An icon of dialogic courage: response to the absurd of the unity of contraries

ABSTRACT

To those who find genuine dialogue embracing difference nearly impossible in an atmosphere of hate and violent polarization, Martin Buber’s notion of the “unity of contraries” can seem absurd. In response, this article contends that the unity-of-contraries approach requires dialogic courage. This article explores the connections between the unity of contraries, the absurd, and dialogic courage through the case study of Mother Catherine Abrikosova and the Russian Dominican Catholic community she founded amid twentieth century Soviet persecution of Catholics. Her heroic communicative response to the absurdity of Soviet censorship, religious intolerance, and violence was informed by a unity-of-contraries identity that flourished rather than decayed as a result of radical difference. Together with the coordinates of Alasdair MacIntyre’s notion of networks of giving and receiving and Ronald C. Arnett’s concept of tenacious hope, dialogic courage is proposed as an essential communicative orientation for the current historical moment.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ The other five include Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Mikhail Bakhtin (Anderson, Baxter, & Cissna, 2004), as well as Paulo Freire and Hannah Arendt (Arnett et al., 2018).

² Buber (1966) also addresses the differences between monologue, technical dialogue, and genuine dialogue.

³ The unity of contraries threads through many of Arnett’s works (Arnett, 1986; Arnett, Arneson, & Bell, 2006, p. 9, 11; Arnett et al., 2006, p. 83; Arnett, 2010, p. 222, 2015, 2020a, p. 14; 2022).

⁴ Historian and Byzantine Catholic priest Christopher L. Zugger notes, “Although literature about the atrocities of the Nazis and other right-wing totalitarian dictatorships between 1933 and 1945 abounds, the Soviet atrocities, which lasted from 1917 to 1991, have garnered nowhere near as much interest” (2001, p. xvii).

⁵ Gulag stands for Glavnoe Upravlenie Lagerei (Main Camp Administration) and refers to the entire system of Soviet slave labor, which includes internment camps, arrests, interrogations, transport in unheated cattle cars, forced labor, destruction of families, exile, and death (Applebaum, 2003, p. xv). Approximately 18 million people passed through the Gulag, fueling the Union’s economy in multiple industries. The existence of the Gulag was denied by Soviets until the initiation of its dissolution in 1987 (Osipova, 2014). The effects of the Gulag still linger today in relations between Russia, Europe, and the United States.

⁶ For biographies of over 1,900 Catholics who experienced the Gulag, see Book of Remembrance: Biographies of Catholic Clergy and Laity Repressed in the Soviet Union (USSR) from 1918 to 1953 (University of Notre Dame, n.d.–b). See also Irina Ivanovna Osipova’s In Your Wounds Hide Me (1996). In 1998, this work was publicized with a warning “that further work was unlikely to be allowed on Soviet secret police archives, adding that [Osipova] had already been barred from continuing her ‘unique research’” (Luxmoore, 1998). On December 29, 2021, the Memorial Human Rights Center in Moscow, hosting this research, was shut down by the Moscow City Court (Voice of America, 2022).

⁷ Though married priesthood has remained a tradition in Eastern Catholicism, Vladimir and Anna followed the rare practice of taking vows of celibacy after being married, described as a “Josephite marriage” in reference to Jesus’s parents, Joseph and Mary. The couple made religious professions in Rome in 1913 (Swift, 1986, p. 29). Father Vladimir was arrested on August 17, 1922, and sentenced to perpetual banishment, eventually settling in Rome until his death in 1966. Mother Catherine and Father Vladimir maintained correspondence through letters until Mother Catherine’s death in 1936.

⁸ Since 1721, Russian Catholics have been persecuted by czars and the Orthodox Church (Osipova, 2014). Zugger explains that “the Bolsheviks inherited a relationship [with Catholicism] based on misunderstandings and a lack of trust … The intolerance arose primarily from policies fundamental to the tsarist and Soviet empires and from a distortion of Christian history, a distortion maintained by tsars, commissars, and Orthodox bishops alike” (p. 7). He suggests that a “clash between the policies of the empire and the goals of the Catholic Church was inevitable” (2001, pp. 8–9).

⁹ Swift acknowledges “No religious community on earth is ever without some faults or problems. Certainly Anna Abrikosov’s group in Moscow had its share. The most zealous souls can be the cause of suffering to others; for the sake of the greater good, religious life can demand the most unexpected sacrifices” (1986, p. 32).

¹⁰ MacIntyre’s most famous texts include After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (1981), Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), and Three Rival Versions of Moral Inquiry: Encyclopedia, Geneaology, and Tradition (1990). MacIntyre’s work finds frequent engagement in the study of communication (Arnett, 1994, 2022, Arnett, in press; Hannan, 2012, 2019; Fritz, 2020).

¹¹ The case for her beautification in the Catholic Church was opened on May 31, 2005 (University of Notre Dame, n.d.–a), and her reflections on The Seven Last Words of Our Lord upon the Cross were published in 2019. