Towards the Spiritual Convergence of America and Russia: American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community, and the Potent Alchemy of National Characteristics
- Автор: Lapeyrouse Stephen Ludger
- Год: 1990
- Язык: английский
- ISBN: 0-9628048-0-0
- Жанр: История
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“If my efforts in this work are adequate to the task, I wish to make substantial intellectual contributions towards a clear description of how essential and profound a spiritual, philosophical and psychological relation exists, between characteristic highest (“vertical”) conceptions and aspirations — and tasks — of Mankind in America and Russia. The hope is that such understanding could contribute, essentially, towards a clearer, creative, and mutually-beneficial spiritual orientation — in thoughtful and heartful individuals of both nationalities — which might lead to a more conscious spiritual meeting of “Russian” and “American”; and thereby, possibly, promote an alchemical blending of the American Mind and Russian Soul, American Individuality and Russian Community. Such a greater clarity towards a greater spiritual realization, and more complete wholeness, in some men and women of each country, and thereby, perhaps, in portions of Mankind as a whole.” — the Author
Society everywhere is in a conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of die other. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.
Whoso would be a man, must be a nonconformist..Nothing is at last sacred to you but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. [202]
As Emerson viewed ancient wisdom, tradition, the continuity of ü past, he wrote in the same essay:
Whenever a mind is simple and receives a divine wisdom, old things pass away — means, teachers, texts, temples fall; it lives now, and absorbs past and future into the present hour…If therefore a man claims to know and speak of God and carries you backward to the phraseology of some old mouldered nation in another country, in another world, believe him not… Whence then this worship of the past? The centuries are conspirators against the sanity and authority of the soul. [203]
The strong contrast of Emerson’s “self-reliance” to Khomyakov’s “sobornost” is obvious [204]. Below, we shall see how they are kin.
The highest ideal of man, for Khomyakov, was for the individuals of a community — in freedom, love and truth — to have their guiding spiritual representatives, let god speak through each of them, in a communal relationship. One isolated individual alone could, at best, be a partial, incomplete human being, with a limited knowledge of Truth, and a single inadequate voice for God. It was the spiritual community — those members of any entire society who are the true men and women of God — which was to constitute a chorus, a polyphony, a polyloguy of God’s Truth. As Khomyakov wrote:
All the life-giving capacities of the higher intellect (Razum) live and flourish only in a friendly communion of thinking beings. The lower intellect (Razsudok) however, in its lowest function, analysis, does not require this and becomes, therefore, the inevitable and sole representative of the thinking capacity in an impoverished and egotistical soul. [205]
Clearly, for Khomyakov, individual or collective man, whether European, American or Russian, could function in the mundane world with the “lower intellect”; but the spiritual life in community only lives in the highest aspects of human nature, communally enjoined.
Both Khomyakov and Emerson [206] strongly rejected the individual, social, and spiritual condition of the “egotistical soul”, which lived exclusively in the secular, mundane world by way of the rational “lower intellect”. Yet, while Khomyakov spoke unambiguously of the communal individual, be that of the earthly “obschina” or “mir”, or the spiritual “sobornost”; Emerson, just as firmly rejecting the common condition of man, called for the sovereign individual to stand alone before society, culture, history and God. In other words, for Khomyakov, the condition of the “impoverished and egotistical soul”, living in the “lower intellect”, is relieved by participation in the higher inner life, which can only be achieved in “a friendly communion of thinking beings”. But for Emerson, this condition is to be relieved by the solitary individual alone, reaching independently, for the higher inner life. They both conceive of an escape from the mundane condition of the “impoverished and egotistical soul”, into the “higher intellect” (Razum, Reason). But for the Russian Khomyakov, this can only be accomplished communally; whereas for Emerson, it is the solitary individual who must do this.
The American Scholar is, as “Man-Thinking” in America, to take such an independent stance before the world. And in the “Address to the Divinity Class”, Emerson told the students of divinity, not to be preachers of tradition, but to be “new-born bards[s] of the Holy Ghost”. [207] The individual is to have a solitary relation to the higher inner life and the world of God; to be a “soliloquist” of God. This is a spiritual soliloquy for Emerson; for Khomyakov, it is a spiritual polyloguy that is essential.
