Theology and theosis after the Gulag

Varlam Shalamov’s Challenge to Theological Reflection

in Post-Communist Russia

Katya Tolstaya

[Originally published in Fernando Enns, Annette Mosher (eds.), Just Peace: Ecumenical, Intercultural,

and Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 50-69; slightly edited]

In this contribution I wish to touch upon the topic of individual and ecclesiastic

theological accounts in the dehumanization of humans in Auschwitz and the Gulag.

Such an account is a condition to speak about God in the 21st century. “Theology after

Auschwitz” is understood here as exemplary for (theological) reflection about God,

recognizing the singularity of any suffering. There is a tradition in Western theology

for thinking about “God and/in/after Auschwitz”; in post-Communist Eastern

Orthodoxy, however, comparable reflection on the Holocaust and/or on the Gulag

and the Communist past is lacking. At the same time, particularly the Russian

Orthodox Church (ROC) recently published important doctrinal documents on

issues such as human rights and dignity. I will inquire how this lack of reflection

works out in the ROC’s use of the traditional theological notions of imago dei and

theosis. 1

1 This article is part of an ongoing project. In my forthcoming monograph Theology after Gulag: Conditions for Reflection on the Soviet Past and Post-Soviet Present (2016), I will work out how theosis may be applied in theology after Auschwitz/Gulag when confronted with the challenges that Shalamov’s testimonies pose for traditional theology. Here this challenge will be first introduced.

“The Man in Man” in Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn

A question that has occupied me for quite some years regards an essential difference

between two works of literature about labor camps. Both are composed by Russian

writers with some ninety years space between them. The first one is Dostoevsky’s

House of the Dead (1860-1862).2 This work marked Dostoevsky’s comeback into

literature after the ten years he spent as a political prisoner in Siberia, four years of

which (from 1850 to 1854) in servitude. During those years of hard labor Dostoevsky

lived amid the “dregs” of Russian society. In The House of the Dead Dostoevsky

incorporated many biographical observations. Besides its literary value, the book

gives a unique social and psychological portrait of the Russian convicts in this time.

One of Dostoevsky’s Siberian discoveries was that the Russian nation is basically a

Christian nation. It was precisely in Siberia that his religious convictions came to

stabilization. Moreover, it was there that he came to love the Russian people and to

believe that the nation is essentially good, pure, and strong.

Dostoevsky tried to penetrate the essence of humanity his entire life. When he

was eighteen years old he already appointed himself his life task: “Man is a mystery.

It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don’t say

that you’ve wasted time; I’m studying this mystery because I want to be a human

being.”3 In 1881, the final year of his life, Dostoevsky sums up the goal of his

authorship: “In full realism finding the man in man.”4

“The man in man” is exactly what I want to highlight here. Dostoevsky was

not a theologian: theological idiom was foreign to him. Still I do not think that a

2 To place the content of Dostoevsky’s personal faith in relation to his literary oeuvre see: Katya Tolstaya, Kaleidoscope. F.M. Dostoevsky and the Early Dialectical Theology, transl. Anthony Runia (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2013). 3 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Complete Letters, edited and transl. by David Lowe and Ronald Meyer (Ann Arbor: Ardis Publishers, 1988-1991), I, 55. 4 F. M. Dostojevskiĭ, Полное собрание сочинений в тридцати томах [Complete Collected Works in Thirty Volumes], edited by V.G. Bazanov et al. (Leningrad: “Nauka”, 1972-1990), XXVII, 65. [Henceforth PSS]

theological equation of this “man in man” with imago dei, God’s image, would be

wrong. My working definition of God’s image is: the indefinable essence of humans,

which makes humans human.5

One of Dostoevsky’s most important personal experiences in Siberia was that

in the “dregs” of society the human essence was preserved. In the Siberian camp of

Dostoevsky the basic things which make a human human, such as friendship and

affinity with creation, are maintained; there is even room for celebration of religious

holidays. One may call this preservation of humanity the central idea of the book. In

theological vocabulary, the people of The House of the Dead preserved their image of

God in spite of the severe living conditions and hard labor.

Something similar can be said of the Stalin camp experience of another great

Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Of course, compared to Dostoevsky, there is

a radical change of the ethical norm as a consequence of Soviet state atheism. The

Stalin camps confirmed the truth of Dostoevsky’s expectation that the abolition of the

concept of God will lead humankind to what he calls “anthropophagy”6 and to

crime. Solzhenitsyn’s description of the camps can serve as illustrations of

Dostoevsky’s formulas: “if there is no God everything is permitted,” or “Conscience

without God is horrifying, it can stray into extreme immorality.”7 A certain camp

utility can, nevertheless, still be derived from Solzhenitsyn’s writings. Solzhenitsyn

and Dostoevsky share the same theological anthropology. For both, the camp can, in

principle, have a purifying function, leading to a catharsis. Because of this similarity

between the two, Solzhenitsyn is not the writer I want to concentrate on here.

5 For a full definition, accounting for the interconnections of a) imago dei, b) soul and c) spirit within a more technical systematic-theological discourse would be a prerequisite. 6 An equivalent of misanthropy (also an existing word in Russian). Cf. e.g. PSS, XIV, 65, 83, 235; XXVI, 90. 7 PSS XIV, 240; PSS XXVII, 56.

“Dokhodyagi” in Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales

In Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales8 I find challenges for theological anthropology,

which also can be found in stories about Auschwitz. Without reflection on these

challenges no honest discussion about God is possible.

