“Dead Souls” by Nikolai Gogol (translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky)

I will try to read almost any book translated by Pevear and Volokhonsky. This novel does not always flow, especially in Volume 2, which is hindered by gaps, large and small, in Gogol’s manuscript. The result is a plot that sometimes leaves the reader guessing to fill in the blanks. One is saved by the fact that not too much happens in this story anyway. For the most part, Gogol weaves a beautiful description of provincial life in a Russian town. Of a typical landowner the narrator wonders, “Were you born such a bear, or did you get bearified by the backwoods life, sowing grain, dealing with muzhiks, and turning through all that into what’s known as a pinchfist? But no, I think you’d be just the same even if you’d been raised according to fashion, got your start and lived in Petersburg, and not in this backwoods. The whole difference is now you tuck away half a rack of lamb with groats, followed by a cheesecake as big as a plate, and then you’d eat some sort of cutlets with truffles. Yes, and now you have muzhiks under your rule: you get along with them and, of course, wouldn’t mistreat them, because they're yours and it would be worse for you.” The muzhiks are, of course, serfs bound to the land and their master for life. The “dead souls” in Gogol’s title refer to serfs deemed still alive for the tax purposes of the infrequent Russian censuses, though very much dead in point of fact. “What was this riddle, indeed, what was this riddle of the dead souls? There was no logic whatsoever in dead souls. Why buy dead souls? Where would such a fool be found? What worn-out money would one pay for them? To what end, to what business, could these dead souls be tacked?” Chichikov, the novel’s protagonist, is a mysterious man, who seems to have a gift for buttering up provincial officials of title and repute. “Obscure and modest was our hero’s origin. His parents were of the nobility, but whether ancient or honorary—God knows.” His life’s path did not seem easy, but it was hard to tell just whose fault that was exactly. “Now it might be concluded that after such storms, trials, vicissitudes of fate, and sorrows of life, he would retire with his remaining ten thousand to the peaceful backwoods of some provincial town and there wither away forever in a chintz dressing gown at the window of a low house, on Sundays sorting out a fight between muzhiks that started up outside his windows, or refreshing himself by going to the chicken coop and personally inspecting the chicken destined for the soup, thus passing his none-too-noisy but in its own way also not quite useless life. But it did not happen so.” One longtime landowner summed up provincial life the best, “For us fashion is no order, and Petersburg is no church.”

“On the Genealogy of Morals” by Friedrich Nietzsche (translated by Michael A. Scarpitti)

In these three short essays, Nietzsche brings his unique take on the progression of mankind specifically to the history of morality. He has no problem casually tearing down all received wisdom. “No one has, up to the present, expressed the slightest doubt or hesitation in judging the ‘good man’ to be of a higher value than the ‘evil man’, of a higher value with regard specifically to human progress, welfare and prosperity in general.” Nietzsche posits that, in fact, it was the aristocracy, from their position of power, who labeled their own actions as ‘good’, in a self-justifying manner. “The judgement ‘Good’ did not originate among those to whom goodness was shown! Rather it has been the ‘good men’ themselves, that is, the noble, the powerful, those of high degree, the high-minded, who have felt that they themselves were good…. It was from this pathos of distance that they first claimed the right to create values for their own benefit…. The pathos of nobility and distance, as I have said, the continuing and dominating collective instinct, and feeling of superiority of a higher race, a master race, in comparison to a subservient race—this is the origin of the opposition of ‘Good’ and ‘Bad’.” Modernity has been crippled by its quest for leveling, for the egalitarian spirit. “Our greatest peril lurks in the European drift towards egalitarianism, for it is this prospect which wearies us—we see today nothing which wishes to be greater, we surmise that everything is still, retreating, going backwards, regressing towards something more reserved, more inoffensive, more cunning, more comfortable, more mediocre, more indifferent, more Chinese, more Christian.” Human advancement marches towards the mass man, towards blandness.

