zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — mostly about monks vs riot police on the Holy Mountain ]
.

I’ve written often enough about the black banners in Islamic iconography — here are two examples of black flags from Greece, one of them specifically Christian:

The flag in the upper image you probably know: it’s one version of the Greek nationalist Golden Dawn party flag, with its swastika echo that the party describes as a “meander”. The lower image is described thus by photojourno Nikos Pilos:

Father Paulos is holding the black flag with the white cross, Esfigmenon’s Monastery and zealots’ symbol. The meaning of this flag is “orthodoxy or death “. The monks of Esfigmenon Monastery have stopped since 1972 (time of the patriarch Athinagora, Dimitrio and Vartholomeo) to mention in their preys the name of Constantinople’s Patriarch, blaming him as a heretic because he had and he has conversations with the Pope. The last dramatic episode in the history of one of the earliest Orthodox monasteries, 1500 years after it was first built in Mt Athos, the Holy Mountain in northern Greece.

Let me offer you some angles on what’s given rise to that monk with a black banner…

**

July 29th’s Vatican Insider carried an article titled Patriarchate of Constantinople wages war against rebel monks on Mount Athos, describing the most recent event with a little background:

The Greek government sent riot police to Mount Athos in Northern Greece this morning, to forcibly remove a group of monks from Esphigmenou monastery, one of the twenty monasteries that form part of this famous Eastern orthodox complex. Esphigmenou monastery is renowned for the war it has waged against the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople which it accuses of betraying the Orthodox Church by opening ecumenical dialogue with the Vatican. A war which has been going on since the 70s. According to an Associated Press report, the traditionalist monks threw stones and Molotov cocktails at police and judicial officials as they attempted to storm the building .Patriarch Bartholomew declared the monks of Esphigmenou an illegal brotherhood in 2002 and ordered their eviction. But the monks ignored this, claiming the Patriarch of Constantinople does not have the power to evict them.

**

In response to news media, the monks posted a friend’s report, Correcting the Record:

I just spoke with one of the Esphigmenou monks, Father Sava, and want to correct the record about the ongoing attacks against the monastery today.

This morning, a group of around 20 large armed men armed attacked the Esphigmenou monastery building in Karyes, Mt. Athos where the monks were engaged in quiet prayer. This is the 12th day that the monastery has been under siege. The monks twice asked for the men to leave in peace after a city clerk attempted to serve them with eviction papers. Then the 20 large men attempted to smash their way into the monastery building with a construction bulldozer. As you can see in the video, uniformed Greek police stood around while a bulldozer attacked the property and attempted to smash down the front door:

This bulldozer came within 15 centimeters of killing a defenseless monk (who was behind the door and did sustain injuries) with its steel blade.

Contrary to media reports, they did NOT throw any bombs. I specifically asked Fr. Sava about these alleged “bombs” and he said that they do not have bombs and did not throw any bombs. It appears Greek government officials are trying to cover up their complicity in these lawless and criminal activities by spreading false reports to media outlet now that their nefarious activity has been exposed. The video of the attack shows that there is no evidence of bombs or aggressive action by the monks.

**

Finally, here’s the Theology of the dispute, also from the monks’ site:

The fathers of Esphigmenou struggle against the heresy of ecumenism which states that there is no one church which possesses the Truth. The Orthodox Church believes, as the monks of Esphigmenou Monastery believe, that the Church has never lost the Truth or its unity. The Nicene Creed states the Orthodox Church’s dogmatic basis, “I believe in one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church. I believe in one baptism.” Ecumenism rejects these fundamental truths of the church by teaching that there are many churches and many baptisms.

The beliefs of ecumenism and the beliefs of Orthodoxy are mutually exclusive. You can either believe in the Creed or you can believe in ecumenism, not both. By embracing ecumenism Patriarch Bartholomew has embraced a belief in conflict with the teachings of the Orthodox Church. This is what the monks object to and what they wish to discuss with the Patriarch. There is not a single saint of the Church, ever, who believes in what Patriarch Bartholomew teaches and practices with regards to ecumenism, and this has caused great concern on the part of the monks. The Patriarch refuses to allay those concerns and refuses to engage in constructive dialogue with the monks. He has, however, demanded an apology in writing for questioning him.