From 1937 to 1953 Shalamov spent seventeen years in the Gulag,9 and it took

two more years before he was permitted to leave Kolyma.10 Like Dostoevsky’s House

of the Dead, Shalamov’s stories are based on biographical observations. They are

testimonies, which is important for my point. Like The House of the Dead, the Kolyma

Tales are not merely a literary masterpiece, but also a lucid sociological and

psychological slice of the Soviet convicts. Totally opposite to Dostoevsky—and for

this part to Solzhenitsyn—is the whole experience Shalamov derives from his camp

years. Whereas the positive side of Dostoevsky’s and Solzhenitsyn’s camp

experiences lies precisely in the depiction of the ineradicability of imago dei,

Shalamov challenges theology by describing a human condition in which everything

human has left the human being.11

8 Varlam Tikhonovich Shalamov, Kolyma Tales, transl. John Glad (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994). Not all of the Kolyma stories have been translated in English. 9 The Gulag was the Soviet Governmental Agency that administered the main forced labor camp systems. One cannot trust statistics on the number of victims, see a good overview of contestations and reliable numbers: Michael Ellman, “Soviet Repression Statistics: Some Comments,” in: Europe-Asia Studies, Vol. 54, No. 7, 2002, 1151–1172. 10 Shalamov had already been arrested in 1929 and spent three years at Solovki prison, being released in 1932. The Kolyma is not a region in Siberia, but part of the Russian Far-East. See the following statistics of Memorial (the Russian International Historical-Enlightenment Human Rights and Humanitarian Society) on victims of the Gulag: http://memo.ru/s/319.html, accessed on 9 March 2012; for summary data on political charges in 1939-1946: http://www.memorial.krsk.ru/index1.htm, accessed on 9 March 2012; for e.g. Petrograd-Leningrad: http://memorial-nic.org/terror/16.htm, accessed on 9 March 2012; for the “great terror” there: http://memorial-nic.org/terror/02.htm, accessed on 9 March 2012. 11 Shalamov points to this difference with Dostoevsky’s House of the Dead explicitly in many of his writings. See references to Dostoevsky in Shalamov Valerii Esipov, «В. Т. Шаламов и Ф. М. Достоевский» [“V.T. Shalamov and F.M. Dostoevsky”] (2010), at: http://shalamov.ru/research/160/, accessed on 9 March 2012.

Such dehumanized “living corpses” are called dokhodyagi.12 This phenomenon

is not solely a Soviet one. The “living corpses” of the Nazi camps are known as

Muselmänner. Unfortunately, there is no room for dealing with the witnesses of the

Holocaust in this article, but Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Tadeusz Borowski, Ella

Lingens-Reiner, and many other Holocaust survivors testify the same as Shalamov:

there is a limit of exhaustion behind which no moral laws count. There is a frontier

behind which nothing human is left in a being.13 A survivor of Auschwitz, Isidor

Levin, calls the question “where was God in Auschwitz” almost blasphemous. “The

question should be: ‘where were you, man’?”14

I would like to apply this question to Dostoevsky’s “man in man” as: where

was the imago dei in Auschwitz and in the Gulag? I will not touch upon the executors

because this theme has little to do with the point I want to make and would, thus,

unnecessarily complicate my argument.15

In Shalamov’s experience, two main factors lead to this extreme of

dehumanization. The first is severe hunger:

All human emotions – love, friendship, envy, concern for one’s fellow man,

compassion, longing for fame, honesty – had left us with the flesh that had melted

from our bodies during their long fasts. [In the slight muscular layer which still

remained in our bones (...) differed only anger – the most enduring human feeling.]16

12 Plural of the Russian “dokhodyaga,” something like “goner.” 13 Cf. A. van Harskamp, B. Siertsema and B. Voorsluis, Geloof en vertrouwen na Auschwitz (Zoetermeer: De Horstink, 1995), 24-25. 14 http://www.docstoc.com/docs/71632849/Gulag-Archipelago-II, accessed on 9 March 2012. 15 I intend to address this aspect of the question of evil and dehumanization in my forthcoming monograph (see fn. 1). 16 Shalamov, “Dry Rations,” Kolyma Tales, 56. Translation between square brackets are mine; this passage has not been included in the translation by John Glad.

The second factor leading to total dehumanization is severe frost: “The same frost

that transformed a man’s spit into ice in midair also penetrated the soul. (…) And the

soul shuddered and froze – perhaps to remain frozen for ever.”17

Hunger and frost seem to have a power to totally reduce the human being to a

physical thing:

To eat better, one had to work better. But to work better one had to eat better.

Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians were always the first to die – a phenomenon

that the doctors always explained away by claiming that peoples of the Baltic states

were weaker than Russians. True, there normal way of life was more dissimilar than

to that of the camps than was the world of the Russian peasant, and it was more

difficult for them. The primary reason, however, was quite different: it wasn’t that

they possessed less endurance, but that they were physically bigger than the

Russians.18

The vanishing of all human emotions besides anger and bitterness is repeated many

times in Shalamov’s stories about the Kolyma camps:

Envy, like all our feelings, had been dulled and weakened by hunger. We lacked the

strength to experience emotions, to seek easier work, to walk, to ask, to beg… We

envied only our acquaintances, the ones who were lucky enough to get office work, a

job in the hospital or the stables – wherever there was none of the long physical labor

glorified as heroic and noble in signs above all the camp gates.19

17 Shalamov, “Carpenters,” Kolyma Tales, 48. 18 Shalamov, “Shock Therapy,” Kolyma Tales, 30. 19 Shalamov, “Condensed Milk,” Kolyma Tales, 181.

The narrator in the story “Sententious” testifies: “Bitterness was the last feeling with

which men departed into nonbeing, into the world of the dead.”20 A dokhodyaga plans

his life for the next two hours at the most.

Shalamov writes that by severe frost and hunger and while working sixteen

hours a day seven days a week and being constantly beaten up by convoy and

criminals, healthy young men became dokhodyagi within twenty to thirty days.21

“These terms are repeatedly tested,”22 Shalamov’s narrator adds laconically. Whereas

in Dostoevsky the “dregs” of society preserved their imago dei, in Shalamov the

dehumanization involves anyone, regardless of background, social, educational, or

any other condition. In Shalamov the dehumanization is unconditional.

