For about 40 years, between the early Eighties and his death in 2021, Roberto Calasso produced a body of bewilderingly interdisciplinary work combing such fields as literary studies, political theory, religion, anthropology, philosophy, and art history, and dedicated to topics as diverse as Kafka, Tiepolo, Baudelaire, the French Revolution and the Bible, not to mention the Indian, Greek, and Sumerian mythologies. One wonders if there is anything Calasso did not write or know abundantly about. The result is a series of over a dozen closely interrelated books, starting with The Ruin of Kasch (1983) and ending with Under the Eyes of the Angel, which he was still working on when he died and was published in 2022. When the former came out, Italo Calvino, in an attempt to summarise it, observed that the book was about two main subjects: the first was the French diplomat and politician Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, and the second, tutto il resto (“everything else”). Calvino failed in his attempt, then, but he does get his point across succinctly: that it is almost impossible to state what exactly the book is about. And that has been the case with most of Calasso’s work ever since.

Nevertheless, whatever they may focus on, Calasso’s books very often revolve around one central topic: sacrifice. For him, sacrifice is what ties humans to the gods, what brings order into the world and meaning into our lives. In the many mythological traditions that he explores, the cosmos — and the humans within it — came into existence through a primordial sacrificial gesture. That act needs to be constantly re-enacted, through ritual and ceremonies, for the ties between Earth and Heaven to be maintained. Christians partake in such a ritual every time they attend Mass.

Yet for Calasso, sacrifice is not only religious. Indeed, before being a religious event or sacramental practice, sacrifice is life at its most fundamental. In an illuminating interview for The Paris Review, Calasso sketches a philosophy of sacrifice that casts a helpful light on some of the main arguments of his work. The fact is, observes Calasso, that we have “a surplus of energy” which we have to “dispose of”. It all starts with that excess.

“That surplus is simply life. There is no life without surplus. Whatever one does with that surplus, that decides the shape of a culture, of a life, of a mind. There were certain cultures that decided they had to offer it in some way. It is not clear to whom, why, and how, but that was the idea.”

Calasso’s books act as so many signposts on one’s way to the kind of true knowledge that formal education promises but cannot provide — knowledge that will eventually redeem us. That road is long, solitary, and arduous because we are so remote from where we should be. (If this sounds Gnostic, that’s because it probably is.) The problem with our secularised world is that, while sacrifice lies at the heart of life itself, we are no longer willing to accept it. In an age where everything is done for a clear reason, or for certain profit, sacrifice as a supremely gratuitous act has become “entirely useless and obsolete”.

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And yet, suggests Calasso, since such acts “have gone on for hundreds of thousands of years and have thus left their traces in our minds”, ignoring them comes at a price. Deprived of the deeper significance of sacrifice, we can no longer make sense of a series of fundamental human experiences: of loss and grief, of transience and impermanence, of our fundamental precariousness and finitude, and in general of all that makes us what we are. In the ancient kingdom of Kasch, when people stop making sacrifices and following rituals, it seems to make their lives easier, but certain ruin follows.

In The Unnameable Present, another important piece of his multi-volume project, Calasso describes the contemporary secularised society as one largely relieved of religious duties and rituals, and yet eaten up by the sense of its own insubstantiality, by spiritual disorientation, and a lack of clear purpose. For all their religious emancipation, “the secularists are not happy”, he observes. “Nor do they feel relieved of great burdens. They feel the insubstantiality of all that surrounds them. At times they recognise something ominous in it… The same insubstantiality exists in they themselves.” The fact that we no longer follow explicitly religious rituals does not mean that we don’t practice other, disguised rituals. “Tacitly, though firmly, the secular brain has resigned itself to thinking that it cannot do without repeated and rigidly formalised acts,” writes Calasso. “Secular life is increasingly interspersed with situations that must involve behaving in a certain way.” We are religious without knowing it. Which is not without its irony, considering how anti-religious we usually think we are.

Calasso wants to do something about this situation. In his books, he seeks to “unearth”, as he put it, the deeper significance of sacrifice and to show that we have much to gain — spiritually, intellectually, culturally — from a renewed relationship with it. His monumental body of work is meant to teach us a novel way of approaching the world by giving the unknown and the mysterious — all that which transcends us — their due. Such humility should do us some good. He writes:

“In the act of sacrifice, you establish a relation with something that you recognise as enigmatic and powerful… The unknown itself is in our own mind as well — our mind is in its largest part totally unknown to us. Therefore, it is not only a relation to the exterior world, it is a relation to ourselves.”

