Dear Barbara,

Never mind the sniping. Your story was beautiful and reminded me of one of the reasons I loved Halloween as a kid. It was a chance to socialize, and after dark at that, like grownups do.

I got one treat yesterday, a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup I’ve yet to eat. S prazdnikom!

Old World Rus’


[This message has been edited by Rusnak (edited 11-01-2000).]

I am not participating in any of these discussions for the duration of the Nativity Fast, but I found this material and can't resist posting it. God have mercy on me, a sinner!

I found the following in "The Illuminating Icon", a book by Anthony Ugolnik, an American of Russian decent in the Orthodox Church of America:

>>>For [Russian theologian Vladimir] Solovyov, Christ embodies the perfection of beauty, because Christ is at once material, spiritual and immortal. Unlike Hegel and his school, Solovyov sees immortality or permanence a a necessary quality of perfect beauty. In his thought, then, beauty contains a real, objective element.It is grounded in concrete fact when, through its attraction, it draws us together into common life so complete that Solovyov
borrows a Greek word, syzygia, to convey its intensity:

Not to submit to one's social environment, but not to dominate it, but to be in loving interaction with it, to service it as an active fertilizing principle of movement, and to find in it the fullness of vital conditions and possibilities--that is the relation of the true human personality not only to its immediate social environment and its nation, but to humanity as a whole.

Solovyov conveys a mistrust of "fact" that is somewhat alien to the American temper. One kind of American believer tends to integrate religious perception into the world of fact: Scripture becomes part of that "world", and its claims are literally--that is, factually, verifiably--true. But in this light, even the miracles of the Gospel can lose their definitive elements of wonder. Miracles are miracles, after all, because they violate the rule.
The Russian religious impulse is to regard the world of fact itself as "conditional, transitory, and not normal".

Russian believer are suffused with a sense of the miraculous. They commonly make pilgrimmages to certain shrines and pray before certain icons, and those place and images then "break through" the natural world of fact for them. J.R.R. Tolkien is a Western writer who also recognized the limitations of pure rationalism. He called it "the tyranny of fact", a tyranny that has seized hold of modernity. According to Tolkien, the artist has
the power, in effect, to cooperate with the gospel in breaking this tyranny. Through the power of fantasy, or through what the Orthodox thinker might call the creation of beauty, the artist can allow us to look beneath the transitory nature of this world and see the stirring truth which underlies it.

Tolkien's trilogy, The Lord of the Rings, now published in Russian, enjoys a vigorous popularity in the USSR [this book was published in 1989--SLK]. Christian readers, of course, find within it the Christian artist acting out his redemption of the world. "That's precisely it!" said a friend of mine with enthusiasm after completing the work. "Frodo is engaged in the Christian quest--not
only to save Christians but also the whole of Middle Earth. This is synergia--our cooperation with God to save the world. We are all part of a great fellowship". The popularity of fantasy in the USSR, fantastika, bespeaks a natural human hunger to penetrate the veil of "fact", to perceive a beauty where none is immediately apparent. As Tolkien observed, "Fantasy remains a human right: we make it in our measure and in our derivative
mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker" ["On Fairy Stories"].

Tolkien helps the Western Christian to clarify the tremendous salvific power that the Russian [Orthodox] Christian sees in beauty. For beauty binds together those who submit, collectively, to its attraction. And it will not submit completely to the "tyranny of fact", the process of rational analysis by which we understand only parts of the world. It submits us "to the whole", to a wholeness in which we participate. Russian [Orthodox]
thinkers then do not see aesthetics as the passive, "individualizing" light it can become in Western idealism. Christian idealism in Russia does not separate the arts from involvement in the world in a version of the "art for art's sake" perspective. Submission to beauty means not an estrangement from our society, but a deeper involvement in it.<<<