Mr. Mayor, the problem for all of usfor you as for usis: what do we do with our memories? We must deal with them or they will crush us.

-Elie Wiesel to the Mayor of Kiev during a Babi Yar visit¹

Can the formerly Soviet peoples of eastern and central Europe advance from totalitarian rule to political nationhood without lapsing into "pre-political" nationalism and revanchism? Events already indicate that the threat of the latter outcome is real. Much will depend on the ability of these societies to absolve the traumas of the Soviet past. Meanwhile the tasks of economic and governmental reconstruction compete for center stage. Without bread on the table and order outside the door, there can be no renewal. Yet binding up the spiritual wounds of whole peoples cannot wait. Chauvinism looms where catharis dawdles.

This paper, after some preliminary remarks, will elaborate briefly some distinctions between political and pre-political nationalism. It will then address the problem of political ressentiment and its absolution. Finally, in essaying the resources of healing, of catharsis, it will turn to the religious heritage of the European peoples of the former Soviet Union.

But first some disclaimers. I am not a "Sovietologist" nor an expert on east European affairs, but nonetheless have been involved for several decades in a variety of sustained conversations with religious and academic persons in Soviet lands, and have travelled many times to the Soviet Union and the countries under Soviet hegemony. It is my impression that geographic, historical, and geopolitical factors outweighed the ideological in the former superpower contest. Moreover, I hold no brief for either socialism or capitalism as ideologies. Alike, they are descendents of the Enlightenment and rely excessively on economic determinism; in their disagreement on the priority of the "individual" and the "collective" each abstracts and absolutizes a half-truth.² As historical "experiments," however, the societies juxtaposed since the "October Revolution" present an enormous challenge to the social sciences. On the human plane, modesty if not indeed silence is indicated for outsiders with regard to the sufferings of those subjected to the Soviet debacle.

ETHNOS AND NATION

Our human social nature appears to be primordially grounded in the solidarities of blood and soil. The propensity for secondary, rationally-constructed social configurations, vastly wider than clan and village, appears to be likewise inherent in the scheme of things. To some indefinite extent, however, these two modalities, one primary and the other secondary, appear incompatible. Wider loyalties in some measure dilute and surmount the claims of groups close at hand. That is, with the advance of civilization, local solidarities and cultures recede. But thereby deficits of affect, affiliation and support arise in the population; for these the larger social configurations cannot fully compensate. Some degree of anomie, of social disaffection and alienation, seems inevitable in modern societies.

In the modern world, as we know, the "nation-state" has become the terminal community; that is, it encompasses all lesser groups within its scope while resisting supra-national incorporation. In recent centuries, nationalism has been the standard mobilizing concept worldwide in the creation of larger configurations, transcending the manifold associations, districts, provinces and the like, which it presupposes. Hans Kohn, whom I follow here, regards nationalism as the first motivating force "which acts to organize all peoples (who once lived in dynastic or religious states, tribal agglomerations, or supranational empires) into nation-states," nationalism providing "the foremost and predominantly emotional incentive for the integration of various traditions, religions, and classes into a single entity, to which man can give his supreme loyalty."³

Nationalism as "emotional incentive," however, has been both source and symptom of ambiguity and paradox. Anticipating Nodia's distinction between "modern" and "primordial" notions of nation, Kohn distinguishes "political" or "territorial state" nationalism from "romantic" or "ethnic linguistic" nationalism. Political nationalism rests on citizenship, democracy, and popular sovereignty. Individual citizens rather than solidary groups (families, clans, etc.) are the building blocks in such nationalism. As Kohn observes, this corresponds in some measure to the Toennies notion of Gesellschaftassociations of autonomous individuals. Action in such associations, Max Weber held, consist of "a rationally motivated adjustment of interests."⁴ According to Kohn, political nationalism of this sort appeared in Britain, France, and Scandinavia.