Key to Calasso’s programme of re-enchanting the world is a better relationship to myth. As he says in another interview, “myths are a special way of knowledge” — one that’s based not in argument, scientific methodology or empirical evidence, but in stories, storytelling and, in general, in a narrative mode of making sense of the world. “Knowledge is made not only with concepts, not only with experiments, it’s made with stories.” In a godless world like ours, only storytelling, as a reflection of myth, can reconnect us not only to the gods, but to our deeper selves.

Not only does Calasso operate primarily as a storyteller, regardless of what he writes about, but much of his work is also a re-telling of the great mythical narratives of the past. That’s what writing is all about; as he puts it in the same interview, “literature is, from the beginning, re-telling”. In The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, he retells the Greek myths, in Ka and Ardor, the Indian ones, and in The Book of All Books, he re-tells much of the Bible.

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And that’s where The Tablet of Destinies, the last book-length work Calasso published in his lifetime, comes in. Calasso re-tells here some of the Sumerian myths we know from other sources (such as The Epic of Gilgamesh), but with some twists. “Shortly before the Flood, I was king of Shuruppak. It wasn’t the centre of the world, but it wasn’t far off.” That’s how the narrator, Utnapishtim, introduces himself. The god Ea entrusted him with the mission of building a ship that would allow the human race to survive the Flood. The Mesopotamian Noah dutifully obliges and escapes not just the Flood, but somehow death itself. He now lives, in a perpetual present, in a deserted place called Dilmun, from where he observes, with ironical detachment, the unfolding of the human and godly affairs. That’s how he met Gilgamesh, as he was desperately seeking immortality: “I was the one who would have to explain to Gilgamesh that his adventures were to no avail. Man is as fleeting as a dragonfly that flits for a day over the waters of the Euphrates and is gone.” And that’s also how he meets Sindbad the Sailor, of Arabian Nights fame (anything is possible in the timelessness of storytelling), to whom he recounts the story that is the object of The Tablet of Destinies.

Like any great mythical narrative worth its salt, the story starts with — and the world it brings into being relies on — a series of sacrificial events: “Apsu was killed by his son Ea. Then Tiamat by Ea’s son Marduk. The world continued to be made up of their measureless bodies, from the fresh subterranean waters to the vault of the havens, Tiamat’s back, which Ea neatly flattened out and studded with stars.” This is a cosmogonic story, about how the world came into being, but also the story of its gradual disenchantment. The tamer the gods become, the emptier the cosmos. Eventually, the gods withdraw altogether. After Marduk, Utnapishtim says, “all other gods ceased to appear, as if they had become extinct, or killed one another off”. But if you think humans miss the gods, you are wrong. “Living without gods, people found, was not only acceptable, but easy.”

Rooted in Sumerian mythology, The Tablet of Destinies is about prehistorical happenings, or even about worlds that did not come to pass. From time to time, however, we are jolted when we realise that Utnapishtim is describing us. As when he talks of the withdrawal of the gods, and what the world is like without them. “When they do reappear, very likely no one notices. For some they have become an object of curiosity. Chance, on the other hand, is now dominant, it is worshiped. And is no less inflexible. It does no one any favours. This is all that I have been given to see.” The story that Calasso, through Utnapishtim’s mouth, tells us here, then, is also our own story — from enchanted, if bloody beginnings, to a disenchanted and awfully bland end.

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Unlike other books in his multi-volume corpus, in which Calasso routinely engages with specialist scholarship and unfolds complicated theoretical trappings, The Tablet of Destinies is a slim and straightforward work. Pure, unadulterated narrative, it draws a straight line between storytelling and keeping the world in continuous existence. One day Utnapishtim realises that his compulsive narration was the reason why the gods kept him immortal. They “had wanted this; they had arranged it all”. The gods needed “a voice to tell the stories that had happened before the Flood. And I was the only one still alive. I had been part of those stories, or they had been told to me”.

