The
[u]nited States is a frustrating place to live.
So much that gives meaning to life is dissolved in the quest to gain
money or ‘freedom’. One’s identity is
not grounded in the traditional soil of Church, family, clan, city, region,
nation, empire, and so on but simply in job occupation, leisure activities, and/or
the abstractions of various political constitutions and charters.
This
unhealthy imbalance has seemingly led to another unhealthy imbalance meant to
correct the former: Race is becoming one
of the most important factors in forming one’s identity in the States. Thus, the rise of La Raza, white
nationalists, Black Panthers, etc.
Even
the Orthodox clergy in the States seem unbalanced in their attempts to deal
with this, in a recent statement bordering on the denial that nationality,
ethnicity, and so forth have any real value for the present or the future:
But
it seems that both sides are falling into harmful ways of thinking. The various ethno-nationalists do not see the
dangers lurking in their strict identification of race and nation:
And
the cosmopolitan Orthodox seem to be forgetting that nationality does have an
important role in the present and the future.
Our
Lord says that ‘all nations’ will appear before Him at the Last Judgment (St
Matt. 25:32), and the recognition of ethnic distinctions continues on in Heaven
(Rev. 5:9). The Orthodox Church has also
unapologetically proclaimed as saints some who have advocated very strongly for
loving their native lands and cultures - St Paisius of Bulgaria, St Ilia of
Georgia, and St Nikolai Velimirovich of Serbia among them:
How
should we think of nationality, then, so as not to fall into any of the errors
spoken of above? Vladimir Moss speaks to
this:
And this raises
the very difficult question: assuming that there is a sense, albeit
metaphorical, in which a nation does have a unique spirit or soul, how are we
to define it? Or, if a definition is impossible - for, as Aksyuchits says,
"just as a person cannot be simply defined, but only described, so is it
with a nation"91 - how are we to describe it, at any rate approximately?
Or, if it cannot even be described, but only be "felt", how are we to
distinguish a true apprehension of the nation's soul from a false one?
In order to
answer these questions, I propose briefly examining several criteria of
nationhood, both spiritual ones like the religion of a nation, and more
concrete ones, such as blood, land and language. In an article written in 1970,
and entitled "Three Attitudes to the Homeland", the Russian
Slavophile Vladimir Osipov proposes the following set of criteria: "What
is a nation? Faith, blood, language and the land. Religion, and even a certain
complex of rites, are a part - indeed, the most important part - of the spirit
of a nation. An individual person can get by without religion. But without
religion, an individual nation cannot survive as a nation... A people
disintegrates literally before one's eyes when faith in God
disintegrates..."92
Here we find the
religious approach to the problem of nationalism – the importance importance
attached to the faith of the nation - that is characteristic of almost all
Russian writers. It is not that the call of blood, language and land are not
felt by Russians - especially the latter. But the strength of the Orthodox
Christian tradition in defining the Russians' consciousness of themselves and
of others remains strong, even after 70 years of atheist and internationalist
socialist propaganda. And this tradition declares that blood, after all, is not
a defining quality of nations (especially in such a racially mixed nation as
Russia) - and in any case, as the Apostle Paul said, God "hath made of one
blood all nations of men" (Acts 17.26). As for language and land, they
change and develop without the essential spirit of a country changing -
although there is no doubt that a deep knowledge of the language and living
contact with the land has an important role in keeping the spirit of a nation
alive.
Aksyuchits echoes
this judgement: "The positivist definitions of a people - for example,
common origin (blood), language, territory, economic structure, culture, state
unity - do not embrace the concept of that mysterious unity which is the
people, the nation. All such definitions are only partial. They cannot, for
example, explain the existence of such a people as the Jews, who in the
thousands of years of their existence have become mixed in blood93, have
changed their language and culture, have not had a common territory, or
economic structure, or their own statehood, but have nevertheless been fully preserved
as a people."94
The example of
the Jews is indeed instructive, and there can be little doubt that the only
major bond holding them together as a nation since the destruction of their
statehood in 70 A.D. has been their faith. However, it is also instructive to
note that when the Jewish leaders felt that the identity of their nation was
being threatened through assimilation with the European nations in the
nineteenth century, they founded the Zionist movement at Basel in 1897 with the
explicit aim of bolstering the Jewish identity by a return to the land of
Israel.95 Since then, moreover, it has been felt necessary to resurrect the
Hebrew language - and to make common blood a condition of citizenship in the
state of Israel.
So while a nation
can exist by faith alone, this faith is strengthened by its association with a
specific territorial, linguistic and genetic inheritance (however artificially
these associations may be constructed or reconstructed). This intermingling of
spirit and flesh in the self-definition of a nation has much to do with the
kind of state structure it eventually adopts. A truly theocratic people may be
strong enough in its allegiance to its heavenly Homeland to exist without a
homeland or state on earth; for they "confess that they are strangers and
pilgrims on the earth" and seek "a better country, that is, an
heavenly" (Hebrews 11.13,16). However, once settled in a certain place,
they will naturally tend to establish a monarchical state structure; for
monarchy, and especially hereditary monarchy, is both an expression and a
guarantor of continuity with the past. Nor is such traditionalism a matter just
of preserving some quaint old habits and customs. Insofar as the faith which
expresses the spirit of the nation is a historical one - "the faith of our
Fathers", - and bound up with certain specific historical events, such as
the Resurrection of Christ or the Conversion of St. Constantine, the history of
the nation will be to a large extent the history of that faith in that land, and
the keeping of historical memory will be both an expression of that faith and a
means of keeping it alive in the people.
