High Noon in Byzantium

Book reviewed: Byzantinism and Slavdom by Konstantin Leontiev

Is the sun finally about to set on the West? Allowing for the problematic nature of the question (how does one define the West, and what does one mean by its death?), as well as for the number of false positives produced by doomsday tropes, the answer is probably yes. All the signs are there. The center of the free world has become a fractured gerontocracy, and perspicacious pundits on the heterodox spectrum are asking whether the US as a state can even survive in its present form. Across the ocean, Europe is staring down the barrel of a demographic crisis, unable to offer the world anything other than a hectoring Swedish teenager. The general mood is apocalyptic; a century after Spengler wrote his gloomy book, a wailing banshee seems to be at hand.

Konstantin Leontiev foresaw all of this. Konstantin who, you ask. Perhaps it is time you met him. The effete bard of voluptuous despotism, an “aesthetic immoralist” and pious aristocrat, a roaming iconoclast without a fixed domicile in Russia’s 19th-century intellectual landscape, Leontiev was one of the most intriguing thinkers of his time. Anticipating both Nietzsche and Spengler in his work, Leontiev predicted some of the seminal events of the 20th century as well as our own troubled times. While Leontiev’s world of Eastern Christianity — one in which all roads lead to Byzantium — might seem like uninviting terrain to a Western reader, it is terrain worth exploring for anyone seeking to understand why the symbols of Western civilization in 2021 come down to more or less face masks and Justin Trudeau’s socks.

A few words about the man himself. His was a colorful life. Born into a noble landowning family in 1831, Leontiev enrolled in medical school but, unsuitable for a doctor’s (or, indeed, any other) career by temperament, he plunged into literature instead. Yet not even literature could satisfy his yearning to escape the tedium of the imperial capital of Saint Petersburg. Leontiev enlisted in the army to serve as a doctor in the Crimean War and subsequently entered Russia’s diplomatic corps in the Ottoman Empire. Married but polyamorous, he enjoyed a string of love affairs, and some scholars have maintained he was bisexual, though the burden of proof has yet to be satisfied. At forty Leontiev experienced what we’d today call a midlife crisis. Triggered by his poor health, the event kindled Leontiev’s interest in monastic life, and the erstwhile sybarite turned towards asceticism. A few months before his death in 1891, Leontiev became a monk — but not before he’d squeezed in a six-year stint as a censor. For a philosopher, it doesn’t get any more picaresque.

It was during his diplomatic service in Turkey that Leontiev wrote one of his key works. Byzantinism and Slavdom is an exposition of his philosophy, which boils down to the exact opposite of the ethos the West has followed, with occasional detours, since the French Revolution. Drawing on his medical training, Leontiev compares society to a living organism. Living organisms have three stages of development. At its nascent stage, the organism is simple and cannot be differentiated from other organisms. As it develops, it becomes increasingly more complex and unique until it reaches its highest point, where it is most unlike other organisms. Finally, the organism moves on to its third stage, reverting to simplification and, ultimately, decay.

The same process of development applies to states and societies. The most complex, and therefore sophisticated, society is one that has the greatest number of differences. Differences are inequalities. The more complex the society, the greater the number of existing inequalities and the need to contain them. Only form can fulfill that function, and as a society develops, it acquires form to frame it. Leontiev defines form as an “expression of an idea contained in matter . . . Form is the despotism of an internal idea that contains matter and prevents it from running away” (all translations from hereon are mine). The life of any organism, including that of society, consequently requires the presence of despotism if the organism is not to become flaccid and decompose.

The corollary of this is that an ideology or doctrine that aims to do away with despotism and abolish its inherent inequalities cannot but be noxious, as the actual outcome will be the simplification of society and its eventual decay. Progress “that fights against any kind of despotism . . . is only the process of decomposition”; democratization is just another name for self-destruction.

Leontiev rejects humanism and the French Revolution. Both spawned a process of democratization that eroded European culture. It made Europeans less complex and, in modern jargon, less diverse. The freedom democratization strove to confer upon its people undermined the complex aristocratic societies that had made European societies flourish, and hastened their decomposition. Unlike de Tocqueville — who saw the process of democratization as a shift to a radically new kind of society, albeit at the expense of the old aristocratic one — Leontiev considers democratization to be the death of society, period. The utopia it promises is only a cul-de-sac; beyond lies the graveyard of history.