Roberto Calasso is certainly one of the great unappreciated minds of our time, but beyond the strictly intellectual worth of his work, which is considerable, we detect here a heightened spiritual sensitivity that allows him to sense, like few others, the great dangers lurking beneath the joyous surface of our time: self-idolatry and self-deception on a planetary scale, doubled by the sense of our own insubstantiality, a great propensity for inessential and boundless vanity, as well as a fundamental inability to place ourselves within a larger frame of reference. There is indeed something of the doomed prophet about Calasso. In a conversation with his translator, Tim Parks, he speaks at one point of a “terror of election”, of one’s designation for a higher mission as “gift and condemnation” at once. He must have known something about this terror from personal experience. He must have known, too, how important doomed prophets are when “time is out of joint”, as it seems to be now. Not necessarily as teachers, but because the incandescence of their sacrifice may bring, at last, some light into our lives.

Precious few details were given about that harm. The signatories, comprising eventually more than 800 scholars, offered some perfunctory scholarly reasons for their demand, but it was clear that the article’s main shortcoming, in their view, was of an extra-scholarly nature: its conclusions went against the political sensibilities prevalent in today’s mainstream humanities, in whose name they were writing. Rather than a scholarly document, the letter was a rallying cry built around such conspicuously political terms as “privilege”, “harm” and “erasure” — which feature abundantly in the current discourse of the Left.

Separately, some of the journal’s associate editors apologised on social media for “the harms”, stating that “clearly, the article should not have been published”. Both Hypatia’s editor and its board of directors, however, stood by the journal’s initial decision to publish Tuvel’s article, which is still available online.

In another section of Anglophone academia, a team of three scholars, Peter Boghossian, James A. Lindsay, and Helen Pluckrose, were perpetrating what they ultimately called the “grievance studies affair”: over two years, they jointly wrote several hoax papers, and submitted them, under assumed names, to mainstream journals in the humanities. Even though these articles advanced blatantly absurd claims, and sometimes made little sense, some of them were accepted for publication — often enthusiastically. In “Human reactions to rape culture and queer performativity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon”, for example, published in Gender, Place & Culture, the authors claimed that “dog parks are ‘rape-condoning spaces’ and a place of rampant canine rape culture and systemic oppression against ‘the oppressed dog’ through which human attitudes to both problems can be measured and analysed by applying black feminist criminology”.

How did papers of no scholarly merit pass, sometimes with flying colours, the crucial test whereby a scholar’s subjective opinion becomes reliable knowledge: the peer-review process? Because the authors understood how important conformism to the dominant ideological orthodoxy is in the academic humanities. The hoaxers didn’t need to place any real knowledge in their submissions, only the recognisable markers of belonging to the same camp — dazzling buzzwords such as “rape culture”, “queer performativity”, “systemic oppression” — which mesmerised both journal editors and the external reviewers. (When the hoaxers came out of the shadows, the journals retracted the papers.) These two stories reveal, each in its own way, the outsized role that extra-scholarly factors play in scholarship — and, therefore, the extreme overall fragility of the quest for truth in today’s Anglophone humanities.

Almost a century ago, in La Trahison des Clercs (1927), Julien Benda warned against what he considered one of the greatest dangers of his time: the “betrayal” committed by intellectuals who, instead of defending les valeurs éternelles et désintéressées, chose to put themselves in the service of intérêts pratiques associated with specific ideologies, militant causes, social movements, and political parties. These intellectuels engagés pretended to seek universal values, while in fact advancing the specific agenda of one group or another. Max Weber’s theory of “value neutrality”, earlier in the century, had similarly argued that researchers need to keep their own values and personal biases in check if they are to truly understand what they are studying. Not to do so would be to fail as a scholar. Both Benda and Weber were writing at a time of intense ideological battles, not unlike ours. And yet they thought the way out of the crisis was not more politicised knowledge, but less — preferably, none.

This ideal would form the backbone of Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (1943). Throughout the Thirties, Hesse saw the devastating effects of instrumentalised knowledge in the world around him: in Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, and fascist Italy, but also in the democracies that were preparing to confront them. In the novel, set in the 25th century, this confrontation marked the beginning of a catastrophic “Age of Wars”. Towards the end of this period, tired of all the senseless violence, social chaos, and political cynicism, people start to envision a solution: the pursuit of pure, rigorous, disinterested knowledge, sought for its own sake, and uncontaminated by any practical interests. Only such knowledge, they thought, will save society from self-destruction. The idea was that:

“…if respect for the world of the mind is no longer operative, ships and automobiles will soon cease to run right, the engineer’s slide rule and the computations of the banks and stock exchanges will forfeit validity and authority, and chaos will ensue… the externals of civilisation — technology, industry, commerce, and so on — also require a common basis of intellectual honesty and morality.”

