*
St. Justin Popovic (April
6, 1894-April 7, 1979) survived two world wars in
Serbia, and in this treatise on European culture he
discerns the problems with the European worldview
that led to such a human disaster, and touches upon
the probable future.
Theanthropic culture
transfigures man from within, and thereby likewise
influences his external condition. It transfigures
the soul, and by way of the soul, it transfigures
the body. According to this culture, the body is the
temple of the soul, and it lives, moves and has its
being through the soul. Take away the soul from the
body and what will remain other than a stinking
corpse? The God-man first of all transfigures the
soul, and subsequently also the body. The
transfigured soul transfigures the body; it
transfigures matter.
The goal of Theanthropic culture is to transfigure
not only man and humanity, but also all of nature
through them. But how is this goal to be attained?
Only by Theanthropic means: through the evangelic
virtues of faith and love, hope and prayer, fasting
and humility, meekness and compassion, love of God
and neighbor. It is by means of these virtues that
Theanthropic Orthodox culture is fashioned. Pursuing
these virtues, man transfigures his deformed soul,
making it beautiful; it is transformed from
something dark into something light, something
sinful into something holy, something with a dark
countenance into something Godlike. And he
transfigures his body into a temple that can
accommodate his Godlike soul.
It is through the ascetical labor of acquiring the
evangelic virtues that man acquires power and
authority over himself and over nature around him.
Banishing sin both from himself and from the world
that surrounds him, man likewise banishes its
savage, destructive, ruinous force; he fully
transfigures himself and the world, and subdues
nature, both within and without and around himself.
The finest examples of this are the saints: having
sanctified, having transfigured, themselves through
the ascetical labor of attaining the evangelic
virtues, they likewise sanctify and transform nature
around them. There are many saints who were served
by wild beasts and who, simply by the mere fact of
their appearance, could subdue and tame lions, bears
and wolves. They treated nature prayerfully, mildly,
meekly, compassionately, and gently, being neither
harsh, nor stern, nor hostile, nor ferocious.
It is not an external,
violent, mechanical imposition thereof, but an
inner, good-willed, personal assimilation of the
Lord Jesus Christ through the ascetical labor of the
Christian virtues that establishes the Kingdom of
God on earth; establishes Orthodox culture—for the
Kingdom of God does not come externally or visibly,
but internally, spiritually, imperceptibly. The
Savior says: The
kingdom of God cometh not with observation: Neither
shall they say, Lo here! or, lo there! for, behold,
the kingdom of God is within you (Lk
17:20-21). It is within the God-created and Godlike
soul, sanctified by the Holy Spirit, For
the kingdom of God is not meat and drink; but
righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit (Rom.
14:17). Yes, in the Holy Spirit, and not in the
spirit of man. It can be in the spirit of man to the
extent that man fills himself with the Holy Spirit
by means of the evangelic virtues. Wherefore the
very first and very greatest commandment of Orthodox
culture is: Seek
ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness;
and all these things shall be added unto you (Mt.
6:33), that is, everything will be added unto you
that is needed for supporting the life of the body:
food, clothing, and shelter (Mt. 6:25-32). All these
things are but the appurtenances of the Kingdom of
God, yet Western culture seeks these appurtenances
first of all. This is where its paganism to be
found, for, in the words of the Savior, it is the
pagans who seek these appurtenances first of all. In
this lies the tragedy of Western culture, for it has
starved the soul in its concern for material things,
whereas the sinless Lord has stated once and for
all: Therefore
I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what
ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for
your body, what ye shall put on(For after all these
things do the Gentiles seek:) for your heavenly
Father knoweth that ye have need of all these
things. But seek ye first the kingdom of God, and
his righteousness; and all these things shall be
added unto you (Mt.
6:25, 32-33; Lk. 12:22-31).
Great is the extent of those necessities that modern
man passionately creates in his imagination. In
order to satisfy these senseless needs men have
turned our wondrous Divine planet into a
slaughterhouse. But our philanthropic Lord has long
since revealed “the one thing needful” for each man
and for all of humanity. And what is this? The
God-man, Jesus Christ, and everything that He brings
with Him: divine truth, divine justice, divine love,
divine goodness, divine holiness, divine immortality
and eternity, and all the other divine perfections.