**

DoubleQuote Sources:

Golden Dawn black banner: IB Times

Monks’ black banner: Nikos Pilos

[ by Charles Cameron — destruction of sacred spaces ]
.

Do we grieve the destruction of the Abbey of Monte Cassino as we grieve the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas?

**

With playful and appropriate scholarly tongue-in-cheek, Umberto Eco describes the importance of monasteries — and of the Benedictine Order specifically — in preserving culture, literacy, the arts and sciences through dark ages in his novel, The Name of the Rose:

“Monasterium sine libris,” the abbot recited, pensively, “est sicut civitas sine opibus, castrum sine numeris, coquina sine suppellectili, mensa sine cibis, hortus sine herbis, pratum sine floribus, arbor sine foliis. … And our order, growing up under the double command of work and prayer, was light to the whole known world, depository of knowledge, salvation of an ancient learning that threatened to disappear in fires, sacks, earthquakes, forge of new writing and increase of the ancient. … Mundus senescit. If God has now given our order a mission, it is to oppose this race to the abyss, by preserving, repeating, and defending the treasure of wisdom our fathers entrusted to us.

Monte Cassino is the spiritual home of the Benedictine monastic order. It was here that Saint Benedict of Subiaco built a retreat in 529 CE, here that he wrote his Regula Monachorum or monastic Rule, the central text of western monasticism, and though the monastery had been previously sacked by the Lombards in 585, the Saracens in 884, and the Normans in 1046, it was devastated anew during the Battle of Monte Cassino 1944, an American artillery commander telling his men:

I don’t give a damn about the monastery. I have Catholic gunners in this battery and they’ve already asked me for permission to fire on it…

Harold Bond, in his book Return to Cassino A Memoir of the Fight for Rome, describes the scene as 256 American heavy bombers began dropping 576 tons of munitions on the abbey in waves, in words echoes by the video below:

There was no anti-aircraft fire from the Germans, either, just the drone of the big planes. They were very close now, and the first formation flew in over the abbey, releasing the bombs. We could see them fall, looking at this distance like little black stones, and then the ground all around us shook with gigantic shocks as they exploded. Another formation flew in, and then another, each followed by thunderous detonations. Now where the abbey had been there was only a huge cloud of smoke and dust which concealed the entire hilltop.

**

The bombing appears to have been authorized on the basis of a mistranslation. An intelligence intercept of the question “Ist Abt in Kloster?” — “is the Abbot in the Monastery” — was translated by the US as though Abt was short for Abteil, “Is the HQ in the Abbey?” The recorder answer “Ja” then led to the bombing.

Three days after the bombing, the Abbot was interviewed in person by the commander of XIV Panzer Corps, himself a lay brother of the Benedictine order, and reported:

Until the moment of the destruction of the Monte Cassino abbey there was within the area … neither a German soldier, nor any German weapon, nor any German military installation.

Thankfully, the abbey was restored and reconsecrated in 1964 by Pope Paul VI and remains to this day the mother house of the Order of St. Benedict.

**

I hope to review relevant portions of Peter Caddick-Adams‘ Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell, available in the UK and due to be released in the US in April 2013, later this year. A review copy has been my source for details of the Battle of Monte Cassino described above.

Image sources, upper pair:

Destruction of the taller Bamiyan Buddha, CNN via Wikipedia
Montecassion destroyed, from Monte Cassino Tour

Image sources, lower pair:

Bamiyan Buddhas, from Random Walks
Monte Cassino by John `Warwick’ Smith, from the Tate

[ by Charles Cameron — more food for thought on religious and irreligious outrage — and Paris again, too ]
.

.

It will not have escaped the eagle-eyed readers of Zenpundit that three of the incidents we have been discussing recently — the Pussy Riot affair, the Innocence of Muslims video and the Charlie Hebdo cartoons — all revolve around issues of blasphemy and free speech.