That’s how the fictional “pedagogical province” of Castalia, the quasi-monastic setting of Hesse’s novel, is established. There, the brightest minds of every country in our future spend their lives doing nothing but playing the equally fictional Glass Bead Game. The game is never clearly defined in the novel, but we understand that it is the highest achievement of the human mind imaginable. “It has particularly taken over the role of art, partially that of speculative philosophy.” The most salient feature of the game is its contemplative dimension. The players don’t pursue it for any practical goals; they dedicate their entire existence to it without any concern for material gain, social status, or worldly fame. They are total scholars pursuing “the life of the Mind”, seeking nothing but useless knowledge.

And yet the Glass Bead Game has a vitally important function in society: through what they do, the Castalians preserve the integrity and purity of thinking, making sure that it doesn’t get contaminated by extraneous factors such as greed, thirst for worldly fame, and politics. Especially politics. For nothing corrupts the pursuit of knowledge more than power. The Castalians live, as Hesse writes, “in a state of political innocence and naïveté such as had been quite common among the professors of earlier ages; they [have] no political rights and duties, scarcely ever [see] a newspaper”. While outside of Castalia, people are free to engage in politics, as well as in business, professional careers, and other worldly pursuits, within the “pedagogical provinces” themselves, there is no place for such things. What lies at their core is not the pursuit of power, but that of service.

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Life in Castalia may strike us as outlandish, yet it’s nothing but the fleshing out of an old and widespread idea. The novel builds on the notion that there are largely two existential attitudes, two fundamental modes of relating to the world: vita activa and vita contemplativa. The distinction has been known to every civilisation, Eastern or Western, ancient or modern, simple or sophisticated. We can approach the world pragmatically, and act upon it with a view of bending it to our own needs and desires. This has always been the approach of statesmen and military strategists, politicians and policymakers, revolutionaries and activists of all stripes. Or we can approach the world contemplatively, seeking to understand it in its own terms, and not in relation to us, and hoping to grasp how things are in themselves, regardless of the use we make of them. Achieving such understanding is what the enlightened of all ages and all places have done: Zen monks and Sufi masters, sages and hermits, great theorists and visionaries, Glass Bead Game players and artists of genius — and, in their best moments, scholars, too.

After all, the primary job of the scholar is not to act upon the world, but to understand it. “Not to laugh, not to lament, not to detest, but to understand,” in the haunting words of Benedict Spinoza, the most contemplative of modern philosophers. One cannot understand something and act upon it at the same time; when we are acting upon an object, we put ourselves in a utilitarian, possessive, and manipulative mode, which makes us incapable of grasping its true meaning. On the contrary, a scholar is someone who takes a step back, stays still, and observes everything at leisure (scholē in Greek, from which our word derives). Scholarship, then, ends where action starts. Someone else may use scholarly knowledge to devise a practical course of action, but that enterprise is not scholarly. Those who seek to understand the world and those who want to change it are two different breeds of people, following separate paths. They may occasionally wave and smile at each other, have meaningful conversations, and even be friends, but they remain different.

Karl Marx’s bon mot, in Theses on Feuerbach (1845), that “Hitherto philosophers have sought to understand the world; henceforth they must seek to change it”, was not the beginning of a political liberation, then, but that of a great intellectual confusion. How can one change a world one does not understand?

Almost 100 years after La Trahison des Clercs, Benda’s “betrayal” has become the norm in the academic humanities, especially in the English-speaking world. Nowadays if a piece of humanistic scholarship doesn’t broadcast, or at least allude to, the author’s political views and ideological mindset, it is seen with suspicion by her peers. Weber’s “value neutrality” appears as an aberration. Indeed, to write in its defence, as I am doing here, may be construed as positive proof of — God forbid — the author’s un-leftist views.

For not only are we supposed to wear our politics, visibly, on our scholarship, which is bad enough, but we also need to hold only certain views, which is plainly absurd. As has been observed, over the last few decades academia has progressively shifted to the Left. This has translated into an increasing lack of viewpoint diversity, which has compromised “the ability of scholars to seek truth, and of students to learn from a broad range of thinkers”, as two commentators recently noted. Ideally, there should be no politics at all in our scholarship. Failing that, there should be a variety of political views involved, in the hope that they will cancel each other out.