According to Shalamov there is no room for love or friendship for a dokhodyaga

in the camp. This may be qualified by the remark of another Gulag survivor,

Yevgenia Ginzburg, “[t]here are no more fervent friendships than those made in

prison.”23 Both with Shalamov and with Ginzburg, there is a clear differentiation

between the living conditions in a Stalin prison and in a Stalin camp. Camp is

obviously worse, and as I argued earlier, quality of life is the only reason for the

difference of Dostoevsky’s, Solzhenitsyn’s, and Shalamov’s camp experiences.

Shalamov’s testimony reads:

Friendship is not born in conditions of need or trouble. Literary fairy tales tell of

‘difficult’ conditions which are an essential element in forming any friendship, but

such conditions are simply not difficult enough. If tragedy and need brought people

together and gave birth to their friendship, then the need was not extreme and the

tragedy not great. Tragedy is not deep and sharp if it can be shared with friends.

20 Shalamov, “Sententious,” Kolyma Tales, 75. Cf. 70: “Little flesh was left on my bones, just enough for bitterness – the last human emotion; it was closer to the bones. (…) What remained with me till the very end? Bitterness.” 21 See Shalamov, “Татарский мулла и чистый воздух” [Tatarian Mullah and Fresh Air], at: http://shalamov.ru/library/2/19.html, accessed on 9 March 2012. 22 Shalamov, “Tatarian Mullah”: “Эти сроки многократно проверены.” 23 Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York/London: Harvest, 1975), 99.

Only real need can determine one’s spiritual and physical strength and set the limits

of one’s physical endurance and moral courage.24

A testimony on friendship can also be found in the story, “An Individual

Assignment”:

Cold, hunger and sleeplessness rendered any friendship impossible, and Dugaev [a

main character of the story] – despite his youth – understood the falseness of the

belief that friendship could be tempered by misery and tragedy. For friendship to be

friendship, its foundation had to be laid before living conditions reached that last

border beyond which no human emotion was left to man – only mistrust, rage and

lies.25

Hermeneutics of Real Suffering

A narrator in another story tells: “We understood that death was no worse than life,

and we feared neither.”26 This brings to mind a fragment from a lost tragedy by

Euripides: “Who knoweth if to die be but to live, / And that called life by mortals be

but death?”27 Yet this association does not hold true, not only because Shalamov’s

thought comes from a story with a reality behind it, while Euripides’ isolated

sentence remains open for any interpretation, but also because of a qualification by

Shalamov: for a dokhodyaga life is qualitatively not better than death. Because it has

been severed from its context, Euripides’s sentence does not belong to a genre of

tragedy, but to a philosophical, epistemological discourse, which remains abstract

24 Shalamov, “Dry Rations,” Kolyma Tales, 66. 25 Shalamov, “An Individual Assignment,” Kolyma Tales, 20. 26 Shalamov, “Dry Rations,” Kolyma Tales, 57. 27 In Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, transl. R.D. Hicks, vol. II, Loeb Classical Library 185 (London: William Heinemann; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 487.

exactly because its context is lost. Shalamov’s qualitative assessment of life and death

brings the discourse to the level of real tragedy.28

The difference between concrete suffering and abstract reflection is important.

This may be elaborated some more in order to show the connection of hermeneutics

with the very essence of humanities, in particular of theology and ethics. In his

brilliant comparative analysis of Shalamov’s and Solzhenitsyn’s message, the French

philosopher Alain Badiou prefers Shalamov. According to Badiou, Solzhenitsyn is

too much of a Russian to be able to teach the Western readers something they could

discover themselves—that is “that Stalin was totalitarian.”29 I agree with that.

There is, however, a problem with Badiou’s methodology, and the discipline

he chooses to analyse the two writers. He opts for Shalamov because “his art directs

the possibility of political thought.”30 The abstract level of political philosophy is

inappropriate for understanding the difference between Shalamov and Solzhenitsyn.

In any case we cannot start on this level. Our analysis has to start on the level of the

concrete testimonies. An ethical norm, applicable on this level is (to quote Shalamov):

“there are, perhaps, worse deeds than to dine on a human corpse.”31

Anamnestic Culture: Remembering the Forgotten Victims

Departing from this concrete anthropological level, opposite to Badiou’s project, will

immediately clarify what really matters—the question of preservation of humanity in

28 This evokes a whole spectrum of hermeneutical and heuristic questions on our relation to and understanding of the texts and the real people of the past, which I can not address here. See my Kaleidoscope, and F. Bestebreurtje, “Postmodern Orthodoxy? The Problem of Biblical Criticism in Orthodox Hermeneutics,” in K. Tolstaya (ed.), Orthodox Paradoxes: Heterogeneities and Complexities in Contemporary Russian Orthodoxy. Proceedings from the 1st INaSEC Conference (Institute for the Academic Study of Eastern Christianity), Brill: Leiden, Boston 2014. 29 Alain Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought? followed by Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of the State, trans. Bruno Bosteels (Durham: Duke University Press, forthcoming), 21. I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Bosteels for sending me his translation prior to publication. 30 Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, 22. 31 Not translated in the English version of the “Dominoes”: “есть, наверно, дела и похуже, чем обедать человечьим трупом”, cf. at: http://shalamov.ru/library/2/27.html, accessed on 9 March 2012.

the Gulag. Badiou writes that Shalamov’s purpose was to create an artistic world

where “exception becomes the metaphor for normality, and the literary immersion in

this nightmare may awaken us to the universality of a will.”32

Shalamov was, indeed, an artist. But the issue is not at all his interest in

metaphors. His ultimate goal was not a “literary immersion” of his reader into a

“world of metaphors.” Shalamov is writing what he calls “the prose of the future,”

the only criterion of which is “reliability”: “prose of the future demands something

different. Not the writers will talk, but men of profession who possess the writer’s

gift. And they will tell only about what they know, what they saw. Reliability – this is

the power of literature of the future.”33 To some degree the author Shalamov is trying

to exceed a common ontological condition of his narrators. For example, the narrator

of his story “Dry Rations”: “A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory

is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good.”34 Moreover, the

narrator of the story “Sententious” tells about the eviction of language and inevitably

also of memory and emotions in the camp. The goal of Shalamov’s prose can be

described with what the Catholic political theologian Jürgen Manneman in another

context calls a creation of an “anamnestic culture, which remembers about the

forgotten victims.” Shalamov wrote: “I don’t want to forget anything and exactly in

that (…) I see my fate!”35 Because a reader cannot experience what Shalamov has

experienced, his prose is not aimed at “literary immersion.”