In his second essay, Nietzsche moves on to the origins of obligations, debts, conscience, repression, and religion. “It is then in this sphere of contracts and legal obligations that we find the crucible of moral concepts such as ‘guilt’, ‘conscience’, ‘duty’, the ‘sacredness of duty’—their beginnings, like the beginnings of all great things in this world, are drenched with blood, through and through…. How can suffering be considered a compensation for ‘debts’?—It is because the infliction of suffering produces supreme pleasure, because the injured party will receive in exchange for his loss (including his vexation at his loss) an extraordinary reward: the pleasure of inflicting suffering—a real feast.” The joy of inflicting suffering had to be restrained as humanity matured. “It was that desire for self-torture in the savage who suppresses his cruelty because he was forced to contain himself (incarcerated as he was in ‘the state’, as part of his taming process), who invented bad conscience so as to hurt himself…. This man of bad conscience armed himself with religious precepts so as to carry his martyrdom to its ghastly extreme…. He takes ‘God’ as the most extreme antitheses that he can find to his own characteristic and indomitable animal instincts.”

Finally, Nietzsche takes on the march from ascetic ideals to secular modernity. “All good things were once bad things…. The feelings we call tenderness, benevolence, care, sympathy—which have been valued so highly that they are now almost ‘intrinsic values’—were for a very long time actually despised by their possessors…. The submission to law; oh, how reluctantly the noble races throughout the world renounced the vendetta and gave to the law power over themselves! ‘Law’ was for a long time a vetitum, an outrage, something unheard of; it was introduced with force, as a force, something to which men submitted only in shame.” The State finally usurped from the powerful. Nietzsche questions the values of secular truth and science, supposedly the outgrowth and cure for religion. “The belief on which our faith in science is based has remained to this day a metaphysical belief. Even we modern men of science—we who are godless foes of metaphysics—light our torches in that conflagration which was kindled by a belief thousands of years old, that Christian belief, which was also Plato’s belief, the belief that God is truth, that truth is divine…. What if God Himself proved to be our oldest lie?” Science is not opposed to asceticism, only art is. “In art, lying is consecrated, and the desire for deception has good conscience on its side. Plato felt this instinctively—Plato, the greatest enemy of art whom Europe has ever produced. Plato versus Homer.” For Nietzsche, only the poet can triumph over the truths. Asceticism alone will never quench man’s thirst. “The ascetic ideal simply means that something was lacking, that Man was surrounded by a tremendous void…. He suffered from the problem of his own meaning…. He was in the main a diseased animal; his problem was not suffering itself, though, but lack of an answer to that crying question, ‘Why do we suffer?’ Man, the bravest animal and the one most inured to suffering, does not repudiate suffering in itself; he desires it, he even seeks it out, provided that he is shown a meaning for it, a purpose for suffering…. Man will desire oblivion rather than not desire at all.”

“Laurus” by Eugene Vodolazkin (translated by Lisa C. Hayden)

Vodolazkin is a philologist and expert in medieval Russian history, who moonlights as a novelist. This story, set predominantly in fifteenth-century rural Russia, deals with medicine, mysticism, the nature of time, and faith in an epoch of uncertainty, hunger, and plague. “The house’s masters had not survived the last pestilence. These were years when there were more houses than people.” The novel chronicles Arseny, from an orphaned boy raised by his grandfather, a village healer and prophesier, through his travels around rural Russia and, finally, on pilgrimage to Jerusalem and back. His grandfather, Christofer, mixes the old folk ways with a deep-seated conviction in Christ. “Each of us repeats Adam’s journey and acknowledges, with the loss of innocence, that he is mortal. Weep and pray, O Arseny. And do not fear death, for death is not just the bitterness of parting. It is also the joy of liberation.” After Arseny’s son and the baby’s mother die in childbirth, Arseny leaves home in penitence to begin his journey of suffering. He refuses all companionship and comforts as he wanders from village to village, using the skills he has learned to heal the sick. “You serve your memory and display boundless devotion, but know, O Arseny, that you are destroying the living in the name of the dead.” He would spend years living as a Holy Fool, living in poverty, refusing to speak but his name, while healing all who approached him. “A stranger to your own people, you endured everything with joy for the sake of Christ, searching for an ancient, perished fatherland.” As he begins to doubt the direction of his life’s path, he meets a monk in Jerusalem, “Do you not know that any journey harbors danger within itself? Any journey—and if you do not acknowledge this, then why move? So you say faith is not enough for you and you want knowledge, too. But knowledge does not involve spiritual effort. Knowledge is repose and faith is motion.” Throughout the novel, the book returns to themes of the cyclical nature of life and time. “Arseny thought back to the sorrowful events of his youth, but his thoughts were warm. These were already thoughts about someone else. He had long suspected that time was discontinuous and its individual parts were not connected to one another, much as there was no connection—other than, perhaps, a name—between the blond little boy from Rukina Quarter and the gray-haired wayfarer, almost an old man.”

“Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650” by Carlos M.N. Eire

At just under nine hundred pages, Eire’s history of the Christian Reformation is comprehensive. He begins by stating that one necessary precursor was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, which allowed for the mass dissemination of texts, from books to sermons, printed in the vernacular. “Whereas every book produced before 1455 had to be written by hand, now books could be reproduced mechanically and in any numbers one desired…. While Latin would remain the lingua franca of the educated elite for several generations, the vernacular languages of Europe could flourish like never before.” Another precursor was the humanist movement that began in Italy during the Quattrocento and quickly spread throughout Europe. “Whether or not one uses the term Christian humanist, the fact remains that many non-Italian humanists began to give a distinctly religious turn to the principle ad fontes, seeking to recover an “original” or “pure” Christianity that had existed in antiquity but had somehow been corrupted. Guided by the central paradigm of the Renaissance—the assumption that there was a “dark age” to overcome—these so-called Christian humanists applied themselves to the study of ancient languages and history as a means of finding what had been lost and bringing it back to life. Naturally, these humanists tended to focus more intensely on the Bible and on the writings of the early Church fathers than on pagan authors.” The age of Reformations was a time of institutional decay, but also an age of discovery and the breaking of traditions.

Erasmus was a contemporary of Luther who, although a reformer, remained faithful to the Catholic faith until death. “His Greek New Testament and Latin translation would come to be the single most important text for an entire generation of reformers, both Catholic and Protestant, enabling them to return ad fontes, and providing a common text for all who wished to theologize by scripture alone. In turn, it would also become the basis for many a translation into vernacular languages, from Luther’s in German (1522) to the King James English version (1611).” Erasmus was also a precursor to the later reformers in terms of theology. “Especially taken by the distinction that Neoplatonist metaphysics made between matter and spirit, which gave an intellectual framework to the piety he had picked up from the devotio moderna, Erasmus became an uncompromising critic of popular religion, championing the claim that the spiritual realm is superior to the material, and stressing that genuine piety requires a certain distancing of oneself from rites and symbols. What mattered most in life, Erasmus argued, was the inner disposition of one’s heart and mind. Genuine Christian faith was not to be found in abstract doctrines or in rites such as pilgrimages, processions, fasts, the lighting of candles, and rote prayers, but rather in a total surrender of the self to the divine, and in a total dependence on Christ alone. Rites were necessary, Erasmus argued, but only as entry points into a deeper, purely spiritual connection with God that transcended the visible world and the rites themselves.” This modern interpretation of religion, in itself, came very close to bordering on Protestant heresy.

After detailing prior Christian heretics, Eire finally gets to Luther and his Ninety-Five Theses. “Luther was the first to succeed where many others had failed. He challenged the supremacy of the pope and the legitimacy of the Roman Catholic Church, he redefined religious authority and church-state relations, and he changed the focus of Christian piety and ethics.” Luther defended himself thus, “No believing Christian can be coerced beyond Holy Writ. By divine law we are forbidden to believe anything which is not established by divine Scripture or manifest revelation…. I am a Christian theologian; and I am bound, not only to assert, but to defend the truth with my blood and death. I want to believe freely and be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university, or pope.”

Contemporaneously to Luther, in Switzerland, Zwingli was laying the foundations for Calvinism and the Swiss Reformed Church. “While Luther’s conversion began with the biblical texts of the Psalms and of Romans, and focused solely on the issue of justification, Zwingli’s began with a poem of Erasmus, with a focus on ritual and piety and the question of proper worship…. Zwingli was more intensely focused on the issue of worship and intercession, and on the need to return to a strict Christocentric piety, than on the soteriological questions that so consumed Luther’s attention. His burning preoccupation became how to best approach God and relate to him, not how to find forgiveness.”

