Isabel Hapgood: an Anglican friend of Orthodoxy

 Today Isabel Florence Hapgood will be commemorated by American Episcopalians as a pioneering ecumenist. Among Orthodox Christians, some may recognize her as the translator of an Orthodox service book that is still widely used today. But I believe she should be better known among English-speaking Orthodox Christians and remembered with gratitude for her contributions to Orthodoxy.

Isabel was born in Boston in 1850 into a well-off family that believed girls should receive a good education. Early on, she displayed a remarkable linguistic talent. She spent her twenties mastering numerous languages, becoming fluent in, among others, French, German, Polish, Russian, and Church Slavonic. Unsurprisingly, she went on to become a professional translator, introducing many of the greats of Russian literature to an American audience. According to her obituary in the New York Times, she was ‘one of the few members of an honorable profession who succeeded in rising above the obscurity’ and who ‘raised the middleman’s craft in world literature to the level of art’.

But her interest in Russia and Orthodoxy went far beyond translation. In the 1880s, she began travelling regularly to Russia. After her first visit, she wrote a travelogue, Russian Rambles (1887), which debunked some of the myths then associated with travel in Russia. Her reputation as a translator opened doors for her, and she quickly built up an extensive network of Russian acquaintances and friends, including Leo Tolstoy (with whom she spent the summer of 1887) and members of the imperial family. Subsequently, she visited the country almost annually.

Her love for Orthodoxy and Russia found expression in practical ways. For example, she raised substantial amounts of money for Tolstoy’s efforts to ameliorate the Russian famine of 1891–92. She also helped to organize the music for the consecration of St Nicholas Cathedral in New York.

On one of her visits, she attended Vespers at St Sophia Cathedral in Kiev. That experience was what initially inspired her to translate the Liturgy into English. It was already the policy of the Russian Church to make English the language of the Church in America, so her plans were warmly supported by successive Russian Orthodox bishops in America and she became a lifelong friend of Patriarch Tikhon. Those plans came to fruition with the publication of a first edition in 1906. However, as she pointed out in the Preface, that Service Book was only a provisional effort, and she soon set to work on a revision.

She hoped that her Service Book would establish English as the liturgical language of the Orthodox diaspora in North America. But she also hoped that it would help other churches, particularly those of the Anglican Communion, to ‘a right understanding of the Holy Orthodox-Catholic Apostolic Church of the East’.

Her visits to Russia continued until 1917. Indeed, at the time of the October Revolution, she was in the country doing research for a history of Russian Orthodox music and was forced to escape via Vladivostock.

Unable to return to Russia, she nevertheless continued to serve as a foreign correspondent to The Nation and the New York Evening Post. She also contributed articles, news reports, and feature stories to various newspapers and magazines (including the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Weekly), interpreting Russian and European culture and literature to Americans.

Here is the Collect with which Episcopalians will today remember her:

Teach thy divided church, O God, to look upon one another with a holy envy, to see what is good and right in our separate traditions, and to continually seek the unity that thou desirest for all thy people. Grant that we, following the example of thy servant Isabel Florence Hapgood, may love our sisters and brothers in Christ unselfishly and labor generously for their wellbeing, seeking not our own good but the good of others. Through the same Christ our Lord, who didst pray that his church might be one. Amen.

While, as Orthodox, we cannot agree with the pick-and-mix approach to traditions suggested by the first sentence, we should surely be able to agree with the rest and say, ‘Grant, O Lord, eternal rest unto Thy departed servant Isabel and make her memory to be eternal!’

Well-being and attending to nature

The other day, I came across an interesting piece of research exploring the psychological impact of paying attention to the natural world. It is Whitney Fleming, Brian Rizowy, and Assaf Shwartz (2024) ‘The Nature Gaze: Eye-tracking Experiment Reveals Well-being Benefits Derived from Directing Visual Attention towards Elements of Nature’. People and Nature, 4 June 2024 (available at https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10648). Here is the abstract:

1. The urban lifestyle has a profound effect on mental health, contributing significantly to the challenges faced by people who reside in urban areas. Growing empirical evidence underscores the potential of nature to alleviate these mental health burdens. However, we still lack understanding of which specific natural elements provide these benefits.

2. Using eye-tracking technology, we experimentally explored the relationships between intentional visual attention to natural (green) and human-made (grey) elements in urban areas and their association with well-being measures. Participants took a 45-min outdoor walk that simulates a walk to and from work, in which we examined pre- and post- measures of cognition, affect, anxiety and perceived restorativeness. Participants were prompted to direct their attention to green, grey or a mixture of both elements. By analysing participants’ eye movements and patterns, we determined adherence to experimental conditions and related visual attention to natural elements.

