, as the giver of love, has the freedom to remain anonymous or to fill people’s spiritual longings with some symbolic   This was rightly criticized in Nohavica’s albums Wastrel and In That Stupid Year.   See Vysotsky, ‘It’s My Fate to Fight Till the End, to the Cross’; Nohavica,

13 14

‘Halleluja’. 15   See Moltmann, Theology of Hope, 196–197.

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mediation of faith and hope, revealing the Father and the Son. Second, Christ’s redeeming light shines on those who love. Genuine love initiates a process of human conversion and leads to other gifts. In this process, we face our limits, but also questions of hope and faith. A Christian theology has a symbolic tradition in which all these aspects fit into one whole, and it can help others by keeping its traditions alive and by making them accessible. However, it has to be always mindful of the fact that, even if in Christian spiritual life, liturgy and doctrine it is unthinkable to consider the Christian God as one among many, Christianity is in fact one among many religions and world-views. And the Holy Spirit we believe in moves also in others, and communicates love and conversion to us through others. Our cultures in Central and Eastern Europe are unlikely to turn back to Christianity. But this does not mean that they could not be cultivated both by Christian theology and by what cultivates Christian theology. From within it we need to recognize that our roots are not given only for our sake. We cannot force nourishment from them on others, but by embodying what we believe and hope for, by our own conversion, we can take others along, at least part of the way. Moreover, the roots of a Christian theology grow through the cultures within which it lives, including the present culture, shifting from the secular to the postsecular. Throughout the process, Christian theologians felt free to borrow symbols from these cultures and to use them in the context of a relationship with God. There they were filled with new deep levels of meaning and with new referentiality. So we should not be mean-spirited or worried when our cultures borrow symbols or fragments of them from what we consider our own. As those who belong both to the post-secular and post-Christian cultural bodies and to different bodies of religious practice, we should see in this borrowing opportunities for renewed communication. As theologians, we need to listen and understand why these symbols (or fragments) have again become important, and which new levels of meaning they reveal. Then we may find words for remembering what other meanings and connections were forgotten. As theologians, we stand both within the symbolic religious traditions and within the plurality of cultural bodies in our time and place. We need to learn how to be (among many others) guardians of communication between the traditions and the present search for love, hope and faith. We need to allow both, the traditions and the search, to be nourished in their different ways from our common roots and to be touched by what transcends any symbolic mediation. Thus both can contribute to the cultivation of human life, of the world in which it is lived, of the culture in which it is remembered and where it is opened towards the future. With this conclusion we can come back to Čapek‘s ordinary man and say that, although both a majority Christian culture and a majority secular culture have, at least in Central Europe, come to an end, there needs to be ‘no horror, only surprise, and the consciousness that we have to settle it somehow’.16 We need the courage to   Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 318.

16

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open our eyes and turn our heads, to allow ourselves to be filled with awe: ‘Lord, how beautiful that garden seemed to me, like never before, never before.’ Then, with and despite all that we suffer and strive for in a world marked by the fall, we will not lose from our sight ‘the light and shade ... the full flowers of the spiraeas, and the blackbird who was struggling with an earthworm’17 Because this is where our roots lie, and this is where we encounter transcendence.

  Čapek, An Ordinary Life, 318.

17

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Index

Abraham 34, 51, 129 absolute 35, 134, 170, 177, 192 Adam and Eve 22, 59, 170 aesthetic, aesthetics 9 dimension of language 7 theological aesthetics 9 values 81 America, American 16, 24, 30, 80, 151, 166 anamnesis 11, 72, 130, 193 angels, angelic 30, 34, 49, 51–54, 102, 106–108, 148, 189 Anselm of Canterbury 45, 122–123, 179 anthropology 63, 71 cultural 4, 123 theological 168 Aquinas, Thomas 58, 63, 179 archetype, archetypal 24, 65, 80, 85–86, 90, 94, 133, 139 art, artistic 4, 8, 30, 78, 83, 149, 157 artists viii, 7, 21, 80, 147 language and mediation 7–10, 13, 199 Athanasius of Alexandria 53, 70, 119, 122 atheism, atheist 4, 19–21, 46–48, 63, 73 atonement 120–123 Augustinianism, Augustinian 45, 58 Augustine of Hippo 58, 63, 72, 136–137, 172, 175, 179 Austria, Austrian 45, 47 Austro-Hungarian Empire 3 Basil of Caesarea 59, 71 beatific vision 27, 164 beauty 16, 20–21, 26–27, 29, 41, 99, 101, 131, 152, 161, 196–197, 202 Benjamin, Walter 95, 128, 134, 136 Bernanos, George 151 body 51, 59, 181, 196 of Christ 173–175, 193–195 cultural 5, 17, 77, 201

