Resurrection: prison and land reform

Resurrection by Leo Tolstoy

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


A rather didactic and moralistic novel about fin de siècle prison conditions in imperial Russia. In many places it reads like a documentary. Tolstoy appears to be trying to do what Dickens did in a lot of his novels -- expose social evils -- but he has a heavier touch, and lacks Dickens's sense of humour.

Tolstoy's Resurrection has been sitting on our bookshelves for many years, along with a couple of other books of his, bought by my mother. I don't know if she read them, but I did not. The Covid-19 lockdown, however, with libraries and bookshops closed, drove me to look at the unread books on our shelves. I did try, once, about 30 years ago, to read War and Peace, but found it boring, as it opened with a conversation with a Freemason, and was all about the aristocracy. So much of what I knew of Tolstoy was other people's opinions. I had heard that he was a pacifist, which I liked, but other things that I had heard I liked less. So I began reading Resurrection without much hope that I would like it.

To begin with, I was pleasantly surprised. It seemed a much more interesting book than War and Peace. It includes the aristocracy, but the protagonist is an aristocrat with a social conscience, who takes an interest in the welfare of the peasants, and sees that many of their problems are caused by the lack of land. The land question is big in South Africa, and the way Tolstoy handles it I think makes it worth reading for South Africans, whatever one's view of land. Tolstoy's views were influenced by Henry George, an American who proposed a system of land reform not unlike advocated by the EFF in South Africa today, and in his novel Tolstoy looks at some of the pros and cons of that.

In this Tolstoy resembles Dickens, using his fiction to make his readers aware of social problems, but he lacks the humour of Dickens, and his light touch. At some points he goes in for rather heavy-handed moralising, analysing the spiritual failings of his characters at length rather than letting the reader see them through the story.

At some points Tolstoy could be commenting on current events. Last month the death of George Floyd at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, USA sparked off worldwide protests against police brutality. There was talking of "defunding the police" and the Minneapolis city council was thinking of abpolishing its police force. Tolstoy would have applauded.

At one point in the story the protagonist, Nekhlyudov, witnesses prisoners marching to the station in summer heat to board the train for Siberia to serve out their sentences there. Several collapse because of heat exhaustion, and some die. Nekhlyudov, thinking about this, attributes it to the official mentality of the police:

"All this comes," thought Nekhlyudov, "from the fact that all these people -- governors, inspectors, police officers, and policemen -- consider that there are circumstances when human relations are not necessary between human beings. All these men, Maslennikov, and the inspector, and the convoy officer, if they were not governor, inspector, officer, would have considered twenty times before sending such a mass of people out in such heat -- would have stopped twenty times on the way and seeing a man growing weak, gasping for breath, would have led him into the shade, would have given him water and let him rest, and if an accident had still occurred, they would have expressed pity. But not only did they not do this, but they hindered others from doing it, because they thought not of men and their duty towards them but only of the office they themselves filled, and considered the obligations of that office above human relations. That is the whole matter," Nekhlyudov continued. "If once we admit -- be it only for an hour or in some exceptional case -- that anything can be more important than a feeling of love for our fellows, then there is no crime which we may not commit with easy minds, free from feelings of guilt."

Tolstoy is sometimes described as a Christian pacifist and anarchist, the inspiration for Gandhi and Martin Luther King. I am inclined to be a Christian anarchist and pacifist, but I don't feel much inspired by Tolstoy. His factual information is interesting, his moralistic rants less so. Among Rusan novelists, I prefer Dostoevsky, who raises some of the same issues, but not in quite such a didactic and preachy way.

Shortly after the publication of Resurrection Tolstoy was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church, and after reading the book I am not surprised. Two chapters are devoted to a hostile parody of Orthodox worship, which Tolstoy says is "All lies",

Tolstoy says, not without justification, that what the prison system achieves is that

Ordinary simple men holding the social and Christian morality of the ordinary Russian peasant, lost this conception, and formed a new prison-bred one, founded chiefly on the idea that any outrage to or violation of human beings is justifiable if it seems profitable.

Yet the "social and Christian morality of the ordinary Russian peasant" came from the very worship that Tolstoy denounces and mocks in terms that nowadays would be called "hate speech".


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Antioch Abouna: True Hope

People often assume that all Christians understand the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in much the same way. This is true if you only take Roman Catholic and Protestant views into account.

Antioch Abouna: True Hope: "what is this fundamental commonality between most non-Orthodox traditions and where does Orthodoxy differ? With Pascha (Easter) approaching in the Orthodox Church it is crucial that we acquaint ourselves with these issues because they touch upon the whole meaning of the gospel, its preaching and celebration."

Easter - Christian or pagan?

It has often been claimed in some circles that Christians "stole" Easter from pagans. The claim has been repeated so often that it has become a factoid (a piece of unreliable information believed to be true because of the way it is presented or repeated in print).

I was prompted to write about it because in this month's synchroblog Julie Clawson mentions it in onehandclapping: Rejection, redemption and roots. Since it is not central to the main point of her article (which is very good) I thought it was worth discussing separately.

