MONKS VERSUS MARXISM
Tennyson, Hallam
MONKS versus MARXISM By HALLAM TENNYSON TT IS in Serbia's monasteries that the full flavor of the ancestral Orthodox faith can best be savored. The traveler in the new Yugoslavia is free to make...
...Sometimes I can speak so well," he said, "but sometimes my sin comes between me and God and then God cannot use me for speaking...
...Those behind carried an archway of boughs with a red star and the legend "Forward With Tito To Viotory" inscribed across the top...
...Look at that girl down there under the tomb of the kings...
...Hers was the Faith of a vanished age, but our age has not provoked from us a Faith appropriate to it...
...The only frescoes that have never been spoiled are those abortions in the ante-chapel...
...But if you think the monastery is built on a pack of lies," I asked the government artist, "why are you interested in the beauty of the frescoes...
...When Brother Gregory paused to refresh himself with wine, words like "Salvation" and "Atonement" boomed up unexpectedly from the other end of the table...
...This was the obvious explanation...
...They were fasting for tomorrow's feast, but they had spread a table lavishly with foods that were not proscribed: home-baked bread, forest honey, cheese...
...Each time she removed one of her innumerable petticoats she gave us a broad, coy smile through the gloom...
...Oh, no...
...And straightway he launched onto a hazy sea of metaphysics...
...They were the guardians of national art and culture...
...What is relevant is the quality of our Faith...
...Brother Gregory was a bluff hulk who told us jokes in unintelligible French...
...I suppose she expects to get rid of some disease or other and I bet the monks encourage her...
...Of all the monks we met on that mountain only the old hermit seemed likely to gaze past the hum of the turbines on the neighboring peak to the silence that still lay beyond...
...The artist laughed...
...That's probably why they have staged a demonstration to compete with us...
...He was the last of the old hermits, once considered the real justification of any Serbian monastery worth its salt...
...It is no wonder that they chose mountains as a building site...
...Once the monastery represented the advanced, progressive forces of the day...
...Oh, yes, we've had to give them up to the artists...
...But Christ was the first socialist," I suggested mildly, "and perhaps what Christians need is to learn to follow him better so that they can lead the way...
...What chance would the monks have to compete with that...
...Until our revolution this monastery owned more than 1,000 acres of land and the neighboring peasants all had to work for them...
...This was its only form of heating...
...It doesn't need to...
...Thought he could paint better than the medieval masters, so he plugged plaster all over the walls and painted indescribable horrors on top...
...Instead of leading the advance towards social justice and international peace, Christians are sitting back and allowing the initiative to slip gently out of their hands...
...Our arrival, they insisted, needed immediate celebration...
...Brother Joseph said he didn't know what she was doing and quickly diverted us to the sacristy to see a scull encrusted with gems...
...But, you see, it's a church holiday...
...What...
...Everywhere, I thought, science is wresting vision, courage, confidence from those who once conquered mountains and dwelt on lonely summits of the mind...
...He was tiny and hunch-backed and had an extraordinarily resonant bass voice...
...He is the author, among other books, of "Tito Lifts the Curtain...
...All such motives are mere formulas, a death-knell and not a rallying blast...
...The questions of state persecution or state patronage, of the advancing evils of Marxism (in the East) or of materialism (in the West), are quite irrelevant...
...He asked us timidly to save the rinds of our salami for the monastery cats of which he had sole charge...
...The frescoes in the ante-chapel were three centuries later and already decadent—static, consumptive looking saints with tapering limbs and expressionless faces...
...Perhaps the good monks were embarrassed by them: unwelHALLAM TENNYSON, great-grandson of the poet, has written and broadcast widely on Yugoslavia...
...Now that we have socialism they are just dying out of their own accord...
...come modern intruders in the atmosphere of medieval hospitality they had re-created for our benefit...
...But then you mean that the monks have degenerated and that you have nothing against the Institution itself...
...Really, how interesting...
...Were they afraid to tell us the truth...
...They don't try to persecute us directly...
...The hermit showed us around without a word...
...he roared...
...Outside, Brother Joseph looked up significantly and touched his head...
...I've always imagined that's what they were supposed to be...
...I don't see much dedication or service in that...
...They had beards, black robes, and matted locks, and they struck the Protestant traveler as Druidic, pre-Christian...
...The peasants came down from the surrounding mountains with presents of food and clothing for the monks...
...About the hard actualities of the present the monks were considerably reticent and vague...
...II Sunday was the Feast day, and the monastic fast lasted until the end of Mass...
...We ourselves, more urban and therefore more self-consciously rustic, enjoyed eating with our fingers in the orchard behind and evel| photographed each other in the act> An ancient anchorite came out of his orchard cell to gaze at us...
...You people from abroad can never imagine such ignorance...
...But there is still so much that needs to be discussed...
...One of the artists had been peering at us inquisitively out of the scaffolding, waiting for Brother Joseph to leave...
...She emerged a few hours later into the sunlit courtyard, smiling more broadly than ever, and announced that her headache was cured...
...Yes, they simply regard us as lunatics because we think they have one of the finest cultural monuments in 'the whole of the Balkans...
...But the cells still look used," I said...
...The traveler in the new Yugoslavia is free to make his own arrangements, so my wife and I chose one of the most famous, as well as the most isolated, of the monasteries for a visit and made our way slowly through the mountains in a borrowed car...
...Then suddenly he gathered up one of his cats in his arms and rubbed its fur fondly against his beard...
...On the far side of the gorge we ran into a great concourse of carts and trucks with a crowd of people disembarking from them and mustering into a procession...
...Whoever heard of a Christian socialist...
