Robert Collins, in Orthodox Baptism, Seraphim, is a humanities scholar located on what he calls the “fringes of academia.” He completed his MA in European history and Ph.D. in Russian history at Birkbeck, London, after which he sought and found the truth in Holy Orthodoxy. He is active in the pro-life movement in the UK—formerly as the head of fundraising at the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, and now at the Life charity, providing practical pregnancy support.
We spoke with Seraphim on how he found the Orthodox Church, and the narrow, monolithic world of academia, in which he intends to make a crack.
—Seraphim, thanks for visiting us. Before we delve into the topics of your work in the UK, tell a little bit about yourself, and how you became an Orthodox Christian.
Seraphim Collins, in Russia
The Church of the New Martyrs
In my youth, I was a very devout, traditionalist Catholic.
As I’m sure you know, the Catholic Church is almost in schism with itself at the moment. This has been the case since the Second Vatican Council. I was a traditionalist, going to the pre-Vatican II Roman Rite. I was confirmed as a teenager by Archbishop Lefebvre, the founder of the traditionalist Society of St Pius X, Then I went to university, and there I drifted away from the faith in general. I was basically a secular person most of my life after that, though I was still interested in culture, literature, traveling, and history. I drifted away from the faith, I stopped going to church, but I came back to Christianity through Russia. It’s a little emotional of me, but I disagree when people in England say to me that they wish we could just have the Church without being Russian, and suchlike. I love the Church Slavonic language. And I love the Russian language too. But mine was a very peculiar route.
About twelve years ago, I was very interested in the history of the Soviet Union. I eventually decided to do my master’s degree on the persecution of the Church under communism in the 1920s, and for this I travelled to the Odessa region of Ukraine.
I had been studying under the prominent British Sovietologist Professor Orlando Figes at Birkbeck [constituency of University of London]. Orlando told me to go to Odessa for research, because I would be able to get into the archives more easily than in Russia—and this was definitely true at the time. They just opened the doors and I could go and look at anything I wanted. And it was absolutely amazing. Also, Odessa is a Russian-speaking town, which made things easier. At the time, I wasn’t religious in any way at all.
In the research process, I became more and more interested in the faith—obviously, my subject was bound up with Christianity. So I was sitting in these dusty old archives pulling open drawers filled with hand-typed sheets, some half of which were in Ukrainian, so I had someone help me with translations. But most were in Russian. They would say amazing things like, “woman shot on the evidence of her own children,” and other such things. It was absolutely incredible; it was like a cloud of unknown witnesses. We always talk about unknown saints, and I could feel their presence in the archives. I would come out thinking, wow, this is the Church of New Martyrs, right here. It was very moving experience, and I actually started going to church. At first it was all very new to me, so I was hiding in the back of church, with someone saying, “don’t stand there!” and so forth.
Then I started going to a Catholic church in Odessa as well. I was there for a very long couple of months, and then I returned to the UK and started going back to the Latin mass as well as to Russian Orthodox churches, just standing at the back. This went on for many years. Eventually I joined the Russian Church, and was received into the church through ROCOR (the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia) at a church in the UK countryside.
I continued with my Ph.D., which was on the crisis in the Surouzh diocese. I originally wrote it as a book and published it through Routledge.
Also, I’ve just recently had an article published as a chapter another academic book about the situation in Ukraine, although my chapter is about historiography. It’s called “A Battle of Historiographies.” My original article was greatly edited in order to be published in that book.
Secularization, modernity, and “re-enchantment”
But my real interest throughout the last stages of my PhD and through writing this article is about something a bit less controversial, but more interesting for me. It is about the understanding of time and eternity in the East and West, how it has changed. There’s a lot of talk in secularization and modernity studies at the moment about ‘re-enchantment.” The history of modernity has one pivotal idea: How and why did secularization happen, and how did modernity happen? These are things that really fascinate me. Did modernity begin in the scholastic period, or did it start very early on with a different understanding of time?
In modernity, our understanding of time is a linear idea of bobbing along in time, while for the ancients there was a more cyclical idea of time. Christianity combined both, the cyclic-archetypal and the linear, and this schema also continues to some extent in Hegel and today’s secularized idea of progress. So I wanted people to talk about re-enchantment being about this false dichotomy between the transcendental and the immanent that the West had. The West prized the transcendental over the immanent, and thus produced the “banishment of God” as it is described by Yannaras.1
The world became completely fallen, and God was somewhere else. But in Orthodoxy it’s much more complicated than that. Here we have a kind of heavenly immanence. People don’t talk much about this. What has come about is what I would call the “disenchantment of time.” Time itself became secularized, and eternity was removed from it. You can see this in the way that even the liturgical side was simplified. People started going to church only on Sundays, and not every Sunday. It’s also reflected very practically, for example, in the way we treat the dead. Even the dead were physically banished from churches, and then they were banished completely from the town into cemeteries outside town. Earlier Christians would have been horrified to see this—it’s actually very pagan. The dead began to be considered as something else, having no place in our life; they were beyond anything. So, you can see that these ideas permeate the West, modernity, and secularization.
I think that they are false ideas. I don’t think we can go back, because it’s very hard to go back in history. There have been attempts in conservative movements, for example after the Napoleonic Wars, to go back—but they were never really successful, because you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube, as the saying goes. But I think that we can move forward and reincorporate some of these ideas into the West again, into what’s been lost.
