Last Saturday, America’s second most famous1 Orthodox Christian was in Romania2, so I went to say hello & maybe catch up. We meet at conferences, last year it was in Rome3, so that’s what I said to him, I said, Rod, last time I saw you the world was about to end, & he said to me, yeah, I was already looking for hand sanitizer. I told him he was ahead of the curve—last February, I could think of little else than the intoxicating beauty of Rome, unaware that soon Italy would go under arrest, as would so many other supposedly free countries, but I suppose my feelings were what they were precisely in the shadow of this imprisonment we have all suffered.
You might remember, last year Easter was largely canceled. This is a holiday of some importance to Christians, who hold by its claim to salvation. This didn’t really matter, because our liberal politics, even when it is not unholy on purpose, tends to reduce our souls to questions of public health & safety. I was busy at the time avoiding our liberal elites’ lockdowns in faraway Bucharest, the greatest distance I could manage from Western Europe, & where restrictions were light for most of the past year, but especially egregious when it came to the Resurrection Mass. I was on top of a tower in an undisclosed location in Bucharest, listening with the wife for the singing from other towers, announcing the coming midnight, when many of us lit our own candles. This affected her rather more than it did me, since she was brought up to sing in church, part of a community… Now, alone among strangers, we could hear, as on the wind, the choir from a nearby church we couldn’t see; we could see many, many candles lit in windows near & far throughout the city. All those lights were the only public sign that Romanians knew it was Easter; some of us listened on the radio to the service at the Patriarchy. I’d like to say I flouted the lockdown & spent the night in a church somewhere that did likewise, but I didn’t, so don’t take this as boasting. The only thing I will boast of is, I know when authority tramples my freedom & I don’t give a damn what they think is a good justification.
This year, Easter was not canceled again, but we weren’t going to take any chances—we went away to a village far from civilization, where nobody gave a damn about masks in church, or indeed, anywhere else. In this sense, freedom is a very primitive thing, since it requires an animal instinct to bite when someone wants to collar you, & a lack of imagination or sophistication with regard to the justifications or powers of institutions bent on bending you to their will. There is very little left of this instinct for freedom in our cities, in Romania or anywhere else in Europe. After all, much more powerful countries that were supposed to deal with a pandemic much better also arrested their people indiscriminately, unwisely, all the more powerful for acting out fantasies of safety. Supposedly civilized regimes put people in a position where the evidence of one’s soul would only be believable if one went to jail. America hardly offered any better example of faith & freedom joined at their roots, it goes without saying.
Faith In A Parlous Time
Last time I talked to Rod, our podcast was modestly hopeful about the prospects of communities of faith, but then at the time we didn’t know how easily so many churches would be shut down & how compliant we’d all be. We have to be good, that is, law-abiding citizens, but the time has also come to think about why we think citizenship is good for us. Any American Christian today, if he is not deluded, has in the back of his mind not just the scandals that have rocked very old institutions—but the new political attacks on churches, including legal attacks, as well as the churches burned in & around last year’s riots. I’ll ask Rod in our next podcast whether he thinks a serious deterioration has occurred in the last year or so in the situation of Christianity. Certainly, there’s been no improvement.
Now, Rod was adamant that the peoples of Eastern European shouldn’t feel embarrassed before Americans or Western Europeans, given the disgraceful collapse into woke ideology they are now undergoing. The crowd was not displeased to hear this sentiment. It’s worth remembering the shocking transformation we’ve been through. Until 1989, Eastern Europe was tyrannized by Communism, which put an end to Christianity in some places—Eastern Germany, for example. Freedom was alive in the West & Christianity was not under political attack. Since then, Christianity has been collapsing in the West—it’s not doing great in the East, but it doesn’t seem to be suffering from the same attack by elites.