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Yet that today’s humanist academics have strong political views and don’t hesitate to pass them on as real knowledge is not even their worst failure. What’s even more damaging is that the body of humanistic knowledge itself — its basic assumptions, the process though which it is produced, even the language in which it is communicated — is structured along political lines. Much of today’s humanistic scholarship is not just about politics, it is itself a form of political performance: it generates and increases power, it creates and maintains hierarchies, it splits the scholars into camps, tribalising the humanities and turning them into a power-charged field. Most of the time we think and write and act not as mere scholars, but as political actors — always on the lookout for ways to maximise their power, prestige and influence. Regardless of the topics of our research, much of what we do is shaped not by the inner logic of our work, but by something extraneous — by what is going on, micro-politically, in the world within which we operate. We don’t pursue knowledge for its sake, but for our own.

Ponderous questions keep the humanist scholar awake at night. Which methodology should we use: something time-tested, yet old-fashioned, or the latest fad that everybody is talking about and following compulsively, and which would place us in the spotlight? And on which topics should we work exactly: those we believe we have something genuine to say about, or the trendy ones, those that seem to bring instant social media attention, excellent political positioning, and prompt publication — something which the hoaxers of the “grievance studies affair” exploited to great comical effect? Whose work should we cite: that of some long-dead names, yet whose contribution is still crucial, or that of living scholars with influence, the “power-houses” in our field, regardless of their scholarly worth? And when we cite other scholars, should we consider strictly the intrinsic merits of their scholarship, or should we mention them, strategically, because of their gender, race or sexual identity? And, in general, what kind of stance should we take? A risky one, like Rebecca Tuvel’s, with potentially crippling effects on our career, or one that flatters the prevalent orthodoxy and smoothes our way to greater power, fame, and influence?

Deeply preoccupied with such dilemmas, we have seriously lost our way. Even worse, we can’t find our way back to start again, because our journey hasn’t been guided by anything but an incessant adjusting to the latest trends. Worst of all, however, is that, dazzled as we are by our spectacular successes, we may not even know that we have gone astray. Failure can’t cut any deeper.

One feels compelled — especially when one comes from Eastern Europe — to look to literature for answers to bigger questions about Russia’s history and presence in the world. The Brothers Karamazov is a highly symbolic book, and Smerdyakov is perhaps the ultimate symbol in it. As he grows up, he gets better and better at gratuitous evil. Now an adult, Smerdyakov teaches kids in the neighbourhood a certain trick: “take a piece of bread, […] stick a pin in it, and toss it to some yard dog, the kind that’s so hungry it will swallow whatever it gets without chewing it, and then watch what happens”.

Why torture the dogs? Why not? Eventually Smerdyakov develops this into a systematic, coherent behaviour. He kills Fyodor Pavlovich without any clear motive; he plans the murder to the last detail and commits it in cold blood, but we don’t know why. He kills just because.

Smerdyakovism is an obscure, yet tremendous force that runs deep throughout Russian history. Its basic principle is formulated succinctly by the lackey himself: “The Russian people need thrashing”. Why? Just because. Smerdyakovism flares up especially in the form of leaders and institutions that rule through terror alone; repression for the sake of repression. Its impact is overwhelming, its memory traumatic, and its social effects always paralysing. Joseph Conrad sees “something inhuman”, from another world, in these Smerdyakovian institutions. The government of Tsarist Russia, relying on an omnipresent, omnipotent secret police, and “arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation”. And that was just the beginning.

It was Stalin who brought Smerdyakovism to perfection. Under his rule, Smerdyakov starved to death millions of Ukrainian peasants and killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners. In Siberia he built a vast network of camps and prisons whereby a significant part of Russia’s population was turned into slave labor. All this for no particular reason — just because.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documents the whole thing in maddening detail. The Great Terror that Stalin orchestrated and put into practice with the help of the NKVD in the late 1930s is perhaps the most eloquent example of Smerdyakovism in 20th-century Russia. Without any trace of rational justification, the country’s artistic, scientific, political, and military elites were decimated within a few years. Some of its best writers, scientists, engineers, and generals received then a bullet in the head. Among them was Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), philosopher, theologian, mathematician, physicist — one of the greatest minds Russia ever had, often called the “Russian da Vinci”. And so was Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), one of its finest poets. But maybe we should not be surprised that Stalin killed poets: after all, Smerdyakov never liked poetry. “Verse is nonsense”, “who on earth talks in rhymes?” he complains. “Verse is no good”.