That is “the one thing needful” for man and for
humanity, and all the rest of man’s necessities, in
comparison with this are so insignificant that they
are almost unneeded. (Luke 10:42)
When man seriously, and
in accordance with the Gospel, contemplates the
mystery of his own life and of the life around him,
then he must of necessity conclude that the most
pressing need is to reject all necessities and
follow decisively after the Lord Jesus Christ, to
unite with Him by way of perfecting evangelic
ascetical labors. Without having done this, man
remains spiritually unfruitful, senseless, lifeless;
his soul dries up, crumbles away, disintegrates, and
he gradually grows insensate, until he finally dies
completely; for Christ as divine did say: Abide
in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit
of itself, except it abide in the vine; no more can
ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, ye are the
branches: He that abideth in me, and I in him, the
same bringeth forth much fruit: for without me ye
can do nothing. If a man abide not in me, he is cast
forth as a branch, and is withered; and men gather
them, and cast them into the fire, and they are
burned (Jn.
15:4-6).
It is only through a
spiritually organic unity with the God-man Christ
that man can continue his life into life eternal,
and his being into one of eternal existence. A man
of Theanthropic culture is never alone: when he
thinks, he thinks through Christ, when he acts, he
acts through Christ, when he feels, he feels through
Christ. In a word: he constantly lives through
Christ-God, for what is man without God? At first he
will be half a man, and in the end, no man at all.
It is only in the God-man that man finds the
completeness and perfection of his own being, his
Prototype, his perpetuity, his immortality and
eternity, his absolute worth. The Lord Jesus Christ,
alone among men and all beings, proclaimed the human
soul to be the greatest treasure of all worlds, of
those both above and below. Fear
them not therefore: for there is nothing covered,
that shall not be revealed; and hid, that shall not
be known.(Mt.
10:26).
All the stars and planets are not worth a single
soul. If a man wastes away his soul in sins and
vices, he will not be able to redeem it, even were
he to become master of all the stellar systems. Here
man has but one way out—the God-man Christ, Who is
the only One Who grants immortality to the human
soul. The soul is not freed from death by material
things, but enslaved; and it is only the God-man Who
frees man from their tyranny. Material things have
no power over the man who belongs to Christ; rather,
he has power over them. He sets the true value of
all things, for he values them in the same way as
did Christ. And whereas the human soul, according to
the Gospel of Christ, has an incomparably greater
worth than all the beings and all the things in the
world, Orthodox culture is therefore primarily a
culture of the soul.
Man’s greatness is only in God—that is the motto of
Theanthropic culture. Man without God is seventy
kilograms of bloody clay, a sepulcher prior to the
grave. European man has condemned to death both God
and the soul, but has he not thereby also condemned
himself to that death following which there is no
resurrection? Try dispassionately to grasp the
essence of European philosophy, of European science,
politics, culture, civilization, and you will see
that in European man they have killed God and the
immortality of the soul. And if one seriously
ponders the tragedy of human history, then it is
possible to see that Deicide always ends with
suicide. Remember Judas: first he killed God, and
then he destroyed himself, such is the inevitable
law of the history of our planet.
The structure of European culture, erected without
Christ, must crumble away, and crumble away very
quickly, prophesied the insightful and astute
Dostoyevsky one hundred years ago, and the mournful
Gogol over one hundred years ago. And before our
very eyes are the prophecies of these Slavic
prophets coming to pass. For ten centuries has the
European Tower of Babel been building itself, and
now a tragic picture meets our gaze: what has been
constructed is a huge nothing! General perplexity
and confusion have begun: man cannot understand man,
nor soul understand soul, nor nation understand
nation. Man has risen up against man, kingdom
against kingdom, nation against nation, and even
continent against continent.