However, as a
nation begins to lose its faith, the keeping of the traditions, and the
preservation of the spiritual unity of the nation in and through the
traditions, will come to seem less important than the fulfilling of the needs
of the individual citizens. And at that point, as has happened in the history
of almost all the European nations, the opportunity arises for an antimonarchical,
democratic revolution. For democracy, as we have seen, is oriented to the needs
of the individual as opposed to society as a whole, and of the individual as a
materialistic consumer as opposed to the individual as a member of the people
of God.
Source: http://orthodoxchristianbooks.com/books/downloads.php?book_id=724, pgs. 97-9, downloaded 12
May 2018
What
we see here is that nationality is more a matter of belief and behavior than
strictly race. The ethnic researcher Lev
Gumilev also confirms this in his book Ethnogenesis
and the Biosphere:
An ethnos, in my
understanding, is a collective of individuals that has a unique inner structure
and an original stereotype of behaviour, both components being dynamic.
Consequently an ethnos is an elementary phenomenon that is not reducible to
either sociological biological, or geographical phenomena.
. . .
Ethnoi are always
linked, on the contrary, with natural conditions, through active economic
activity, which is manifested in two directions, viz., adaptation to the
terrain, and of the latter to the ethnos. In both cases, however, we come up
against an ethnos as a really existing phenomenon, although the reason for its
origin is not clear.
It is also not
necessary to reduce the whole diversity of my theme to some one thing. It is
better simply to establish the role of certain factors. The terrain, for
example, determines an ethnic collective's possibilities during its rise, but a
newly born ethnos alters the terrain in accordance with its requirements. Such
mutual adaptation is only possible when a rising ethnos is full of strength and
is seeking to apply it. Later, however, it becomes used to the established
situation, which becomes near and dear to its descendants. Denial of that leads
inevitably to a conclusion that peoples have no homeland, understood here as a
combination of topographical elements dear to all hearts. Hardly anyone will
agree with that.
That alone indicates
that ethnogenesis is not a social process, because spontaneous development of
the sociosphere only interacts with natural phenomena, but is not a product of
them. But it is precisely because ethnogenesis is a process, and a directly
observed ethnos is a phase of ethnogenesis, and consequently an unstable
system, that any comparison of ethnoi with anthropological races is ruled out,
and so with any racial theories. In fact, the principle of anthropological
classification is similarity, and the people who comprise an ethnos are
diverse.
Source: http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/ebe1.htm, opened 18, 19 May 2018
The word 'Romans' (romani),
for instance, originally meant a citizen of the polis Rome, but not
at all the Italics and not even the Latins who inhabited other towns of Latium.
In the epoch of the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries A.D. the
number of Romans increased through the inclusion among them of all
Italians-Etruscans, Samnites, Ligurians, Gauls, and many inhabitants of the
provinces, by no means of Latin origin. After the edict of Caracalla in A.D.
212 all free inhabitants of municipalities on the territory of the Roman Empire
were called 'Romans', i.e. Greeks, Cappadocians, Jews, Berbers, Gauls,
Illyrians, Germans, etc. The concept 'Roman' lost its ethnic meaning, as it
were, but that was not so; it simply changed it. The general element became
unity not even of culture, but of historical fate, instead of unity of origin
and language. The ethnos existed in that form for three centuries, a
considerable period, and did not break up. On the contrary, it was transformed
in the fourth and fifth centuries A.D., through the adoption of Christianity as
the state religion, which began to be the determinant principle after the
fourth ecumenical council. Those who recognized these councils sanctioned by
the state authority were Romans, and those who did not became enemies. A new
ethnos was formed on that basis, that I conventionally call 'Byzantine', but
they themselves called themselves 'Romaic', i.e. 'Romans', though they spoke
Greek. A large number of Slavs, Armenians, and Syrians were gradually merged
among the Romaic, but they retained the name 'Romans' until 1453, until the
fall of Constantinople.
