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Transmitting Philosophical Symbols
After I was done writing the Russian monk piece last week, I pulled Sergius Bolshakoff’s Russian Mystics off the shelf. It’d been years since I read it, but I remembered loving it.
I quickly remembered why, though I was a bit surprised to see that I read only half of it (a nasty habit of mine), stopping in the nineteenth century. I can tell I stopped halfway because that’s when my copious underlining stops. I’m now looking forward to reading the rest, including the pages on the Optina monastery, which was so influential on Dostoyevsky.
Bolshakoff makes clear in the introduction that the Russian mystics were also theologians. In fact, he makes it clear that it can be no other way: mysticism and theology go together like bread and butter. Theology carries mysticism like bread carries the butter. Without the bread, the mysticism becomes a gooey mess. You get Shirley MacLaine’s Dancing in the Light instead of Staretz Ambrose advising Dostoyevsky.
It’s not an unusual concept. It’s the religious equivalent of putting your money where your mouth is. It’s the reason I don’t promote my writings locally: too many people around here know I’m a sonofabitch. It’s Plato’s observation that philosophy is a way of life, not a subject.
And it’s why we today laugh at philosophers and roll our eyes at mystics.
