There’s an old image in the Christian East: a labyrinth, not a maze. I first came to think about labyrinths after Fr. Vlad spoke so beautifully about them in our film, Headed East. The funny thing about a labyrinth is you can’t get lost. You can walk convinced you’re heading the wrong way and actually be drawing closer to where you’re meant to be the whole time.
Study of the West, American history, governance, and the pre-political had brought me to several points of clarity: the inversions permeating our language and our society and, crucially, how the West unwittingly re-defined the individual – the human person – only to later see as its crowning achievement a system that requires that lost anthropology to thrive.
Ideas critical to our current American discourse.
Written in the language of sovereignty – the book endorses the American order (as contained in its founding documents, if never lived in reality) as the natural political translation of the true account of the person. That’s form following necessarily from anthropology – an idea I had outgrown by the time of its publication.
This in no way impacts the central ideas in the book – or what I’d humbly submit are their importance. So why raise it now?
Because when I look out across our land, I see far too many of our brothers and sisters who have stood for some time now at a threshold. Drawn by a quiet, persistent longing they can neither fully name nor set aside. Something true – its beauty, its goodness, its refusal of the thinness they have known – keeps calling to them. Yet every time they draw near, a toll is placed in their hands – one that feels like a rejection of their country even while her soil and story still claim their affection. And so they stand. Longing for what they know is their place, but recoiling at what seems a step too far.
Perhaps you know such a man or woman. Perhaps you’re one of them.
I’m not quite sure where we got this idea that such a toll need be paid.
The Byzantine double-headed eagle isn’t just a portrayal of empire in symphonia – it’s a portrayal of man himself in harmony. Its two heads are the symphonia of basileia and priesthood – the temporal power and the Church – the gifts by which God orders human life. The emperor takes counsel from both and is guided by both, yet he himself stands within the Church, not above it, and beneath God, whom he images but never replaces. This is taxis – sacred order: each rank receives from above and gives to those below. Where the ordering is right, it flows down into the people as a shared life of self-emptying and thanksgiving.
Instead of asking our American brethren to submit to a toll of rejecting their political order outright, we should instead welcome, pray, and repent with them. Because here’s the paradox: America asks every citizen to carry interiorly what the emperor carried in his office – the self-emptying, the standing-under, the freedom to refuse to be his own final authority. The demand is total and the scaffolding conspicuously absent.
The very posture the republic requires is unintelligible without the Orthodox anthropology of what a person is. The East has long held that theological differences matter and they cash out as anthropological ones. The filioque, created grace, the juridical turn – all of these are themselves corruptions of our anthropology, not merely our theology, because they produce a different, thinner self. One that can’t make the submission or fulfill the communion that sovereignty requires because it no longer knows itself in fullness.
The West didn’t just describe God differently. It produced a different human being.
The crowned and anointed sovereign has haunted our imagination for millennia. The symbolism embodied by monarchy is unavoidable – and outrageously beautiful. It’s perhaps the clearest embodiment of the symphonia of marriage between ruler and people that a healthy civilization reflects.
In the ideal, we see one who kneels first: scepter in hand while himself under a higher hand. Ruling only as one who is ruled, reflective of the truth that all authority is borrowed and every crown sits beneath the cross. The glory of the anointed king isn’t his crown. It’s his knees. It’s gorgeous. And it’s real.
But it’s not required. Monarchy’s importance is as an icon, not a secular political form.
It’s sanctified persons who then leaven history from within – their love radiating outward – rather than sanctified forms disciplining inward. Symbols unite reason and revelation into a pattern we can live within. But if we’re not careful, we can fall prey to the temptation to submit to the inversion of this great gift – seeing symbols and hierarchy as producing order as opposed to reflecting that which is already in right alignment. The difference is subtle, but decisive. One respects God’s refusal to coerce the will. The other treats order as prophylactic against fallenness.
Forms aren’t just inhabited – they’re received and offered. A Russian can receive monarchy. An American the liberal order. Neither reception is more Orthodox than the other.
The Church has long taught that Divine Providence orders the circumstances of life for the working out of salvation, including the date of our birth and death, our gender, parents, the time in which we live, the country where we were born, and the talents that we have been endowed with. We’re to trust and receive these gifts – honoring the specific circumstances in which God has placed us while seeking the eternal Kingdom. As Bishop Euthymius (Moiseyev) has articulated, “The Lord gives us a starting position, and we choose whether we will use it for good or evil.”
While always subordinate to love of God and the heavenly homeland, tradition affirms a healthy love of one’s earthly homeland – patriotism, not nationalism – as a natural and virtuous extension of love for family and neighbor. St Paisios of Mount Athos expressed it simply: “One who does not love God or his family isn’t capable of loving anything, and of course he doesn’t love his country either, which after all is but one big family.” This sentiment is common amongst the saints, who spoke openly of this understood balance and love – including St. Basil the Great, St. Gregory the Theologian, St. John of Kronstadt, St Ambrose of Milan, St. Philaret of Moscow, and St. John Chrysostom.
Earthly politics should never have our primary allegiance. We support the state in the doing of good and oppose it in the doing of evil – engaging in these matters only out of love for our fellow citizens.
We all want to recover the sacred in public life. But the reality is, there’s only one real way to do so: by starting with our broken selves and submitting to the journey of theosis by grace.
Look around. Find someone standing at the threshold and extend a hand.
That’s Orthodoxy.