The evening Rod gave his public talk, I met my padre in the audience—he’s a big fan & has sold dozens of copies of Rod’s new book at his church, since his parishioners are rather more conservative than most in Romania, perhaps especially Bucharest, as well as more interested in apologetics. The padre tells me, these days Rod’s book is the thing he quotes from most, after the Gospel. Indeed, he was mentioned last Sunday… The padre even went & asked Rod for an autograph after the talk! Lots of people were as grateful as this man, even though most of us aren’t as pious. Selling tracts in church is unsurprising, but it’s especially needful for small publishing houses like the one translating Rod’s books, who can’t afford to go through marketing or advertising in the way wealthy publishers do. In Romania, as elsewhere, the college educated public is largely atheistic & liberal, so they read & imitate the stuff familiar to you from America or Western Europe. They go with the times, so that intellectual discourse is an embarrassment most of the time. The surprising development is that these institutions can now be bypassed—Rod’s writing is addressed to a community &, given our new digital technology, can actually reach it. Orthodox Christians don’t need to wait on prestigious publishing houses, hoping they will take an interest in authors with whom they disagree on most questions of politics & morality. So some of his popularity has to do with the new autonomy of certain Orthodox communities from the broader opinions & prejudices. But much of it, as with the padre I mentioned, comes from a deeply felt need for help—2020 was an especially bad year for many churches, as communities lost some of their habits & some of the conviction that undergirded them. People listening to Rod or reading him partly share in his worries, but partly hope that his success will give more people confidence which they badly need. He did not come to a place that’s thriving spiritually, but it might do so if people take heart…
More than a few of my more pious friends in Romania pay more attention to American Orthodoxy than you might expect—much of that has to do with podcasts, another use of digital technology that’s helping to bring together people around their identity. Mostly, that’s to do with the ways in which Romanians learned democracy & capitalism by imitating whatever they could from America, directly or indirectly. At least at a superficial level, the small Romanian middle class resembles the American quite a lot. Indeed, if Orthodoxy is to revive in Romania, it seems to me they would need to learn a lot more from America, above all, with respect to education. Christian schools, that is private schools, are rare in Romania, although there are some that have a good reputation. Homeschooling is much rarer still, & I think it’s primarily Christians who homeschool their kids. These are American ways of associating that have no history in Romania, but if middle-class Romanians were to imitate them, the urgent problem of dealing with the next generation would begin to be solved. People do care a lot about their kids, but making decisions about education, especially in relation to religion, is a very new idea. The way Romanians now live has little to do with the Christian faith they to some extent espouse, or at least don’t reject—education is both a way to shore up failing communities & to encourage a return to faith in those who have simply assumed, without strong motives or much reflection, that capitalism & democracy mean no more Christianity.
Of course, tech-savvy & education are not the only American habits Romanians should pick up—a third one would be charity & organizing around helping the needy, another activity of immense importance, since it is both an answer to the urgency of events & a reminder of the things that ultimately count, of love for human beings as ensouled beings. Romania was & still is a poor country, so this would have far more serious consequences than among more comfortable peoples…
Establishment
All of this goes to the most important difference between Christianity in the West & in the East. Romania, like any other country around, has an established religion. This means Orthodoxy is broken up in a way among the different countries, each with its own Patriarch, unlike the Catholic church, but also unlike Protestants, whose differences are not for the most part national. Unlike in the West, Romanian priests are paid employees of the state, although they are not paid very well, so to some extent they rely on parishioners as well. Further, the Orthodox Church hierarchy is itself very close to the state—that’s one big reason why compliance with lockdowns &c. was so widespread. The good & the bad of an established church are all seen in the most ambitious recent project of the Patriarchy, building a new cathedral, the largest in the country & one of the largest among the Orthodox peoples, next door to the Parliament, which is housed in a vast edifice built by the last Communist tyrant. This cathedral is supposed to be large enough to seat 5,000 people, as well as an entire complex from museums to restrooms. The price tag, already over $100million, is astonishing for Romania. About a quarter of the money is said to have come from donations, the rest from the state. It’s not quite finished yet, but it was consecrated a few years back—in all, it’s been in construction some 15 years. It’s called the Cathedral Of The Salvation Of The People.
An established church is of course much harder to reform than others, but perhaps easier to ignore, since it is not chosen. The Romanian Orthodox Church is of course in need of great reform, since it was corrupted by half a century of Communist tyranny. I don’t know what could be said in hope about this entire matter, so I will drop it. In this generation, I fear the young will simply not care anymore about religion, as in so many other parts of Europe & America. There are institutions involved in the education of the youth, but no wonderful work to announce as yet. The Orthodox Church is, for all its establishment, almost entirely absent from public life.
All this is cause for worry, but not despair. Rod said at some point that in important ways Romanians have much more to teach Americans than the other way around. I believe he meant, primarily, that Romanians are less deluded, as the weak tend to be compared to the strong—specifically, Romanians know what it means to hold on to faith in face of tyranny. Since times are about to get rather bad for Americans, I agree with Rod & I think Americans should do their best to learn about what a community of faith has to do to face legal-political persecution. But I think the question concerning Orthodoxy goes deeper. It is, in a way, the oldest church—the Greek church, the place of the Eastern Roman Empire, the Constantinian empire, & the language of the New Testament. In another sense, it’s the newest church—after the Byzantine collapse, Orthodoxy turned from the height of civilization to barbarian nations, mostly Slavic, in Eastern Europe, converted around the turn of the millennium. There are tremendous sources of faith & wisdom in both these aspects of Orthodox identity, just like there is a past that can be seen in churches that are older than modernity. Whether & how Romanians will recover these sources, I cannot say, but the very difficulty of our situation, the crisis of our civilization, suggests the need. Institutional memory, documented more than living, admittedly, & popular consent, passive more than active, admittedly, might prove to be of great importance. At any rate, I’m confident that nothing else except the Orthodox faith can make Romanians, or the nations around Romania, inasmuch as I know them, survive.