Here we have come to the deep kinship of the anthropologies, the “an-throposophies” of Emerson and Khomyakov. The spirit of God, the “Holy Spirit” (pneuma, spiritus) of God in Man, must — to both of these men — speak to, in and through Man. Yet in Emerson, the enthusiastic (en+theos) individual must speak, as an independent, solitary, sovereign individual, to mankind. As cited above from Emerson’s Divinity School Address at Harvard:
The true Christianity — a faith like Christ’s in the infinitude of men — is lost None believeth in the soul [“spirit”] of man, but only in some man от person old and departed. Ah me! no man goeth alone. All men go in flocks to this saint or that poet…They think society wiser than their own soul, and know not that one soul, and their soul, is wiser than the whole world. [208]
For Khomyakov, no single, isolated individual is even capable, in separation from other devoted sons and daughter of God, to be but a broken, fragmentary portion of the Truth-in-sobornost As a study of the Slavophile idea of the person and society has it:
The Slavophile theologian Khomyakov defined “true Christianity” as “not an institution, not a doctrine”, but as a supraindividual spiritual togetherness (sobornost), the “living organism of truth and love”. The precondition of such a community of supra-individual consciousness is the in viable continuity of the Christian Church tradition, which presupposes a rejection of the autonomy of the individual reason. [209]
The contrast and kinship here, is fundamental, and profound; revealing quite different spiritual paths, contrary historical directions and unique struggles, to come to an understanding of the relation of man to God, society, life and world. And is perhaps — as I hope now to clearly explain — potentially much more than historically interesting.
…and Spiritual Nationality
It is in die spiritual heights, in the highest aspects of Man, as conceived by Emerson and Khomyakov, that there is to be found the great kinship of their thought. Their evaluation of the individual human being, within the social order, reveals a deep contrast. Yet both base their thought on an idea of Man which has, essentially, the same spiritual source. So here we have, two leading representatives, from each of these separate and distinct cultures; who, wholly unknown to each other, become — contemporaneously — the voices of those conceptions of Man which each nation came to consider as most characteristic and unique of itself. And yet, in regard to their spiritual conceptions of Man, it could truthfully be said, that Emerson, Khomyakov, and Kireyevsky, are kin; related members of a common community; citizens of the same “spiritual nation” (natio [210]). For, however much they may have differed biographically, and as Russians and Americans; in their philosophies of life, man and world, they commonly participate, essentially, in the origin and injunction of the highest conception of Man in the Western tradition: that in which Man comes originally from God, and can be a representative of God’s spirit (pneuma, spiritus) on Earth. Though in America, with Emerson, it is the enthusiastic (en-thusiasm) individual that is central; and in Russia, for Khomyakov and Kireyevsky, it is the enthusiastic, inspired community, which is so seen. In both countries, for those people in each nation who would orient and guide their lives by the spiritual, the “vertical” life in man, both have in common, as it were, the heritage of “the First Adam”, and the challenge of the Last. And in this way, they are not only kin in origin; but also in seeking the same destination, of spiritual citizenship — one which, ultimately, is that of the same otherworldly city. [211]
[202] From “Self-Reliance”, in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals, ed. Lewis Mumford, p. 91-92.
[203] From “Self-Reliance”, in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals, ed. Lewis Mumford, p. 99-100.
[204] The evaluation of the religious, traditional past is here characteristically contrasting to the Slavophiles.
[205] Cited in V. V. Zenkovskii, Russian Thinkers and Europe, p. 54. Kireyevsky held to a similar “psychology” of the highest in man. “The nature of the reason…which is experienced in the highest development of inner spiritual intuition is wholly different in kind from that of the reason which limits itself to the development of external life.” Cited in Zenkovsky, History of Russian Philosophy, p. 218, [Cf. Note 120, and especially Note 140 wherein Emerson is considered.]
[206] See Note 140.
[207] From “Address to the Divinity Class”, in Ralph Waldo Emerson: Essays and Journals, ed. Lewis Mumford, p. 62.
[208] For the larger context of the quote, see section “Emerson, and Man as a Sovereign State” in the main text above.
[209] Andrzej Walicki, “Personality and Society in the Ideology of the Russian Slavophiles”, in California Slavic Studies, vol. II. (1963), p. 3.
[210] Nation is derived from natio. “Latin natio, originally a birth, hence a creature’s entire offspring at one time, hence a clan’s offspring, hence a people’s, hence that people itself.” See Eric Partridge, Origins, p. 428. Consider also the idea of the ecclesia spiritualis.
[211] The New Jerusalem