European man has reached his destiny—determining and
head-spinning heights. He has set the superman at
the summit of his Tower of Babel, seeking therewith
to crown his structure, but the superman went mad
just short of the apex and fell from the tower,
which is crumbling away and collapsing in his wake,
and being broken down by wars and revolutions. Homo
europaeicus had to become a suicide. His “Wille zur
Macht” (lust for Power) became “Wille zur Nacht”
(longing for night). And night, an onerous night,
descended upon Europe. The idols of Europe are
crashing down, and not far distant is that day when
not a stone will remain upon a stone of European
culture—a culture that builds cities and destroys
souls; which deifies creatures and casts away the
Creator…
The Russian thinker Herzen, enamored of Europe,
lived there a long time. But in the sunset of his
life, one hundred years ago, he wrote: “For quite
some time did we study the worm-eaten organism of
Europe. In all its strata, everywhere, we saw the
signs of death… Europe is advancing toward a
frightful catastrophe… Political revolutions are
collapsing beneath the weight of their inadequacy.
They have wrought great deeds, but have not
accomplished their task. They have destroyed faith,
but have not secured liberty. They have kindled in
men’s hearts such desires as were not fated to come
to pass… Before all others, I turn deathly pale and
am frightend of the impending night… Farewell, dying
world! Farewell, Europe!”
The heavens are empty,
there is no God in them; the Earth is empty, there
is no immortal soul upon it. European culture has
turned all its slaves into corpses and has itself
become a graveyard. “I want to journey to Europe,”
said Dostoyevsky, “and I know that I am going to a
graveyard.” (F. M. Dostoyevsky, Winter
Notes On Summer Impressions).
Prior to the First World
War, Europe’s impending perdition was sensed and
foretold only by melancholic Slavic seers. Following
it, some Europeans also take notice of and sense
this. The boldest and most sincere of them,
doubtless, was [Oswald] Spengler, who shook the
world with his book Untergang
des Abendlandes (O.
Spengler, vol. 1, Image
and Actuality)
In it, through all the means that European science,
philosophy, politics, technology, art, religion,
etc., could provide him, he shows that the West is
perishing. Ever since the First World War, Europe
has been emitting her death-rattle. Western, or
Faustian, culture, which according to Spengler had
its origins in the tenth century, is now passing
away and crumbling down, and is destined to perish
completely in the twenty-second century. (At present
it would seem that this process has become
accelerated.) In the wake of European culture,
Spengler foresees the coming of the culture of
Dostoyevsky, the culture of Orthodoxy.
With each new cultural discovery, European man grows
ever more mortified and dies. European man’s love
affair with himself—that is the grave from which he
neither desires to, nor, consequently, can be
resurrected. Its infatuation with its reason is the
fatal passion that desolates European humanity. The
only salvation from this is Christ, says Gogol. But
the world, throughout which “are dispersed millions
of glittering objects that scatter one’s thoughts in
all directions, has not the strength to meet with
Christ directly.”
The type of European man has capitulated before the
fundamental problem of life; the Orthodox God-man
has solved all of them, each and every one. European
man has solved the problem of life through nihilism;
the God-man, has solved it through eternal life. For
the Darwinian-Faustian man of Europe, the main
object of life is self-preservation; for the man of
Christ it is self-sacrifice. The first says:
sacrifice others for yourself! while the second
says: sacrifice yourself for others! European man
has not resolved the pernicious problem of death;
the God-man has resolved it through Resurrection.
Doubtless, the principles of European culture and
civilization are theomachic. Long did the type of
European man become what he is, until such a time as
he replaced the God-man Christ with his philosophy
and science, with his politics and technology, with
his religion and ethics. Europe made use of Christ
“merely as a bridge from uncultured barbarism to
cultured barbarism; that is, from a guileless
barbarism to a sly barbarism” (St. Nikolai
[Velimirovich], “A Sermon On Everyman").
In my conclusions about European culture there is
much that is catastrophic, but let this not astonish
you, for we are speaking about the most catastrophic
period of human history—the apocalypse of Europe,
the body and spirit of which are being rent asunder
by horrors. Without a doubt, volcanic contradictions
are implanted in Europe, which, if they are not
removed, can be resolved only by the final
destruction of European culture. Where does
humanistic culture lead?
