Nationhood and roots: Dostoyevsky and Weil on national culture and Europe*

Abstract

The relationship between religious, national and wider European or global identity' is one of the most disturbing and fascinating questions of the late twentieth century. With the end of National Socialism in Germany and Fascism in Italy, Western Europe was charged with a burst of idealism and hope that never again would the continent be convulsed by the effects of nationalist aggression. The founding fathers of what is now the European Union shaped a clear vision of a Europe whose peoples would proceed towards ever closer union. The means to this end was the integration of the economies of Europe's nation states. On the other side of the 'Iron Curtain', the official ideology also maintained a vision of an international community, though in this case it was an international community of Socialist countries. In retrospect this internationalism seems merely to have been a glossy veneer smeared by Soviet tanks over a bloc of countries no less nationally self-conscious than their western counterparts. Yet while Russians envied Poles, and Czechs and Slovaks envied Hungarians, the ideal that national identity had been superseded was not entirely fictional. The break-up of the Soviet bloc caught almost everyone by surprise. In these contexts, the development of the European Union and the apparent permanence of International Socialism,2 the resurgence of nationalism has been deeply shocking to many. The roles played by religion in recent forms of nationalism have varied, but have been consistently significant. In some forms of nationalism religious and national identity have been fused together. In the East, the Ottoman practice of treating church leaders as both ecclesiastical patriarchs and national ethnarchs confirmed an already strong association between church and nation. In Russia, after the end of the destruction of Byzantium, Moscow came to be seen as the Third Rome. In 1472 the grand duke of Moscow, Ivan the Great, married Sophia, the niece of the last Byzantine emperor, and assumed the Byzantine title of tsar; these developments involved the conscious acceptance by some in the Russian Orthodox tradition of a Byzantine model of the relationship between church and nation. Metropolitan Ioann of St Petersburg once said that 'if Russia isn't your mother, God can't be your Father'.3 Kallistos Ware has noted that while 'the integration of Church and people has in the end proved immensely beneficial' , this close identification of Orthodoxy with the life of the people, and in