Leontiev’s weltanschauung is not as dark as it seems, nor does it place him among the ranks of the extreme right. Leontiev lacks the gloominess of reactionaries such as Joseph de Maistre. While the latter believed that the most useful person in any society is the executioner, Leontiev would have deferred to a high priest bathed in a halo of incense. Leontiev was more of an aesthete than an ideologist, and his defense of despotic societies has much to do with his conviction that only despotism is complex enough to create beauty. By chipping away at inequality, egalitarianism churns out nothing but ugliness. Despotism gave Europe St. Peter’s Basilica and Byron; democratization gave it the railroad and barracks. Leontiev’s view of history is almost sensuous — bullfighting might be gory, but it’s a lot more interesting than a vegan restaurant.

Good is indissoluble from evil, and beauty often originates in the cradle of violence. Eudemonistic programs to drown the world in a pool of happiness are incompatible with notions of beauty. Better the illicit passions of the fecund Renaissance than the soporific affluence of stolid modern-day Switzerland. As a Russian diplomat in Ottoman Turkey, Leontiev had to sympathize with the Slavic peoples chafing under the yoke of the Sublime Porte; as a philosopher and aesthete, he preferred the rule of Turkey to the nationalist aspirations of those ethnic minorities. The exotic Turks were more attractive than the bourgeois Europeans, and Leontiev believed that Turkish oppression strengthened the Byzantine Orthodox spirit of the Slavic peoples; pan-Slavic nationalism would only draw them into the orbit of European philistinism. If suffering was necessary to keep the Balkan fustanella and avoid the execrable European frock coat, then so be it.

While aspects of Leontiev’s ideas overlapped with some of those in vogue in Western Europe, they were not relations; his thought was autonomous and autochthonous. At home, he was a sui generis phenomenon. The Russian intellectual current of the second half of the 19th century was flanked by the Westernizers and the Slavophiles, who jutted out like promontories; Leontiev sailed right through. He was the antithesis of everything the Westernizers stood for. He was well aware of the debt that Russia owed to European culture, but that debt predated the French Revolution and Europe’s bourgeois civilization. The Westernizers didn’t have much use for him, either. In an intellectual climate whose more progressive elements lambasted any literature that did not fulfill a useful social function, Leontiev’s defense of an all-justifying aesthetics and Byzantine Orthodoxy must have been downright scandalous.

Nor was Leontiev at home among the Slavophiles. Leontiev dismissed the nationalism implicit in the Slavophile movement. Remarkably tolerant and open-minded, Leontiev excoriated any civilization based on a community of ethnic groups. He knew that the rise of ethnic identity in a political framework was only a false dawn. He writes, “The idea of ethnic tribes as it is presented in the 19th century is essentially a cosmopolitan idea that is hostile to both state and religion, destroying much and creating nothing, incapable of separating nations by culture, since culture means differences and differences nowadays almost always perish as a result of political freedom. Individualism kills the individuality of people, spheres of life, and nations.”

Pan-Slavic fervor cannot unite the Slavic peoples. Only the Byzantine Orthodox Church, godly and timeless, can help the Slavs find a common form that will uphold the internal hierarchy of their society and prevent it from decomposing. Leontiev believed that it was Russia’s role as the leader of the Orthodox world to build a new eastern civilization that would replace the dying Roman-Germanic civilization of Europe (an idea that would develop into Eurasianism in the 20th century). Dusk had started to envelop the West, but it was still high noon in Byzantium.

Leontiev’s intellectual sovereignty made him a political vagrant. He was pragmatic enough to realize that a fixed political identity, insofar as it ignored the development of society, was an ideological trap. In Leontiev’s thought, the dichotomy of progressivism and conservatism is not static. Remembering that societies evolve, there is a time to be progressive and a time to be conservative. In a young society, conservatism serves as a force of obstruction and progressiveness a force of development; in a mature society, conservatism acts as a force of preservation, while progressiveness is a force of destruction. One’s political leanings should reflect the development of one’s society.

Clearly much of Leontiev’s thought is controversial. As the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev concludes in his short biography of Leontiev, the man is not suitable for general consumption. The idea that aesthetics trumps ethics, especially, is a hard one to digest. Faulkner was channeling his inner Leontiev when he said in an interview that “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is worth any number of old ladies. Fair enough, but who would be willing to be one of the old ladies? Berdyaev sensibly points out that conservatism alone will not save a society that is about to slide down the civilizational slope; instead, a creative act wholly absent in Leontiev’s thought is needed. Leontiev’s view of the French Revolution and its consequences is reductive (as Rosenstock-Huessy argues in his brilliant Out of Revolution, all of humanity was represented on the stage of the French Revolution), and one might also ask if it is at all possible to preserve something that, by definition, will die. A living organism is not a museum relic, a fact that not even Byzantine Orthodoxy can change.