earthly 54 ecclesial 6, 193–194, 196 human 26, 32, 159 social 114 Bogomilova, Nonka 47–48 Bohemia 151–152 Bulgakov, Sergei 177–178 Čapek, Josef 18, 21 Čapek, Karel 10, 15–29, 33–34, 41–43, 49–50, 55–56, 59, 62–64, 67, 69, 72–75, 109, 145, 197–198, 201 Central Europe vii–ix, 2, 9–10, 16, 69, 78, 100, 109, 168, 170, 201 Christianity in 167 cinema 11, 146 countries 10, 46 cultures 46, 129, 198, 201 history 69 literature 9 population 34 societies 46, 163 theology viii Chauvet, Louis-Marie 103 Christ 61, 63, 71, 117–125, 127, 173, 187–188 coming of 127, 131, 175, 181 death and resurrection 61, 118, 120, 123–124, 126, 132, 137–138, 193–194 faith in 118, 173 following of 45, 69, 154, 166, 168, 174, 176, 179, 182, 188, 192 humanity and divinity 61, 119 life in 61, 62, 143, 167, 193 light of 118, 151–153, 174–175, 181–182, 195–196, 201 love of 174, 187 memory of 8, 119, 187

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see also atonement, body, Father, Jesus, kenosis, Logos, Redeemer, sacrifice, Son, Spirit Christianity, Christian 1, 8, 49, 68, 132, 166, 174, 190, 198, 201 doctrine 51, 57, 118, 120, 125–128, 139, 176 faith 8, 51–52, 176 God 109–110, 123, 201 hope 137 see also culture, God, liturgy, spirituality, symbolism, theology and tradition Church, churches 3, 5–6, 40–41, 45, 47, 68, 91–92, 101, 106, 109–110, 131, 151–154, 163, 166, 169, 173–175, 180, 191–196 Early Church 50–51, 56, 60, 63, 68, 118, 121, 123, 193 hierarchy 151, 153, 174 politics 151 property 3, 47, 93 triumphant 131 see also Christ and Spirit Cílek, Václav 15, 198 Clément, Olivier 170–171, 193, 195 communion 128, 182, 190–194, 196 among people 57, 172 with God 10, 61, 71, 73, 128, 131, 165–166, 186, 199 as rite 131 of the Trinity 179 Communism, Communist viii, 2–3, 10, 16–17, 47, 69, 80, 95–6, 113–114, 139, 170, 200 countries 11, 47, 79, 112, 159, 166, 168 ideology 69, 80, 126, 148 Party (Communists) 32, 46, 79, 83, 106, 113, 146, 152 period 3, 11, 46, 147, 200 persecution 60, 83, 106–107, 114–116, 151 regime vii, 3–4, 47, 78–79, 95, 97, 106, 112, 151–152 Congar, Yves 174–175, 178–179 conscience 95–6, 186, 190 conscious 114, 133, 164, 197 beings 56, 188, 198

choice 166, 179, 188 mind 146 relationship 75, 166, 179, 187, 195–196 consciousness 27, 77, 188, 190, 196–197, 199, 201 conversion 11, 78, 92, 109, 112, 139–140, 164–168, 171, 173, 186, 192–195, 199–200 as gift 143, 166, 172, 182–185, 194 images of 80, 195 as process 43, 163, 201 creation 4, 9–10, 70–71, 118, 123, 125, 136–140, 164–179, 191, 198 creation, redemption and deification 9–10, 61, 168, 172 narratives 13, 19–23, 50–64 new 15 see also fall, goodness Creator 29, 51–52, 55–58, 60, 65, 67, 136, 171, 198 creatures, creaturely 54, 136, 165, 169, 176–178, 181, 191, 194 creed 51–52, 118 cultural anthropology 4 belonging 9 change 2, 9 continuity 24, 109 identity 42, 89, 90–91 mediation vii–xi, 5, 7, 62, 68, 73, 80, 85, 117, 120, 172, 186, 194 memory 43, 75, 77–78, 84, 94, 112, 115, 134, 179 culture viii, 1–13, 15, 17, 29–31, 34, 40–42, 46–50, 55, 64–65, 73–74, 77–78, 109, 132–133, 138–140, 143, 145–146, 166, 168, 173, 175, 190–191, 197–201 alternative 11, 73, 78–79, 95, 11, 199 Christian 176 counter-cultures viii, 5, 11, 21, 29, 62, 68, 79 dominant 17–18, 42, 78, 199 high 81 Jewish 38, 129 low 43