32 Badiou, Can Politics Be Thought?, 23. 33 Shalamov, “Tie”: “проза будущего требует другого. Заговорят не писатели, а люди профессии, обладающие писательским даром. И они расскажут только о том, что знают, видели. Достоверность — вот сила литературы будущего.” http://shalamov.ru/library/2/22.html, accessed on 9 March 2012. 34 Shalamov, “Dry Rations,” Kolyma Tales, 66. 35 “Я ничего не хочу забывать (…) и именно в этом вижу … свою судьбу!” Shalamov, Новая книга: Воспоминания. Записные книжки. Переписка. Следственные дела [New Book: Memoires. Notebooks. Correspondence. Case Investigations] (Moscow: Eskimo, 2004), 593.

Theology after Auschwitz and Theology after Gulag

The category of memory reminds us that we must find conditions in order to speak

about God in the face of the dehumanization in the Gulag and Auschwitz.

Uncomfortable and leading to aporias (or inability to solve theological questions),

thinking about ‘God and/in/after Auschwitz’ has a tradition in Western theology.

Representatives of this tradition are Dorothee Sölle, Hans Joachim Iwand, Jürgen

Moltmann, Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Helmut Gollwitzer, Richard Rubenstein,

Johann Baptist Metz, Jürgen Manneman and many others. “Theology after

Auschwitz” was nearly the first topic I learned about when I began my study of

theology in the Netherlands in 1993.

Contemporary Western theology has no answer to Auschwitz. According to

some Christian theologians, God is present in:

1. the “why” question itself, or,

2. in the aporia we experience, or,

3. in our complaint and indictment of the violence, or,

4. in reason fighting the violence of technique and reflection through

dialogue and reconciliation, through compassion and retry.36

The answers given are not conclusive, exactly because theology (in its primary

meaning of the human capability of speaking about God) reaches its limits here.

Soteriology, Christology, and eschatology are possible directions to reconsider these

aporias. What matters is not the absence of a conclusive answer, but the presence of

systematically validated theological groundwork which can be fruitful for theological

reflection in Eastern Europe.37

36 The list is taken from an unpublished manuscript on Christian dogmatics by A. Van der Kooi, whom I thank for her kind permission to use it here. In Part II, I intend to discuss further related questions. 37 In this respect, a theology after the Gulag could learn much from the theology after apartheid and South American liberation theology as well.

Time, distance and, even more, repentance is required for adequate reflection.

Theologie nach Auschwitz emerged some 20-25 years after the Holocaust. The same

amount of time has now passed since the fall of communism.38 Within the Reformed

tradition in post-communist Eastern Europe a profound reflection on the communist

past has arisen (I only mention Michail Beintker here).39 In post-communist Eastern

Orthodoxy, however, reflection on the Holocaust and/or the Gulag and communism,

comparable with that in the West, is still lacking.40

Given the current Russian church-state relations, a complicating socio-

psychological aspect should be mentioned. “Theology after Auschwitz” is, in

general, twofold: one side is given political, historical and theological guilt through

38 A singular case in this respect is the process of reconciliation in South Africa, where reflection, introspection, and remission—whether successful or not—lie at the basis of post-apartheid history, theology, and the legal system. See a valuable contribution from a jurisprudential angle by Wouter Veraart, De passie voor een alledaagse rechtsorde. Over vergeten, herinneren en vergeven als reacties op historisch onrecht [The Passion for Everyday Legal Order. About Forgetting, Remembering and Forgiving as Responses to Historical Injustice] (The Hague: Boom Juridische Uitgevers, 2010). See for the genesis of “Theology after Auschwitz/Holocaust” in the US and Western Europe: Hans Jansen, Christelijke theologie na Auschwitz. Deel I: Theologische en kerkelijke wortels van het antisemitisme [Christian Theology After Auschwitz. Part I: Theological and Religious Roots of Anti-Semitism] (The Hague: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 19822), 17-28. 39 Cf. e.g. Michail Beintker, „Die Neuorientierung nach der Wende des Jahres 1989,“ in: Michail Beintker, Sándor Fazakas (eds.), Öffentliche Relevanz der reformierten Theologie, Theological Journal of the Debrecen Reformed Theological University, Sonderheft [Special issue] (2008), 77-82; „Theologische Neuorientierung: Einführung in das Thema,“ in: EvTh 55 (1995), 211-217; „Die Schuldfrage im Licht der Barmer Theologischen Erklärung und das Stuttgarter Schuldbekenntnis und die Stellung zur Deutschlandfrage,“ in: Materialien der Enquete-Kommission „Aufarbeitung von Geschichte und Folgen der SED-Diktatur in Deutschland,“ Bd. VI,1 (Baden-Baden: hg. vom Deutschen Bundestag, 1995), 47-53 (Diskussion: 53-69); „Das Erbe des Kommunismus und die Kirchen. Theologische Herausforderungen,“ in: Katharina Kunter, Holger Schjørring (eds.), Die Kirchen und das Erbe des Kommunismus. Die Zeit nach 1989 – Zäsur, Vergangenheitsbewältigung und Neubeginn (Erlangen: Martin-Luther-Verlag, 2007), 383-396. 40 The international conference on “Theology after Auschwitz and its Connection with Theology after Gulag ” in St. Petersburg (1998) is a unique event, see Natalia Petcherskaya (ed.), Богословие после Освенцима и его связь с богословием после Гулага: Следствия и выводы [Theology after Auschwitz and its Relation to Theology after the Gulag: Consequences and Conclusions] (St. Petersburg: High Religious-Philosophical School, 1999). See the detailed report of Anton van Harskamp, “Controversen rond Auschwitz, Goelag, Joden en Christenen” [Controversies Around Auschwitz, Gulag, Jews and Christians”], http://www.bezinningscentrum.nl/indemarge/ssi_indemarge/pdf_indemarge_hor/marge197.pdf, accessed on 9 March 2012.Harskamp describes some awkward situations during this scientific conference; for example, that a man shouted “Zjid, zjid, zjid” (“yid”, or “kike” in Russian) during the presentation of Isidor Levin, the Auschwitz survivor mentioned earlier.