3. The experimental groups instructed to direct their visual attention to green, grey or a mix of both infrastructures exhibited differences in negative and positive affect, anxiety and perceived restorativeness, but not in cognition after a walk in an urban environment.

4. The percentage of time spent viewing natural elements showed that people who focused more on green features reported a decrease in anxiety and higher perceived restorativeness. In contrast, those who spent more time viewing grey elements reported increased anxiety and lowered perceived restorativeness. The percentage of time viewing natural elements was not linked to affect or cognition. Viewing trees showed the strongest association with well-being measures compared to other natural elements.

5. Together, our results indicate that a simple behaviour change (directing visual attention to elements of nature instead of grey elements) can produce mental health benefits in the form of reducing anxiety and perceived restoration for people in urban areas. Thus, efforts to integrate nature, especially trees, in urban areas and promote city dwellers to visually interact with it during their daily routine can improve mental issues associated with urban lifestyle.

Against natural theology

Natural theology, at least as traditionally understood, seeks to prove the existence of God (and possibly give an account of some divine attributes) solely by drawing on evidence from the world around us. A classic example would be Thomas Aquinas’s five ways.

Of course, not all Christians would approve of such a rationalistic approach to theology. In particular, many Eastern Orthodox theologians have questioned the value and validity of such an approach.

The other day, I came across a useful summary rejection of natural theology from the pen of St Gregory Palamas. Interestingly, Palamas (who was no fan of Aquinas) does not attack Aquinas directly but looks instead at the pagan Hellenistic roots of natural theology:

By examining the nature of sensible things, these people have arrived at a certain concept of God, but not at a concept truly worthy of Him and appropriate to His blessed nature. . . . For if a worthy conception of God could be attained through the use of intellection, how could these people have taken the demons for gods, and how could they have believed the demons when they taught man polytheism? In this way, wrapped up in this mindless and foolish wisdom and unenlightened education, they have calumniated both God and nature. They have deprived God of His sovereignty (at least as far as they are concerned); they have ascribed the Divine Name to demons; and they were so far from finding the knowledge of beings – the object of their desire and zeal – as to claim that inanimate things have a soul and participate in a soul superior to our own. They also allege that things without reason are reasonable, since capable of receiving a human soul . . . they have classed among things uncreated and unoriginate and coeternal with God, not only matter, and what they call the World Soul, but also those intelligible beings not clothed in the opacity of the body, and even our souls themselves. (The Triads I.i.18)

God works around human freedom

The other day, I came across an interesting quotation from St John Chrysostom. He is trying to make sense of the disagreement between St Paul and St Barnabas over whether or not to reinstate John Mark as a companion on their missionary travels. And he says,

In many things they acted upon their human judgment, for they were not sticks or stones. (Homily 34 on Acts 15)

His point is that even the apostles did not have a reliable understanding of God’s will for their lives. This contrasts sharply with the determinism that has crept into some expressions of Christianity (via Augustinianism and Calvinism).

The aftermath of this blazing row between Paul and Barnabas is that they go their separate ways: Barnabas takes Mark with him to Cyprus, while Paul sets off for Syria and Cilicia with Silas. But as Chrysostom points out, this disagreement, far from hindering the Church’s mission, actually serves to spread the gospel.

We are not pawns pushed around on the chessboard of life by God. And our failures and sins certainly do not condemn us living God’s second best for us (a view that is regrettably only too common among evangelicals and charismatics). On the contrary, God adapts to our foibles and inexorably draws the cosmos towards its eschatological fulfilment. If you fancy a musical metaphor, think of God as the leader of a jazz ensemble rather than the conductor of a symphony orchestra.

Salvation and the Church

St Cyprian of Carthage notoriously remarked that ‘outside the Church there is no salvation’ (Ep. 72). This has often been misinterpreted to mean that only those who are visibly within the institutional Church are saved. But as St Augustine said of the Church of his day, ‘How many sheep there are without, how many wolves within!’ (Homilies on John 45.12).

It is not our visible membership of a human institution that determines our salvation, but the nature of our relationship with Jesus Christ. However, this does not mean (as some today suggest) that membership of a local Christian community is somehow irrelevant. The Greek theologian, Christos Yannaras, spells out why participation in the worshipping life of the Church is a vital part of the process of salvation:

The liturgy of the Church is not simply an expression of religious worship, but the core and sum of her life and truth, of her faith and ethics. The life and truth the Church, her faith and her ethos are a liturgy, an organic function of a unified body which receives man in order to save him, to make him whole and restore him to the fulness of his existential possibilities as a person: ‘What shall the receiving of them be, but life from the dead?’ (Rom. 11:15). (The Freedom of Morality, p. 85)