Index majority 5, 8, 48, 79–80, 167, 181, 190, 200 popular 5, 9, 132 Post-Christian 173, 175–176, 180, 182, 185, 195–196 Post-Communist 112–113 Post-secular 70, 75, 116, 120, 176 religious 20, 29, 42, 46, 49, 68, 73, 90–91, 123, 129 sub-cultures 5–6, 32, 111, 139 totalitarian 11, 79–85, 199 utilitarian 20, 42, 73 Cyprian 63, 173–174 Czech, Czechs 18–19, 21, 94, 114 culture 1, 10–11, 15, 17, 79, 94, 145, 151 religion 3, 48, 151 Czechoslovakia vii, 17, 29, 95, 97, 99, 151 death 26–27, 32–33, 35, 37, 42–43, 83, 85, 93, 103, 137, 150, 154, 159, 163, 169–170, 183–185, 195, 197 of Christ 61, 11, 118, 122–124, 195 fear of 80, 92 of God 20 of idols 100, 110 life after 25, 40, 42, 48, 62, 90, 170–172 life and 11, 102 of the self 195 of utopia 69 death-bed 33, 180, 198 deification 9–10, 61, 65, 70–73, 119, 172, 192 and humanization 199 and utopia 62, 75 see also creation Deml, Jakub 145, 151, 154, 181 demons, demonic 30, 49, 51, 89, 102, 132, 145, 147–148, 168, 189 destiny 10, 89–92, 99, 102, 109 devil 88, 122–123, 148–150, 168–9 Dionysius the Areopagite 53–54 discernment 139–140, 194, 196 of spirits 67, 181–182, 185–90 disordered inclinations 183–185 divine 4, 45, 49, 66–67, 70–71, 130–132, 177, 186 activity 17, 124, 130, 134

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aid 93, 124 economy 181 glory 70–71 goodness 53, 67, 70 grace 70–72 inspiration 67 justice 122 knowledge 178 light, illumination 171, 186 love 168, 170, 172, 175, 179–181, 186, 189 laws 36, 41 life 125, 179, 193 memory 131 mystery 5, 169 nature 45 pleroma 165, 192 power 131 providence 71 sphere 53 substance 34–35 wisdom 122 see also gift, kenosis, Logos, salvation and Spirit, divine–human cooperation 62–5, 71, 75, 143, 188; see also synergy relationship 56, 120, 178 doctrine 84, 108–109, 133, 135, 139, 173, 193 Christian 62, 117, 120, 139, 143, 198, 201 and experience 108, 110–111, 125–128 racial 69 dogma 39, 104 Christological 118 Trinitarian 118 dogmatic, dogmatism 42, 89, 110, 117, 125–126, 133 anti-dogmatic 109 non-dogmatic 29, 139 dystopia, dystopic 17–20, 24, 29, 41–43, 50, 55, 62, 69 Eastern Europe vii–ix, 2, 9–10, 78, 100, 170 Christianity 70, 167 countries 10, 46 cultures 46, 198, 201

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Jewry 16, 30, 42 population 34 theology viii Enlightenment 2–4, 19, 34, 46 epiclesis 11, 131 equal 2, 59, 68, 79, 191 equality 69, 143, 155, 157–160, 163, 180, 191 eschatology, eschatological 66, 125, 136, 138 eucharist 165, 182 fulfilment 124 future 65, 125, 131, 140, 192–193 horizon 129, 136–138 justice 66 paradox 131 perspective 129, 143, 192, 194 reality 68, 132, 193 pre-eschatological 192–193 reserve 67 time 131 transformation 68 vision 11, 69 see also hope Estonia 3, 47 Europe, European viii, 3, 16, 46, 99, 115, 150 culture 18, 29 history 19 literature 18 modernity 2 secularization 46–47 Union 2 unity 156, 162–163, 191 Value Study 47 Evdokimov, Paul 4–5, 15 evil 27, 45, 50, 55, 59–61, 97, 120–121, 167, 173, 189 conflict with 45, 50, 60, 75, 97, 112, 122, 124, 199 forces of 178, 193 good and 58, 61, 67, 71, 86, 166 healing of 124, 199 knowledge of 60, 140 radical 55, 60 spirits 43, 188–190 see also experience evildoing 19, 97, 150

existence 43, 50, 54–55, 60, 72, 97, 143, 153, 178 co-existence 5, 48, 122, 129, 199 non-existence 41, 199 pre-existence 118 existential 200 conversion 173 questions 6 situation 127–128 existentialism, existentialist 90, 94, 98 experience 16, 23, 33, 39, 43, 46, 52, 55, 57, 62, 72–75, 104, 109–110, 117, 137, 155, 165 archetypal 80 of beauty 27 of Communism 80–81, 85, 106, 112–116, 200 direct 84 of evil 43, 55, 74, 105, 121, 140, 198 faith-experience 13 of God vii–viii, 54, 64, 66, 72, 122, 128, 139, 186–187 of the absence of God 63, 67, 176 of healing 106 historical vii, 60, 170, 198 human 2, 7, 13, 16, 30, 67, 110–111, 138, 178 inherited 51, 64, 112, 133, 139 life-experience 64, 73, 189 of love 165, 180, 189 of Nazism 85 personal 95, 185, 196 religious 48, 166 experiential 110 pre-experiential 58 eucharist, eucharistic 193–194 Christ’s 193 eschatological 165, 182 eternal 165, 191 liturgy 131 factory 17–21, 29, 69, 198 faith 39, 72, 74, 99–100, 151, 166, 174, 179, 200 blind 16 in Christ 180 Christian 8, 51–52, 176 of the Church 41