Calvin first published his Institutes in 1536, with a preface directly addressing King Francis I. He stressed two distinct features— “belief in the thorough corruption of human nature by original sin, and belief in election and predestination…. In essence, belief in salvation through faith and grace alone—sola fide, sola gratia—necessarily implies some sort of election, for if salvation is entirely up to God’s will alone and humans can do nothing to be saved, it means that God chooses to dispense his saving grace to some, but not to all… Stressing that every single event, no matter how small, was expressly willed by God, Calvin offered his followers the hope of believing that anything that came their way, no matter how unpleasant, must be God’s will, and therefore good.” Calvin asserted, “No one who wishes to be thought religious dares simply deny predestination, by which God adopts some to hope of life, and sentences others to eternal death…. We call predestination God’s eternal decree, by which he determined himself what he willed to become of each man. For all are not created in an equal condition; rather eternal life is fore-ordained for some, eternal damnation for others.”

The Swiss Reformers and the Lutherans, with their distinct emphases, were bound to go their separate ways. “Although the Swiss and the Lutherans shared the same soteriology, believing in salvation by faith alone, the Swiss took a less paradoxical approach to the pervasiveness of sin in the individual and society. While Lutherans stressed the inevitability of sin in the individual and the community, and the dissonance between faith and behavior, the Swiss emphasized the transforming power of faith, especially faith under the aegis of the state. In other words, whereas Luther stressed forgiveness of sins and the enduring corruption of the world, the Swiss insisted on the avoidance of sin and the perfectibility of the community. Whereas Luther taught that everyone was a constant sinner, that a christian prince was a rare bird, and that the kingdom of Christ was simply a promise for some postapocalyptic future, the Swiss insisted that sin could be controlled and that the state itself had a duty to suppress it and build the kingdom of Christ on earth, here and now.”

The Anabaptists (or rebaptizers) sought a complete separation of Church and State and a near total renunciation from the secular world. “As they saw it, genuine baptism could be conferred only on believing adults…. Their vision of the true church [was] as an intimate association of genuine believers…. They believed that the true church of Christ had disappeared from the earth and that they were called to restore it, in all its apostolic biblical purity…. A single belief unites all those listed as “Radicals”: their rejection of any church that mixed with “the world,” that is, any church that relied on civil power and insisted on including everyone in the community.” This was not only a rejection of the Catholic Church, but also of all Lutherans, Calvinists, and other Magisterial Reformers.

Eire next spends hundreds of pages on the Catholic Counter-Reformation, particularly the monastic orders that tried to reform the Church from within. The New World colonies of Spain and Portugal were particularly fertile grounds for the spreading of the faith. Transformative in the Catholic Reformation was the Jesuit order, founded by the knight Ignatius Loyola, after being miraculously saved from a cannonball in battle. The Society of Jesus (Jesuits) was approved by Pope Paul III on September 27, 1540. While recovering in a hospital in Spain, Ignatius wrote the Exercises, which would serve as a founding document for the monastic order. “The Exercises take it for granted that God has a specific plan for every person, and that if one puts in the time and effort, God will reveal that plan. Once one knows what God expects, one can indeed choose the correct path and—with the right kind of effort—receive God’s help to stay on it for the rest of one’s earthly life. Free will reigns supreme in the Exercises. And so does the power of the human mind…. Prayer was an essential part of the process, too, as for Ignatius, prayer involved not just the soul but also the mind, and praying was essential to establish the proper relationship with God, obtaining divine assistance, and ensuring salvation…. The central significance of the Exercises for the development of Jesuit spirituality lies not in its tempered dualism, but in its worldly asceticism, which rivaled that of the Calvinists, as it stressed the principle that the purpose of human existence is to find God in this world, become his “servant and friend” and work within the world to magnify God’s glory through selfless and humble service to others…. The world was a place to redeem rather than to run from, and leading a virtuous life was the best way to magnify God’s glory on earth.”