I’m indebted to whoever it was pointed me to Colin Jager‘s Pussy Riot’s punk prayer, posted on the SSSR’s Imanent Frame blog ten days ago as a comment on the punk grrls incident:

Perhaps its most obvious precursor is the intervention staged by several young lettrist poets at Notre Dame Cathedral, on Easter Sunday, 1950. In the middle of the service Michel Mourre, dressed as a Dominican monk, climbed into a pulpit and began to read a sermon/poem that condemned the Catholic Church for “infecting the world with its funeral morality,” and announced that God was dead “so that Man may live at last.” As Greil Marcus details in Lipstick Traces, the response was dramatic: the Cathedral’s guards attacked the four with their swords, and the crowd chased them out of the Cathedral and down to the Seine, where they were apprehended by the police.

**

That’s the sort of hint I like to follow up on, so I found my way to Greil Marcus‘ book, and to this paragraph for starters:

At 11:10 A.M. on 9 April 1950, four young men — one got up from head to foot as a Dominican monk — entered Notre-Dame in Paris. Easter high mass was in progress; there were ten thousand people from all over the world in the cathedral. “The false dominican,” as the press called him — Michel Mourre, twenty-two — took advantage of a pause after the credo and mounted the altar. He began to read a sermon written by one of his co-conspirators, Serge Berna, twenty-five.

Let me say right away that there is at least one pointer here suggesting that Marcus may not be the best observer of religious detail. Marcus says Mourre “took advantage of a pause after the credo and mounted the altar” before reading his sermon — Mourre’s own account has him “mounting the pulpit”. Curiously enough, the writer of the Immanent Frame piece makes a similar error in describing Pussy Riot:

Singing “Mother of God, Chase Putin Out!,” and clad in brightly colored dresses, leggings, and balaclavas, the women danced, kneeled, and crossed themselves in front of the Cathedral’s high altar.

Only in a stretched sense can the Pussy Rioters be described as performing their act “in front of the Cathedral’s high altar.” They were in front of the great doors of the ikonostasis, which when opened, lead to the altar. But the ikonostasis itself is no more an altar than a pulpit is.

Sacred architecture, gentle readers: these are differences here that do make a difference.

**

Marcus then gives the text of the sermon, which can be found on Wikipedia and concludes with the line:

We proclaim the death of the Christ-god, so that Man may live at last.

Compare the Pussy Riot prayer, the Guardian’s translation of which can be found here, and which includes the lines:

Fight for rights, forget the rite – Join our protest, Holy Virgin.

**

Moving along, Greil next allows us to glimpse the response, which included the drawing of swords and the threat of lynching:

The cataclysm that followed went beyond anything expected by Mourre and his fellows, who first planned merely to let loose a few red balloons. The organist, warned that a disruption might take place, drowned out Mourre just after he pronounced the magic words “God is dead.” The rest of the speech was never delivered: swords drawn, the cathedral’s Swiss Guards rushed the conspirators and attempted to kill them. Mourre’s comrades took to the altar to shield him — one, Jean Rullier, twenty-five, had his face slashed open. The blasphemers escaped — his habit streaked with Rullier’s blood, Mourre gaily blessed the worshippers as he made for the exit — and were captured, rather rescued, by the police: having chased the four to the Seine, the crowd was on the verge of lynching them.

You may recall for comparison with this incident that the sum total of weaponry attributed to Christ’s disciples in the Gospels was two swords, worn on just the one evening —

And they said, Lord, behold, here are two swords. And he said unto them, It is enough.

— [Luke 22.38], and that the sum total of wounds inflicted by those swords was the loss of one ear, which was quickly and miraculously replaced by the savior himself —

And one of them smote the servant of the high priest, and cut off his right ear. And Jesus answered and said, Suffer ye thus far. And he touched his ear, and healed him.

— [Luke 22:50-51]

**

Next up, here is Michel Mourre’s own, retrospective account, from his book In Spite of Blasphemy:

It would be absurd to expect that the incident I was organizing with my friends was going to bring about a change in the state of the Church. In the fever of excitement we were in at the time, some of my friends, particularly one who was a former monk, a Spanish Jesuit, really believed it would. But I knew only too well that I had no message to deliver, no reforms to attempt, since I as in a far more wretched moral condition than so many others. I did not believe that God could be found anywhere outside His Church or that God could be an ally of ours against the Catholic Church. In this connection there was the example of all the pseudo-saintly sinners, the pseudo-mystics, the pseudo-illuminaries, both Buddhist and otherwise, who flourished in Saint-Germain-des Pres, and the “hidden knowledge,” the “esoteric intuitions,” the “visions” of the diabolical procession in honor of Satan, the Devil-Lucifer, of which at least one initiate could be found any evening in a Saint-Germain bar ready to describe his “trances.” All these voluntary outcasts from the Church, all these madmen drunk on occult fumes and in search of a substitute God, a substitute Church and Mysteries, discouraged, by the very excess of their nonsense, any attempt to look for God outside the discipline and rules of the Church.

