It was June 13, 1940. A young Vladimir Lossky (later to be author of The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church) was making his way on foot with the crowds from Paris who were fleeing from a victorious, invading German army. The invasion was sudden, surprising, and completely overwhelming in its success. The entire operation took no more than six weeks. Lossky kept a diary. The small book, Seven Days on the Roads of France (SVS Press, 2012), is one of the more profound reflections on a singular moment in history. It is well worth the read. On the first day he observes:
The Germans are in Paris; perhaps they will get to the Loire, to the Garonne, everywhere. But France is not conquered yet; the ‘human’ war has only just begun. Perhaps it will last for a century. As during that other great period of troubles that we call the Hundred Years’ War, a period which nevertheless saw the birth of a new France.
“Perhaps it will last a century.” Of course, we know that Hitler’s Third Reich would be defeated by May of 1945, Paris having been liberated in August of 1944. Nonetheless, “…perhaps it will last for a century,” is a sobering thought.
We live in a day and time that many ponder as the “end” of Western Civilization. I suspect that it is not the end, but merely the continuing evolution of modernity, a philosophy and period of time that has sought for several hundred years to kill its patrimony. History never “ends” so much as it fades in and out moving towards a direction that is in the hands of God.
I read of another group of refugees (of a sort), in a snippet sent to me by a friend. It is a passage from an article in the New York Times Magazine, entitled, “Why Is the Loneliness Epidemic So Hard to Cure?” (August 28, 2024). The article cited a lecture in which the virtues of religious communities were praised. It posed a different observation, however.
“I’m not suggesting that we should become more religious, but I want to just suggest to you that religious communities are a place where adults engage kids, stand for moral values, engage kids in big moral questions, where there’s a fusion of a moral life and a spiritual life,” Weissbourd said at a talk held in March at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.
“A sense that you have obligations to your ancestors and to your descendants, where there is a structure for dealing with grief and loss,” he went on, repeating his opening caveat. “I feel urgently like we have to figure out how to reproduce those aspects of religion in secular life.”
It seemed to me that the speaker was identifying spiritual refugees battling the anomie of the modern world. I appreciated his great regard for religious communities, though I suspect that many fail to fulfill even the functions he describes.
It serves as a reminder to me that when something is lost, more than what we imagine to be the “main” thing is missing. There are so many “small” things that constitute the full life and culture of the Church. The Reformation abandoned the richness of Medieval culture, and replaced it with a sterile, simplified ideology that has clearly been unable to withstand onslaught of secularism. As Orthodox Christians, we must remember that we conserve more than the “doctrines” of the Church. The very texture of Orthodox life is itself the embodied memory of the Greater life.
During his flight from Paris, Lossky thought about the nature of the fight ahead. He wrote:
…”war is not waged for absolute values. This has been the mistake of all so-called ‘religious’ wars, and the main cause of the atrocities associated with them. Nor is it waged for relative values that one endeavors to turn into absolutes, nor yet for abstract concepts which have been lent a religious character…”
Lossky was ready to fight and was trying to find somewhere he could volunteer. It is interesting to me that among the “relative values” he described were a man’s “native soil, his land, his country.” He said that such relative values must not be seen as absolutes – even as you take up arms to defend them.
For the refugees fleeing Paris (or the many other places abandoned by so many), it is quite likely that most imagined their losses as absolutes – that it would be impossible to live without them. This is where our lives as Christian refugees must differ. Christianity makes a classical distinction between the things that are eternal and the things that are temporal. The temporal is always passing away. If it’s not the Nazis taking over your capital, it’s someone else making “unbearable” changes. Yet, the eternal abides. The Kingdom that resides in the heart, made manifest in the life of the Church and her sacraments, abides. It is the treasure of every refugee. If we rightly understood our life in the Church we would not lament our role as refugees. Stanley Hauerwas, back in the 1980s, famously described Christians as “resident aliens.” We live here, but this is not our home.
From Hebrews (11:9-10):
“By faith [Abraham] dwelt in the land of promise as in a foreign country, dwelling in tents with Isaac and Jacob, the heirs with him of the same promise; for he waited for the city which has foundations, whose builder and maker is God.”
Our “land of promise” is not a renewal of Western Civilization, nor any number of imagined fixes to this world. It is a city that has true foundations – built by God. Stay on the road. Walk like a refugee.
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