Romantic nationalism, on the other hand, as Kohn continues, is rather more Gemeinschaft-like. It rests on "prepolitical, prerational foundationsmother tongue, ancient folk traditions, common descent, or the 'national spirit.'" Here the political criteria noted above are subordinate to "the ties of inheritance and tradition." "People speaking the same tongue or claiming a common ancestry," it is thus proposed, "should form one political state." Or, again to speak with Max Weber, communal (Gemeinschaft) action of this sort is based on "a subjective feeling of the parties . . . that they belong together." Romantic nationalism, according to Kohn, appeared in Germany, in Italy and among the Slavic people of eastern and southern Europe. The writings of the German romantic, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803), are cited as a literary source (his discovery of Volk) of such nationalism.

On the surface all this is familiar enough. Yet, as recent events around the world demonstrate, history has yet to disclose its solution to the basic enigma: How is the balance between the dynamics of Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft to be struck as societies modernize? Though the form of the problem is always situation-specific, it appears at all stages of modernization, from the earliest to the most advanced. Admittedly, ideal typical polar typologies of the Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft sort have long since revealed their empirical inadequacy. In any case, these are not contrasting historical forms, with a life of their own, that groups or societies may assume. As analytical distinctions they refer rather to contrasting modes of social interaction that commingle in endless combinations, rather as variegated threads woven into fabrics.

Gemeinschaft modes are the identifiers, the markers, that are given, inherited, "unwilled,"ancestry, family, name, gender, language, race. Gesellschaft modes are "willed,"⁵ achieved, deliberately chosenoccupation, friends, partners, activities. Though analytically distinct, each mode is present in the other. When I "will" an act, my "unwilled" traits clothe my action. One or the other energy may dominate in a given instance, appropriately or inappropriately. Nonetheless, as modernization advances, the center of gravity in the social process tends to shift increasingly toward the "willed" pole of the continuum. In political nationalism, Gesellschaft tempers Gemeinschaft; in romantic nationalism, the preponderance flows in the opposite direction.

National boundaries, for the most part, result from the accidents of geography and of history. Contemporary nation-states typically include populations of diverse ethnic descent. In some instances, ethnic groups are mutually at odds within common national boundaries. In other instances, individual ethnic groups do battle with the societies and/or states that seek to absorb them. Around the world, the question arises repeatedly: when is an ethnic group entitled to such autonomy? And who shall decide?

Finally, though analytically, nations may be ranked on a continuum from romantic to political nationalism, their position may well shift from one to the other with events or crises. Kohn's distinction between the two types of nationalism must not be reified. The response of the American public to the 1991 Gulf War, for example, is a sobering reminder of the psychological vulnerability of the modern nation state. Questions regarding the validity of US action and achievement aside, it would appear that the public response, notably the victory celebrations, vastly exceeded the geopolitical significance of what transpired. Instead free-floating anxieties and frustrations were vented and manipulated, as, for example, in the slogan, "kicking the Viet Nam syndrome."

THE POLITICS OF RESSENTIMENT

In sublating the lesser loyalties of clan, village, and region, nation-states appropriate, and hence become responsible for, aspects of the identities of their individual citizens. In so doing, however, as already indicated, they acquire psychological burdens that they cannot fully discharge. Moreover, in partial response, and by means of a curious alchemy, national "egos" emerge in the process. Through their governments, nation-states appear as actors in the international arena, wearing their respective egos, as it were, on their sleeve. Officials acting on behalf of states are compelled accordingly to speak and act in ways that in interpersonal relations would appear both irrational and immoral.

As the humiliation of the United States and the Soviet Union in Viet Nam and Afghanistan, respectively, demonstrated, the wounding of national "egos" may have important domestic and foreign consequences. Identifying the parallels can importantly aid mutual understandings among the several societies. The suffering of the peoples of the former Union under Soviet rule, of course, was incomparably more traumatic than the US humiliation in Viet Nam. The litany of gulags, of espionage, of betrayals, in the Soviet instance is familiar, and needs no elaboration here.