complicity with the genocide of the Jews (the chosen people) simply by association of

their identity as Christians. The second is the problem of speaking about God after

this evil and suffering. These two aspects are, of course, reciprocal.

For the post-soviet society—given the political, historical, and theological

dimensions—the question of complicity is more intricate because the borders

between enemies and victims were extremely blurred. Within the communist system,

which ideologically implanted the idea of brotherhood, any citizen/comrade could

become an “enemy of the people” just as anyone could be or become an NKVD

(former KGB) informant.41 The repressive system sorted enemies inside society. By

contrast, the complicity in Auschwitz (and for that part, for instance, in apartheid)

was that of guilt against a clearly defined outsider (Jew, Gypsy, homosexual, black,

or colored). Paradoxically, this “otherness” apparently makes confession and sense of

complicity easier to accept. Reciprocity, not (necessarily) confinement to one

stigmatized group or people, of the communist legacy, makes complicity

unconditional. This is, however, on another level than the unconditional destruction

of imago dei as described by Shalamov.42

Three further factors are important to consider the content of theological

reflection in the Russian context. First, that the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) is

adopting doctrinal documents after more than 70 years of enforced silence; second,

the disruption with the pre-revolutionary tradition of academic theology; third, the

41 For example: “Various statistics, which are difficult to verify in terms of their accuracy, show the Gestapo having 1 regular member per 4,800 citizens in 1938 compared to the Soviet Union with the KGB's 1 per 5,830 in the late 1930s.” Steve Hewitt, Snitch! A History of the Modern Intelligence Informer (London: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 105. At my inquiry, however, “Memorial” (see note 11) answered that no statistics have ever been gathered on the “snitches” due to inaccessibility of sources. No personal files were disclosed in Russia, and archives with dossiers where such information could be found are still locked. In investigational dossiers that can be obtained by researchers, this information is blocked, or these documents are not given out because they contain such information. On this level, too, the remnants of the closed Soviet system hinder remembrance and repentance. 42 In my forthcoming monograph on Theology after Gulag (fn. 1), I will argue that unconditionality of guilt can become theologically functional in the project of “Theology after Gulag.”

growing rapprochement of church and state where the successors of the repressive

apparatus hold power and are, thus, not inclined to repentance.43

Below I will relate the question of destruction of imago dei to the official theology of

the ROC.

The Absence of Memory in New Doctrinal Documents

of the Russian Orthodox Church

One of the new doctrinal documents adopted by the ROC is “The Russian Orthodox

Church’s Basic Teaching on Human Dignity, Freedom and Rights,” issued in 2008.44

As can be expected, within the above mentioned socio-political and socio-

psychological setting this document is not based on introspection, but on

mirroring—that is, re-flection turned outwards. As stated in the “Introduction,” it is

an address of the ROC to “the world today.”45 The whole address to “the world”

regarding human dignity, freedom, and rights lacks any direct reference to or

account of recent Russian history—decennia of suppression and injustice.46

43 See, by contrast, the preamble to the South-African Constitution of 1996: “We, the people op South Africa (…) [h]eal the divisions of the past (…).” Quoted in Veraart, De passie, 35. In contemporary Russia the current course is to reinforce patriotism and create a positive image of the communist governmental structures. A sort of conspiracy theory emerged through this that claimed: because of the high percentage of former KGB employees in the current Russian administration, the government demanded that former KGB people, or members of the party, or of government bodies be portrayed in books and films as pious and courageous people—people who are able to guide the country in harmony with the Orthodox revival. In the slipstream of the increasing confluence between church and state in Russian society, this would lead to a better popular image of the KGB[/FSB]. I touch upon this problem in Katya Tolstaya, Peter Versteeg, “Inventing a Saint: Religious Fiction in Post-Communist Russia,” 2012 (forthcoming). 44 See discussions in e.g.: Alfons Brüning and Evert van der Zweerde (eds.), Orthodoxy and Human Rights (Leuven: Peeters, 2012, forthcoming); John A. McGuckin, “The Issue of Human Rights in Byzantium and the Orthodox Christian Tradition,” in: John Witte, Jr., Frank S. Alexander (eds.), Christianity and Human Rights: An Introduction (New York: Cambridge UP, 2010), 173-190, there 184-190; criticism in: Igor Gordyi, “The Ukrainian Churches and the Europeanisation of Ukraine,” in: Juliane Besters-Dilger (ed.), Ukraine on its Way to Europe: Interim Results of the Orange Revolution (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009), 309-329, there 312-314. 45 http://www.mospat.ru/en/documents/dignity-freedom-rights/introduction/, accessed on 9 March 2012. 46 The so-called “Darmstädter Wort” of the Bruderrat der Evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland was adopted on the 8th of August 1947. „Der von Hans Joachim Iwand entworfene und unter Beteiligung

One of the few indirect references is in Ch. II, Section 4 to the “martyrs who served

God even to death and the (…) confessors who refused to renounce Him in face of

persecutions and threats.”47 One might see this as an allusion to the Orthodox victims

of the Soviet repressions.48 Exactly this allusion brings me to my main question of

theological account for dehumanization in the Gulag.