Index content of 51–52, 173 experience of 13 gift of 195–196 in God 140 and hope 154, 162, 166, 176–177, 179–180, 192, 194–196, 201 hope and love 8–9, 40, 62, 73, 195–196, 198, 201 images of 171 journey of 154, 180, 182, 196 liberating 8 people of 40–41 questions of 153 fall 4, 45, 50, 54, 63–64, 68, 90, 118, 140, 143, 202 narratives 22, 57–61 fallen angels 148, 168 humankind 71, 119, 123, 169–170, 172 world 10, 74 Father, the 51, 54, 93, 111, 118–120, 123–124, 173–174 Father, Son and Spirit 7, 59, 61, 75, 123–124, 131–132, 137, 140, 174–182, 192, 195, 198, 200–201 goodness of 179 invisible 59, 177 of lights 131 see also Creator, goodness, kenosis, memory, transcendence Fathers (Church Fathers) 50, 56, 60, 118, 121, 186 film 11, 143, 145–164, 168, 179, 180, 182–185, 191, 195, 200 forgetting 65, 75, 77, 80, 84, 111, 128, 133, 154 forgiveness 33, 36–37, 77, 102, 113, 119–120 fraternity 69, 143, 155, 160–163 France, French 89, 123, 157–159 chanson 94 Revolution 2, 46, 143, 155 freedom 20–21, 33, 55, 60, 71–72, 87, 99, 100, 143, 156–157, 163, 167–173, 177, 182–185, 191, 194–195, 200 religious 46 of the Spirit 59, 111, 175, 195 see also liberty

223

fulfilment 143, 145, 148, 150, 158, 164, 170, 176, 191–192, 195–196 of desires 97, 163, 169 eschatological 124 the ultimate vii–viii, 11–12, 143, 145– 146, 150, 162–164, 166, 168–169, 183, 188, 191, 194–195, 198 future 11, 23, 61–62, 69–70, 78, 83, 87, 101, 103, 105, 111, 136, 143, 159, 171, 184, 201 eschatological 65–68, 125, 131, 136–138, 140, 192–193 of Europe 2 images of 50 memory of 193 messianic 172 promised 131, 138, 192 utopic 66 Futurism 18 garden 13, 17, 21–24, 26–27, 42, 55, 63, 104, 197–8, 202 of Eden 4, 15, 22, 59 utopia 24, 29, 55, 67 gardener 22, 27 great Gardener (God) 22–3, 55 German, Germany 17, 24, 85, 100, 114–15, 166 Eastern 3, 47, 147 Nazi 29–30, 147,168 Western 147 gift vii–viii, 62, 64, 67–8, 75, 104, 109–10, 129, 131, 139, 165, 182 of beauty 99 of conversion 182 of deification 70–71 divine 168, 179 exchange of gifts 26, 70, 143, 145, 176, 180, 191, 198 of faith 195–6 of freedom 170, 172–3 of grace 64, 75, 129 of hope 195–6 human 56, 143, 198 of life 22, 92–3 of Logos 75, 90 of love 165–166, 168–70, 191, 195–6, 201

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of memory 116, 133 of salvation 61, 71, 131 of the Spirit 75, 174–5, 180–81, 195 of the world 10, 13, 16, 46, 50–61, 64–5, 74, 198 Girard, René 123–4, 146 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von 147–9 goodness 1, 45, 62, 64, 176, 179, 196 of creation 50, 61, 198 divine 53, 57, 60, 64, 67, 70–71, 179 of the world 43, 55, 58, 60, 74, 123 grace 62–4, 68, 70–72, 75, 95, 102, 117, 119, 129, 187–8, 192 and human actions 64, 70, 137 Gregory Nazianzus 119, 123 Gregory of Nyssa 71–72, 119, 122 heaven, heavenly 51, 106, 137, 186–7 heaven and earth 51–4, 193 Heidegger, Martin 58, 65, 198 history 11, 66–8, 79, 85, 95, 101, 109, 119, 124–6, 129, 137–8, 147 Communist 94, 199 pre-Communist 3 Soviet 80, 82–3, 199 of God 137 human 5, 69, 124, 192 Modern European 15, 19 Central European 69 personal 161, 167 of salvation 176, 193 historical 80–94, 100, 131–2 action 58 conditions 200 events 99 project 66 remembering 133–6, 140 see also experience holiness 1, 30, 43, 116 Holocaust 43, 100, 130, 153 holy 39, 89, 117, 132, 184 Church 193 ground 163 memories 141 people 40, 57, 73 Trinity 53, 177 see also Spirit

