Kenoticism, asceticism, monasticism, holy foolishness, self-immolation, self-flagellation, and self-castration are different, if somewhat overlapping religious practices. Each is worthy of in-depth psychoanalytic study in its own right. Although all share the property of moral masochism, other psychoanalytic properties are involved in varying degrees and combinations as well (such as paranoia, narcissism, exhibitionism, depression, and intellectualization), and each practice will fit slightly differently into the psychobiography of any given religious masochist.
Early Observers of Russian Masochism
Serfdom was one of the first social phenomena to be attacked by the fledgling Russian intelligentsia at the end of the eighteenth century. Berdiaev goes so far as to say that the intelligentsia “was born” when Aleksandr Radishchev (1749–1802) expressed his outrage over the cruel treatment of Russian serfs in A Journey from Petersburg to Moscow (1790).61 According to Radishchev, the peasant who works the field is the only one who has a real right to it, yet “with us, he who has the natural right to it is not only completely excluded from it, but, while working another’s field, sees his sustenance dependent on another’s power!”62 The enslavement of the Russian peasant not only provokes moral indignation in Radishchev, but induces him to make interesting psychological observations, such as the following:
It appears that the spirit of freedom is so dried up in the slaves that they not only have no desire to end their sufferings, but cannot bear to see others free. They love their fetters, if it is possible for man to love his own ruination.63
Not only the literal slave, however, behaves slavishly. Members of the nobility can display extreme servility in their relations with others. Radishchev wonders whether those abused by a certain high dignitary know that
he is ashamed to admit to whom he owes his high station; that in his soul he is a most vile creature; that deception, perfidy, treason, lechery, poisoning, robbery, extortion and murder are no more to him than emptying a glass of water; that his cheeks have never blushed with shame, but often with anger or from a box on the ear; that he is a friend of every Court stoker and the slave [rab] of everybody, even the meanest creature, at Court? But he pretends to be a great lord and is contemptuous of those who are not aware of his base and crawling servility [nizkosti i polzushchestva].64
If the serf grows to love his chains, the nobleman wallows in servility. In both instances Radishchev identifies what appear, on their face at least, to be masochistic attitudes.
Poet Aleksandr Pushkin (1799–1837) reacted somewhat negatively to Radishchev’s characterization of the peasant’s plight in Russia. The French peasant, or the English factory worker is worse off, opines Pushkin in his 1834 essay on Radishchev’s Journey. This is doubtful, however, and in any case is irrelevant. At one point Pushkin declares: “Take a look at the Russian peasant: is there even the shadow of slavish degradation [ten’ rabskogo unichizheniia] in his behavior and speech?”65 This rhetorical question is followed by praise of the Russian peasant’s boldness, cleverness, imitativeness, generosity, etc.—none of which necessarily preclude slavishness at all.66
A particularly sharp critique of serfdom was made by the philosopher Petr Iakovlevich Chaadaev (1794–1856). In the first of his famous Philosophical Letters, written in French in 1829, he said:
Why… did the Russian people descend to slavery [l’esclavage] only after they became Christian, namely in the reigns of Godunov and Shuisky? Let the Orthodox Church explain this phenomenon. Let it say why it did not raise its maternal voice against this detestable usurpation of one part of the people by the other. And note, I pray you, how obscure we Russians are in spite of our power and all our greatness. Only today the Bosphorus and the Euphrates have simultaneously heard our canon thunder. Yet history, which at this very hour is demonstrating that the abolition of slavery is the work of Christianity, does not suspect that a Christian people of forty million is in chains.67
Chaadaev clearly disapproves of slavery, but he does not really direct his disapproval at the original enslavers, that is, at “our national rulers” who he believes inherited the spirit of “cruel and humiliating foreign domination” from the Mongols. Rather, he criticizes the Russian Orthodox Church for not intervening on behalf of the Russian people. For Chaadaev, official Russian Christianity is despicable for its failure to act. It is more backward, less truly Christian than Christianity in the West (he forgets the Christianity of the American South). He seems to suggest that the Russian Orthodox Church was itself behaving slavishly when it acceded to slavery in Russia.
Chaadaev utilizes an interesting familial image here: the Russian Orthodox Church did not raise its maternal voice (“sa voix maternelle”) against serfdom. In effect, the Russian church is not as good a mother as the Roman Catholic Church which, since the time of Tertullian, had been known as Domina mater ecclesia.
Where there is a mother, a child cannot be far behind. For Chaadaev that child is Russia herself, or individual Russians:
We live only in the narrowest of presents, without past and without future, in the midst of a flat calm. And if we happen to bestir ourselves from time to time, it is not in the hope, nor in the desire, of some common good, but in the childish frivolousness of the infant, who raises himself and stretches his hands toward the rattle which his nurse presents to him.68
Chaadaev repeatedly resorts to the image of a child: “we Russians, like illegitimate children, come to this world without patrimony”; “We are like children who have never been made to think for themselves.”69
Russian “children” lack not only a sufficiently maternal church, but a real legal system as well. As a result, according to Chaadaev, childish Russians come to expect, even welcome punishment from the paternal figure of the tsar, traditionally referred to as “little father tsar” (“tsar’ batiushka”) by Russians. The rule of law is utterly alien to Russians: “For us it is not the law which punishes a citizen who has done wrong, but a father who punishes a disobedient child. Our taste for family arrangements is such that we lavish the rights of fatherhood on anything that we find ourselves dependent on. The idea of lawfulness, of right, makes no sense to the Russian people.”70
So, childish, inadequately mothered Russians live an abominable life. They willingly subject themselves to paternal authority. Incapable of asserting their rights, they only know how to ask permission: “Nous ne disons pas, p. e., j’ai le droit de faire cela, nous disons, telle chose est permise; telle autre ne l’est pas.”71