No, I had really no idea of changing anything in the Church! I was trying rather to convince myself that God no longer counted for me, nor did His Church, nor above all did the atmosphere of sacredness that could be felt in the ceremonies of the Church. By this insult to God, by this small sacrifice I was going to make, but not without anxiety or fear, I was trying to make God equal in my eyes with human, transient things which are destined to die and which can be trodden underfoot relentlessly and without regret.

And yet, once I was embarked on the details of our scheme for creating a disturbance during the Easter service at Notre Dame, I began to take it all quite seriously. To my feverish mind the cry of revolt which we decided on at a table in the Mabillon was like a message to the Church, to the world, and I found it quite natural to put on my monk’s habit again before mounting the pulpit. For me the habit of Saint Dominic was an exasperating symbol, an object of reproach. By profaning it I hoped to be rid of it.

Next day, after the Credo of the Easter High Mass in Notre Dame, dressed as a Dominican and wearing a tonsure, I mounted the pulpit and shouted out the old blasphemy: “God is dead!” But the blasphemy is no longer what it was in Nietzsche’s day, the prelude to a hymn of joy; it is only a cry of madness and horribly sad.

**

While the Moscow Cathedral and Notre Dame incidents are similar in some ways, the Notre Dame venue — Paris, 1950 — prefigures both the students at the barricades in 1968 and the Last Temptation troubles that I reported in connection with the Innocence of Muslims video — and Charlie Hebdo, too. The motivations, however, are quite dissimilar, as the quotes from the grrls closing statements, which I’ve excerpted here and which are extensively quoted in the Jager piece, suggest:

Maria Alyokhina, for example, asserted that for the Orthodox Church “[t]he Gospels are no longer understood as revelation, which they have been from the very beginning, but rather as a monolithic chunk that can be disassembled into quotations to be shoved in wherever necessary.” Noting that Jesus himself had been accused of blasphemy, Alyokhina goes on: “I think that religious truth should not be static, that it is essential to understand the instances and paths of spiritual development, the trials of a human being, his duplicity, his splintering. That for one’s self to form it is essential to experience these things.” And she makes the link to contemporary art explicit: “all of these processes—they acquire meaning in art and in philosophy. Including contemporary art. An artistic situation can and, in my opinion, must contain its own internal conflict.”

and:

The radical power of that diagnosis becomes most clear in Yekaterina Samutsevich’s closing statement: “In our performance,” she writes, “we dared, without the Patriarch’s blessing, to unite the visual imagery of Orthodox culture with that of protest culture, thus suggesting that Orthodox culture belongs not only to the Russian Orthodox Church, the Patriarch, and Putin, but that it could also ally itself with civic rebellion and the spirit of protest in Russia.” Most striking here, perhaps, is the language of “uniting” orthodox and protest culture, rather than setting them against each other. This is done, Samutsevich suggests, in the name of a democratic ideal: both orthodox and protest culture are properties of the people rather than of one group or another. The performance, on this analysis, becomes a visual and aural demonstration of what Alyokhina had called “internal conflict,” something posed by all three women as the space in which religious revelation happens. Thus art, religion, and the state are not conceptually separated here but deliberately mixed up, in the name of religious truth.

**

It is worth noting that Michel Mourre, who had been a Dominican friar before the event in Notre Dame, came back into the Church and lived until 1977, writing a number of books including Religions et Philosophies d’Asie, Le Monde à la mort du Christ and L’Histoire vivante des moines, as well as his Dictionnaire d’histoire universelle.

As the world spins, so spins my head.

[ by Charles Cameron — that’s the thing: only what’s deep survives ]
.

.