Resentments against Marxist-Leninist rule have long smoldered in the Soviet lands. Grievances are complex, profound, and varied and have hastened the breakup of the old Union. To refer to those grievances, I shall use the original, more robust, French term, ressentiment, originally proposed as a technical term in another context by Friedrich Nietzsche, and later refined by Max Scheler. The latter used the term early in the present century to refer to deeply repressed "emotions and affects . . . (of) revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to distract, and spite."⁶

Both the concept and the condition to which it refers deserve greater specification than is possible here. In any case, ressentiment consists of deep-seated and persistent rancor and thirst for revenge. The Soviet regime originally seized control of, and extended, the multi-national, czarist empire. The non-Russian peoples in the Union were thus doubly-yoked by both an ideologically alien and an imperial rule.

In his paper (chapter I above), Ghia Nodia notes one specific dimension of the resulting trauma, namely the loss incurred in seventy-year interruption in the historical development of peoples of the former Union. But beyond the seventy-year loss, "Communist rule does not provide anything useful to be kept in the period of transition to modernity and leaves after itself a kind of social desert. There is nothing real on which an attempt to build a modern (`democratic,' `free market,' etc.,) society may be based." This contrasts, in his view, with modernization elsewhere that "occurred on the basis of elements which emerged in traditional societies." Instead, formerly Soviet societies "can only be founded on ideas: recollection of national past and imitating pre-given models" (presumably, other already-modern societies).

Questions may be raised regarding so sweeping a verdict, though Nodia presumably refers specifically to the salient features of the communist system, rather than to the whole life of the era. In any case, the democratic energies now exploding in the former Soviet sphere had been growing for decades beneath the Soviet burden. Mikhail Gorbachev did not simply fall unannounced from the sky, a fact that he recognized from the outset. In that sense, modernization in the Soviet sphere, as modernization in the West earlier, "occurred on the basis of elements that emerged" in the existing society.

In the end, though acknowledgement of positive achievements during the Soviet era is part of the healing process, unspeakable trauma remains, and in some respects recurs. Nico Chavchavadze, head of the Institute of Philosophy in the Georgian Academy of Sciences, on his first visit to the United States in 1989, stated publicly that a moral renewal must precede any political rebirth in what then was still the Soviet Union. Subsequent Georgian turmoil appears to confirm his assessment. Nor is it merely or primarily a Georgian problem. Reports out of Czechoslovakia, for example, indicate new and persisting forms of distrust, recrimination, and revenge, despite the nobility of spirit articulated by Vaclav Havel, the dissident turned president.⁷

CATHARIS OR CHAUVINISM?

Can the monstrous wounds of the Soviet era, indeed of this century generallythe wars, the gulags, the genocide, the recriminations, the ressentiment, be absolved? In this regard, the Jewish holocaust has often been treated, as it were, prototypically. Elie Wiesel, himself a survivor, has emphasized, that the victims of that obscenity are in some sense doomed to silence. When we speak, Wiesel observes, we describe by means of comparison. An event, hitherto unknown, is explained in terms of another of which we have some knowledge. But the Holocaust is sui generis, beyond anything comparable. Wiesel writes: "By its uniqueness the Holocaust defies literature.⁸

If obscenities, such as the Jewish holocaust or the traumas of the Soviet era, defy our communicable grasp, absolution of the resulting ressentiment may be similarly handicapped. Without presuming to resolve the conceptual problem, I here employ two "shorthand" terms: chauvinism, for the venting of ressentiment in pre-political ethnic nationalism; catharis for absolution and healing.

Chauvinism derives from the name of Nicolas Chauvin, a French soldier during the Napoleonic wars, a superpatriot who came to typify the cult of military glory among Napoleon's veterans. In dictionary terms, chauvinism refers to "invidious attachment for a group or place to which one belongs or has belonged" (Webster's Third New International Dictionary), in effect, to any kind of ultra-nationalism. Thus defined, chauvinism appears as part of the primordial energy underlying romantic nationalism (Kohn). Usage of the term, however, has been more popular than academic or scientific.

