Laurus

Laurus was awe-inspiring. It's generally about a wandering hermit / monk / holy man named Arseny in medieval Russia who travels on a long and weary route throughout eastern Europe and the Holy Lands on a sort of exhilarating, fraught pilgrimage. Along the way it explores piety, suffering and death, sanctification, penance, the nature of time passing, and redemption. It feels like a strange but wonderful blend of the Sayings of the Desert Fathers and stories of St. Francis of Assisi, Cold Mountain / the Iliad, the Brendan Gleeson movie “Calvary,” the Avett Brothers song “The Fire,” South American magical realism literature, and the Brothers Karamazov. A very wide-ranging and impressive lot!

While I would give a few technical qualms about Arseny's personal theology of justification and salvation, the deeper themes of humility and suffering are beautiful and wise. One of my favorite eastern church fathers, and Dostoevsky's favorite, is St. Isaac the Syrian. His most famous passage emphasizes how the Christian must have “a merciful heart ... burning for the sake of all creation... from his great compassion, his heart is humbled and he cannot bear to hear or to see any injury or slight sorrow in creation. For this reason he offers up prayers with tears continually for all of creation.” Dostoevsky phrases this as “watering the earth with your tears.” Arseny isn't neglectful of those suffering - he uses his medical knowledge and faith to heal all day long - but he also knows that death comes for us all and it's silly to imagine we can avoid it. But still, his heart breaks every time he loses someone. A nun observes that, “During the day, God's Servant Arseny laughs at the world. At nights he mourns the same world.” His vulnerability with everyone he meets is part of what the people love about him, and this vulnerability comes from his renunciation of possessions and relationships, partly because of his suffering in them. In Laurus, renunciation isn't about avoiding the world and its emotions, but about entering them more deeply alongside people. His radical generosity often feels like it belongs in a Gospel story that got cut from the New Testament, and his hospitality with dangerous strangers and nature feel like a tale from the life of St. Francis of Assisi. Talking about Dostoevsky one time, Archbishop Rowan Williams reflected on suffering in a way that fits this story well: “Suffering confers a certain authority. We learn from it. Dostoevsky is often accused of masochism. But he's not saying suffering is good for you. He's saying suffering is how you are likely to learn. Don't be frightened when it happens to you.” I recently read “Hannah Coulter” by Wendell Berry, and it prompted me to consider the fruits of taking a vow of stability like some monks still do, and what's missing from the modern world when very few people's lives have any form of stability. In a similar vein, I think Laurus really shows how a vow of poverty can open us up to loving more widely and deeply, and how our material things keep us from living in right relationship with others and God.


In a way that I'm not really cut out to describe, the world of Arseny is also mystical and alive with wonder and meaning, “enchanted” in a sense. More than any theological treatise I've ever read, this has made me curious about the Eastern Orthodox tradition. One Orthodox reviewer wrote, “Most Americans who read Laurus will take it as a work with a strong current of magical realism; the handful of us American readers who worship in the Eastern Christian tradition will recognize it as simply Orthodoxy, where the border between wonder-working and everyday life is porous.” I don't know much about Orthodoxy, but I know scripture says “You shall judge them by their fruits” (Matt ch7); if books like Laurus are the fruits of Orthodoxy, then it sure has a lot to offer today's hyper-materialistic, reductionist modern world. This interaction between faith, miracles, and the natural world pops up over and over again. When Arseny heals someone, a nun asks herself, “‘Is this the result of our brother Arseny's therapeutic measures or the Lord's miracle, appearing independently of human action?' Essentially, the abbess answers herself: ‘one does not contradict the other, for a miracle can be the result of effort multiplied by faith.'” This reminds me of an excellent passage from Terry Pratchett in Small Gods about how “just because you can explain something, that doesn't make it stop being a miracle.” It also touches a bit on something Aquinas is a big fan of, how grace doesn't contradict nature, but rather perfects it (Q1.8).


I also learned a lot about a part of world history that I didn't know much about, and enjoyed filling in that part of the map and timeline in my mind. (Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr, and The Secret Commonwealth by Philip Pullman have also helped in this area recently.) The author has a few fascinating interviews online where he discusses how the concept of the Middle Ages doesn't apply to Russia in the same way it does in Western Europe, because one of the primary historical touchstones for Russia doesn't happen until the Christianization of the region in 988 leads to a unification of many smaller groups into one larger Russian state (of course there are a million intricacies here, especially with modern politics, disclaimers, etc). But it's fascinating how the story that the farther eastern stretches of Europe tells itself is much different than what Western Europe tells itself... in the West our histories often gloss over the millennium between the fall of Rome and the rise of the Enlightenment, but that's of course a mistake and a type of historical malpractice. I've greatly enjoyed the imagination and landscape of the Russian novels I've read in recent years (Brothers Karamazov by Dostoevsky, The Master and Margarita by Bulgakov, the Death of Ivan Ilych by Tolstoy, and in a more trivial way even the Shadow and Bone books, whose author is of Russian-Jewish descent), and Laurus helped paint a more rich picture of the backdrop for the whole region's sense of identity and heritage.

The book also used a strange mix of Old English and modern language, which worked well since part of the book is about how the passage of time feels so elusive, and we experience the flow of time strangely at different moments of our lives and faith journeys. Several times Arseny experiences multiple overlapping moments in time all at once, and they're beautiful prose.

One last thing, which really stuck with me. In all of his wanderings, Arseny sometimes has a great sense of purpose, but in the first half he mostly just seems to be blundering forward in some combination of restlessness and guilt. At this point he has an interaction with an older monk that I loved. Arseny has just asked the monk for a sign that he is going in the right general direction: “‘But is not Christ a general direction?' asked the elder. ‘What other kind of direction do you seek? And how do you even understand the journey anyway? As the vast expanses you left behind? You made it here with your questions, though you could have asked them in your local monastery. I am not saying wandering is useless: there is a point to it. But do not become like your beloved Alexander [the Great] who had a journey but had no goal. And do not be enamored of excessive horizontal motion.'
‘Then what should I be enamored of?' asked Arseny.
‘Vertical motion,' answered the elder, pointing above.” This distinction between horizontal motion and vertical motion strikes me as a brilliant comparison for our age, where so many people and systems are trudging forward without a broader eye to where certain trends are carrying society. We have spent a lot of technological brilliance in recent decades answering “how do we do __” questions, but not a lot of asking where that will take us or if we should pursue it. Lots of modern life, with lurches forward, sometimes feels telos-less. Maybe Arseny and the Orthodox have found a better telos than the rest of us.

Had high hopes for this. Was told to expect something along lines of Umberto Eco but alas it fell far short of his mastery. Learned a lot about medieval medicine but the plot was just not as engaging and the background for the book just not as alive in the work as it could have been given its huge scale.