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The more fascinating the philosophical vistas opened up by The Brothers Karamazov, the more puzzling its author. Dostoevsky is a complicated case. As a creative artist, he is as insightful as it gets. He has given us access to regions of the human soul that few before or after him have. He is bold, visionary, and uncannily prophetic. As a novelist, Dostoevsky is a most generous demiurge: each of his novels emerges as a universe in its own right, a polyphonic world where characters have their distinct voices, independent from their author’s. Yet as a journalist Dostoevsky can be embarrassing. He was narrow-minded, often mediocre, and parochial, when not openly xenophobic and anti-Semitic.

This Dostoevsky — the nationalist, the inveterate Slavophile for whom Russia was a “God-bearing country” that had some natural right over others — would have likely approved of Putin’s efforts to save Ukraine from the paws of the godless West. Ever since he died Dostoevsky has not ceased to supply Russia’s political establishment with ideas, one fancier than the next.

We should not be so surprised, though. For that, too, is in The Brothers Karamazov. Throughout the novel, Ivan toys with the idea that “if God does not exist, then everything is permitted”. He drops it carelessly in conversations so that any idiot can pick it up and use it. Then, one day, Smerdyakov tells him that he just used it to murder his father. The killing “was done in the most natural manner, sir, according to those same words of yours”, says the lackey, barely containing, we surmise, sardonic laughter. Smerdyakov is of course lying — he killed Fyodor Pavlovich just because — but his mockery of Ivan’s idea is real. Mocking philosophical ideas is another facet of Russia.

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Putin’s spin doctors are always ready to connect his politics to a line of Slavophile thought that runs deep in Russia and leads straight to Dostoevsky himself. Indeed, Putin is often seen crossing himself in the presence of Orthodox clergy and lighting candles in the midst of pious, simple Russian folk. Cameras are always close at hand to capture his churchgoing, just as they are to seize his tiger hunting, horse riding, crane saving, reindeer feeding, topless fishing, tank driving, or jet flying. Putin must be laughing like mad at Dostoevsky’s Slavophilia, just as Smerdyakov was laughing at Ivan’s philosophy. For Putin cares as much about ideas (Slavophile or otherwise) as he does about the tigers he kills.

Putin can be a politician, a thinker, a hunter, a fisherman, a hockey player, a fighter pilot — he can be anything he likes because he is nothing in particular. “He is an excellent imitator”, writes Anna Politkovskaya. “He is adept at wearing other people’s clothes, and many are taken in by this performance”. Journalists have often noticed how difficult it is to “read” Putin, since he is always so slippery. Yet for any serious reader of The Brothers Karamazov this is something familiar. Featurelessness itself can be a feature — that’s one of the indications that you are in Smerdyakov’s presence.

Putin, too, is Smerdyakov. The institution that created him (the KGB) is one of the most Smerdyakovian institutions ever devised. His unapologetic defense of the Soviet Union and his attempts to revive it, his recycling of the Stalinist propaganda machine, the silencing of human rights movements all over Russia, the manner in which he annihilates his opponents — all are signs that Smerdyakovism enjoys a new life in today’s Russia. Most significant of all, however, was Putin’s first vivisection of Ukraine; Smerdyakov’s signature all over it. An army of faceless, nameless, insignia-less “little green men” who steal themselves into the country under the cover of night and, before anyone knows it, cut off a piece of it. Since they do everything on the sly, and the whole operation looks more Mafia-like than military, people liken Putin’s army to a gang of thugs. That’s inaccurate: the “little green men” are not thugs, they are Smerdyakovs in action. There is nothing fake about them; their modus operandi is the lackey’s 100%.

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To be sure, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is not Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. They are both Smerdyakovian, but, by its very nature, Smerdyakovism is protheic, multidimensional, complex. Stalin’s Smerdykovism manifests itself especially in his “just because” acts, while Putin’s in his anonymous, cowardly mode of operation. But that’s little consolation to an Eastern Europe traumatised for centuries by its stronger, always erratic, always drunk-like neighbor. For these countries the danger does not necessarily come from Putin or Stalin personally, but from Russia’s timeless Smerdyakovism, of which they are only temporary embodiments.