Catharsis, originally an Aristotelian term referring to the purging of emotions in the experience of tragic theatre, denotes "any act of purgation that brings about a spiritual renewal or a satisfying release from tension." Normally a wide range of activities, beginning with the daily, weekly, monthly, and annual rhythms of living, and including an endless variety of recreative experiences, provide relief from ordinary tensions. But the wounds here before us are far deeper, usually beyond the reach of regular rhythms of life.

THE "GOD QUESTION"

Catharsis, healing, is clearly a multi-dimensional process. Three distinctions appear useful: (a) the spontaneous energies in life, just noted; (b) deliberate measures in the various institutional spheres, above all, political; and (c) therapies engaging the deeper layers of the psyche. While "religion" may be involved in all three dimensions, the "God question" arises primarily on the third level. Richard Rubenstein's dictum, that After Auschwitz the denial of God became morally mandatory, has been widely noted. Rather more profoundly, Elie Wiesel comments "How strange that the philosophy denying God came not from the (death camp) survivors. Those who came out with so-called God-is-dead theology, not one of them had been in Auschwitz." It is not God, but Wiesel's `faith' that is consumed by the flames, Brown comments. What has been "murdered," Wiesel continues, is "my God and my soul," the God conceived by the pious Hasidic child of fourteen years. Brown continues: do not assume, Wiesel reminds us in every book, that it is consolation to believe that God is still alive. Rather than providing a solution, that awareness simply states the problem. Ever since the first night at Auschwitz, Wiesel has struggled with two irreconcilable realitiesthe reality of God and the reality of Auschwitz.⁹

Among the European peoples of the former Soviet Union, for historical reasons, the religious question arises primarily in Christian terms. Those peoples were formed as nations under Christian cultural hegemony. That fact is of highly ambiguous import at this historical juncture. Renewed engagement with their pre-Soviet legacies, includes a re-encounter with Christian affirmations. Accordingly, signs of spiritual renewal are already evident.

On the other hand, the tradition of the centuries weighed heavily, sometimes imprisoning the churches in the culture they had helped to create. Soviet oppression reinforced the tendency in many quarters to identify church and nation. Meanwhile the integrity of church life was often jeopardized by the manipulation of the Soviet or Soviet-style regimes. Thus, it remains to be seen to what extent the Christian communities can transcend, rather than reinforce, the chauvinist tinder awaiting ignition in many quarters.

THE ARMENIAN EXAMPLE

An emerging discussion among Armenian Christians may well serve as an illustration and a case study. Christianity was adopted in Armenia by royal decree early in the fourth century, and may well be the oldest "national" Christian church. Meanwhile many Armenians have been dispersed (cf. the Jewish diaspora) in the United States and elsewhere. An important chapter in that dispersion was the Turkish genocide of the Armenians ("Armenocide") in 1915. This was followed shortly by the imposition of Soviet rule. Inevitably, parallels to the Jewish holocaust have been noted.

Vigen Guroian, a dean at St. Nersess Armenian Seminary in New York, has begun to address the burden of the ressentiments left by these catastrophes. He cites an oral history done among the survivors of the 1915 Turkish atrocities, which "documented patterns of denial, rationalization, resignation, reconciliation, rage and revenge in the lives of survivors and their children." During the last twenty-five years, Guroian observes, literature on the Armenocide has grown dramatically. "Conspicuously absent, however, from this flush of artistic and scholarly work has been theological reflection on the event and its consequences for religious belief . . . ; the crisis of faith and morality which became the legacy of the Armenocide (has) not been addressed forthrightly" by either the church or its theologians. . . . (M)ost Armenian church leaders," he maintains, "have refused to recognize that the Armenocide brought Armenian Christendom to an end."¹⁰

