Beyond the Monastery Walls: The Ascetic Revolution in Russian Orthodox Thought, 1814–1914 by Patrick Lally Michelson (review)

Beyond the Monastery Walls reconstructs the asceticism discourse in Imperial Russia over the century preceding the outbreak of World War I. The book neatly demonstrates that the history of asceticism as discourse and ideology has been characterized by competing interpretations, diverging conceptual horizons, and an array of paradoxes. Michelson also highlights in this cacophonic diversity an underlying commonality: asceticism was seen "as the key to understanding a people's national confessional essence and its historical trajectory" (P. 10) as a shared hermeneutics in Russia and in the larger European context. The aim of this fascinating book is to understand the way asceticism discourse came to occupy a central place in Russian Orthodox thought, and to recover all the divergent meanings it acquired throughout a century of modern Russian history.

The main focus of chapter 1 is the prehistory of asceticism discourse in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Russia and in Europe. The reigns of Peter I and Catherine II were characterized by the marginalization of monasteries and ascetics' modes of life. The beginning of the nineteenth century, however, witnessed the advent of a monastic revival. Asceticism accompanying the revival contributed to the creation of linguistic and conceptual boundaries within and outside of church walls. Monastic revival also challenged synodal authority, and asceticism discourse became a "conceptual and rhetorical arena" (P. 36) where debates about ecclesiastical authority took place. During the reign of Nicholas I (1825–1855), asceticism became relevant for lay religious thinkers such as Pyotr Chaadaev and the Slavophiles, Aleksei Khomiakov, and Ivan Kireevskii. Echoing German romantic understandings of the Volk, Slavophile thinkers propagated the idea that the Russian people (the narod) possessed a distinct Orthodox epistemology that should be brought to state and society in order to lead Russia back to its Sonderweg.

Chapter 2 takes a step back chronologically, to the reign of Alexander I (1801–1825), in order to capture the beginning of the "ascetic revolution" behind the walls of theological academies. This section reconstructs the history of the recovery of patristic asceticism by Orthodox theological academies at the beginning of the nineteenth century.¹ These academies published patristic texts in Russian translation in their periodicals, infusing the Orthodox scholarship with ascetic tropes and bringing patristic heritage to the attention of the public. Under the leadership of prominent figures such as Metropolitan Platon (Levshin) and future Metropolitan Filaret (Drozdov), theological academies strove for interpretative authority and became a "gateway and vessel of confessional authenticity" in Russia (P. 72). Patristic texts by Isaac the Syrian or Basil the Great highlighted positive aspects of asceticism, for instance, the potential for moral and psychological renovation.

One of the most exciting chapters in the book is chapter 3, which focuses on a debate between critiques and defenders of asceticism. Michelson shows that Nikolai Chernyshevsky and the radical intelligentsia, drawing on German materialist readings, understood asceticism as a "neurological disorder" that could be cured by atheism. The novel What Is to Be Done? by Chernyshevsky, the "Bible" of the radical intelligentsia, aimed at disrupting and inverting conventions of Orthodox asceticism by creating a new stereotype of the irreligious, ascetic revolutionary. Chernyshevsky's secularization of asceticism discourse triggered responses by church members such as Pamfil Danilovich Iurkevich. The latter's "Orthodox philosophical asceticism" was a criticism of materialist anthropology underlying revolutionary politics. In Iurkevich's interpretation, asceticism was transformed into a "bulwark" against the politics of scientific atheism and into a weapon to combat revolutionary ideology. In the years following Emancipation (1861), the meaning of asceticism became intermingled with questions about Russian nationalism, historical trajectory, and social order. For Iurkevich, Orthodox asceticism was not only beneficial but also necessary for the formation of Russian identity. For Chernyshevsky and the radical intelligentsia, asceticism represented an obstacle in the life of the narod that needed to be eliminated.

Chapter 4 investigates how lay religious thinkers contributed to the...