“History is not just remembering the past but a heroic awakening”
The national revival, now underway in Ukraine and many other states of the modern world, cannot be reduced to a simple restoration of the cultural heritage of past epochs. It requires a special vision of history as not just remembering the past but as a heroic awakening of what does not vanish and permeates the universal existence of a nation and, hence, all humankind. Unlike an ethnic group, which can also lead an isolated existence, a nation is characterized precisely by the people’s ability to come out onto the arena of world history, accumulate its own experience of creating common values, and excite universal culture with the pulses of its own energy and fate.
It is significant that national self-identification of the Ukrainian people in the dramatic seventeenth century aroused public interest in the common foundations of European civilization, such as Ancient Greek and Roman culture, Christianity, and the Enlightenment. The exigency of that time was reflected not only in increased armed and political struggle for national independence but also in the foundation of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and other institutions, the application of common European education curricula, the defense of the humanist value of Latin as the international language of culture, the increased number of itinerant international students, and the establishment of the spiritual republic of European savants, of which Hryhory Skovoroda wrote. In the time of an increasingly bitter confrontation between Catholicism and Protestantism, when the West was being swept in the wave of the Catholic Counter Reformation, Petro Mohyla proclaimed the ideas of ecumenism, the Christian unity of the whole cultural world, and mapped out the concept of a synthesis of East Slavic and Western European cultures.
The application of common human values characterizes the mainline of national development. I do not mean that the national should be reduced to the universal but that an ethnic group should acquire the meaning of humanity’s national hypostasis and ethnic archetypes should manifest themselves in the context of their universal components. In this interpretation, universals make up the reverse side of the enrichment of ethnic cultural archetypes. In this way, the culmination of ethnic problems brings universal values to the fore.
The same relationship characterizes the major national achievements of nineteenth-century Ukrainian culture and the broad universal problems that they provoked. For example, artistically exposing the psychological and historical features of the Ukrainian people’s national uniqueness, Taras Shevchenko drew up the esthetic example of an ideal human being embodied in either the image of Christ or the allegoric “mother Ukraine.” It is for this reason that the great Kobzar’s poems, which raised Ukrainian spirituality to the zenith of the common human heritage, are so naturally related to the verses based on the Biblical Psalms.
In a different field, but within the same logic of national and universal orientation in creative writing, Mykola Hulak, who together with Shevchenko belonged to the Brotherhood of Cyril and Methodius, also paid attention to the regional factors that helped Slavs develop a democratic mentality, as well as to the common methodological questions of studying nature. Analyzing the natural-science components of the universe’s geometric pattern, this Ukrainian scientist made a series of discoveries that make him one of the precursors of the twentieth-century scientific revolution. Hulak’s book, An Experiment in Four-dimensional Geometry, was a pioneering study in Europe, after the works by Riemann on the problems of multidimensional geometry. The methods of this geometry were used by Albert Einstein to develop the general theory of relativity.
The overtones of universalism were inherent in Ukrainian culture as early as in the times of the frontier civilization created by Kyivan Rus’ on the shore of the great steppe ocean. For the tide of forays of the steppe nomads scattered over two continents could only be stemmed by concerted material and spiritual efforts. Kyivan Rus’ chose “the rational Sophian (wise) ecumene” of the city as a counterweight to the hostile Field’s “chaos,” “abyss,” and “outer darkness.”
The concept of worldwide Sophianism, i.e., the search for the rational idea not only in the intellect but also in everyday life, which was supposed to reveal itself as a book of wisdom, as a “radiantly artistic” cognition of vital activities, was outlined by the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations. A modified version of this was picked up in the tenth century by Kyivan Rus’ which began to create a new, Greco- Slavic, type of European culture. Throughout the Middle Ages, Kyiv was regarded as a conductor of the Ancient Greek tradition in Eastern Europe.
In the twentieth-century postwar years, a half-length portrait of Apollo was found under a layer of paint in the St. George side altar of Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral. The picture must have been used as model for depicting the Christian martyr. This is by far the most graphic evidence of a direct transfer from ancient to medieval civilization, with Kyiv’s St. Sophia Cathedral being the cultural representative of this in Ukraine.
Kyiv Sophia’s philosophical and artistic concept is unique in combining Ancient Greek and Christian ideas. The temple links — via the philosophemes of Neoplatonism — the idea of Sophianism with that of “ontological optimism” and apocatastasis, i.e., serene restoration of God-given purity in the human earthly lifetime. The Sophia frescoes are free from such mandatory Christian temple images as scenes of the Doomsday, Apocalypse, death, entombment, pieta, assumption, etc. The foreground picture shows the Eucharist, the consecration of bread and wine, which symbolizes the conversion of things fleshly into things spiritual and, in a broader sense, the atonement, purification and restoration of the primordial supersensitive image of the flesh. The intense conflict of the spirit and the flesh, a highly dramatic element of all Western European theology, has been superseded in Orthodoxy by the concept of deification of the flesh or the so-called virtuous flesh. The Ukrainian mentality regards this flesh not as an alternative to intellect but as “spiritual reason” (sort of a combination of the soul with the thought and symbols of being) which, according to Isaya Kopynsky, leads to God. The wide development of the idea of virtuous flesh and spiritual reason by medieval Ukraine’s collegiums and fraternities notably enriched universal Christian values.
