Sainthood and Celebrity

Plus: virtue is its own punishment, monks thirst (for the Word), and more

Creatures, this conversation shames me: I permit you, and even beg you, to report it to M. le Vidame. In this edition, a nosegay of short takes.

Inimitable Examples of Virtuous Conduct

I read The Princesse de Clèves, in Robin Buss’s translation. This 1678 novel about amorous intrigues in the court of Henri II (the French one, not the Lion in Winter one, that’s why his name is spelled frilly) starts off slow, in a welter of dauphins, but by page 80 or so I adored it. I know I just don’t understand Jane Austen and that’s a skill issue or whatever, but this book felt like the perfect foil for her world. Everyone is simultaneously lovestruck and intensely virtuous, and—this is the beauty part—their virtue is as white-hot and as stupid a passion as eros. Virtue is like romantic passion in that it’s useless and unconquerable. They just can’t help themselves! The conscience wants what it wants! God, I loved this, it’s very Incense and Insensibility. The dowager aunt of a hundred degenerate adultery-and-repentance novels.

The marriages and love affairs are matters of shame or honor, but they do lack the practical urgency of Austen’s marriage plots: Nobody here is going to go hungry. Buss’s introduction claims that the scheming and factionalism of the court is intentional political commentary, presenting Henri II’s reign as a kind of Gilded Age, glittering and teetering. That seems quite plausible to me in terms of how the novel feels to read, though I don’t feel competent to make the claim so boldly myself. I just enjoyed all these people making speeches about how they don’t even hope that their love is requited.

There is one scene that is purely erotic, rather than tragicomic: a scene all about the gaze, the hidden man gazing at the woman, whose hair is all undone over her breast as she gazes upon his portrait. That’s a mysterious scene, touching the heart of the novel’s idea of human life, all thwarted longing, humid and humiliated and guilt-ridden, somehow hushed and admirable rather than just silly. But mostly I think my experience of this book is summarized by the man, mourning his unfaithful lover, who says, “Today, I can justify nothing of what I feel.”

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Following Yonder Tsar

Also read Nadieszda Kizenko’s 2000 study, A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People. This is a fascinating look at a fascinating man. Father John was born in poverty in 1829, became a priest at a time when Russian Orthodox culture considered priesthood an unlikely arena for sanctity, became world-famous for his startling feats of charity and even more shocking ability to heal the sick, inspired a wild cult of followers/grifters who professed to believe that he was literally the Trinity, and died in 1908 as a reactionary defender of autocracy.

Anyone interested in Christian confrontations with modernity will find a treasure trove here. Kizenko delves into Father John’s nonconsensual josephite marriage. She explores his early social vision, and how he, like basically everybody imho who tried to find a way to serve the poor under modern conditions, turned from purely personal to institutional approaches. She shows you his “liturgical innovations”—my man not only added his own curlicues to the liturgical rubrics, which already shows a certain insouciance toward tradition and authority, but he did mass public confessions! They were mob scenes! People howled and shrieked and maybe injured themselves intentionally??

He held himself to a stringent morality: “I sinned before the Lord: I was at a reindeer-race yesterday at a tobogganing hill.” And yet those who met him reported his kindness, his generosity. In his earlier years, he condemned Russia’s inequalities. The 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II seems to have shocked him—he wrote that “streams of martyrs’ blood have begun to flow.” From that time forward his condemnation of revolution and his (complex, not wholehearted) alliance with the far right only strengthened. He began to identify Russia and Russianness with Orthodoxy, and Orthodoxy with defense of the tsar and the monarchy. His rhetoric became not only strident but violent, calling for a “cleansing of the tares.”

And meanwhile he was astonishingly famous. He had his picture on postcards across the Russian Empire; for the first time, Orthodox authorities faced the difficult question of how to photograph a living person in a way that would ensure that the photographs wouldn’t be used mistakenly as icons. Kizenko compares Father John to a few different Catholic figures: Most frequently, she contrasts him with St. John Vianney, another modern parish priest beloved for his work as a confessor. But in his invention of a kind of Orthodox celebrity—and in his imho basically unsuccessful struggle to navigate the central crisis of his time and place—he reminded me of nobody so strongly as Pope St. John Paul II.

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Vicar in a Tutu

I’ve been loving my friend Grant Hartley’s substack—most recent post is about Guigo II, a dude I’d never even heard of, and the erotic intensity of this monk’s experience of reading Scripture. My Catholic readers will love this newsletter; and for those of you who skip most of my more obviously God-bothering stuff, I will say that I think Grant’s writing shows the marks of a recognizable gay tradition: in its sensuality, its attentiveness to longing and unslaked desire, its flamboyance, and—last but not least!—its very queer cultural references.

Dear Alana

I worked with the creators of this podcast, which tells the story of the life and death of Alana Chen, a devout Catholic woman whose experiences with same-sex attraction and conversion therapy likely contributed to her suicide. (Both creators are quoted in my America magazine article about conversion therapy in Catholic settings.) The first few episodes are out today, and I hope you will give it a try. Simon Fung has worked really hard not to use Alana’s story as a kind of weapon or chess piece, but to explore the resonances between her life and his own experience, and to imagine the many different ways faith can look on the other side of conversion therapy.

icymi

“A Better Outdoors Indoors”: I’m in The Lamp reviewing a history of the mall. I also did short notes on a lot of movies: part one (inc They Cloned Tyrone and Dark Days); part two (horror/spooky); part three (imperial bedrooms).

Now Playing

Prayers, “Gothic Summer.” Don’t miss the video.

Modern interpretation of a Russian imperial crown photographed by “Shakko,” via Wikimedia Commons and used under a Creative Commons license.