www.byzcath.org Forums General Discussions Town Hall what is name and author of book about russian orthodox vampire?

Hi,
About two years ago someone recommended an excellent good vs evil self published novel about a Russian ORthodox vampire. I read it and really enjoyed it,but the title and author's name escape me.If you can refresh my memory I'd greatly appreciate it as I'd like to pass on the recommendation to some friends.
Thanks!

Peace,
Indigo

Is that The Vampire Armand - by Rice, I think?

Many years,

Neil

That would make it a bit difficult - no baptismal cross, no Sign of the Cross, no getting blessed with holy water - certainly no Communion...

Sounds like a lot of "Orthodox" I've met.

Those types usually only come to church on Pascha. Come to think of it, if services are at midnight and end before sunrise, that would be prime "vampire" time. Hmm, the plot thickens...

Dave

I'm not into vampires myself. Those who are might wish to know that some editions of funeral service contain a blessing against vampires to be used over the grave.

Fr. Serge

Vlad Tepes Draculya was Orthodox, albeit at that particular time and place (1460s-70s) there was much confusion and division between those who accepted the Council of Florence and those who did not. As he is the subject of Bram Stoker's novel, does he count?

Vlad Teppeš, Draculja, was an apostate, at least by his actions.

You mean by defending Christian Wallachia and Romania from the Ottoman Turks?

For me, an Orthodox, this thread is odd and not Christian. At least if we would remember the words of St. Gregory of Nyssa regarding the name of Christian et al.

No, by bathing in blood, dining by death screams, and generally relishing the torture of humans, even if they were Turks. Somewhere along the line he went well beyond anything reasonable.

"No, by bathing in blood, dining by death screams, and generally relishing the torture of humans, even if they were Turks. Somewhere along the line he went well beyond anything reasonable."

Much of the information commonly known about Vlad Tepes is polemical and hyperbolic, the work of his enemies both within Romania as well as (for some reason) Germany. The original propaganda tales got embellished over time, being reprinted for their lurid entertainment value long after Vlad was dead.

Was Vlad brutal? Of course he was. He lived in a brutal age, in a particularly nasty neighborhood. There were only two types of rulers then--brutal ones, and dead ones. Even the "enlightened" Matthias Covinas of Hungary (possessor of the largest library in Europe) felt the need to resort to draconian punishments to keep unruly nobles in line. Certainly, Mehmet II, Vlad's Ottoman opponent, never quailed at the notion of "disproportionate response".

Who were Vlad's victims? Mainly two groups: the Wallachian boyars, who schemed tirelessly to undermine both his reign and his father's before him; and common criminals. Oh, and about 20,000 Ottoman prisoners of war, whom he had impaled when Mehmet invaded Wallachia with an army estimated at 150,000 men (about ten times the number Vlad could muster). Let's look at each of these in turn.

The boyars were, for the most part, petty tyrants interested mainly in preserving their autonomy and perquisites. As such, they were constantly scheming to overthrow the Voievode, even to the point of conspiring with the Turks. By oppressing them, Vlad was able to centralize authority in his own hands, necessary both for common defense and for the administration of justice. In so doing, he invoked their perpetual enmity, and they eventually overthrew him by conspiring with Vlad's brother Radu, who in turn was a puppet of the Ottomans. And, since the boyars were literate (or at least had scribes on their payrolls), they got to write the histories.

Of the common criminals, it is important to remember that banditry was endemic, that bandits preyed off the peasants and other commoners, and that they themselves were incredibly brutal in their tactics. In killing them off, Vlad earned the appreciation of the common people, who probably did not shed any tears for the murderers, thieves, extortionists and outright thugs whom Vlad stuck on poles. But peasants don't write history.

Finally, there are the Turks. Don't buy into the story about how enlightened they were as compared to nasty old Christians. They conquered all of Anatolia, the Middle East and half of Europe by being brutal and ruthless. When Mehmet the Conqueror, the man who took Constantinople (read Runciman to see how pleasant that was) invaded Vlad's principality with a huge army, Vlad responded by impaling 20,000 prisoners (possibly an inflated number) along the road from the border to his capital. Contrary to the myth, Mehmet was not so impressed that he turned back (though he was impressed!), and eventually took Vlad's castle. But Vlad took to the hills and waged guerrilla against the Turks, eventually driving them out. At that point, Mehmet simply bought off the boyars and installed Radu as Voievode, while Vlad lingered in the prisons of Matthias Covinas.

When judging people from the past, avoid the twin pitfalls of anachronism and presentism; i.e., of importing current ideas unknown at that time, and of judging them according to the standards of our time, rather than of their own. If we take what you said at face value, there is hardly a Christian ruler, East or West, between Constantine and Louis XIV, who was not an apostate.

Is that located in the various Bulgarian and Romanian editions of the Book of Needs?

What about blessings against werewolves? I understand lycanthropy remains a serious problem in some parts of the Carpathians.

This isn't what the original was looking for, but Katherine Kurtz now has a series about a group of crusading knights who were afflicted with vampiracy.