I don’t think the shadow on the wall behind and to the right of Noah Levine (above, left) is wearing a mohawk — I think it’s the shadow of a Tibetan monk wearing the kind of headdress you’ll see on the young Tulku (above, right)… but even so, the picture does remind me of this one, which I posted a few days ago, titled “choir punk”:
.

.

The similarities are more than visual, however — and they’re instructive.

**

As you may recall, the lower of the two images is one that I used to illustrate my opening post on the topic of Pussy Riot, and it illustrates the theme that punk and Orthodoxy have something important in common. The upper image (left) shows another punk who got religion — in this case, Buddhism. His name is Stephen Levine, and he’s the guy who set the Dharma Punx wheel rolling, coming out of a life of prison, punk and crack addiction into the stillness of meditation in much the same way that the punk monks featured in that earlier piece came out of their own nihilism, punk and despair into the stillness of contemplation…

From nihilism to peace.

I’ve never been into punk music myself, I’m a Bach and Gregorian Chant man — but what’s striking me here is the sense that punk knows the first thing there is to know: that the things we do to try to keep ourselves happy necessarily ring hollow after some time. Possessions, status — these things may appease us for a while, but they don’t truly satisfy.

The punk knows this, and the monk knows this — whether the monk in question is Buddhist or Christian or whatever. Only the monk makes the discovery that leads out of contemptus mundi into the alternative strategy.

**

And somehow, you need to reach full tilt boogie to get there, howsoever full tilt boogie may be defined in your own case, and whatever form the contemplative, relaxed, inward life may take.

Here are two versions of what it takes:

Samuel Johnson, I’d say, is seeing something very close to either one of these when he says:

Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

**

A close brush with death — or sure knowledge of one’s mortality. A red-hot iron ball stuck in your throat. Rock bottom…

All of these things can concentrate the mind wonderfully, and the concentrated mind can do things, can allow things that the bothered mind would get insanely bothered by.

You may wear rose-tinted glasses for a while, and get away with it. You can try out the dark glasses of ironic superiority. Both ways of looking involve a measure of self-delusion, however, for they catch surfaces and miss the depths.

At times — when you or someone you love gets an unexpected and advanced cancer diagnosis, say, or you lose your house to the bank — the illusions get stripped away, and you simply see. And what you see will either be enough to make you cry and rage, or enough to make you dance and sing.

Because when the illusions get stripped away, only what’s deep survives.

**

I’d like to take this just a step further.

The old Lakota medicine man Archie Fire Lame Deer told his biographer, Richard Erdoes:

I am no wino or pishko, but I am no saint either. A medicine man shouldn’t be a saint. He should experience and feel all the ups and downs, the despair and joy, the magic and the reality, the courage and the fear, of his people. He should be able to sink as low as a bug, or soar as high as an eagle. Unless he can experience both, he is no good as a medicine man.

I don’t suppose anything I say in words can get this exactly right anyway, but I’ll try.

If you try to give advice to someone who is suffering more than you have ever suffered, your advice is liable to come across as uncomprehending and shallow. You have to have known your own blues to sing the blues. And you have to be in peace to convey peace…

And that, it seems to me, is what allows monks to hear and understand and talk, peer to peer, with punks — and that’s what allows punks to become monks.

**

Noah Levin’s book, Dharma Punx, is available on Amazon, as is the DVD of Meditate and Destroy, the 2007 documentary about him.

**

Punk may still not be my kind of music — but I’m beginning to see the punk mohawk as a kind of instinctive tonsure…

[ by Charles Cameron — mystery beyond the senses, holy of holies behind the veil, altar beyond the iconostasis, and other considerations bearing on Orthodoxy, Pussy Riot, holy folly and monastic punk ]
.

Life is full of surprises.

.

Okay, I started fishing around the web the way I do because when I first ran across the Pussy Riot story, I kept seeing press reports that said the grrls had been protesting on the altar of Christ the Savior Cathedral [Russian Orthodox] in Moscow.

**

What surprised me about this was that the altar in an Orthodox church would be behind the closed doors of the Iconostasis, because what takes place on the altar is too mysterious for us to grasp through the unaided senses.

Aside: there’s a lot of religious “clash of civs” going on in the Pussy Riot affait, so let me untangle some of the interesting threads, and then see where that leads us.

