What is Rain?

I've long been struck by the following passage about St Nikolaj's years as a professor at St Tikhon's Seminary in South Canaan, PA:

IN 1951, Bishop Nikolai came to St. Tikhons Seminary first as a professor and finally, with the death of the former Rector, Bishop Jonah, as Rector of the Seminary Here he lived out the last years of his life as an example of humility, as well as an elder to the monastics at St. Tikhons Monastery. To the students of the Seminary, the old Bishop was a loving father figure whom they would never forget. To the laity and faithful of the monastery parish, as well as all who came in contact with the Bishop, he was a hierarch in whom they saw manifest the grace of God. And to all, he was an example of humility. During his years as an educator at St. Tikhons Seminary Bishop Nikolai was seen to be a very unusual person in that his courses were profoundly simple, informal and very warm. His requirements were very basic: he taught, you learned, and he corrected.

Perhaps one of the most striking characteristics of his classes was that he taught solely in the English language, at a time when very few courses were taught in that language (and these usually by outside lecturers). This often caused friction with other faculty members, but Bishop Nikolai held fast to his position, for he knew the importance, for the seminarians, of hearing lectures in their native language. Indeed, without this use of English, much of the subtlety of his teachings would have been lost from memory. The use of English extended even to the monastery church, and on most occasions he would preach in that language. Often the parishioners would complain about this, but his answer would be: You have learned and heard enough. Its time for [the seminarians] to learn something.

Bishop Nikolai's classes, sermons and conversations were always geared to his audience, whether they be students, professors, theologians or simple parishioners, and his vocabulary never extended itself beyond the comprehension of his hearers. For him, class could be any time. Anything said to him could be turned around and assigned a deeper meaning. He would always take examples from conversations in class, at the dinner table, or that which occurred as he walked about the grounds, and would always introduce examples from Holy Scripture, relating them to life at hand. For example, one day in class a student mentioned the fact that it was such a terribly dismal day because of the rain. Bishop Nikolai walked over to the window, looked out, and expounded on the further dimensions of rain, from Noah until the present time: What is rain? It is like Christ Who was also sent by the Father from Heaven to water a thirsty earth.

This passage strikes me so strongly in large part because it serves as the perfect antithesis of my own experience as a seminary teacher. I was young, overconfident, and had a head full of partially digested ideas from graduate school that I thought should serve as the keys to any proper understanding of theology. Like so many young academics, my tendency was always to complicate and "complexify" ideas, forever pursuing originality of interpretation. After all, one establishes oneself in academia largely through the relentless self-promotion of one's own originality, through carving out one's own specific niche and line of argument. How often I was too clever by half, spoiling a perfectly good idea by needless reinterpretation. The old joke about the Russian newspaper Facts and Arguments is that it has neither. In my case I had too many of both, or certainly of the latter. A colleague from another institution once approached me after I had delivered a paper at a conference to compliment me on having given such a "nuanced" presentation. While I'm sure she intended her remark in the most complimentary way, I was horrified.

What was lacking in my own teaching was precisely that simplicity of manner and attention to fundamentals that we see so elegantly depicted in the paragraphs above. St Nikolaj was among the best-educated men of his times, had acquired a multitude of degrees, spoke many languages, and was able to relate to people from every level of society. Yet he was neither an intellectual nor an academic as those terms are popularly understood today. His writings bear none of the tortured and ironic tone so characteristic of nearly all contemporary academic writing. There is no application of critical method where it does not belong, no attempt to hide behind scholarly objectivity, no desire to overturn everything that came before him. There is genuine profundity of thought without futile intellectualization.

Those who have followed this web log for some time, or who have at least dipped into the archives, will likely have noticed that my posts have become increasingly less argumentative in tone. I've been out of the teaching and studying business for a few years now, no longer particularly keep up with academic publications, and have recently undergone a fairly severe illness. This has served to relieve my mind of the constant internal dialectic that is the keystone of the intellectual life. My imaginative life has been much more occupied with the Holy Scriptures than anything else. I do continue to read a good bit of classic literature (particularly the Russians and the Victorians), but it's been some time now since I've read a work of "abstract" theology. I've recently said very little from or about myself on this web log (this post being the exception that proves the rule), preferring rather to translate texts from the Russian and collate links to other worthwhile online resources. Many of the old arguments simply don't seem so important anymore. This is not to say that I won't still cry foul when need be (I do have at least one more forthcoming post on The Orthodox Study Bible), but it does mean that as my own basic intuition about what's important changes, so too will this blog.