A term commonly used in the Soviet Union for World War II was the “great patriotic war”. Stalin, with his back to the wall, found that most of his subjects were far more enthusiastic about fighting for Mother Russia than for international Socialism. For strategic reasons he even relaxed for a period his hostility to the Orthodox Church, which had continued through violent persecutions to be a source of Russian national identity. No good deed goes unpunished. Now Vladimir Putin, a Russian nationalist and super-patriot who hobnobs with the Patriarch and probably has never in his life talked about the international proletarian revolution, is getting a dose of his own medicine. It turns out that Ukrainians really love their country too. What is the source of all true patriotism? Surely it is the love of locality, locality invested with a transcendent ethical as well as sentimental value. One of the first poems ever to thrill me is by Sir Walter Scott: “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land! Whose heart hath ne’er within him burn’d, As home his footsteps he hath turn’d, From wandering on a foreign strand!” This was all about some place I didn’t recognize called Caledonia, wherever that was. Not long afterward our teacher introduced us to the once-famous short story “The Man Without a Country” by Edward Everett Hale. (He was the nephew of the guy who gave an endless harangue at the Gettysburg battlefield dedication for whom Lincoln was supposed to serve as the warm-up band.) The story is the patriotic tear-jerker of all time.
I am thinking about the nature and various meanings of patriotism not merely on account of current world events, but because of two personal cultural encounters of the week, one with Jan Yoors and the other with Franz Schubert. This is probably an equation with at least one unknown. Yoors (1922-1977) is hardly a household name, but one of my favorite fellow Flemings. Born in Antwerp, he made his adult career in New York as artist, tapestry maker, photographer, and author before dying too young. At the age of 12, in 1934, with the blessings of his pre-hippie artistic parents, he joined a band of Rom “travelers” (gypsies) passing through Flanders with whom he mainly lived for several years in their wanderings. He entered fully into their cultural cocoon. He learned their cryptic language. Fully accepted, he went native. In 1967 he published a fascinating book (The Gypsies) in which he recounts his youthful experiences. I feared I had lost this book, but just discovered it with great relief while cleaning up a closet, and I immediately reread its opening chapters. Young Yoors was not merely setting off on a strange adventure. Official Nazi racial policy toward the Roma was similar to that toward Jews and had similarly horrifying results. He would soon be heading toward the maelstrom, and he wrote about that in a second book. He loved his adoptive family and recognized their many virtues. But he was utterly clear-sighted about their cultural habits—including petty thievery, confidence trickery, and mendacity—that so often brought down upon them the hostility of conventional society. They were a people utterly without patriotism for they had no geographical patria, a tribe of eternal wanderers. Their “identity” resided in cultural factors unrelated to any concept of locality. The murderous Nazi policy was primarily based in bunkum racial theory, but their notorious want of “Germanness” was also a factor.
A couple of days after this rereading we were at a concert featuring the pianist Mitsuo Uchida and the tenor Mark Padmore performing songs by Beethoven and Franz Schubert. The Schubert was the complete “Swan Song” series, which I had never before heard in full. The words of the first seven poems of this work were written by Ludwig Rellstab, apparently an important figure in the world of early nineteenth-century German music but previously unknown to me. Rellstab wrote them with Beethoven in mind, but they were later passed on to Schubert. One of them is called “In der Ferne” (“Far Away”), about a disappointed lover trying to flee his sorrow. In its English translation by Richard Wigmore it goes like this: “Woe to those who flee, who journey forth into the world, who travel through strange lands, forgetting their native land, spurning their mother’s home, forsaking their friends: alas, no blessing follows them on their way! The yearning heart, the tearful eye, endless longing….” In this song the language dealing with the exile is more censorious than consoling. The issue is by no means one merely of temperament, homebodies versus rolling stones. It is fraught with moral significance.
Curiously, perhaps, the issues raised here in a secular and political context—what might be called an ethical interpretation of residential locality--have their parallels in the medieval religious culture I have spent many years studying. The issue was the question of Christian “perfection,” the ideal of the monastic life. The theory of asceticism was that in voluntarily denying the common desires of human nature—material comfort, sexual gratification, free agency—the monks and nuns freed themselves to be available for higher or more “perfect” spiritual experience. Their models were biblical, but susceptible of ambiguous interpretation. One great image of “religious” life was the Hebrew Exodus. But is the Exodus story one of hard, dangerous, and protracted travel or one of establishing a glorious settled kingdom in a Promised Land? What might be called the political Zionism of Exodus and the Hebrew history books has its metaphoric or spiritual parallels everywhere in the prophets. The relationship between the literal and the figural remains an issue in Jewish theology to this day. In the early Christian writings in Greek there is a definite spiritualization of pilgrimage and homelessness. “Let us go forth therefore unto [Christ] without the camp, bearing his reproach. For here we have no continuing city, but we seek one to come.” That is a mystical and millenarian idea that has its secular, political analogue in the Dust Bowl ballad of Woodie Guthrie, “I Ain’t Got No Home in This World Any More.” Remember why the English words travel and travail are kissing kin. In actual fact the “open road” of pilgrimage could be the same ordeal it is for refugees today.
The legendary lives of the earliest monks, the so-called Desert Fathers, are epics of peregrination and dismal squats in desert places, caves, and the abandoned lairs of wild animals. This is plain living and high thinking at the possibly fanatical level. The fantastic biographies of the “wandering saints,” most especially Athanasius’s super-best-seller Life of Saint Anthony, fired the imaginations of thousands of religious idealists, but could provide no viable model for actual mass asceticism. Mass asceticism required considerable material organization and support, kitchens and dormitories, arable land and endowments. The great Victorian historian W. E. H. Lecky, author of The History of European Morals (1869), expressing the nationalist sentiments of his time and place, has the following choice remarks about St. Anthony. “A hideous, sordid, and emaciated maniac, without knowledge, without patriotism, without natural affection, passing his life in a long routine of useless and atrocious self-torture, and quailing before the ghastly phantoms of his delirious brain, had become the ideal of the nations which had known the writings of Plato and Cicero and the lives of Socrates or Cato.”
As early as the fifth century Augustine was denouncing circumcellions, or religious wanderers. The prologue to the Benedictine Rule, by far the most influential ascetic legislation of the Western Church, attacked so-called gyrovagi—those who “wander around in circles”—the idea of the circum and the gyro being essentially identical. A not bad translation of the strange word gyrovagus might be gypsy. Monasticism in the Benedictine tradition was based in residence in a fixed locality, “stability of place”. Indeed, metaphorically the monastery was often called a “prison”. In the later Middle Ages a parallel controversy arose around the new orders of mendicant friars, especially the Franciscans. One of the early tensions within that order was between those who claimed strict “evangelical” poverty—those who thought they could own literally no property, especially fixed domiciles—and others more accommodating of the old Benedictine idea. The refusal of mendicants to stay in one place is a wide-spread trope of the abundant anti-clerical literary satire of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. Like the wandering lover in the Schubert Lieder, and like the gypsies, the religious wanderers, having no earthly patria, lacked also patriotism.
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