You may recall that when Christ died on the cross outside the City walls, there was a parallel incident inside Jerusalem: “the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent” [Matt 27.51]. This could, it seems to me, be an involuntary gesture of mourning on the part of the earth and temple — but it also opens the holy of holies..

In very broad strokes then, there are three spaces in Orthodoxy, separated by two doors, and they correspond to three ways of knowing.

• Outside the church, there’s the realm where the senses and rational mind can be pretty much relied on for the kinds of transactions that humans mostly engage in, food, drink, shelter, exchange of goods…
• Passing in through the church door we are in a space of devotion, the nave, in which attention is focused on the second doorway, that of the iconostasis, where the icons are presented. Here the mental activity is typically one of prayer, and the icons are available to lead the senses and mind towards that which the mind cannot comprehend.

.

.

• And passing, as only the ordained may, through the doors of the iconostasis into the Sanctuary, we enter the space of the altar and the sacramental transformation of the Eucharist — which neither rational mind nor senses can apprehend, and which is accordingly the realm of Mystery properly defined.

The Pussy Riot grrls are clearly dancing (and singing and prostrating and crossing themselves in the video) in front of the doors of the iconostasis — not “on the altar” — a big difference, which I would suggest is comparable in kind to the difference between human prayer and divine revelation.

No, they were not “staging an anti-Kremlin protest on the altar of Moscow’s main cathedral” [Telegraph], nor “performing what they called a ‘punk prayer’ on the altar of Moscow’s Christ the Savior Cathedral” [ABC News].

**

By way of giving you some context, Eurasia Review has the religious politics:

The actions of Pussy Riot inspired indignation on the part of Church leaders and regime officials. Patriarch Kirill called their action a “mockery of a sacred place.” Sergei Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, said it was “blasphemy.” The women were described as “satanic devils” and “prostitutes” and there were calls for them to be ripped to pieces on the ancient execution site in Red Square.

What was lost in all this was the identification of the Russian Orthodox Church with the Putin regime. Putin’s inauguration was marked by the ringing of church bells in the Kremlin. Kirill held a special prayer service for his “health” and “success in government,” in the Cathedral of the Assumption in the Kremlin. In the Novodevichy Monastery, the nuns sang psalms round the clock for Putin’s health.

And then there was that 2009 London Times article:

The Russian Orthodox Church will choose tomorrow between three alleged former KGB agents as its next spiritual leader.

More than 700 priests, monks and lay representatives will decide who should become the new Patriarch in the first Church election since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The contest at Christ the Saviour Cathedral in Moscow pits the favourite, Metropolitan Kirill of Smolensk and Kaliningrad, against two rivals who also rose through the heirarchy at a time when the Church was under strict Communist control.

**

Here are the lyrics to the “punk-prayer” Virgin Mary, Put Putin Away that they were singing:

(choir)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away
?ut Putin away, put Putin away

(end chorus)

…
Black robe, golden epaulettes
All parishioners crawl to bow
The phantom of liberty is in heaven
Gay-pride sent to Siberia in chains

The head of the KGB, their chief saint,
Leads protesters to prison under escort
In order not to offend His Holiness
Women must give birth and love

Shit, shit, the Lord’s shit!
Shit, shit, the Lord’s shit!

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, become a feminist
Become a feminist, become a feminist

(end chorus)

The Church’s praise of rotten dictators
The cross-bearer procession of black limousines
A teacher-preacher will meet you at school
Go to class – bring him money!

Patriarch Gundyaev believes in Putin
Bitch, better believe in God instead
The belt of the Virgin can’t replace mass-meetings
Mary, Mother of God, is with us in protest!

(Chorus)

Virgin Mary, Mother of God, put Putin away
?ut Putin away, put Putin away

(end chorus)

Here’s a linguistic comment, which I can neither affirm nor refute, from The Economist:

“The Lord’s Shit!” is a literal translation, while the expression “Sran’ Gospodnya” found in the lyrics is an equivalent of English “holy shit”, which is a totally diferrent matter.

And then there’s this:

But prosecutors sought to downplay the political angle and highlight the blasphemy, overriding the defense’s objections with the help of Syrova’s many “question disallowed!”

“Do you believe it acceptable to say ‘Holy sh*t!’ in the church?” a prosecutor asked a father of one of the defendants in the courtroom.