Modern English thinker Alfred North Whitehead believed that the development of civilization is conditioned not only by the triad, Truth-Good-Beauty, but also by the energy of a historical happening that overcomes metaphysical distance between the realm of dreams and reality. Therefore, not only Plato and Aristotle but also the labors of Odysseus speak about Ancient Greece, as do the people of Magellan’s stock, who made great geographical discoveries, about the new European civilization, and as do Cossacks, the steppe chevaliers of high heroic adventure (if the latter means ability to upset the humdrum everyday life and a thirst for heroic actions), about the historical mission of Ukrainian civilization. The Ukrainian Cossack estate was a true incarnation of both the national spirit and the historic mission of defending the South European boundaries of the Christian world.
Such prominent European authors as Voltaire, Hugo, Byron and Slowacki wrote poems devoted to the figure of Ivan Mazepa, while Franz Liszt even composed a symphonic poem on this subject. The central episode of these works shows a frantically galloping wild horse with the future hetman tied to its back. In punishment for his carnal adventures, his rivals have left him at the mercy of chance and fate. A boundless steppe, the clatter of hooves, a wild horse and a heroic personality ready to oppose all the vagaries and surprises of a whirling life — this is the way the poetry of romanticism pictured the symbols of a historical adventure in old Ukraine.
Yet, the symbols of adventure perhaps found a more adequate application in the Ukrainian Baroque which features the spirit of unrest and tension, oversteps the bounds of the ordinary, depicts strength as the acme of activity, shows an adventurously curved line in architecture, and dramatically juxtaposes life and death in poetry.
Dmytro Chyzhevsky proved that the Ukrainian Baroque was the style of a historical epoch, which reflects a type of individual, culture, and a particularly philosophical way of thinking. This is why the baroque in Ukraine was able to answer the fundamental questions put forward by the developing Western European Baroque. Accordingly, national versions of the Baroque as a common European trend display such features as the heroic and stoic in Ukraine, virtuosity in Italy, the dramatic in Spain, mystical in Germany, romantic in France, and metaphysical in England. The tragic component in the baroque consciousness could not eclipse the stoic assertion of existence in the Ukrainian mentality.
One of the facts that point out the unique spiritual contribution of Ukraine to the Baroque is an ideological and philosophical reassessment of the “cosmic pessimism” caused by the dramatic situation when man lost his position as the center of the universe after the Copernican world view was accepted in the seventeenth century. Ways of solving this Baroque-epoch “world drama” were outlined in the oeuvres of Hryhory Skovoroda, a champion of this trend in Ukraine. For, from the perspective of his concept of three worlds, if man has ceased to be the center of the huge astronomical world, he can still be viewed as a world apart or as the center of a special symbolic world system.
In contrast to the view of man as a macroworld, a concept dating back to Ancient Greece, that posited the existence of an “inner man” who personifies God and leads a specific existence of his own by means of what may be called “ABCs of the world” established by the Bible. Thus the symbolic sequence of the Baroque culture came to be treated in ontological terms, as the universal Christian theme of anthropocentrism was undergoing a new reconstruction. This is no accident because anthropocentrism and the related idea of the individual’s ethical value were archetypal in Ukrainian culture.
Although the Ukrainian mentality took its first steps under Byzantine influence, Ukraine refused to accept the main principle of Byzantinism, the supremacy of the universal over the individual. Center stage in Ukrainian history has always been occupied by people of a free warlike spirit, each of whom wanted to be an actor, not just a spectator, in the world drama. This cult of the free self-sufficient individual, indispensable for survival under the conditions of a frontier civilization that fought back the incursions of steppe barbarians, nourished the Cossack republic, the free ways of seminary students, the missions of itinerant priests, the private enterprise of city dwellers living under the Magdeburg Law, and the independent status of the woman as an equal partner in the family. A similar development of free individuality also lay the groundwork of the frontier civilization of the American prairie pioneers who colored their nation’s history.
As to Ukraine, certain elements of understanding the value of the individual were present even in the Rus’ka pravda (code of laws for Rus’) of Prince Yaroslav the Wise, a code which set fines for hurting a woman and allowed neither capital nor corporal punishment in the legal sense of the word. The eternally developing idea of representative government also ran through the constitution of Pylyp Orlyk and democratic federalism of the Cyril and Methodius Society (see Kostomarov’s Book of the Existence of the Ukrainian People and Hulak’s dissertation, The Juridical System of Seaside Slavs. One should add to this municipal self-government and election of church hierarchs, a traditional Ukrainian practice in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The idea of the value of the free individual received a powerful impetus in the Ukrainian classics of the late nineteenth century. This made it possible, inter alia, to uncover the potential of the nation’s mentality in discussing the universal problems of humanist values. What can serve as a graphic example of this is Lesia Ukrayinka’s artistic and philosophical treatment of Don Juan as an example of the overall European theme of the liberated individual.
The poetess viewed the Spanish grandee’s drama not as the temptations of hedonism but as an attempt to create a private world of one own opposed to the stone foundations of government autocracy, a world resting on love, freedom, and the ideal of female beauty. Yet, this ideal becomes distorted: Donna Anna uses him as a lure for a careerist adventure, and seducer Don Juan cannot resist the temptation of the will to power. Betraying himself, he feels the handshake of the Commander, a symbol of state omnipotence, and turns into a statue of stone.
This is a profound and unique metaphor. For the Commander’s handshake is not a thing of the past. In the twentieth century, it extended to many people and nations that found themselves in the embrace of totalitarianism.
How can one break free from this grasp? This is a universal problem of our time. Ukraine is addressing it by further developing its national independence, building a civil society, protecting economic freedom, and inalienable human rights, proclaims our new Constitution. Hopefully, it is on this road that Ukraine will assert itself as a full-fledged member of the world community.
