May 12, 2001, 8.25 PM, Moscow

AMERICANISM AS MONASTICISM

When Russian Orthodox in Russia tries to untegrate United States into his world-view he has many troubles. The country of sexual vice, individualism, bean-counter...

The radical and rational medicine is to think about USA as a sort of a monastic order. This is possible in structural sense: USA maximize the tendencies of European civilization like monasticism maximize the tendecies of Christian life.

American individualism is most important. certainly--monasticism means individualism, and monk is
"mono", he lives alone. Monastics vows of obedience are only the means to save indidual soul. America is the ideal combination of two different types of monasticism: anchorites and communities.

This is possible also in the literal sense. Monkhood means chastity, celibacy--but American marriage patterns can be called celibacy in a sense that both partners are estranged from each other as much as it is possible for two loving hearts. American sexual extravagancies? But in most monasteries monks and nuns have sexual problems and abuses. "Playboy" and other pornography aren't the manifestation of problems typical not for normal adults but for people with celibacy vows?

Bean-counter seems such an opposition to the monastic vow of poverty. But it is not by chance that monasticies produced most powerful economic entity of Middle Ages. Monasteries collected great money because money were not most important for them. The American prosperity is the result not of avidity, which results usually in meanness and poverty, but of very aloof and manipulative relation to money. Only people who are not stick to money with all their heart can invest them and make work.

Monks are thought to be most ardent promoters of veneration of icons. Actually, monks have been deeply divided in this question, but this is the way Russian Orthdox tradition remembers the past.

So although formally Americans as Protestants are mostly iconophobes and reject any veneration of sacred images, it is interesting that American support most powerful cinema industry -- and isn't a film some sort of secular icon? Well, I was told my one American friend that most movie-makers are Jews. Then let us turn to another American rite--always keeping a set of pictures with family, relatives, etc. and making these pictures an object of mutual and social interest. Something unheard of in Russia and not very widespread in Western Europe. Can it be that these pictures are also a sort of some private icon or even iconostasis -- a wall covered with images of saints? It is so natural for those who think that all Christians are saints to use a photo instead of icon.

American moviemakers often produce remakes of old pictures. Moreover, many movies are actually only slight variations of one and the same theme. This reminds of the icon-painting and veneration of icons: the amount of subjects if strictly limited and people enjoy variations (replicas) of the well-known image.

5/9/2001