Other than the secular Human Rights Declaration, “The Basic Teaching”

derives human dignity from the biblical notion of the endowment of man with God’s

image and likeness (Gen. 1:26).49 “The image of God can be either darkened or

illumined depending on the self-determination of a free individual, while the natural

dignity becomes either more apparent in his life or obliterated by sin.”50 I constrain

myself here to only one remark: this chapter (II) of “The Basic Teaching” is entitled

“Freedom of choice and freedom from evil.” The fate of the Muselmänner and

dokhodyagi of respectively Auschwitz and the Gulag has disclosed a possibility of

what I would call a total loss of any dignity and of the image of God.51 Free will was

von Martin Niemöller, Karl Barth und anderen überarbeitete Text galt der Konkretion eines kirchlichen Schuldbekenntnisses nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg.“ [“The text, designed by Hans Joachim Iwand and revised under the participation of Martin Niemöller, Karl Barth and others, served the concretion of a confession of guilt of the church after the Second World War.”] Beintker, Die Kirchen, 388. Beintker discusses the import of this document for reflection on Protestant post-communist theology and “Theology after Auschwitz.” 47 http://www.mospat.ru/en/documents/dignity-sfreedom-rights/iv/, accessed on 9 March 2012. In this regard the question of dehumanization can be pursued on the examples of two of Shalamov’s stories concerning clergymen—a pastor, Frisorger (“The Apostle Paul”), and an Orthodox priest, Zamiatin (“A Day Off”). 48 Between 1992 and 2000 “at least thrice as many” saints have been glorified and canonized as in the entire previous history of the Church. Vladislav Cypin, Церковное право [Church Law] (Moscow: Fond “Christianskaya zhisn’,” 2002, at: http://www.klikovo.ru/db/book/msg/4203, accessed on 9 March 2012), there § 48.1. In 2000-2008 the ROC’s Synodal Commission for Canonization of Saints proceeded with canonizations in comparable proportions. Most people recently glorified and canonized are martyrs of communist rule. See Fr. Nektarios Serfes, “Glorification Of The Assembly of Russian New Martyrs And Confessors August 2000 In Moscow, Russia” (7-11-2000, at: http://www.serfes.org/royal/glorification.htm, accessed on 9 March 2012). 49 Ch. I, section 1: “According to the Biblical revelation, God not only created human nature but also endowed it with qualities in His image and after His likeness (cf. Gen. 1:26). It is the only ground which makes it possible to assert that human nature has an inherent dignity.” 50 Ch. II, section 1. 51 I find a similar observation in David Patterson, “Nazis, Philosophers, and the response to the Scandal of Heidegger,” in: John K. Roth (ed.), Ethics after the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and Responses (St. Paul, Minnesota: Pargon House, 1999), 148-172, there 152: “The divine image in man can

out of order in these circumstances. Another layer forms, in this regard, the question

of freedom of the ‘free’ Soviet society at large; for example, given state imposed

atheism. As far as the radical evil of dehumanization of the dokhodyagi in the Gulag

represents suffering and injustice in general, the question seems appropriate whether

the ROC preserves its veracity/reliability in not accounting for the recent history and

its own role in its newly adopted documents.52

Revival of the Concept of theosis

Dehumanization of the Gulag and Auschwitz forms a fundamental challenge for

Christian theological anthropology as such, and especially for Eastern Orthodoxy,

considering the importance of deification (theosis)53 and the current theological

revival of this doctrine. Given that contemporary interest in theosis is certainly not

confined to the Orthodox context, but “is perhaps the hype of twenty-first century

theology,”54 the link between the concepts of imago dei and of theosis in the newly

adopted doctrinal documents of the ROC becomes important for our discourse on

be destroyed. No more threatening proof to this effect can be found than the so-called Muselmann in the Nazi death camp…” Patterson draws on the Jewish theological anthropology of Torah and Talmud and describes the destruction of imago dei as an “attack” on God and man. His overall approach, however, is rather abstract. 52 I intend to discuss this question in Part II. Cf. the opinion that rejection or ignorance of the Holocaust “is foreclosed to ‘us humans’ not just qua Europeans, Americans or Westerners, but qua members of humanity – in this case understood as a community of all human beings that have gone, are going, or will go through a human life. (…) On the plane of justice on a global scale, the adoption of conceptions that fail to condemn the perpetration of new holocausts under different names (…) can then be rejected as something, that undermines humanity’s possibility of maintaining a sense of self-respect, and each of its members’ ability to regard humanity within himself [I read: imago dei, K.T.] as worthy of respect.” Alessandro Ferrara, “The Idea of Charter of fundamental Human Rights,” in: Claudio Corradetti (ed.), Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights: Some Contemporary Views (Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New York: Springer, 2012), 173-190, there 185. 53 I use both terms here as interchangeable. 54 Maarten Wisse, Trinitarian Theology Beyond Participation (New York: T&T Clark, 2011), 301. See there interconfessional bibliography, 301-312. Wisse expresses a common opinion (302) that “Lossky introduced Eastern Orthodox theology to Western readers as early as the 1950s.” It was, however, M. Lot-Borodine who in a series of articles introduced the Orthodox concept of deification in the West in 1932-33. See Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4; Heleen Zorgdrager, “A Practice of Love: Myrrha Lot-Borodine (1882-1954) and the Modern Revival of the Doctrine of Deification,” in: JECS (forthcoming, 2012).

searching directions for 21st century theology. Within Orthodox theology, and thus in

these documents, deification is a soteriological consequence of the anthropological

and ontological presuppositions of imago dei. Precisely with its notion of theosis

Eastern Orthodox theology bears a great potential to make theological thinking about

God more or less sufficient, or, perhaps, together with the Western solutions more

comprehensive. In this contribution I will restrict myself to some comments on the