Eire also describes post-Reformation Christians, such as the Deists. “Herbert of Cherbury sought to reduce the Christian religion to its most elemental rational components…. Cherbury proposed a simple five-point creed: (1) That there is a supreme Deity (2) That this Deity ought to be worshipped (3) That true worship and genuine piety consist of virtue (4) That men should refrain from wrongdoing and repent of it (5) That the goodness and justice of the Deity demand reward and punishment for one’s actions, both in this life and after it…. In Cherbury’s reasonable and natural religion ethics displaced ritual and dogma as “the chief part” of religion.” The fellow Englishmen Locke and Toland would modify Cherbury’s deism further. “While Locke undid the Deism of Herbet of Cherbury by denying the existence of innate ideas, he gave shape to a new sort of Deism based on empirical observation and a logical approach to religion as an ethical code that was accessible to all human beings rather than as an esoteric muddle of dogmas, symbols, and rituals…. Toland’s chief argument was as simple as it was revolutionary: he denied the possibility of divine revelation. This meant that there was nothing sacred about the Bible.”

Finally, Eire begins his long conclusion on the significance of the Protestant Reformation. “The ultimate legacy of the Reformations, after all, was the creation of a religiously fragmented Europe, with multiple churches, each of which approached “the world” and life on earth in different ways.” Indeed, the very scope of the world was a point of contention. “The terms religious and spiritual had a very specific meaning, referring to the clergy and those who left “the world” behind. Protestants refused to accept such an assumption, and in various ways they redrew the boundaries between the Christian and “the world.”… Arguing that all baptized Christians were “priests” and “Spiritual” in God’s sight, Luther demolished a basic distinction undergirding the social and political order of his day…. Though he still insisted on a distinction between body and spirit, Luther nullified such dichotomies, secularizing the church and spiritualizing the state…. Protestants changed the nature and function of the clergy by stripping them of the higher ontological, social, and political status that the Catholic Church had upheld for more than a millennium. For all practical purposes, they were laicized; that is, they became common citizens, just like everybody else, subject to the same laws and law courts. Free to marry, they became husbands and fathers, mere heads of household. They were also mere officeholders who could be removed from their posts by the communities they shepherded. According to some historians, this was not only the greatest appeal of the Protestant message, especially to urban populations, but also one of the chief distinguishing features of the transition from medieval to modern.”

Protestants insisted that by returning ad fontes, they were simply returning to the true Church of Jesus. Their reforms were nonetheless radical. “Protestants developed pieties that focused on an omnipresent, omniscient male deity who needed no intermediaries and favored no location in particular over another. Their pieties also tended to assume that human nature was far from perfectible, and that the main purpose of prayer was to praise and thank the divinity and to align oneself with his will rather than to ask for alterations in reality. Forgiveness came straight from the divine, not through any human agency…. Protestants developed a piety that was centered squarely on the Bible, and in which the sermon assumed a central place in worship. The use of Latin in ritual was discarded by all Protestants and replaced by the local vernacular. They also discarded the cult of the saints, the veneration of images and relics, pilgrimages, and processions. Protestants rejected asceticism, and monasticism too…. Purgatory ceased to exist for Protestants, and so did suffrages for the dead. For the most part, Protestants rejected the continued occurrence of miracles…. They also tended to reject mystical ecstasies and visions and supernatural phenomena that normally accompanied them…. As the map was stripped of holy places, so was the calendar wiped clean of special feasts such as Corpus Christi or saint’s days, and, in some cases, of special seasons such as Lent or Advent.”

Eire focuses on the term desacralization to describe the Protestant Reformations. “Desacralization is a process of subtraction from within, of Christians eagerly reducing the scope of the supernatural on earth…. God was spirit, and God had created a material world, ontologically related to him, but metaphysically different and inferior. Humans were the pinnacle of this creation, part matter and part spirit, composed of a mortal body and an immortal soul…. Protestants made matter and spirit much less compatible. And their rejection of material access points to the spiritual realm turned Protestants into iconoclasts…. It was a theological upheaval, and a redefinition of the sacred…. It was an act of violence against the costly symbolic code of medieval Christianity and its guardians, the Roman Catholic clergy…. Religion was no longer a search for the immanence of the divine in this world, an attempt to encounter heaven in sacred spaces or through pilgrimages and the veneration of images and relics. Nor was it a search for the miraculous and otherworldly mediated by priests who enjoyed a higher ontological status and had the power to change bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ the Savior. Religion was something else, something more transcendent, more focused on an unseen spiritual realm and a code of ethics, something internalized by individuals and communities, something less tactile, but definitely more worldly.” Luther sums up this change in theology and faith well, “The summons of death comes to us all, and no one can die for another. Every one must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone.”