Politically, the tragedy of Eastern Europe comes from the fact that its security ultimately depends on what happens in Russia. Here political legitimacy is produced not through ordinary democratic practices, but through fabricated crises, at home and especially abroad. Putin has staged the farce of free elections several times already; he’s had his fun, but must be tired of it. At the same time, as he well knows, to stay in power he can’t rely on photo ops alone, no matter how lowly they get. Having made a mockery of democracy, Putin has reached a point where only inventing conflicts and invading countries could bring him what, in Russia, passes for political legitimacy. That’s true of the Smerdyakov who rules Russia now, as it is of those who will rule it in the future.

This in an extract from a piece published in the LARB in 2014, after Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

But even in Augustine’s time, the idea was old. He was following in the footsteps of the early Christians, who, we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, “owned all things communally”, and “sold their properties and possessions, and distributed to everyone, according as anyone had need.” David Bentley Hart (whose translation of The New Testament I use here) cannot but conclude that “the early Christians were communists”.

Except, of course, that they were not — not in our shallow sense of the word. For Christianity was so much more than a political revolution; it caused a tectonic shift in the mind. Like any major religion worth its salt, Christianity involved taming the power-hungry, self-assertive, greedy animals that humans, by their nature, are. Yet it went one step further and offered the highest prize to those at nature’s losing end: the meek, the wounded, the vulnerable, the unfortunate. And since so much in the human world revolves around material wealth, the religion’s founders struck at its source: our acquisitive instincts.

You really want to be perfect? Jesus Christ recommends a life of utter destitution: “Go sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you shall have a treasury in the heavens, and come follow me.” The result was a religion so “radical”, as Hart calls it, that it was impossible to put into practice in the real world. There was only one Christian, Nietzsche quipped, and he died on the cross. To be a true Christian must be unbearable.

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By Tomiwa Owolade

But Christianity didn’t have to be put into practice to have an impact on the world — trying was enough. By trying hard to be Christians (even without ever succeeding), people in the West and elsewhere have, in time, brought forth a major anthropological revolution: a new way of seeing the world and humanity, a new ethical vocabulary, an enhanced and expanded individual subjectivity. And there was something remarkably dynamic about this new subjectivity — one never content with itself, never at ease, always on the move, always having to navigate a perilous inner landscape: temptation, sin, guilt, dread of eternal damnation, remorse, repentance, state of grace.

Not that Christians were much better beings than others. They could be just as bloody as the heathens, if not worse. But they were always thinking about what a better humanity would be like. And in the process, they were taught to seriously distrust “this world,” and to stay away from its “traps”. Above all, they were sensitised against material wealth.

So, when the Industrial Revolution (which was all about material wealth and how to multiply it) came to pass, many Christians recognised it for what it was, and found themselves equipped to deal with it. Capitalism was a wonderful thing, they thought, except that it went against what the Gospels had taught, by fundamentally favouring the wealthy and the strong, the self-assertive and the unscrupulous, at the expense of the poor and the weak and the humble. And to oppress the latter was to hurt Christ personally: “inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.”

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The West has lost its virtue

By Paul Kingsnorth

That’s why, from John Ruskin and Leo Tolstoy all the way to Pope Francis, from that brand of British Labourism that was dubbed “more Methodist than Marxist” to the Social Gospel in the US, from Italy’s cattocomunismo to “liberation theology” in Latin America, there has always been a serious concern, among reflecting Christians, about the damage that the incessant pursuit of material wealth can do to the soul. The wealthier we become, the poorer our spiritual health.

All this is not — or should not have been — surprising. What is more surprising, perhaps, was that even overtly atheist rejections of capitalism — of the “religion-is-the-opiate-of-the-people” variety — were similarly informed by a vigorous Judeo-Christian social vision. For here, too, the rejection of capitalism was done on behalf of its victims: the poor and the powerless, “the least of these my brothers.” For all their anti-religious rhetoric, Marx and Engels’s works make for excellent theological reading. The radical solution they proposed — overthrowing the wealthy and the powerful, enthroning the poor and the downtrodden in their place — is not very different, in its spirit, from the one we find in Christianity, where, you may recall, God has “chosen the destitute within the cosmos,” and offered them his Kingdom.