hope 11, 16, 20–1, 23–4, 29, 57, 62, 103– 04, 107–08, 110, 117, 129, 133, 143, 159–60, 182, 198, 200–201 eschatological 11, 69 gift of 195–6 human hopes 15, 69, 80, 99–101, 145, 153, 155, 187 of salvation 125 signs of 128 transforming 112 utopic 65–70 for this world 42 see also faith humanity 22, 25–6, 29, 50, 55–7, 61, 71, 100, 118–19, 127, 153–4, 172–3, 181, 193 humanism 29, 42, 66 humanization 71, 199 humankind 20, 42, 62, 71–3, 111, 120, 122–3, 169, 171–2, 194 Hungarian 11, 145–50 icon 59, 88, 91, 132 iconic 5, 43, 57, 119 ideology 5, 17–18 Communist 80, 83 counter-ideology 199 Marxist-Leninist 3, 69 neo-liberal 69–70 totalitarian 69, 199 idol 5, 31–33, 59, 62, 70, 72, 100, 110, 169, 188, 192–9 idolatry 19–20, 43, 73, 187 Ignatius of Antioch 193 Ignatius of Loyola 183–186, 188–190 image of God 50, 56–7, 59, 67, 169, 172–3, 179 in extremis 26, 49, 145–6 incarnation 54, 59, 70, 130, 140, 175, 177, 181–2 inculturation 9 institution 80, 99, 110 Church 106, 175 religious 2–4, 46–8, 63, 108, 111, 173 institutional 112 Christianity 49 mediation 106 religion, religiosity 48–9, 89, 94, 128

Index anti-institutional 109–10 non-institutional 29, 47 integrity 92, 108, 117, 121, 147, 166, 200 intuition 26, 133 Irenaeus of Lyon 59, 61, 71, 111, 119, 154, 174, 180 Jesus of Nazareth 45, 68, 71, 92, 118, 120, 135, 140, 178, 181, 188, 190 proclaimed 184 see also Christ, Lord, Redeemer, and Son Jews, Jewish 30, 36–40, 101, 149, 152 faithful 36, 38, 130 ghetto 39 God 109 philosophy 34 religious thought 36 world 8, 16, 30, 34, 101 see also culture, God, liturgy, tradition and Yiddish John of Damascus 53, 122 John Paul II, Pope viii, 92 Jossua, Jean-Pierre 115, 119 joy 56, 59, 92, 132, 177 eternal 93, 127, 140, 173 spiritual 189 joys 11, 200 Justin Martyr 4, 8, 175 Kant, Immanuel 38, 56 kenosis 74, 176–177 divine 176 of Christ 168, 176–177 of the Spirit 169, 176–180, 196 of Christians 75, 154, 167–168 Kieślowski, Krzysztof 11, 143, 145, 155–63, 168, 182–184, 191 knowledge vii, 4, 22, 38, 43, 45, 54, 59–60, 66–7, 85–6, 104, 125, 137, 166, 187, 190 and goodness 179 mythical 52 of good and evil 59 of evil 60, 140 of God 174, 177–8, 181 of people 25 self-knowledge 189

225

tree of 22, 55 Kovalevsky, Eugraphe 177 Kryl, Karel 95, 97 land 88–89, 91, 99, 109, 132 motherland 82, 91, 94 no-land 72 promised 67 Levi, Primo 134 Levinas, Emmanuel 28, 136 Libânio, João Batista 17, 67, 69 Lonergan, Bernard 164, 167 Lossky, Vladimir 118–123, 172, 181, 191 liberty 69, 155–157, 160, 163, 166, 184 literature 10, 13, 15–43, 52, 73, 85, 145 liturgy 129–30, 133, 135–6 anti-liturgy 133, 193 Christian 1, 129–133, 171, 198, 201 Jewish 129–130, 133 Logos 59, 64, 75, 118, 180, 190 Christos 118, 175, 180, 196 divine 181, 195 incarnated 54, 118, 175 spermatikos 4, 8, 175–176, 180, 182, 195–196 Lord 20, 53–54, 68, 92, 103, 118, 130–31, 137, 148, 150, 169, 183–4, 187, 189–90, 197, 202 lordship 57, 59, 137 love 11, 19–20, 25–6, 43, 57, 62, 66, 73, 87, 99–100, 103, 131, 143, 145, 153–4, 157, 165–76, 182–6, 191–6, 200–201 Christ’s 154, 187 communion of 192, 196 crucified 165 divine 50, 60, 64–5, 72, 154, 177–81, 186, 189, 194 human 23, 31–4, 38–41, 59, 86, 89, 101–02, 107–08, 152, 154–164, 180, 182, 191, 195 inauthentic 8, 147 reciprocity of 70–71 songs 89, 94, 101 unconditional 148 see also faith