—Do you have any colleagues who are of one mind with you, working on this same theme?
—Not so much. As I said, I’m on the fringes of academia, I’m not an academic. I am involved in the SOPHIE Conference, and so I talk to people there about it. But the world of academia in the UK is very narrow. It is much more wide open in Russia—there you can talk about such things.
My intention with my book was to create some cracks the monolith of academia.
This is all an alien idea in the West. There, in history, the idea of progress is still so embedded—that we are moving forward, and you’re either a progressive or you’re not. They have these ideas of “the right side of history” and “the wrong side of history,” which is a secularized Christian eschatology.
So, that’s why I say that I am on the fringes of academia. It’s partly because of my beliefs, and partly because if I were to be a full professor, I would have to be in a narrow stretch.
—So, here is an irony. If scholarship is supposed to be a search for the truth, and if Christ is Truth, and yet academics engage in all sorts of mental gymnastics in order to find the truth without Christ, then what are they worth? When did the search for truth become something almost resembling propaganda?
—You’re absolutely right. There isn’t room for that argument. It would put one out of a job. You could say the same actually of modernity and secularism, because all this started with scholasticism, which was so in awe of reason that it created a space where we can just reason, and God won’t look at us again. We’ll just do this little bit, but then, over time, God becomes subject to reason. And so we then get the five proofs of the existence of God in Thomas Aquinas.
We say, we haven’t proved that God exists. Just listen to God. We have to prove that You exist, God. So, you’re absolutely right that by its very nature, academia originally suffers from this problem…
—At least in Western academia.
—Yes. Because in Russia, there’s room for acknowledging the truth—the basic truths of Orthodox Christianity. But in the UK, there is room for very, few scholars who do this. Actually, I don’t know if it’s even still possible.
Tristram Engelhardt
Tristam Engelhardt —Tell us about the SOPHIE Conference.
—Do you know Tristram Engelhardt?2 He has since reposed, but he was a professor of philosophy at Texas University. He was originally a traditionalist Catholic, but became Orthodox in the late 90s, I think. He was also a medical doctor. He was a prolific writer; he founded a journal, and he wrote a lot about abortion and such things. He gathered around him a group of fellow thinkers, and many people were converted through meeting him.
And the SOPHIE conference in Europe is the “Society of Orthodox Philosophers in Europe.” In America, it’s SOPHIA, which stands for the “Society of Orthodox Philosophers in America.” The SOPHIA Conference was almost what you were saying, because it was almost anti-academia—although fairly big names from around the world attended it.
It has been held in Germany and in Switzerland, and Serbia as well; it’s generally held in a monastery. I’ve given papers at them. People come from Russia, from Romania, and other places. People come from academia, and there they can speak freely, which they can’t do in academia. You know, it was a kind of revelation to me when I first went there maybe ten years ago, because Tristam was still alive at the time.
When Tristam died, someone in Orthodoxy wrote a lovely obituary about him, because so many people came to the faith through him, perhaps 200 people. Many of them were just secular people, now they’re professors all over the world.
They called Tristam the “Apostle to the Academics.”
Some delegates and the 2023 SOPHIE conference.
—That makes sense, because you would have to be able to speak their language. If someone just comes in and starts missionizing academics, they’re just going to look down on him and say, you know, we really have no need to listen to you.
—Yes, but actually, Tristam did a bit more than. He was already a professor. His work was more like Jordan Peterson’s.
He was a Texan, and he would just get his gun out and say, you know, everyone here is wrong. He was a larger than life, so he managed to do that. But I always say to people that England is the most secular country in the world. It’s a kind of mental prison that you have to live in as an academic.
—In Russia, for example, you have the concept of a fool for Christ, who just blurts out the truth and everybody listens. But what would happen if someone just stood up like that in the British setting you are talking about?
—I’ll give you a couple of examples. I gave a paper at a huge inter-religious conference in Edinburgh, 2000 people. People would come up to me and talk to me. I talked about this concept of history [I had written about], which is a bit more neutral, but nevertheless people were a bit suspicious.
But people come up to me, as they do in the West and they just immediately start talking to me as if I believe what they believe—because they could just not imagine that one could be an academic and think differently about the situation in Ukraine, or homosexuality, or some LGBT or pro-life issues; that it’s not even possible you could have another view. So people would start talking to me and saying, why are all the Russians so obsessed with homosexuality? Can’t they just see it’s just normal? Why are they so crazy? So I chose to say something very mild, like, you know, this is a sin. The response: “A sin? Sin? Are you crazy?”
I also have a friend who is a full-time academic—I won’t say where she works or anything like that—but she’s Orthodox, and has written books. She is very strong, and quite strict, but she has managed to write as I did, in a kind of neutral way. And once the question of abortion came up just in conversation. People were saying that they’re trying to change a law or something [to lean more pro-life]. Her professor (director, or colleague) said to her, “Yes, what are we going to do? This is so crazy.” But he could see that my friend’s expression was slightly different, and the penny started to drop. He as if said, you don’t think… you’re not… You’re a woman… But this is medieval… It just can’t be…
—Is this a typically English thing? After all, Oxford and Cambridge began as Christian institutions, even monasteries.
I’m not sure, perhaps it’s a societal thing, and it’s impossible to avoid it.
—Seraphim, thanks. We’ll talk more about English society next time.