...Mist and primeval silence cling even to the foothills...
...Perhaps they could become centers of dedication and service...
...Those who fulminate against materialism and Godlessness behind the iron curtain are on the wrong track...
...in the East, church-going has become a way of showing opposition to a political regime with which you disagree...
...Not by Turks or Moslems, but by one of their own monks only fifty years ago...
...There was a pause after each of our questions, and then Brother Gregory glared round the table to make sure that we were all drinking...
...They are building a power station on the mountain next to ous," Brother Joseph explained...
...So, on the Communist mountain, they were erecting turbines, generating motors, and echoing underground corridors walled with concrete...
...Ah, how profound was our talk last night, dear sister," he said, squeezing himself into the car beside my wife...
...That's not the way they work...
...We felt ourselves convicted of bad taste for not having found the atmosphere enough...
...We were in the charge of the two monks known for their command of foreign languages...
...They drifted in and out of the Mass —anxious not to miss such a chance of gossiping with their neighbors...
...Mass started at half past five and went on, as always in an Orthodox Church, for four hours...
...It's a matter of evolution," he replied...
...Oh, they are doing very little," Brother Joseph replied quickly and, once again, we sensed the embarrassed undertone in his booming voice...
...Seeing his chance, he swung down with the agility of a caged monkey to join us...
...These mountains, indeed, have a remoteness which many that are higher and more imposing—the Swiss for instance—notably lack...
...Yet in Yugoslavia today no one has any hesitation in complaining to foreigners when he wishes—as long as there is no third party to overhear...
...His articles have appeared in The Spectator, The Manchester Guard-ion, Encounter, and Horizon...
...The artists...
...One for the Father, one for the Son, and one for the Holy Ghost...
...His cell was a derelict shed about five feet square...
...I tried to photograph the festival in progress—but the visitors thought it an insult that I should dare to picture them without knives or forks...
...This was the way that Serbs and men of God should treat their guests...
...Brother Joseph had two locks of wavy hair and a crescent beard...
...The monks used to give education to the peasants...
...As we waited, the group started to march up into the silent woods singing revolutionary songs...
...They set about roasting the sheep on a spit, and Brother Joseph trundled a cask of wine down the cloister to add to the menu...
...Already they seemed to have lost confidence: to be reluctantly accepting their new roles as caretakers of a museum...
...Perhaps they could change...
...Besides, there were no restrictions on drinking, and we were braved with huge quantities of home-brewed wine...
...And there, sure enough, was our village maiden, now looking thoroughly pleased with herself, and dressed only in the tarpaulin with which the tomb had been covered to prevent it being damaged during the restoration of the church...
...We noticed a handsome village maiden who appeared to be undressing in front of the altar screen...
...After Mass, Brother Joseph showed us over the church...
...Now they had only three novices...
...I bet Brother Joseph never told you how they were made...
...The monks had seen us coming and were lined up in the courtyard to greet us...
...And the monks still tell us that by taking the plaster away we'll end by ruining the whole structure of the church...
...Looks as if it's being opened today," I said...
...There was so much scaffolding put up by the artists who had started their work of restoration that it was difficult to see anything...
...Perhaps, I thought, the girl was a member of the local League of Communist Youth and was doing a strip-tease in order to demonstrate against the sanctity of the shrine...
...He embarked at once on a theological disputation with my wife...
...Further down the corridor Brother Joseph waved at cells that had belonged to novices before the war...
...Look at these nasty little holes that have been bored all over the frescoes," he said...
...They are riddled with corruption and vested interests...
...No wonder God cannot use us for speaking...
...Only two glasses...
...Think what would happen if Quakers really communed with the Holy Spirit during their "sessions of sweet silent thought" or Catholics acted as if they had in fact shared each Sunday the body of their Lord...
...And yet with what a hatefully knowing gesture Brother Joseph had passed him off as a lunatic...
...Can Marxism really push God out of such territory...
...In their day they have been attacked by Turks, Austro-Hungarians, Bulgars, Germans, Italians, and Croatians, and now they face a pincer movement from the Communists...
...The devil is in ourselves, I thought, and we pretend to see him incarnate in a system which has grown from our own faithlessness...
...But it isn't...
...No, no—the monasteries are finished...
...Dedication and service...
...When it was time to go, Brother Joseph insisted on chaperoning us to the main road, though we knew it would mean many weary hours of walking back up the mountainside...
...Meanwhile, a fresh load of locals had arrived bearing a sheep and accompanied by an accordion...
...toilets behind like those in Norman castles—holes cut in a plank of wood jutting over a precipice...
...In the West we go to church because it is socially respectable or because we feel the need and value of Faith even though we don't possess it...
...There is less Faith in us than in the peasant girl lying under her king's tomb...
...But the situation was not unique to Yugoslavia nor even to Communism...
...We've a group sent here by the government to restore the frescoes in the church...
...However, we caught gleams of the purple, olive brown, brick-red, and pastel blue which, in the Serbia of the Thirteenth Century, so miraculously foreshadowed not only Tintoretto and the Venetian Renaissance but Cezanne and Van Gogh as well...
...Its walls and ceiling were thick with scraps of rags and sheepskin brought by the peasants to keep him warm in winter...
...You must have at least three, my friends...
...I suppose you people think our government is persecuting the monasteries...
...Serbia's monasteries are all built in the most inaccessible places...
...That's the sort of thing they still consider great Byzantine art...
...And in the general outbreak of good cheer our questions were jostled to one side...
...The guest-rooms had clean white walls, brass bedsteads, and brightly woven blankets...
Vol. 20 • March 1956 • No. 3