The Schoolboy’s Political Theology
Every kid in Romania is taught a poem called The Monastery On The Arges River—see the pictures above—or The Ballad Of Master Manole. This church was built in the early 16th c., which was both a very ancient & a very medieval period, as the ballad explains: The founder of the Wallachian kingdom took ten builders with him to an unholy place to build a great church. Whatever they built by day, however, came down by night, which angered the prince—the architect Manole then had a dream & told his builders that a heavenly whisper came to him in his sleep & demanded a human sacrifice, a woman, & they should agree among themselves to an oath, including silence, that they sacrifice whichever woman should first appear in the morning, a wife or sister bringing food & drink. The first woman was Manole’s wife Ana; he prayed to God that she be delayed by rain or wind & God granted his prayer, but she proved unstoppable, so he after all walled her in alive, as she was crying that her unborn baby was dying. Eventually, the monastery was finished, & the prince overjoyed, until he asked the craftsmen whether they could outdo themselves—preening, they said, of course, so he had his men take down the scaffolding, leaving the workers to die on the roof—they improvised light wooden wings, but fell to their deaths anyway, as did Manole, haunted by his wife’s cries, & a well sprung up where he hit the ground.
I don’t know how old the poem is, apparently it’s from the 17th century, but it was only published in 1852, in the Romantic era, when educated men went around collecting folklore. Modern Romania takes it as a foundational poem, whatever its importance may have been previously. It’s of course taught in schools to kids too young to understand it or care; the ballad is rhymed trochaic trimeter, only five syllables to the line, so it doesn’t sound serious or imposing, nor is it long, only about 345 lines. As for critical interpretation, it’s mostly done by silly persons who like to talk about aesthetics.
The story sounds as gruesome in the vernacular Romanian, if more sentimental than my summary, because it concerns the origins of all order & the two possibilities of human action, politics & art. The first & last sections start with this prince, who is a founder, & whose rule or legacy depends on a great edifice to the greater glory of God. This is in itself important—Romanians have a number of legends about founding princes, but not about the origins of Christianity, since the people were Christian before they knew anything about politics. But human things remain so changeable, violence itself is part of this rule of change, that only something unchanging can justify rule. For that very reason, the prince cannot tolerate competition, so he prefers to get the craftsmen killed whom he had promised reaches & honors, since they are not satisfied with what they have done, they do not see the need for a thing to be permanent & unquestioned. The craftsmen, after all, can always ply their craft in another country, but the prince cannot keep getting other countries. Their Icarus-like death suggests the transport of the beautiful, which, like religion, is necessary & at the same time dangerous for politics. It can go too far, it can claim an independence it cannot secure. They are a necessary sacrifice of politics—the poem does not even hint at condemnation for any of the prince’s actions, which are nevertheless questionable. The distinction between king & tyrant isn’t contemplated, but the prince knows what he’s doing: In the first section, the prince meets a shepherd whom he asks whether he knows the cursed place, since he wants this church built there, & he asks for directions—he knows that rule depends fundamentally on overcoming this fate. He’s not a pious man in a special sense, nor is he a just man, but he seems to know piety is necessarily at the core of justice, & the alternative to it is some kind of horror. He’s undoubtedly a greater man than the protagonist of the ballad. The origins of politics are fearful & even the church is not free of blood. But the ballad is about the architect, who is a strange person indeed & whose deed is more fearful than the prince’s, because it goes against self-interest. Manole claims his dream is a divine inspiration, but the poem doesn’t narrate it or vouchsafe his interpretation—his demand of a blood sacrifice could not possibly be tied to God, yet the man is willing to kill his own wife & child, & eventually gets himself killed, too. It would seem that art, for all its knowledge, which can always be replicated, is not only apolitical, but unnatural. To produce children & to produce buildings are rather different makings & Manole, whom the poem exalts above the other nine craftsmen, doesn’t really hesitate to choose the more rational, but inhuman of the modes of production. The poem only attributes to God the rain & wind that might stop the woman from her fate, but this mercy turns out to be inadequate for men. God isn’t said to be involved in any way in the church. In a strange sense, the craftsmen are more arrogant than the prince: They seem eager to build again, just like they also think of taking flight, unconcerned about their guilt. The poem says nothing about whether the sacrifice was even necessary, only that the men took it to be so. The shepherd had told the prince that dogs go mad around that cursed place—so have these men. Manole4 is the only one who has to pay this personal price, which fits with the fact that he is the best of the ten, therefore the most vulnerable to inhumanity. He is the protagonist of the poem because he ends up doing the worst deed, apparently because he doesn’t really believe there’s any divine providence. This world is pitiless & the curse of the place falls on him. The poem seems to record his fearful fate lest people should get the idea that things work out for human beings. Christianity has its work cut out for itself in face of a people that tells such tales & loves them. There are hundreds of versions of this story in Eastern Europe, where mostly people have been Orthodox this last thousand years or so.
Let me leave you with my podcast with Rod & then some music:
The most famous of course is Tom Hanks, who recently wrote & starred in Greyhound, a fine Christian WW2 movie!
Read Rod’s long account here, it’s well worth your time—gracious, marked by his renowned mix of Christian hope & indignation at the wickedness prospering in our midst.
My Roman dispatches on the uses & disadvantages of nationalism in politics at Law&Liberty, American Mind, & Catholic World Report.
The name is a version of the Jewish Immanuel: God is with us.
Beautiful, Titus. So nice to have a piece on Romanian things from you.
Thanks a lot for the kind words, Carl!