I first came across this idea in The golden bough by Sir James Frazer, which I read when I was in high school. As the Wikipedia summary puts it:

Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king. This king was the incarnation of a dying and reviving god, a solar deity who underwent a mystic marriage to a goddess of the earth, who died at the harvest, and was reincarnated in the spring. Frazer claims that this legend is central to almost all of the world's mythologies. The germ for Frazer's thesis was the pre-Roman priest-king at the fane of Nemi, who was ritually murdered by his successor

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This implies that the disciples of Jesus, some time between his death and the writing of the gospels, decided to apply this myth to Jesus, and to proclaim him as such a dying-and-rising king. The problem of the argument that Christians "stole" it from pagans, however, is that Frazer claims that it is universal to all religions. So if Frazer's argument is true, they all stole it, or at least all but the first one to come up with it, and it is very difficult to know which that one is.

I don't, at this point, want to discuss the historicity of the resurrection. That the resurrection of Jesus was a historic event is central to the Christian faith, but proving by historical methods that that event took place as described is a different matter. What we can discover using historical methods, however, is what Christians believed at various periods. And what we discover is that very early on Christians believed that Jesus rose from the dead, and that this was linked to, and seen as the fulfilment of the Jewish Passover.

As one Easter hymn puts it:

This is the day of resurrection, let us be illumined, O people. Pascha, the Pascha of the Lord. For from death to life and from earth to heaven has Christ our God led us, as we sing the song of victory: Christ is risen from the dead

This may be more familiar to Western Christians in J.M. Neale's paraphrase:

The Day of Resurrection
Earth tell it out abroad
The Passover of gladness
The Passover of God
From death to life eternal
from earth unto the sky
Our Christ has brought us over
With songs of victory.

I've had several debates and even arguments about the topic previously, mainly with fundamentalist Christians who claim to have got the idea from a book called The two Babylons by Alexander Hislop. The first time this happened I could not find Hislop's book, but I checked every historical reference I could find, and found the claim was without foundation. When, some years later, a friend lent me a copy of Hislop's book, I found that Hislop didn't claim it either, at least not in the form that the people who made the claim said he did. They played fast and loose with their own source, never mind any others.

Their argument (which, as I say, went considerably further than Hislop himself did) was based on the word "Easter" itself, and involved the most extraordinary historical distortions and anachronisms, not to mention fanciful etymology, and extraordinary debates about the translation of "Pascha" by "Easter" in Acts 12:4 of the King James English version of the Bible.

Their argument was that since the English word Easter was derived from the name of a pagan goddess, therefore the Christian celebration of the resurrection of Christ was a pagan one -- which brings us right back to Sir James Frazer's point, and the only conclusion of their argument that I could ever discover was that they were saying the Jesus never rose from the dead because the disciples nicked the story from some pagan source, but not even Hislop claims this.

The fact is, however, that Christians celebrated the resurrection of Christ long before the word "Easter" was used, and the word they used for the celebration was Pascha, which is derived from and linked to the Jewish festival of Passover (as the above hymn shows).

So where did the word "Easter" come from?

It's time for a lesson in Christian missionary history.

When part of Britain was ruled by the Roman empire, Christianity spread there, as it did to the other parts of the Roman empire and beyond. Romano-British Christians evangelised Ireland, and Irish Christians sent missionaries to northern Britain to evangelise there among the Picts. Roman Britain was multi-cultural and multi-religious. There were Christians and a variety of local and Roman cults, and mixtures of them. In the 4th and 5th centuries Germanic "barbarians" were invading the Roman empire from the East, and at the beginning of the 5th century Roman troops were being withdrawn from Britain to help defend Italy against the Visigoths. By 410 the withdrawal was complete, and the British were told that they were on their own. The Emperor wrote a letter to this effect to different cities, as there was no longer any central authority. The "barbarians", Angles and Saxons from the continent, the ancestors of the English, arrived in Britain in increasing numbers. Sometimes they settled peacefully among the British, but at other times they embarked on violent conquest (this was the time of the legendary King Arthur), and by the middle of the 6th century they ruled most of what came to be called England, driving the Romano-British and the Celtic population to the north and west -- Cornwall, Wales and Cumbria.

Christian missionaries then evangelised the English -- Celtic missionaries from Ireland and Scotland in the north, and a Roman mission led by St Augustine of Canterbury in the south, which arrived in 597.

A couple of centuries later the English monastic historian Bede wrote his History of the English Church and people and other works on Christian festivals, about which there had been some contention. Among other things Bede tells us about the origin of the word "Easter". The English word Easter comes from the Anglo-Saxon name for the month of April, which was known as "Eostremonath" in the AngloSaxon tongue, and since Pascha was most often celebrated in Eostremonath, the English Christians began calling it "Easter". Bede surmised that the month was named after a goddess Eostre (nothing to do with "Oestrus", which has another derivation altogether), and there is also no demonstrable connection with "Ishtar". Bede tells us very little about Eostre, and there is nothing about her in earlier or contemporary sources. Bede is the earliest reference.

English missionaries to other places, like Germany, took the term "Easter" with them, and so German Christians called it "Ostern", but the rest of the Christian world called it Pascha, or derivatives thereof. So to claim that Passover/Pascha was "stolen" from pagans because the English called it "Easter" several centuries later is anachronistic nonsense.

Pagans might agree with James Frazer, and say that Christians "stole" the idea of a a dying-and-rising king from pagans, but if they do, perhaps they should stop and ask themselves where they themselves "stole" it from, because Frazer claims that it is universal.

But Christians who accept this factoid as a "fact" would do well to ponder St Paul's words: "if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain" (I Cor 15:14).