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Marion, Jean-Luc 5 Marxism, Marxist 63, 84, 90, 113, 178 see also ideology material, materiality 50, 63 materialism 52, 63 matter 19, 178 Maximus the Confessor 124 mediation 109, 182 church 110 cultural vii–viii, 73, 85, 111, 117 figurative 16 primary 7 symbolic 65–70, 196, 200–201 theological 11 traditional 134 memory 30, 60, 64, 66, 72–86, 94, 100, 104, 109, 112, 117–118, 121, 129, 133–136, 138, 143, 199 burden of 95–100 of Christ 8 of Christianity 8 collective 85, 133 cultural 41, 43 excluded 17, 136 of the future 193 of God 62, 64, 94, 100, 109–110, 119, 129–133, 140 gift of 116, 133 human vii, 27, 62, 79, 117, 119, 121, 157 liturgical 129–130 lost 91, 109–110, 114, 156 redemptive 11, 111, 117, 129, 131, 139–140 of salvation 93, 127 of tradition 4 see also forgetting and remembering Michálek, Vladimír 11, 143, 145, 151–154, 162, 168, 174–175, 179–181, 192 Miczka, Tadeusz 160, 162 Milbank, John 57–58 Miller, Heather Lynn 79–84, 89, 91 mimesis, mimetic 70, 123 Moltmann, Jürgen 50, 52–54, 126–128, 137–138, 140–141, 200 Moshe 34, 101, 109, 129 music 11, 78, 79–110, 139, 143, 155–157, 162, 199

film music 143, 155–157 Folk music 78, 79–110 mystery 23, 29, 33, 68 divine 1, 5 religious 70 mystical 30, 127–128 myth, mythical 51–52, 59–60, 65–66, 91, 170 demythologization 52 nations, national 19, 24, 51, 67, 77, 85, 115 National Socialism 69 nationalism 92, 94 nature 10, 15, 17, 22, 29, 49, 60, 122 cosmic 50, 55–57, 71, 120 divine 45 and grace 58, 63, 70 human 122–124, 129, 138, 170, 172 Nazi Germany 29, 147 Nazism 10, 16–17, 69, 147–50, 168, 170 see also National Socialism Newall, Paul 155–157, 160–162, 184 Nietzsche, Friedrich 20–21, 139 Noble, Anthony 78 Noble, Ivana 3, 24, 60, 151, 167, 186 Noble Tim ix, 5, 113, 151, 154 Nohavica, Jaromír xi, 1, 6–7, 11, 78–80, 94–113, 115–117, 120–140, 147, 197, 199–200 non-sacrificial communion of love 11, 165–166, 191–192 objective, objectivity 25, 133, 199 ontology, ontological 55–56, 58, 194 Origen 122 Orwell, George 17, 107 Panikkar, Raimon 118, 127 Papathomas, Grigorios 194 participate, participation 4, 53, 57, 60 64–65, 70, 75, 85, 88, 101, 111, 127, 164, 168, 194 in culture 73 in evil 58, 115, 121, 124, 193 in God 53, 60, 70, 131, 193 in good 58 in human enslavement 80 in totalitarian regimes 78

Index in tradition 42, 111, 194, 199 perfection 34, 53–54, 59–60 perspectivism 24, 28 Poland 3, 16, 30, 34, 46, 158–159 Polish 10–11, 16, 29, 36, 38, 145, 155, 157–158 political, politics 46–49, 66, 68, 79–85, 94–95, 147, 151, 163, 166, 168, 181 Popescu, Alexandru 115–116 Post-Christian cultures 173, 175–176, 180, 182, 185, 195–196, 201 societies, 8, 167 Post-Communist countries 4, 69, 159, 166, 168 cultures 2, 10, 80, 112–113 societies 2–4, 10, 78, 112–113 Post-secularization , post-secular 2, 46–7, 50 cultures 11–12, 70, 75, 120, 129, 176–7, 199, 201 interpretation 74 people 42, 52, 127, 173, 199 prayer 48–9, 103, 120, 129, 131, 185–188 prisons, prisoners 25, 79, 122, 159, 191 Communist 3, 31, 60, 82, 95, 115–116 propaganda 81, 88–89, 147–148, 150 anti-Christian 8, 132 anti-religious 46, 120 realism 81 socialist 81, 83–84 Redeemer 78, 105, 117, 119, 124, 134 redemption 67, 78, 95, 104, 109–110, 116–119, 128–130, 140–141, 170, 174, 201 see also creation relativism, relativist 28, 49, 83 religion 2–4, 6, 10, 21–22, 47, 49, 64, 85, 88, 90–91, 135, 152, 166, 199, 201 anti-doctrinal and anti-institutional 111, 125 anti-institutional 3, 48, 108–110, 128 rationalized 46, 51 traditional 46, 48, 65 religiosity 3, 47–9, 64, 89, 94, 116