Yet to pore over the lacunae and contradictions in Leontiev’s writings is to miss the exactitude of his diagnosis. In the long run, history has proved Leontiev right. Fundamentally anti-hierarchical and thoroughly democratized, Western civilization is locked in an inexorable process of simplification. Take fashion, for example. A hundred years ago, city folk did not venture outside without their hats; today people amble through city centers in shorts and tank tops. The point here is not that shorts and tank tops are bad, but that we have exchanged complexity for convenience. A visit to any modern Western city will reveal the same ragtag clothing style (jeans, sneakers, T-shirt), the same Starbucks beverages consumed “on the go,” the same devices drawing people away from their immediate surroundings, the same hits blaring out everywhere. There are no more differences and no more diversity. To quote Leontiev, individualism has killed off the individuality of our existence.

Culturally we seem to have been reduced to impotence. Don’t let that latest iPhone fool you — a society whose primary goal is to develop the best app to get grub delivered to people’s homes is not a society that will produce cultural works of lasting value, and no one has described Uber Eats or OnlyFans as aesthetically pleasing. Cultural masterpieces require a hierarchy and non-negotiable conventions; we don’t like those. Nor does our cutting-edge technology appear to impart its sophistication to its users. If anything, by standardizing life, it is only speeding up the process of simplification; people become more alike, society a lot less complex.

The anti-hierarchical, democratizing ethos also pervades human relationships and communication. Language is being impoverished through shortcuts, abbreviations, and textspeak. The modern English-speaking world operates on a first-name basis. Younger Russians think nothing of dropping the patronymic even when addressing older individuals — something that would have been unthinkable only fifty years ago. In French the informal tu for “you” (singular) is creeping into more formal settings, and if you don’t see the big deal, consider that the late French president Jacques Chirac used tu with his wife only when he wanted to annoy her.

Busy at ejecting strictures and dismantling norms to advance equality and inclusiveness, the modern man sleepwalks his way through a world devoid of form or any fixed points of reference. He yearns for meaning but can only find it in “the science” and maybe TikTok. He congratulates himself on his technological achievements, blissfully unaware that his society is degenerating into a shambolic techno-ochlocracy, and that the autobahn of progress is leading to history’s necropolis. Even his notion of the heroic has undergone deflation. In this year of our Lord 2021, heroism means little more than mindless compliance with nonsensical government regulations. No need to pack a knapsack and head to a warzone — as a German ad put it last year, staying at home to watch Netflix is good enough.

Leontiev would not have been surprised by any of this. In fact, his writings are eerily prophetic. Leontiev described the nature of Russia’s coming revolution several decades before it took place, and he predicted that the equality-obsessed bourgeois societies of Europe would merge into some kind of federal republic — a prognosis that has been borne out by the Brussels-based juggernaut of the EU. He also presciently identified Chinese civilization as a menace to both Russia and Europe, and the existential threat that technological progress poses to the human race. In Byzantinism and Slavdom, he notes that the final days of a state are characterized by a “strengthening of economic inequality simultaneously, and in tandem with, a strengthening of political and civil equality,” an apt description for the current situation in the US, where the inroads of woke ideology are taking place against the backdrop of a growing chasm between the haves and have-nots.

According to Leontiev, a society that has started to decompose has two options. One is to continue its danse macabre, in which case no barbarians will be needed to administer the coup de grace; “the religion of eudemonism,” with the words “droits de l’homme” on its banners, will be sufficient to finish off the patient. The second option is for the society to incorporate into itself, through a union or outright conquest, foreign societies in order to make it less equal and, therefore, more complex while it attempts to thwart further internal democratization. The foreign elements brought into its fold must also be hierarchical and unequal, since the merger of two democratizing states will only result in a bigger decomposing state.

If Leontiev is right, the choice before us is clear. We can either turn into a moth-eaten anachronism, succumbing to the beauty of our very own swan song, or we can find a way to become more complex (think “Make America Unequal Again”). In either case, we must resign ourselves to the idea that the road ahead will be painful and that the old world will probably be, in part or entirely, lost forever. To be sure, the death of Western civilization does not mean its disappearance tout court, just the death of Western civilization as we know it. For those of us who harbor a nostalgic attachment to the old idea of the West, a merry club that includes this author, the distinction is of little comfort. But death should not be seen as final. It is not final in Leontiev’s theistic Byzantine world, and it need not be final in ours, where the demise of one society might pave the way for a new, better one that will flourish and be a beacon to others. After all, out of the ashes comes the phoenix.