The man denied it, pointing out Russia’s ancient tradition of skomorokhi – traveling actors afforded the degree of freedom of speech that apparently exceeded that allowed to Pussy Riot. Of course, the skomorokhi sometimes faced burning at the stake, but this was not mentioned at the hearing.

**

Which brings us to the entire issue of holy fools in Orthodoxy…

The holy fools are understood to “feign madness in order to provide the public with spiritual guidance” — but I wonder if that’s a rationalization of behaviors that were simply sane, direct and challenging at the time. Consider this description from the National Catholic Register:

In Russian history the greatest of the “holy fools” was Basil the Blessed, a man so revered that the famous Cathedral in Moscow’s Red Square next to the Kremlin was named in his honor. Basil walked through Moscow wearing nothing more than a long beard. He threw rocks at wealthy people’s houses and stole from dishonest traders in Red Square.

Few doubted Basil’s holiness. Tsar Ivan the Terrible feared no one but Basil. Basil was also given to eating meat on Good Friday. Once he went to Ivan’s palace in the Kremlin and forced the tsar to eat raw meat during the fast saying, “Why abstain from eating meat when you murder men?” Countless Russians died for much less but Ivan was afraid to let any harm come to the saintly Basil.

And the grrls explicitly claimed the Holy Fools inspired their mode of protest:

Nadia said. “We were searching for real sincerity and simplicity, and we found these qualities in the yurodstvo [the holy foolishness] of punk.”

Well, there are similarities, and there are differences. The canonical Holy Fools were presumably orthodox in their beliefs, which the Riot may not be — but on the other hand, they are clearly “speaking truth to power” to use the admirable Quaker phrase.

Folly is a tad under-appreciated these days.

**

On the other hand, maybe it’s demonic possession. From the examination of “altar warden Vasily Tsyganyuk, classified as a victim because he claimed to have suffered psychological trauma as a result of the performance” during the trial:

VICTIM: “Those who are possessed can exhibit different behaviors. They can scream, beat their heads against the floor, jump up and down…”

DEFENSE ATTORNEY NIKOLAI POLOZOV: “Do they dance?”

VICTIM: “Well, no.”

JUDGE: “Stop questioning him about those who are possessed. Tsyganyuk is not a medical professional and is not qualified to render a diagnosis.”

Nah, not possessed — possession would be a medical diagnosis.

**

Hey — the name Pussy Riot is a riot — and riots are not always comfortable.

Who would have imagined the name “Pussy Riot” would appear on the digital tongue of Archbishop Cranmer — who only the other day was chastised for saying that British Olympic athletes had “given the nation a veritable golden shower of success after success” when the kind of golden shower he was thinking of was presumably the kind Zeus showered on Danae.

But the good Archbishop — or at least the conservative Christian blogger who has taken that name — has in fact been vociferous in support of the Pussy Tribe, their name notwithstanding:

This is foolish. If history teaches us anything about the murky fusion of religion and politics – the spiritual with the temporal – it is that you cannot persecute the prophets of truth without multiplying the message and spreading the cult. These women had no bombs or bullets: they are not terrorists, but anarchic artists. The more inflated and preposterous the charges laid against them, the more they are elevated to martyrdom. The longer they rot in prison at the behest of a puffed-up Patriarch, the more that martyrdom becomes a cause.

Pussy Riot have nailed their 95 Theses firmly to the door of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. You can’t kill a movement by crucifying the radicals.

That’s theology!

But look, ecclesial nomenclature can be ambiguous in its own right. The original Archbishop Cranmer was a Puritan divine, and Richard Hooker the latitudinarian divine who wrote the classic Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie.

I think we can be safely if secretly amused that one of Cranmer’s respondents in the Pussy matter has chosen the online moniker “The Judicious Hooker”. In fact he’s the one who posted:

I realise that YG was rather plain in the chancel department (praise God for the Laudian revival!) but the ‘prisoners of conscience’ were not dancing on the altar. The Orthodox Holy Table lies behind the iconostasis screen and access is confined to sacred ministers.

The Orthodox – of all Christians – still maintain the sense of the sacred. The Cathedral’s iconostasis – where icons of our Lord and his Saints are displayed for veneration – looks rather impregnable and its doors firmly shut against profanation.