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remembering 10, 64, 75, 77–78, 80, 85–86, 88, 96, 156, 201 Christ’s 119 God and being remembered by 78, 111, 123, 200 and not being remembered by God 110 of healing 104 historical 133–136, 140 liturgical 129–133, 140 redemptive 112, 139, 195 religion 93–94 rightly 77–78, 97, 128 tragic 86 wrongly 97–99, 112, 139 see also forgetting and memory renewal 50, 57–61, 68, 71, 115, 125, 166, 179 resurrection 71, 123, 137–8 of Christ 61, 131–132, 137–138, 194–195 of human race 171 revelation 39, 126, 135, 192 divine 70, 111 human 153–154, 168 Ricoeur, Paul 1, 75, 100 Romania, Romanian 3, 46, 60, 115–116 Russia, Russian 11, 30–33, 37–38, 41–42, 79–94 Rychterová, Sylvie 16, 21–22, 29 sacred 48, 63, 96 sacrifice, sacrificial 165, 191–192, 196 Christ’s 70, 119–125, 140, 177, 192 eucharistic 193 people’s 32, 87, 163, 191 see also substitution saints 172 sanctification 10, 137, 178 salvation 20, 62, 73, 92–94, 101, 110, 122, 124, 127, 140, 163, 173, 189, 193 divine 73, 131 doctrine of 61–62, 80 gift of 71, 131 history 176, 193 hope of 125 memory of 127

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promise of 19 Scheinpflugová, Olga 17, 21 Schmemann, Alexander 58, 61, 63, 93, 127, 133, 140, 193 Schopenhauer, Arthur 36–38, 40–41, 49 Schwager, Raymund 120–121, 124–125 science 29, 69 and technology 2, 20, 46 theology as 7 secularization, secular 2–3, 46–51, 63, 116, 132, 198 autonomy 168 countries 4 culture 176–177 humanism 42 societies 47 Seder Rav Amram Gaon 129 Selinsky, George 81–84 semantic plans 16, 22–23 Serbia 35, 114 Shakespeare, William 79, 86 sin 48, 120–24, 129, 131, 171, 178, 181, 190, 192 original 58–59, 72 sinner 93, 109, 113, 117, 120–121, 124 structural 61, 169, 198 Singer, Isaac Bashevis 10, 13, 16, 29–43, 49–50, 52, 56, 62, 69, 72–75, 198 Slovakia 3, 46, 114, 153 Slovenia 114 solidarity 60, 62, 71, 89, 119, 145, 149 Son, the 68, 75, 122–123, 131, 137, 169, 172–181, 195, 198, 201 of David 130 of God 70, 118–119, 184, 193 of Man 127 mission of 117, 182, 181 prodigal son 173 see also Father and Spirit sons and daughters of God 171 soul 15, 19–20, 81, 89–90, 105–106, 183, 186, 189–190 and body 54 selling one’s soul 147–150, 169 soul, destiny and land 89, 94, 99, 109 Soviet 85, 115 bloc 94, 146 culture 11, 79, 81, 83, 85, 87, 146

history 80 nationalism 94 propaganda 89 trials, prisons and camps 81–82, 84, 116 Union 82, 84, 94 Spinoza, Baruch 34, 36, 49 Spirit 45, 56–57, 64, 68, 75–76, 123–124, 131, 164, 171, 196 and the Church 175, 191 divine 48 filled by 61, 68, 119, 184 freedom of 59, 11, 175, 185, 95 gifts of 68, 75, 143, 165–169, 174, 181, 194–196 Holy 5–7, 11, 54, 61, 67, 70, 75, 118, 123, 132, 168, 174–180, 185, 195, 198–201 invocation of 130–131, 193; see also epiclesis mission of 169, 178, 181–182 of God 48, 173–174, 181 of love 166, 168, 176, 185 of truth 185 works of 169, 172–174, 179–181, 185, 192–195 see also Christ, discernment, Father, kenosis spiritual 50, 63 growth 48, 54, 56, 61, 71, 140 life 1, 47–9, 56, 100, 168, 180, 183, 190, 195, 200 power 48, 64, 74, 168, 176, 196 powers 11, 43, 45, 168 world 51, 55–6, 120, 181 spirituality 178 Christian 185, 198, 201 Hesychast 186–7 Ignatian 183–190 privatized 91 Spousta, Jan 47–9, 64 Spumý, Jaroslav 95, 97, 99 Stăniloae, Dumitru viii, 45, 50, 53–62, 64, 70–72, 76, 128, 140, 172, 175, 177, 191, 198–199 subject, subjectivity 77, 134 substitution 120–124, 136