By the 19th century, then, the ethics, social vision, and philosophical vocabulary of Christianity were simply inescapable for anyone in the business of thinking. No matter what theories one hatched, however secular or un-Christian, one had to employ Christian categories, assumptions, and patterns of thought. Even to attack Christianity itself, one had to resort to Christian language, as Tom Holland has explained in these pages. That fact, of course, can be seen as a great victory for Christianity, if one achieved on the cusp of death.

Communism as an actual political system may have been a failure of historic proportions, but that does not mean that the idea has lost its appeal. Not only do today’s enthusiasts seem to ignore everything about the first attempt’s abject failure in the Soviet Union and elsewhere; they are also, for the most part, blissfully ignorant of the distinctly Christian sound of much of what they say. Elite schools seem particularly good at teaching this kind of ignorance. Secular or even noisily atheistic academics recycle a social vision that has been at the core of the Christian message for some two millennia: a commitment to the victims of any forms of injustice and oppression, to the poor, the weak, and the humiliated — “the least of these.” Their ethical language, too, is radically Christian, centered as it is on guilt and an irrepressible need for repentance, remorse, and reparation.

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The end of secularism is nigh

By Tom Holland

“Privilege” is the new name of the original sin of old: you are born with it, no matter what you do or say or think, you will always remain “privileged,” and will pass your condition on to others. The much derided woke apology seems just another reiteration of the Christian confession: admit that you have sinned in thought, word and deed, say that you are unworthy and show contrition, promise that you will change your ways, and you will be forgiven. If the zealots had it their way, the implementation of this parodic Christianity, centred obsessively as it is on purity, guilt and repentance, accompanied by an incessant hunt for reprobates, and an orgy of punishment and exclusion, would make Calvin’s fundamentalist Geneva look like a pretty lowkey operation.

But perhaps I’m being naïve. What if this is just another trick the elites use to preserve the status quo, maintain their privileges, and get rid of their potential competitors? People in power have always done that, no matter what religion, ideology and political philosophy they have employed in the process. It’s no accident that this woke brand of radicalism flourishes especially in the Ivy League environment, where students have the means and the leisure to play professional revolutionary. Those at community colleges are too busy just trying to stay afloat.

The space within which the elites now operate has, after decades of intense globalisation, become more crowded than ever. Since the more people get in, the more competitive it gets, to move ahead one needs to get inventive. By adopting such a radical rhetoric and instantiating themselves as the exclusive representatives of the underprivileged — or even their most trusted spokespersons — these trust-fund revolutionaries hope to get a competitive advantage on the political market. “I am already representing the downtrodden, all of them, and brilliantly. There is no role for you to play, so step aside. Holier and way more revolutionary than thou.”

However, in so doing, they resort to an ideology steeped in Christian values and language — rather than, say, to social Darwinism, which would be a far more accurate representation of what they are doing, and would come more naturally to them. They may despise Christianity with a passion, but they cannot do without it. And that’s another Christian victory, if a posthumous one.

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How cancel culture makes liars of us all

By Giles Fraser

For, as far as Christianity itself is concerned, this is not life but a form of death. For something to exist socially, it needs to be named by its name. Indeed, this is no ordinary death, but a degrading, humiliating, highly embarrassing one. Here Christianity is used and abused and then casually discarded. But, then again, this is only too fitting, because that’s precisely what makes it such a Christian death; Christianity’s founder died the most humiliating death imaginable in the ancient world, so bad it was reserved only for slaves and social pariahs.

To complicate things even further, at the other extreme of the political spectrum, Christianity is in no better shape. True, on the far Right it is acknowledged and proclaimed, ever more loudly and more perfunctorily. Christ’s name is everywhere: used shamelessly by politicians as a rhetorical device, political slogan, and dirty trick. Here Christ is emptied of any meaning, glued to the car’s bumper, and left there to rot. That’s another way Christianity is dying — and quite another story.

Over the last two millennia, Christianity has died countless deaths like this. Which is perhaps only appropriate for a religion predicated on death — one that has chosen a cruel execution method as its symbol. In the end, it must be death that has given it such a tremendous vitality. For “unless the grain of wheat falling to the ground dies, it remains alone; but if it die it bears plenteous fruit.” Christianity’s victory lies always in defeat.