But I digress, I contain multitudes, I know.

**

One of the more interesting blogs I’ve run across discussing the Putin Pussy event has been Khanya — here’s a taste:

Is there an Orthodox culture, and does it have anything to say about this?

Yes, I believe there is an Orthodox culture, and it is well expressed in one of the hymns we sing repeatedly in the Paschal season.

Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered
Let those who hate him flee from before his face.

Does that apply to Pussy Riot?

Yes, I believe it does.

But you have to come to the end of the hymn to see how it applies.

This is the day of resurrection.
Let us be illumined by the feast.
Let us embrace each other.
Let us call “Brothers” even those that hate us, and forgive all by the resurrection, and so let us cry:
Christ is risen from the dead
Trampling down death by death
And upon those in the tombs bestowing life.

So what do we call the members of Pussy Riot?

Sisters.

And what do we do with them?

Embrace them, forgive them by the resurrection and tell them that God loves them and we love them too.

That’s Orthodox culture.

**

Another insightful blog has been Registan, where Sarah Kendzior came at things from a different angle:

Media outlets that regularly cover Russian politics have noted how male Russian dissidents have been ignored as Pussy Riot draws world sympathy.
.

.
Removing Pussy Riot from the broader problem of political persecution in Russia is a mistake, but the case also raises specific questions about gender, media and politics.

In the same week that Pussy Riot was profiled in the New York Times style section, the Boston Review republished a 2010 interview with Hillary Clinton, in which she was asked who her favorite designer was. “Would you ever ask a man that question?” she snapped. “Probably not, probably not,” the reporter replied. The American media embraced Clinton’s riposte, reprinting it widely. But when it comes to foreign female dissidents, they promote the values Clinton rejects.

**

Meanwhile — and I mean meanwhile, since this has nothing directly to do with Pussy Riot, and a great deal to do with them in indirect ways — in my own beloved California:

In the wilderness of Northern California, Monks John and Damascene searched in hopes of finding a way to reach out to the Punk scene, which John had escaped. Seeing that the scene was full of kids that were sick of themselves and crippled by nihilism and despair, the Monks set out to give them the same hope that they found in Ancient Christianity. To do this, they decided to submit an article about Father Seraphim Rose in the popular magazine, Maximum Rock and Roll.

When Father Damascene read over the magazine, he knew that they would never publish something like it. Struggling to show truth to the darkened subcultures, they tried again, but this time only placing an ad for Saint Hermans Brotherhood. They got a response from the editor, saying “What the @#*% is a Brotherhood?” and the Monks were told “We only run ads for music and ‘zines*.” A light bulb went on and thus, Death to the World was born.

The first issue was printed in the December of ’94 featuring a Monk holding a skull on cover. The hand-drawn bold letters across the top read “DEATH TO THE WORLD, The Last True Rebellion” and the back cover held the caption: “they hated me without a cause.” …
.

.

The first issue, decorated with ancient icons and lives of martyrs inside, was advertised in Maximum Rock and Roll and brought letters from all around the world. People from Japan, Lithuania, and Ireland wanted to get their hands on this new radical magazine. The mailing list grew and grew and the ‘zine was distributed at punks shows and underground hangouts. It was photocopied and passed around by hundreds who wanted to read about the radical lives of the lovers of truth and the mystery of monasticism. It was estimated that at one time, there were 50,000 in circulation.

Father Paisius, who is a Monk at the monastery, said, “This subculture is raucous and deeply disturbed because of their own pain. They see life as worthless. We want to show them an ideal that is worth their life. These are marginalized youth who are wounded, and Death to the World is meant to touch with a healing hand that wound.”

Writing and putting together issues 1-12, the Monks lived in the forests of Northern California in the midst of deer, bears, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes, translating and publishing wisdom from the holy fathers and mothers of ages past. The Monks and friends of the monastery also went to rock concerts and festivals, distributing Death to the World ‘zines and t-shirts, together with icons and other books that the monastery published. The Monks did not put out any issues after issue 12, but they continued to share and hand out back orders of Death to the World.

**

That may be where the guy up there in the choir with the shocking pink mohawk comes in.