Hi George,

My degrees are in Russian Language & Literature and history and I've spent about 18 months in Russia, starting with an academic year on postgraduate exchange at Moscow State University back in 1967-68, and most recently leading a cultural tour of Russia in 2006. My career wasn't as an academic but in "retirement" now I teach three classes at the University of the Third Age (U3A), in Russian language, Russian history and culture, and Russian literature.

Over the last few weeks I have taken my Literature students through Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment. I love Dostoyevsky, apart from his throwaway lines of antisemitism (grievously normal in Russia). He is a profoundly Christian writer. While I marvelled at the amount of theology in The Brothers Karamazov, I had tears in (re)reading parts of Crime and Punishment.

Khomyakov is interesting. Timothy Ware ("The Orthodox Church", Pelican 1963) writes:
"In 1846 the Russian theologian Aleksei Khomyakov wrote to an English friend: 'All Protestants are Crypto-Papists'. What he had in mind was that western Christians have a common background in the past, and have all been greatly influenced by the same events: by the Papal centralization and Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, by the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation."

Now, 163 years since Khomyakov made that comment, I could add the enormous impact of the Enlightenment, which produced a pervasive Western tradition of questioning and subjecting everything to Reason. The Orthodox Church – in Greece, Russia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania – has known no Middle Ages in the western sense, no Reformations or Counter-Reformations. While the Russian Orthodox Church was racked by a schism in the seventeenth century, this had nothing to do with theological questioning of longstanding tradition and church practice: quite the reverse – it was an assertion of conservatism against any reform, even a restorative one.

One could posit a parallel between the western church (both Catholic and Protestant) on the one hand, and the eastern (Orthodox) church and Islam on the other: both of the latter have been virtually impervious to change for many hundreds of years.

Hello Relda,

“The Enlightenment along with Western modernity could only have occurred as a consequence of the clash, military and ideological, between Protestants and Catholics. Perhaps the conflict with Islam (not necessarily military) may also prove, in time, just as fruitful.” - R

Military development in the modern era certainly has benefitted from the Enlightenment and the Great Divergence. In “A Beautiful Mind” (2001) the opening remark about mathematicians winning the war (WWII) is certainty valid. Yet, before the Enlightenment, military pursuits were often tethered solely to technology, without any good knowledge of the underlying science involved. The Chinese, for example, throughout the dynastic periods were masters of the technology, but the Chinese were not scientific in their approach: Nor was the West, until Greek philosophy rediscovered (as you have noted).

On “Quantification in Medieval Physics” (1961) Crombie notes the importance of recognising between “qualified Procedures and “quantified concepts”. Herein,

“To be complete … a procedure must contain both mathematical techniques for operating the scale theoretically and measuring techniques for using it to explore the world. Technology need contain little more than procedures of these kinds, which provide for the measurements and calculations with which it is concerned. But most science aims to go beyond these at providing explanations by means of a theory of science. Thus, “quantified science” is distinct from “quantified technology”.

The modern way of thinking has led to science-in-warfare. Even as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in religious wars, no doubt mathematics was applied to the technology of war; yet, maybe not in the same way mathematics guides the theory of science as theory is employed to warfare today.

The Greeks gave us Aristotle. Aristotle distinguished between “quality” and “quantity”; wherein, when the Greek philosophy was rediscovered, medieval folk took on debate originally raised by Pythagoras and Plato regarding whether, “the physical concept that qualitative differences might be reducible to differences in geometric structure, number and movement, that is to differences in quantities and … mathematical concepts and procedures” (Crombie). Here we see the beginnings of science to later to be used in warfare.

Glorfindel,
Thanks for “outing yourself”, so let me reciprocate by explaining that I grew up in what used to be post-war Czechoslovakia, and came to Australia in 1968. My insight into the “Russian soul” is certainly not as informed and professional as yours. Of course, in the West Dostoyevsky is much better known than Lermontov and rightly so. However, his sentimental poetry somehow contributed to my “spiritual sustenance“ during my formatting years at times that seemed (politically) so grim and futureless for us all (at 17 years of age I sincerely believed that Communisim had to take over the whole of the Western world before the West comes to its senses).

>>One could posit a parallel between the western church (both Catholic and Protestant) on the one hand, and the eastern (Orthodox) church and Islam on the other: both of the latter have been virtually impervious to change for many hundreds of years.<<

I agree to a point: Perhaps because Slavic mentality constitutes a part of my cultural make-up, I prefer to see Orthodox thinking - religion is as important to the traditional Russian philosophy and way of thinking as is logic and mathematics to the British - as COMPLEMENTARY to the Western (in the sense of the Yin-Yang complementarity), rather than as something that merely has been “virtually impervious to change”: To drive a car safely you need both the accelerator and the brakes pedal. So perhaps the Eastern “brakes“ are as important as the Western “accelerator“ to “drive” humanity forward. Within Christianity, Orthodoxy played the role of the brake, and within traditional Western Christianity it is probably the Catholic Church that plays this role, especially when the “vehicle“ seems to be rolling downhills.

