The Curate’s Egg: the Legacy of Fr. Seraphim Rose

The phrase “the Curate’s egg” refers to a cartoon in an 1895 edition of Punch magazine, in which a nervous curate (i.e. an apprentice priest) is having breakfast with his bishop.  When the curate shows reluctance to eat his egg because parts of it are rotten, the bishop asks (perhaps sharply) if there is something wrong with his egg. Not wanting to upset the bishop, the curate stammers out, “Oh no, m’Lord!  Parts of it are excellent!”  It is the same, I suggest, with the legacy of the late Fr. Seraphim Rose: parts of it are excellent.

       But, equally, parts of it are not.  I am a bit reluctant to criticize Fr. Rose since he is no longer here to defend himself or answer critique.  But that is the joy and danger in writing books:  one runs the risk of being criticized posthumously when one is no longer able to reply.  Such departed but much criticized authors include Prof. C. S. Lewis and Fr. Alexander Schmemann (the latter’s approach much criticized by Fr. Rose and companions).  One is tempted to lay down the maxim that if one is that sensitive to criticism one should refrain entirely from being published: if you can’t stand the critical heat, get out of the authorial kitchen.

       Fr. Seraphim converted to Orthodoxy as part of ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia), famous (or perhaps infamous) for its fervent commitment to Orthodoxy as it stood in the time of Czarist Russia, a fervency almost indistinguishable from fundamentalism.  During Fr. Seraphim’s day this entailed being out of communion with almost all of what they called “World Orthodoxy”—i.e. all the other Orthodox jurisdictions.  They considered that the Orthodox Church in Russia was a mere puppet of the Communists and that a Communist-inspired Antichrist would soon arise to dominate the world. 

ROCOR was at this period intensely apocalyptic in its approach to almost everything.  Jurisdictions maintaining communion with the Russian Church (such as the O.C.A. along with everyone else) were denounced as apostate and graceless.  ROCOR therefore constituted a kind of remnant, the final refuge of the faithful in the last days of apostasy.

       Fr. Seraphim tragically died suddenly from an undiagnosed intestinal disorder in 1982 at the age of 48 and so did not live to see the fall of Communism in 1991 when the former Soviet Union reorganized itself as the Commonwealth of Independent States, nor the ecclesiastical reproachment of ROCOR with the Russian Church in 2000. Those events proved that ROCOR’s dark and apocalyptic view of the future was unfounded.  But such views were not unique to ROCOR and hindsight is (proverbially) 20-20. 

       There is much that is valuable in Fr. Seraphim’s work.  But with the growth of anti-woke reactions in western society and a corresponding attraction to a fundamentalist Orthodoxy, there is much that is dangerous as well.  Here I would like to cite three things.

       First is his fundamentalist approach to the Fathers.  Fr. Rose does not place the Fathers within their historical context but de-contextualizes them to make them timeless exemplars in their conclusions—including their scientific and exegetical conclusions.  This non-historical approach necessarily involves turning a blind eye to the disagreement between them and ascribing to them more agreement than was actually the case, reducing a complex reality to simpler (and more useable) one. 

       An example:  in his Genesis, Creation, and Early Man Rose makes the statement (page 243) that “In the Patristic understanding, the ‘sons of God’ [in Genesis 6:2] were the offspring of Seth, the chosen people who were to preserve themselves in virtue. They were living in a higher place, along the boundary of Paradise. They were called ‘sons of God’ because through them Christ was to come.”

       I pass over for now his literal and historical reading of the creation stories.  What is demonstrably false is his assertion that interpreting “the sons of God” as the sons of Seth was “the Patristic understanding”.  As a matter of fact, there was a variety of patristic interpretation about this.  Some Fathers (such as St. Augustine) indeed believed that the sons of God were the godly line of Seth. But other Fathers (such as Justin Martyr, in his Second Apology, chapter 5 and Irenaeus in the Demonstration of Apostolic Preaching, chapter 18) regarded the sons of God as angels (thus also the Book of Enoch chapter 6:2-3 and seemingly 2 Peter 2:4 and Jude 6). Others believed that the sons of God were dynastic rulers, an early aristocracy.   

The point is that there was no such thing as “the Patristic understanding” of this text; Rose dramatically oversimplifies complex things such as views of the Fathers. He consistently uses the Fathers polemically, as weapons and proof-texts and thereby distorts the significance of patristic history.

       Secondly and consistent with Fr. Rose’s polemicism is his refusal to engage with real scientists and his reluctance to leave the world of the Fathers with its outdated cosmology to engage with scientific debates of the late twentieth century.  Bluntly put, after the mapping of the human genome the fundamentalist view that the entire human race descended from two individuals is simply no longer on the table.  (See Adam and the Genome by Venema and McKnight or Evolutionary Creation by Denis O. Lamoureux, all of them devout Christians.)  Citing fourth century Fathers like St. Basil as if that settled the issue constitutes a form of intellectual suicide—something Basil would be the first to protest.  (I may add that citing modern polemical literature from the twentieth century which interacts with Communist propaganda is also less then helpful since both work with the binary of “either God created the world or evolution created the world” as if God could not have used evolution as His instrument.)

       Finally there is the matter of (to use the “e”-word) ecumenism.  Ecumenism means many things to many people and is too big a topic to be dealt with summarily here.  But Fr. Seraphim had a tendency (one found increasingly ascendent with modern fundamentalist Orthodox) to restrict God’s saving grace to the canonical boundaries of the Orthodox Church.  I am told that there were signs that Rose was growing away from such a restricted view in his later years (which hopefully is true; I leave that to others).  But, as with many other ROCOR people in his day, Rose entertained a jaundiced view of the possibility of God’s grace existing outside of Orthodoxy—and his de-contextualized approach to the Fathers aided him in this.

       We see this especially in his analysis of the charismatic renewal in his Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future.  Many of the criticisms he makes of the movement as it existed in his time were spot on.  But Fr. Seraphim failed to appreciate how varied the movement was and that the abuses he cited were not characteristic of the movement as a whole.  I should know because I was there and a part of the movement and Rose was not.  There were indeed many errors, abuses, and genuine stupidities (see my own critique of the movement here). But Rose spoke as from a distance without personal experience of what was going on and so could not help but misinterpret and fail to recognize the complexity of the movement.  (For a scholarly treatment of the movement see God’s Forever Family by Larry Eskridge, published by Oxford University Press.)

Comparing the movement to the Fathers of course could only highlight its failures and deficiencies.  But many people who were far from God and suffering from drug addiction came to Christ through the movement and found freedom, salvation, and peace. They changed and began to hunger for God, to walk in righteousness, and to love Scripture and surely these results came from God’s Spirit.  The charismatic movement was also like the curate’s egg: some parts were rotten but some of it was excellent.

Ultimately of course all final judgment of a man’s life and work must be left with God.  My concern here is not to criticize the man who by all accounts was a man of genuine holiness. Rather my concern is with his lasting legacy, some parts of which I regard as dangerous at the present time. 

If the main danger the Orthodox Church in the West was liberalism (though there is a bit of that in some quarters) Fr. Seraphim’s work would not be dangerous.  But it seems to me that the main danger and temptation is now all in the opposite direction—that of legalism, rigour, narrowness of vision regarding other Christians, and a fundamentalist misuse of the Fathers, indeed, a weaponizing the Fathers to support an Orthodox fundamentalism.

I suppose it is one more danger of being published:  not only can one’s work be criticized after one can no longer reply but (more alarmingly) it can be put to uses one never envisioned and of what one would not necessarily approve.