As I recall, they hide in a monastary living lives of penance waiting for Judgment Day. Here's her websites page on them http://www.rhemuthcastle.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/Books/KotB

Marian, this isn't a regular vampire story;the focus is on good and evil and the temptation to go towards evil,as well as the spiritual consequences. The character's guardian angel gives him a tour before he makes his final decision. It is actually edifying during most of it. The last quarter seems to sympathize with the vampire too much,but then doesn't evil seem sympathetic sometimes,especially when measured against other evils?A sequel is alluded to,and there, I expect a return to the original edifying tone.

It is not written by a popular author,is not based on Vlad,isn't geared towards teens was self-published by a Catholic writer. The story takes place in Russia,so the characters are Orthodox and include both pious and lukewarm Orthodox.

Someone here at Byzcath discussed the book in 2007 when we had a book section that wasn't exclusively biblical.

Eternal City: Confessions of a Vampire
by J. William David Kirkpatrick

Available at Lulu:
http://www.lulu.com/content/1368866

Here is that thread:
https://www.byzcath.org/forums/ubbt...William%20Kirkpatrick--Eterna#Post261234

So are we of a consensus that it is it acceptable to impale thousands of humans, made in the image of likeness of God and with intrinsic value, to scare off possible attacks?

That is bat...guano... crazy.

Alexis

All I am saying is that if it weren't for strong Christian kings and Emperors that Europe and therefore America too would not have the significant Christian populations that they do today.

This again goes into an argument about whether or not evil is permitted in order to bring about good. The Catholic Church, at least, says no.

Alexis

No, the Catholic Church says, "It depends".

From the Catechism of the Catholic Church:

Alexis

Very nice, Alexis. But it means nothing in practice. The reality is it still depends. Let us look, for instance, at the matter of war (which is, of course, my specialty). If we believe that killing is an objective evil, the Church has long countenanced that evil as being necessary on occasion for the defense of the innocent against aggression. The same is true for killing of criminals by law enforcement, and use of capital punishment against convicted malefactors.

I am entirely aware that the Latin Church has developed all sorts of hedges around these areas to "justify" them, but (a) such attempts at justification begin only in the Middle Ages; and (b) were never developed in the Eastern Churches. Eastern Christian moral theology views the human being as an icon of the Creator, and the destruction of that image is objectively evil, even in cases of self-defense, even, in fact, by accident. The Eastern Churches make no effort to "justify" the taking of human life, other than to say in some cases it is necessary and in others unavoidable.

Thus, in the Christian East, one does not find "just war" theory, and soldiers who kill the enemy in battle are (in theory, at least) subject to the same canonical disciplines as ordinary murderers (i.e., three years abstinence from Communion).

The Latin Church has taken a different tack on this, but the net effect is the same, only we don't bother to pretty up what we have to do. Which is to say, we sometimes have to do objectively evil things to attain good ends. You weasel out of that by saying if conditions a, b and c are met, then the acts are not "evil". We beg to differ, which is probably due to our different perspectives on the nature of sin and its effects. The West has always tended to look on sin as a violation of an objective moral law, which in turn demands some sort of "penalty"; let us call this the judicial model of sin. The East on the other hand, views sin as a moral sickness in need of healing, hence instead of penalties we have "therapies" (prayer, fasting, abstention from communion, etc.). Call this the "medicinal" model of sin.

Under our model, all sin is a failure to live up to the image of God within us, a "falling short of the mark" (hamartia), which has both a personal and a cosmic dimension to it. When we kill, for whatever reason, even for the best of reasons, it is still a falling short of the mark that harms us and the Cosmos, and therefore requires healing. That doesn't mean we should be paralyzed into inaction by the fear of hamartia, but it does require us to look open eyed and objectively at what we do.

So, whether we take the Western or the Eastern approach, the correct answer is still, "it depends".

"We don't have to pretty up...you weasel out...etc." I really wish a Moderator would take a look at the tone of this post and how it comes off to Latin Catholics. I don't appreciate being told that my Church's moral theology is weasely. We are all Catholic Christians and there is no need for that.

Secondly, Stuart, you still haven't proved anything. You've basically just given a rundown as to why you think the Eastern view is superior. In another thread you recently accused me of tortured logic to skirt around the meaning of the text. I don't see how your approach with what is clear in the Catechism is any different.

Alexis

I confess I find the Latin way casuistic at times, which is probably one reason I am not a Latin. On the other hand, once you strip away the casuistry, the answer remains, "It depends". Sometimes killing someone is a justifiable evil, and sometimes it is not. But do not ask me to pretend that, because I can check off some abstract criteria on a list, it ceases to be intrinsically evil.

Alexis,

And just how does your tone about how we need to learn to speak Latin come across to Byzantines? You present theology in terms of the Latin Church. That is not how we speak. You are doing the equivalent of entering a Greek home and insisting we speak your language and then condemning us when we continue to speak theology in our native tongue.

I will ask both you and Stuart to post with more charity.

John

On a lighter note, every time I see the title of this thread I chuckle. I can picture a slapstick movie about a vampire who sends his casket to a Russian Orthodox cemetery and finds it went astray to a Russian Orthodox seminary. Think Monty Python. Or "The Princess Bride". Or "Fawlty Towers". With the casket arriving and being stuck in the chapel the vampire comes alive each night during the all-night Vigil. Just as he thinks the service is over and he can sneak out he hears "again and again, in peace let us pray".

You can always rent a copy of "Fearless Vampire Killers".