CHRISTIE'S PROGRESS JOURNAL: SEPTEMBER 27-30, 2004

9-27-04 I was reading in Douglas Schuurman’s book, Vocation:Discerning Our Callings In Life, and I was struck by the idea he presented that Nature points to God. He wrote: “The lawful harmony of nature points to an intelligent, purposeful creator. Some dullards have no curiosity or sense of wonder at the harmony and beauty of creation; others have had it drummed out of them by suffering or deadening educational systems. But traces of the sense of wonder and the quest for meaning survive in most human beings. (65)”

9-28-04 I read the first chapter of Jennifer Price’s Flight Maps. Here are some quotes from her book that I found to be relevant for my major:

-“It is an intrinsically human endeavor to use one’s encounters with nature to define one’s place imaginatively in a particular human and natural world. (40)”

-“We don’t personally harvest the abundance of natural resources we use. All of us consume nature from within cities or markets, where nature arrives commodified, transformed, already dead, and way out of ecological context. We connect to nature long-distance geographically, through a complex maze of economic networks. Our connections to nature are highly mediated. (54)”

9-30-04 I’ve begun reading a book by Mark D. Steinberg, called: Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, & the Sacred in Russia, 1910-1925. I have been focusing most in-depth on the section called Feelings of the Sacred. Here are some things I read that are useful for my major:

-A quote by Mircea Eliade: “Religious symbols which point to the structures of life reveal a more profound, more mysterious life than that which is known through everyday exercise. They unveil the miraculous, inexplicable side of life, and at the same time the sacramental dimensions of human existence.” (224)

-Lower-class Russian writers were mostly raised Christian, though they often sprinkled their works with Christian, as well as other “sacred terminologies, imageries, and narratives…for the metaphoric and symbolic power as means of speaking in sacred terms—in a spirit of mystery, awe, and sublime power—about otherwise profane matters of everyday life and thoughts of social change…Sacred symbols—like religion itself in many cases—represent neither mere theology nor mere ethics, but ways of expressing fundamentally emotional and moral ways of knowledge beyond the narrowing limits of the self-evident and rationalistic. (225)”

-Plebian (low social-ranking) religious voice was key in the revival of religion, spirituality, mysticism, and myth in Russia during the end of the old regime. (225)

-This goes along with the idea of dvoyevery, or dual faith: “Educated Russians were attracted to mystical and religious idealism, venerating charismatic moral preachers and healers, exalting the unconscious and the mythic, voicing apocalyptic premonitions, and showing widespread interest in theosophy, Eastern religions, and other currents of spirituality, mysticism, and ‘occult’ idealizations of imagination, feeling, and mystical correspondences, and other avenues for seeking truths beyond the merely rational. A cult of elemental feeling, a craving to transcend the limits of nature—to ‘fly’ in the common image of the time—proliferated along with visions of both great catastrophe and redemption. (225)”  (*Like the man in the first scene of Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublyov who transcended the limits of nature and flew…)

-Non-Orthodox, popular Orthodoxy, and mysticism were often combined. (Apparitions, possession, walking dead, demons, spirits, miracles, and magic) (226) (*Theophanes returns as an apparition to talk with Andrei, in Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublyov…)

-There was a decline in religious practice among urban Russian workers and other young peasants who had done work in the city. (226-7) (*Due to their separation from Nature?)

-Tolstoy was admired by lower-class Russians less as a great novelist than as a moral/spiritual leader. (*What were his views on Nature?)

-Urban religious movement that most challenged the established church was the Brethren (Brattsy), which began in St. Petersburg in the mid 1890s, and had between 30,000-100,000 followers. (228-9)

-“Traditionally, holy fools defied everyday forms of conventional behavior and respect for authority—they lived lives of great piety, simplicity, and aestheticism but also spoke bizarrely, dared to mock the powerful openly, and might walk about wearing little or no clothing—to remind believers of simpler Christian values and of truths not visible in everyday life or expressible in everyday language. (237)” (*There seemed to be a sort of return-to-nature mentality among religious radicals.)

-“My God is not dressed in gold/ Nor ornamented with diamonds/ On the walls of churches and towers/ My God is love and light.”  -Sergei Gan’shin (p. 235)

-Specifically on page 235, we find that Russian people began losing their faith in a God who cares only for the rich and is deaf to the cries of the poor. How could nature tie into this? Rich people tend to abuse nature for personal gain? Poor people tend to get shafted with the leftover resources, etc.?

-“Poems and stories often spoke of workers’ ‘strength of spirit,’ feelings of ‘youthful life,’ ‘faith,’ and certainty that all obstacles would be overcome. As one worker writer insisted, ‘Man was created for happiness just as a bird was for flight.’ This faith was often cast, if only metaphorically, in religious terms…Metaphorically, this spirit was conveyed with repeated images of inevitable physical transformation of the world, driven by cosmic forces: approaching dawn, the rising sun, the coming spring, spring rain and rebirth, and, less often, more original images such as the force of the wind and the inexorable power of streams cutting through granite. (239)” (*People also saw connections between natural cycles (seasons, day and night) and their life cycles (birth, trials, death).)

-A trade unionist in exile wrote: “I believe in the coming eternal happiness/ I believe in the poetry of life, in goodness and love/ I believe that after the storms and thunder/ The burning sun will appear again.” (*Nature offers hope.)

-“Repeatedly worker writers envisioned themselves symbolically in magical flight returning to earth as saviors. Egor Nechaev wished that he were an eagle or the sun, bringing happiness and freedom to the world. Sergei Gan’shin described himself as ‘an eagle from the skies…from which my mighty voice/ like a tocsin’ rings out for victory ‘in the great and sacred struggle.’ And Aleksei Mashirov portrayed advanced workers like himself coming to the people in inspiring flight: as birds in a black sky, as flashes of summer lightening, or as a ‘meteor falling into the deep abyss’—a momentary evanescence, a redeeming sacrifice, illumining the way for others. (243)”

(*Loss sense of spirituality in Nature in Western civilization. Seems to be no remotely pan-en-theistic thought remaining, or if there is, it’s thought to be odd, eccentric, and stupid.)

-There was a big emphasis on feelings in Russia at this time (1916-1925)…feelings evoked by fantastic scenes in nature…glistening, silvery winter scenes, the beauty of forests and seasons.