Daniel Stein, Interpreter by Lyudmila Ulitskaya
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Heresy That Dare Not Speak Its Name

In the 14th century Catherine of Siena rebuked Pope Gregory XI for allowing lax behaviour among the clergy, and for his own behaviour by remaining in Avignon rather than re-establishing residence in Rome. She got away with it because what she didn't question was papal authority, particularly the authority to define and enforce belief. She could only chide and appeal to conscience, and even then never assert her own conscience as in any way equal to the pope's.

Shmuel Oswald Rufeisen, also known as Brother Daniel and the model for the central fictional character of Daniel Stein in Lyudmila Ulitskaya's novel, is a Polish Jew who becomes a Carmelite friar and spends most of his adult life in Israel ministering to a small congregation of Hebrew-speaking Christians near Haifa.

Brother Daniel has learned to mistrust authority, particularly ideological authority which attempts to regulate belief. He takes his own conscience more seriously than Catherine did hers. And, unlike Catherine, he does not try to impose his views on others. He neither chides nor condemns his congregants or his ecclesiastical superiors. He simply trusts his own conscientious judgment more than the judgment of those who have power over him. And with good reason.

As a teenager he was pressed into service with the Gestapo and forced to participate in the extermination of Lithuanian and Belorussian Jews, many of whom he knew personally. Narrowly escaping from execution by the Communist partisans, Daniel received both the Stalin and Lenin medals for bravery from the Soviet Union but was under suspicion of Polish nationalism.

Daniel was also critical of the life of the church, somewhat more radically, if less outspokenly, than Catherine. Ulitskaya puts words in the mouth of the fictional Daniel which very well could have been in the mind of the real Carmelite friar: "We know that in every age it has been raw politics which has determined the direction of the life of the Church." For Daniel the politics of authority is the same in the church as it is in government or corporate life, namely an attempt to impose belief in the interests of authority itself. And he won't have it.

Doctrine, according to Daniel, is a political not a religious, and even less a spiritual, matter. Both historically and socially; doctrine is used to identify Us vs. Them and as test of social solidarity. Authority is that which defines the identity and supervises the test. What he encounters in the Church is qualitatively no different from his experience with Nazi and Communist military and civil authority.

What matters for Daniel, however, is not doctrine per se, or even its implications for behaviour towards others, but behaviour itself defined in terms of the Christ-mandated rule of charity. Ulitskaya puts the point in the mouth of his assistant: "I recognise that what you believe doesn’t matter in the slightest. All that matters is how you personally behave…Daniel has placed that right in my heart." Ethics for Daniel cannot be derived from doctrinal belief, which is merely an expression of power and submission.

This is of course heresy, and Daniel recognises his position: "Today my views on many matters have diverged from those generally accepted in the Catholic world, and I am not the only person in that situation." But he turns the apparent heresy on its head: "Great faith, simplicity and boldness are to be found in [the] reluctance to acknowledge grandeur and power." If heresy it be, it is virtuous heresy which goes beyond the tentative virtue of Catherine.

The real heresy, which Daniel comprehends, is not to recognise the central message of Christ: the "expansion of love." To subjugate this message to the needs of authority is always and everywhere destructive to this message and therefore wrong. Daniel sweeps the entire Church into a position that would have given Catherine palpitations even though he is only paraphrasing St. Paul: "[Christ] did not hand down any new dogmas, and the novelty of his teaching is that he placed Love above the Law."

It is the failure to admit this real heresy that is the root of Christianity's problems - within itself and with the world - from its inception in Daniel's view: "The Church drove out and cursed the Jews and has paid for that by all its subsequent divisions and schisms." In Daniel's defence Ulitskaya provides a plethora of Christian, Jewish and Muslim examples of the true heresy of authority, its obvious ubiquity and its consequences in prejudice, intolerance, psychosis, and terrorism over the centuries.

Of course, Daniel is ultimately no match for the persistence of authority, which merely replicates itself within the 'everlasting' corporate structure of the Church. Authority marginalises him, and waits him out. His church is closed, his congregation scattered, his annoyance to the hierarchy of the Order and the bishops is all but forgotten. So: "[Daniel’s] specific mission had failed…working as a priest, praising Yeshua in his own language, preaching christianity with a small c, a personal religion of the mercy and love of God and of one’s neighbour, and not the religion of dogmas and authority, power and totalitarianism."

Paradoxically this has always been the real criterion of success for the message of Christ. His little Church on the slopes of Mount Carmel could only ever be temporary and unprotected against the world. One can mourn but only triumphantly, as Daniel's followers do: "Poor Christianity! It can be only poor. Any victorious Church…totally rejects Christ."

Daniel Stein addresses the heresy which Catherine would not: that authority is superior to individual conscience. Individual conscience is certainly not the basis for general mores. But neither is it any less authoritative than the consciences of those with rank and privilege. Any authority - the pope, the text, or a theologically-educated interpreter - when it attempts to impose belief is wrong.

This is the heresy that dare not speak its name within polite religious society. It is the heresy that is at the root of the decline in Christianity. It is the essential untruth rather than the fundamental virtue of any organisation putting itself forward as promoter of the message of Christ. It is Daniel Stein not Catherine of Siena who has practiced that virtue unequivocally.

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