Index Susin, Luiz Carlos 165, 169, 177, 182, 191, 198 symbol, symbolism vii–viii, 13, 65, 74, 91, 100, 173, 180, 197 artistic 7 Christian 1, 8, 88–91, 108, 110, 132, 138, 174, 186, 192, 196, 200 cultural 7, 9, 201 impoverishment 185 Jewish 8 of God 132 of national identity 91–92, 109, 114 religious 5–8, 10, 16, 22, 29, 49, 80, 89–90, 93, 106, 108, 145 theological 7, 90, 136 scriptural 90, 181 symbolic language 6–7, 133, 194 meaning 52, 79, 109, 173, 176, 192 mediation 9, 21–22, 42, 52–53, 65–66, 110, 127, 139, 153, 161, 190, 196, 200–201 narratives 19, 22, 151, 198 structures 16 traditions 1, 4, 6, 9, 12, 29, 64, 85, 103, 117, 121, 125, 128, 138, 190, 192, 196, 200–201 synergy 23, 62 Szabó, István 11, 143, 145–150, 155, 162, 168–171 Štikanc, Karel 95, 117 Thomism, Thomist 45, 58 theatre viii, 84, 148 theology vii–viii, 1, 5, 7–8, 49–50, 63, 65, 111, 114, 140, 165, 172 Christian 50–51, 61, 74–75, 120, 170–171, 191, 199–201 contemporary 56–7, 66, 70, 73, 120, 126, 132, 198 and culture 6, 8–9, 11–13, 198, 200 Liberation 66, 68 Orthodox 72 patristic 61, 71, 119 as a science 7 Trinitarian 10, 198 western 63, 168 theosis see deification

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tradition 5, 48, 72, 74–75, 90, 126, 133–134 Catholic 62 Christian viii, 46–48, 50, 64, 70, 72, 99–100, 117, 138, 175, 192 of doctrine 1, 126, 128 Jewish 33, 47, 50–51, 55, 72, 74, 100, 129–130 loss of 132 Orthodox 72 Protestant 62 and Scriptures 66, 75, 117, 171 traditions vii, 1, 133, 172 biblical 52 about God 110 religious 6, 75, 85, 125, 132, 151, 173, 201 of religious practice 9, 43, 46, 50, 64–65, 74, 185, 190, 199 spiritual 183, 185, 188, 196 symbolic 1, 4, 6, 10, 12, 29, 85, 103, 117, 121, 125, 128, 138, 190, 196, 199, 201 theological 75 tragedy 25, 33, 38, 85–86, 146 tragic 43, 91, 93, 109, 127 destiny 90–91 human condition 80, 85–88, 92, 127, 139–40 tragicomic 82 transcendence, transcendent, the 1, 15–16, 22–24, 42–43, 49, 53, 66, 74, 89–91, 136, 190, 198, 202 and immanence 127, 180 God 6, 110, 117, 130, 174, 177 Other 110, 125, 129–130, 200 Tillich, Paul 5–9, 11, 143 Tylor, Edward, 4 Tyrrell, George 45, 74–75 ultimate, the viii, 5, 52, 162–163, 196 accountability 64, 108, 139 concern 6, 8, 11, 40, 143, 145, 189, 200 good 67, 74, 151 hope 73, 123, 179 meaning 58, 74 perspective 111, 146, 153, 162, 165–167, 170, 191, 193–194

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reality 6–8, 190, 198 universe 18, 34, 36, 41, 46, 51, 57, 63, 72, 75, 125, 165, 190 utopia, utopic 11, 17, 24, 26, 29, 41–44, 50, 55, 62, 65–70, 72, 75 victim 33, 78, 80, 82, 97, 99, 123–125, 133, 139–140, 147, 165, 191, 194 archetypal 24 victimhood as positive identity 111–116, 125, 139 victimizer 112, 139 Vlady, Marina 93 Vocation 119, 151 Volf, Miroslav 77, 97, 128 Vysotsky, Vladimir 11, 78–94, 99–100, 103–104, 109–113, 116–117, 120–128, 132–140, 199–200 war 2, 11, 29–30, 36, 49, 62–63, 69, 83–84, 87, 100, 109, 148 anti-war 17, 84 religious 2, 46 songs 83–84, 94 Vietnam 80 World War I 2, 35 World War II 2, 10, 13, 15, 84–85, 115 Ware, Kallistos 72, 186 Western Europe 163 powers 116

theology vii–ix, 62–63, 70, 136, 168, 177 Williams, Rowan 1, 111–112, 116, 136, 199 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 74 world 4, 9–11, 13, 15–29, 34, 36–39, 41–43, 45–78, 91, 118, 126–9, 132, 143, 160, 162, 195–197, 199–201 above 92, 100 broken 15, 58, 155, 169, 171, 202 created 53, 165, 180 dehumanized 119–120, 124, 145, 148–150, 170 of faith 40 and God 43, 45, 50, 63–65, 74, 119, 128, 131, 133, 137–138, 141, 170, 176–181, 190–195, 198 good 123, 166, 173, 199 higher and lower 34–36, 40–41, 43, 49, 73–74 Jewish 8, 16, 30, 34, 101 of meaning 7, 9, 79, 104, 128, 168 modern 46, 114–116 transfigured 172 vanished 31–34, 40, 88, 102, 129, 133, 198 Wyschogrod, Edith 126–127, 134–136 Yiddish 36–38 Zizioulas, John 175, 181, 193 Žižek, Slavoj 114–115