Probably something along these lines can be said about the Christian-Muslim dialogue, or about the East-West complementarity approach to the global cultural scene, but I shall not elaborate. Perhaps you are familiar with Donald W. Treadgold’s two volumes “The West in Russia and China“ (CUP 1973), where he says something similar.

Oliver,

Where scientism is used in an approach giving the implication of having authority over all other interpretations of life (or death), such as the philosophical, religious, mythical or spiritual, it will explain very little.

The answers provided by a century of scientism have been shown as no longer adequate. The optimism of humanism has been shaken by two world wars, a devastating arms race, numerous famines and political crises demonstrating the practical failure in the idea humans can be autonomous from any external and absolute moral standards. It has begun to appear, autonomy is a myth - it has led not to freedom but anarchy or the arbitrariness of totalitarianism. Scientism does not and cannot address this. Materialism too has come to be questioned - more people begin to react to the impersonality of the machine/ computer age and to the dehumanisation of the individual.

There has been a growing realization (in physics at least) that the best understandings of the universe are indeed models or abstractions, and that ultimate reality is far more elusive than had once been thought. Gödel's work on logical systems, Einstein's on relativity, Heisenberg's on the uncertainty principle, and indeed the whole unsettling field of quantum mechanics. There is, as you suggest, quite a difference between technology and science, but it is a mute point.

The only recently elevated god of the secular and benevolent state, that could itself bring about a socialist utopia on Earth, has also become discredited. For, even if all the old gods are fragmented beyond repair, religion will continue to exist, along with our conflicts. People will continue to seek a meaning for being, a foundation for knowledge, an understanding for experience and a basis for human and other relationships - they will need, if not, want all these integrated into a comprehensive belief system by which to live.

A genteel intellectualism within religion, which abandons both an experiential and relational aspect of their source, has not filled the void. As ever, it is the ‘quality’ of ones belief that is important, not its ‘quantity’.

That's rather a narrow view relda, if you don't mind my saying.

>>The optimism of humanism has been shaken by two world wars, a devastating arms race, numerous famines and political crises demonstrating the practical failure in the idea humans can be autonomous from any external and absolute moral standards.<<

The pain of twentieth century wars is particularly vivid due to two factors. The technology that allowed destruction of lives on such an unprecedented scale, and the technology that allowed it to be recorded for posterity in visual and audible form. This brings it into our modern lives in a way that was never previously possible.

But this does not absolve previous centuries from their own versions of constant warfare, that serially enriched and impoverished countries and peoples across the world.

And it most certainly does not indicate any failure of humanism over and above any other philosophy.

Including religion.

Europe was subject to any number of religion-based wars - the French, the English, the Dutch, the Spanish were all at loggerheads for centuries, for reasons based entirely on the supposed superiority of one version of God over another.

So it is more than a little precious to use the experiences of only one century as evidence to suggest that wars are caused by a failure of "external and absolute moral standards". By which, of course, you mean religious standards.

>>The only recently elevated god of the secular and benevolent state, that could itself bring about a socialist utopia on Earth, has also become discredited<<

Compared with the previous lengthy periods of religion-led states, the secular state can be said to be in its infancy. To leap to the conclusion that it has failed is to ignore the many centuries that religion had to achieve a benevolent result, only to founder in the the carnage of the twentieth century.

George,
Thanks - interesting. I love Lermontov too, 'The Angel' but especially his novel A Hero of our Time. Good descriptive writing about the Caucasus – precursor to Tolstoy’s The Cossacks – as well as psychological portrait of a sociopathic and spiritually bankrupt outsider!

Your belief at 17 that "Communism had to take over the whole of the Western world before the West comes to its senses" has a parallel with Islam today in Europe. I wish far more people would come to their senses, forcing the mainstream parties to stop being politically correct, which leaves it to more or less fascist groups like the British National Party to raise the desperately important issue of creeping Islamization. I wouldn't wish communism on a dog, and I feel exactly the same about Islam, especially if it means that the priceless centres of western civilization (France, Britain, the Netherlands and others) disappear down the toilet.

I agree that the Orthodox and Russian "sobornost'" - sense of collective humanity - is grievously lacking in our atomistically individualistic western culture.

Relda,
Great posting to Oliver. I agree wholeheartedly. This is far from a "narrow” view. The postmodernist condition is a lonely, unsatisfying, cold place to be, although postmodernism has one good consequence in scepticism about fundamentalism. This leaves us open more honestly to ponder "how are we to live?" I was very impressed with someone’s quote from Dr John Dickson that “Only one way of life is logically compatible with Christianity; any kind of life is logically compatible with atheism”.

Yes, "it is the ‘quality’ of one's belief that is important, not its ‘quantity’". The Kingdom of God is within you...

Of the dystopian literature, have you read Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" (1921)? Remarkably prescient, excellent read.