Revisiting Paul Kingsnorth's 2025 essay, 'California Son'
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| Hieromonk Seraphim Rose aat Platina, Bright Week 1981 |
Over at my still relatively new Substack, I have been posting more frequently about the Glorification process for Blessed Hieromonk Seraphim Rose.
Today I felt it would be helpful to share an April 2025 essay by author Paul Kingsnorth, who, as a recent convert to Orthodoxy, brings a fresh and even bold perspective on Father Seraphim.
Here is a section I feel represents the essay as a whole, while addressing some of the topics Father Seraphim wrote about which have made him so controversial in some quarters. The link to the full essay is at bottom:
Working by candlelight in his often-freezing wooden cell, Rose began to translate and then write his own books: God’s Revelation to the Human Heart, Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, The Soul After Death, and other works poured out of him. During the 1970s, with Russian communism in full force, these titles were produced in samizdat translations in the USSR, where many remain bestsellers today. In the West, meanwhile, Rose’s teachings and writings are growing in popularity—and in some cases, relevance. Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, for example, is a blistering examination of the role that digital technology and fashionable occultism will play in the coming of the Antichrist. In the age of WitchTok, and a burgeoning neo-paganism among the young and very online, it’s hard not to read it and shiver.
Writings like this made Rose a controversial figure in some quarters. Some of the claims he made in his books are argued over by theologians, and in some circles he is seen as an extremist or even a fanatic, for the ascetic lifestyle he insisted on leading, for his particular interpretations of Orthodox theology, and for his radical condemnations of what he regarded as the corrupt nature of modern society. In many ways, the criticism is understandable: Rose was a man driven to seek the truth at almost any cost to himself, and he brooked no compromise with a rapidly secularising world which likes its Christianity to be cosy and unthreatening. In the eyes of that world, his life and work do indeed seem extreme or even inexplicable—but then, so did the life of Jesus, and all of his apostles.
As Father Seraphim, he took literally Christ’s call to leave the world and head for the kingdom instead. In this, he may have been closer to historical Christianity, with its litany of martyrs, saints, and ragged desert fathers and mothers, than many of his comfortable critics. As the Orthodox scholar David Bentley-Hart has put it, “one thing in remarkably short supply in the New Testament is common sense. The Gospels, the epistles, Acts, Revelation—all of them are relentless torrents of exorbitance and extremism.” It is, in fact, precisely this lack of sensible, worldly “moderation” that has made Seraphim Rose an increasingly significant spiritual figure in modern America more than forty years after his untimely death.
Much more in the full essay…