Source: http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/ebe2a.htm, opened 18 May 2018
But
in the first century A.D. new people appeared in the Roman Empire, unlike any of
their neighbors, who formed a new entity in the next two centuries. They
already counterposed themselves at the beginning of their advent to 'pagans',
i.e. to all other people, and, in fact, were singled out from their number, of
course, by the character of their behavior and not by anatomical or
physiological traits. They treated each other differently, thought differently,
and set themselves aims in life that seemed senseless to their contemporaries,
in striving for bliss beyond the grave. Asceticism was foreign to the
Hellenistic world; the new people created the Thebaid. The Hellenes and Romans
had already, for several centuries, considered their gods literary figures,
maintaining the cult as a public tradition but guided in ordinary life by many
omens. The new preachers and neophytes considered with complete conviction that
the other world was reality, and prepared themselves for fife on the other
side. While professing loyalty to the Roman government, they refused to
recognize its divine nature, and would not bow to the statues of the emperors,
although that often cost them their lives. These nuances of behavior did not
break the structures of society, but the new people dropped out of the ethnic
unity and evoked the burning hatred of the urban poor, who demanded their
annihilation, proceeding from the principle of denial of the right to be
different.
It
is wrong to think that the cause of the arising hostility was the difference in
convictions, because there were no stable and distinct convictions among the
uneducated pagans at that time, while they were diverse among the people of the
new mentality. But why did the Hellenes and Romans not quarrel with Mithra,
Isis, Cybele, and Helios, making an exception only for Christ? What put Christ
outside must obviously have been not an ideological or political attribute, but
an ethnological one, i.e. a behavioral one that was really new and unaccustomed
for Hellenistic culture.
As
we know, the new entity was victorious in spite of vast losses. The Gnostics
disappeared, and Manichaeans were scattered; the Marcionites (subsequently
Bogomils) were confined to a narrow community, and only the Christian Church
proved viable and gave rise to an entity that had no name of its own. I shall
conventionally call it Byzantine, or Orthodox Christian. An ethnos was formed
from the Early Christian community in the fifth century A,D. throughout the
Roman Empire, that called itself by the old word 'Romaic' (Gr. Rhome). From
the fifth to the tenth centuries A.D. Bulgarians, Serbs, Magyars, Czechs,
Russians, and Alans were converted to Orthodoxy, and then a superethnic
cultural entity of the Orthodox world was created, which was broken up in the
thirteenth century by blows from outside – by 'Franks' [+20],
'Turks', and Mongols.
Source: http://gumilevica.kulichki.net/English/ebe2b.htm, opened 18 May 2018
Mr
Gumilev’s work confirms for us that one’s bloodline is not the primary factor
in national identity. It does count for
something, but it is only one element in the larger national matrix together
with faith, land, and language.
A
nation, an ethnos, may contain more than one race, as in Rome,
Constantinople/New Rome, and Russia. It
is so with the South as well, which is formed mainly of a triple cord of
Englishmen, Africans, and Celts, and many are those who have assimilated to the
pattern of life they created here in Dixie - Germans, Greeks, Sicilians,
etc. Hopefully, one day the Native
Americans who were expelled will also be welcomed back to their lands here in
the South (Muscogee, Cherokee, etc., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Civilized_Tribes) and become part of this
great ethnos as well.
M.
E. Bradford is thus on the right track when he speaks of the Southern identity
as ‘a vital and long-lasting bond, a corporate identity assumed by those who
have contributed to it’ in Why the South
Will Survive (U of Georgia Press, 1981, p. 215).
The
mono-racial state is not necessary for national well-being. What is needed is a common faith, code of
conduct, and history. The fact that
black mammies raised white children throughout the life of the South, and
vice versa, even into modern times, shows
that this did exist in the South. It
still does, largely. What is required of
Southerners now is to perfect their oneness in the Orthodox Church, and to
protect their inherited social order against threats such as weaponized mass
immigration.
The
South has an antinomic character, i.e., unlike things existing together in
harmony. These different kin-groups, the
African and the Western European, co-exist together peacefully in Dixie (there
are exceptions of course, but we are speaking of the general rule). It contributes greatly to her uniqueness in
the world, to the sense of mystery surrounding her. If the antinomy is destroyed, the South is
likewise destroyed.
The
multi-ethnic, multi-racial nature of the Orthodox Christian Empire did not lead
to the melding of all its tribes and nations into one bland people. Some intermarriage no doubt occurred (as it has in the South), but
this is not a sin (here the cosmopolitan Orthodox mentioned above are correct). Overall, however, they retained their
uniqueness, offering it to the glory of God (which is why folks should not be
too eager to destroy these distinctions by thoughtless multiculturalism), while
purifying themselves of sin and learning to love their neighbors.
St-Emperor
Constantine the Great gives us a glimpse of this harmony in his letter on the dating
Easter:
...the most holy festival
of Easter should be everywhere celebrated on one and the same day. ...(So)
cheerfully accept what is observed with such general unanimity of sentiment in
the city of Rome, throughout Italy, Africa, all Egypt, Spain, France, Britain,
Libya, the whole of Greece, and the dioceses of Asia, Pontus, and Cilicia . . .
Source: https://orthodoxwiki.org/Paschalion, opened 15 March 2018
All
these peoples lived peacefully together in the one Orthodox Christian Empire by
the Grace of the Holy Ghost. No one in
the South, therefore, should think it such a strange or dangerous thing to see
different races living under the one roof of Dixie. If she will simply acquire the Holy Ghost,
all will go well with her.
--
Holy
Ælfred the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema
to the Union!
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