ROC documents.55

The Basic Teaching states: “Human life therefore lies in seeking ‘God’s likeness

in all virtue so far as it is possible for man’, as St. John of Damascus says in his Exact

Exposition of the Orthodox Faith. The patristic tradition describes this elicitation of

the image of God as deification. The God-given dignity is confirmed by a moral

principle present in every person and discerned in the voice of conscience.”56 The

Bases of the Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church (2000) calls deification the

“ultimate goal and calling of man”: “The body, free from slavery to sinful passions and

illnesses as their consequences, should serve the soul, while the spiritual powers and abilities,

transformed by the grace of the Holy Spirit, should aspire for the ultimate goal and calling of

man which is deification” (Bold in the original).57

55 I will indicate this direction for interpreting the concept of theosis my forthcoming monograph (see fn. 1). 56 Chapter I, Section 1.3, at: http://www.mospat.ru/en/documents/dignity-freedom-rights/i/, accessed on 9 March 2012. 57 Ch. XI.1, at: http://orthodoxeurope.org/page/3/14.aspx. Cf. I.1; IV.4; XII.1, accessed on 9 March 2012. This document advocates the symphonia model of the ROC’s relationship with the secular state (guided by the principles of reciprocal support and non-interference and patriotism of the national church, “The Social Concept,” III), and delineates in III.2 its position through a non-theological use of “deification”: “According to the teaching of the Church, power itself has no right to make itself absolute by extending its limits up to complete autonomy from God and from the order of things established by Him. This can lead to the abuse of power and even to the deification of rulers.” (At http://www.mospat.ru/en/documents/social-concepts/iii/, accessed on 9 March 2012, bold in the original.) For discussions of this document see Josephien van Kessel, Olga Hoppe-Kondrikova and Evert van der Zweerde, “Compendium en Osnovy: Een Orthodox contrapunt” [Compendium and Osnovy: An Orthodox Counterpoint”], in: Marcel Becker (ed.), Christelijk Sociaal Denken. Traditie. Actualiteit. Kritiek [Christian Social Thought. Tradition. Actuality. Criticism] (Budel: Damon, 2009), 130-160; Alexander Agadjanian,“The Social Vision of the Russian Orthodoxy: Balancing between Identity and Relevance,” in: Jonathan Sutton and Wil van den Bercken (eds.), Orthodox Christianity and Contemporary Europe: Selected Papers (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 2003), 163-183; Zoe Knox, Russian Society and the Orthodox Church: Religion in Russia after Communism (London: Routledge, 2005), 111-132.

In both the Basic Teaching and in the Social Concept the notions of imago dei and

theosis are used from a sort of timeless perspective, in factual oblivion of the recent

past (I suspend both the question of complicity and the problem of dehumanization

and evil here).58 Whereas the “Theology after Auschwitz” church based anti-

Semitism can—up to a certain extent—be identified as non-compliance with

Christian doctrines, for the Orthodox context, concepts like theosis and imago dei

prove incommensurable for the complicity of the Gulag and dehumanization when

they are not confronted with historical reality. A timeless perspective is not adequate

to address the “world today.”59

An additional question should involve the perception of theological notions

by a common (i.e., not theologically skilled) reader. The official doctrine of theosis

came into being as result of controversies.60 Since then this notion has become

theologically loaded and multi-interpretable throughout church history.61 Within the

scope of contemporary systematic theology, discourse on theosis involves a scale of

loci (dogmatic themes such as the concept of God, ontology, anthropology,

Christology, soteriology); the interpretation of which will lead to differences in the

58 The same can be said of other documents, published on the official web site of the ROC: “Metropolitan Hilarion addressed the brethren of Filotheou Monastery with a homily dedicated to St. Simeon the New Theologian” (27.10.2010), at: http://www.mospat.ru/en/2010/10/27/news28950/, and Metropolitan Hilarion (Alfeyev), “Theology of Icon in the Orthodox Church. Lecture at St. Vladimir’s Seminary, 5 February 2011” at: http://www.mospat.ru/en/2011/02/06/news35783/, accessed on 9 March 2012, “‘Church hierarchy as a source of authority in the Church’,” at: http://www.mospat.ru/en/2011/06/28/news43952/, accessed on 9 March 2012, and “Inter-Orthodox Cooperation in the Preparations for a Holy and Great Council of the Orthodox Church,” at: http://www.mospat.ru/en/2011/11/03/news50923/, accessed on 9 March 2012, where the concept of deification is limited to the patristic teachings without any relation to modern history. 59 There is a broader aspect to it that is connected with the Orthodox notion of tradition as unchangeable and with theological hermeneutics. Positioning oneself at an odd hermeneutical point (of view) is also not foreign to Western theologians. See my criticism of Karl Barth and Eduard Thurneysen for (literally) taking a position “from God” [“von Gott aus”] in Part III of my Kaleidoscope (see n. 2), and my “Literary Mystification: Hermeneutical Questions of the Early Dialectical Theology,” in: Neue Zeitschrift für Systematische Theologie und Religionsphilosophie 54/3 (2012), 312-331. 60 Roughly: in the first phase with Barlaam of Calabria, in the second phase with the group lead by Gregory Akindynos, in the third phase with Nicephorus Gregoras, and in the fourth and last phase with Prochorus Cydones. See e.g. Russel, The Doctrine of Deification, 304-309. 61 Cf. the four modes of approaching deification (nominal, analogical, ethical, and realistic) as distinguished by Norman Russell, The Doctrine of Deification, 9.

completion of one’s interpretation of theosis.62 Thus, a functional explanation of its

application in the official ROC documents is needed for theologians, and especially

for the common readers.63 Deification is not considered in a theological (historical)

context in any of the documents published on the official web site of the ROC.64 Thus,

in the documents discussed, the goal of deification and the concepts of human

dignity—“church- state relations and a number of problems socially significant

today”65—remain, similar to Euripides and Badiou, on the abstract level. For a

doctrinal document to be reliable—I recall Shalamov’s demand of reliability—

deification could only be prescribed as a norm to “every person”66 within a thorough

theological account, which is now lacking. When our theology loses its context, the

tragedy of the concrete testimonies becomes as abstract as Euripides’ discourse.