Instead of engaging the Armenian legacy of suffering theo-logically, church leaders have invoked the nation-building role of the Armenian church. "The spiritual and psychological wounds (of the genocide of 1915) are still open and bleeding, festering with self-pity and vengefulness."¹¹ Having "served Armenian nationalism in the past," Guroian writes, "the church lacks the theological tools needed to distinguish faith from patriotism and to develop an ethic grounded in its christology."¹² Guroian quotes a recent (1989) statement by the Catholicos, Vazken I, before a gathering of leaders in Holy Etchmiadzin: "The national identity of the Armenian, the national ethos . . . (and) the national ideology of the Armenian people have been forged here. . . . The Armenian Church for the past seventeen centuries has been the author and leader (of Armenian nationhood." In effect, ressentiment is thus reinforced rather than absolved.

To all this Guroian replies:

The Armenian church should be articulating a new model of a national church, one which confesses Christ in an Armenia `come of age.' It must come to terms with what it means to be its own `diaspora' among the people to whom it once gave an identity as a Christian kingdom and nation. A church in the habit of sacralizing the existing social order and naming it Christian must learn how to critique the secular orders in which it finds itself and provide vital communities of faith and reconciliation from which persons in public life can take the inspiration, conviction and courage to temper Armenian nationalism and set moral limits to the use of power.¹³

All this, of course implies a greater distance, as it were, between "church" and society/nation than formerly national churches assumed. It takes seriously the freedom, decision and commitment that are innately Christian. It must be noted as well that to call for forgiving, reconciling and healing is not to trivialize the issues of justice. Precisely because crimes were committed, that must be dealt with, a post-occupation, post-totalitarian, or post-war era is always excruciating. Yet Shakespeare said it well (The Merchant of Venice): "And earthly power doth then show likest God'sWhen mercy seasons justice." Renewal, not vengeance, is the challenge.

CONCLUSION

Guroian further expands on the great symbols of biblical faith, and more particularly as on the Armenian theological legacy. The necessary elaboration cannot be undertaken here. Instead I underscore the paradigmatic significance Vigen Guroian's summons to the churches in Armenia for the European nations comprising the former Soviet Union. These nations were all built by the royal enlistment of Christianity. In all of these formerly national churches, the temptation of what we might call ecclesial irredentism seems almost irresistible. Insofar as churches succumb, they in fact apostatize, and abet the relapse of these nations into pre-political nationalism and revanchism.

Meanwhile, of course, times have changed. Ruling national churches as a means of social control are no longer an historical option. And while that fact alone already precludes a return to state-sponsored "Christianity," only by intrinsic rejuvenation can the faith communities recover their identity and mission. The Gospel must be engaged in its ultimacy, rather than as means to other ends. This will include a theological reassessment of the nation-building history of Christianity in Europe. Otherwise, in the words of Wiesel, our memories will crush us.

Rolling Ridge Study Retreat Community

1. Quoted by Robert McAfee Brown, Elie Wiesel: Messenger to All Humanity. (Rev. edition; Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1989), p. 20.

2. I developed this point more fully in "Person and Society: the Soviet-American Encounter." Soundings, 67 (1984), 140-153.

3. Hans Kohn, "Nationalism." Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Vol. III:324-339.

4. Max Weber, The Theory of Economic and Social Organization (New York: Free Press, 1964), p. 136.

5. Norbert Elias, "Toward a Theory of Community", in The Sociology of Community, ed. by Colin Bell & Howard Newby (London: Cass, 1974).

6. Max Scheler, Ressentiment (New York: Free Press of Glencoe, 1961), p. 46.

7. Jeri Laber, "Witch Hunt in Prague", New York Review of Books, April 23, 1992, 4-8. This gloomy account was challenged, however, by representatives of the British Helsinki Human Rights Group in a letter to the editors, ibid., May 28, 1992.

8. Brown, op. cit., p. 24.

9. Vigen Guroian, "Armenian Genocide and Christian Existence", Cross Currents, 41 (1991), 322-342.

10. Guroian, op. cit., see above, p. 12.

11. Op. cit., p. 337.

12. Op. cit., p. 328.

13. Op. cit., p. 328.