Thus, the question remains: how can we speak theologically reliably of theosis

and imago dei after Auschwitz and the Gulag? For our discussion of theosis to be

reliable, a confrontation with the reality of one´s own past and guilt is required. One

could even say that such self-reflection is a precondition for the practice of theosis, on

an ecclesial level as much as on an individual level (in this case for complicity in the

Gulag). With F.W. Marquardt—who was led by the Nie wieder! (‘never again

Auschwitz’)—we are determined by the primacy of ethics over dogmatics and of

practice over theory, the historical over the metaphysical.67 In its official documents

the ROC heretofore fails to connect the appeal to theosis to the theological Orthodox

tradition regarding theosis.

62 Wisse gives relevant examples in his Trinitarian Theology, 305-312; cf. Williams, The Ground of Union, 142. 63 A short questionary I held under 15 Russian respondents—none of them a theologian; all had at least an university degree; seven were church attendees; eight were from a more secular background—showed that they expected something “very elevated” («очень возвышенное») and “mystical” by the word «обожение» (“deification”). No respondent would connect it with the Orthodox doctrine or practice, nor with deeper theological strata. 64 See note 58. 65 “The Basis of the Social Concept,” at: http://www.mospat.ru/en/documents/social-concepts/about/, accessed on 9 March 2012. 66 I refer to Chapter I, Section 1.3 of the “Basic Teaching” (see quote above). 67 “Inleiding door de redactie” [“Preface by the editors”], in: Friedrich-Wilhelm Marquardt, Bij de slip van zijn kleed… Een christelijke theologie na Auschwitz (Baarn:Ten Have, 2003), 15.

Theosis and Memory of the Gulag

The amnesia of the Gulag experience in the new adopted doctrinal documents of the

ROC brings to memory Shalamov’s driving force. As Juri Drumi says:

In memory [Shalamov] sees ‘a symptom of humanity’. Memory is also a safeguard of

immortality and resurrection.68 As follows from the story ‘The procurator of Judea’, to

forget the names and faces of martyrs, or equally to consign to oblivion their

executors, means to forget Christ and His torturers. With all might of his nature

Shalamov resists ‘the terrifying human force – the will and ability to forget’.69 Only

having overcome in himself the temptation of unconsciousness, he calms down and

goes to sleep: a right to sleep quietly has only he, who remembers the faces of the

cripples, who did not forget the insane shine of their hungry eyes.70

To recall Badiou once again, the awakening from “this nightmare” should have

nothing to do with “the universality of a will” or with political philosophy. An

allusion to Pascal’s “Jesus will be in agony until the end of the world, we must not

sleep during that time”71 seems more appropriate. I also think of Yevgenia

Ginzburg’s testimony that memory in the prison “reaches virtuosity”—as she calls it,

she writes that she literally knew pages from difficult books, she read only once, by

heart:

During the long months and years I spent in various prisons, I was able to observe

the virtuosity that human memory can develop when it is sharpened by loneliness

and complete isolation from outside impressions. One remembers with amazing

68 Drumi refers to Shalamov’s story, “Resurrection of the Larch.” 69 Drumi quotes from Shalamov’s story, “Train.” 70 Juri Drumi, «По десяти заповедям». Религиозно-нравственная основа «Колымских рассказов»” [“‘According to the Ten Commandments’. Religious-moral base of the Kolyma Stories”], I.P. Sirotinskaya (red.), К столетию со дня рождения Варлама Шаламова [For the hundredth birthday of Varlam Shalamov] (Moscow: n.p., 2007), 73–84. 71 Blaise Pascal, Pensees, transl. A.J. Kralsheimer (Harmondsworth: Penguin books, 1966), 313.

accuracy everything one has ever read, even quite long ago, and can repeat whole

pages of books one had believed long forgotten. There is something almost

mysterious about this phenomenon.72

We live in different times than Shalamov and Ginzburg. Despite different socio- and

church-political differences and positive steps toward European integration, we still

can say with Johann Baptist Metz that we lack the “anamnestic spirit” required to

comprehend what in “such a disaster” happened “also with us, with Europe and

eventually with our talk about God.”73 In these times amnesia or a dormitory

stupefaction is, probably, not merely an ecclesiastical, but a broader cultural

phenomenon: I have read Shalamov’s stories at least five times and each time I forget

the concrete content. The paradox is that theology is, on the one hand, a normative

discipline, and, on the other hand, it is a hazardous enterprise that demands—as a

norm—the individual voice of the theologian. It is only with individual voices of

theologians that theology after Auschwitz was initiated in the West.

Theological rethinking of theosis (and imago dei) might give the Church (and,

foremost perhaps, the individual believer) a means to confess and accept this guilt,

but also to find a way forward to a faith and theology after the Gulag. In what way

the doctrine of theosis can be a theological basis for individual and ecclesial account

in the shadow of radical evil requires elaboration. It will involve a discussion on the

related Orthodox doctrine of divine essence/energies.74

72 Eugenia Ginzburg, Journey into the Whirlwind, trans. Paul Stevenson and Max Hayward (New York/London: Harvest, 1975), 71. 73 J.B. Metz, “Theologie als Theodizee?“, in: Willi Oelmüller (ed.), Theodizee – Gott vor Gericht? (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1990), 103-118, 113: „weil uns jener anamnetische Geist fehlt, der nötig wäre, um wahrzunehmen, was in einer solchen Katastrophe auch mit uns, mit Europa und schließlich mit unserer Rede von Gott geschah.“ 74 I shall expound my vision of this positive potential of Orthodox thinking on theosis-essence/energies to become a theological basis for this individual account in the shadow of radical evil in my monograph (see fn. 1).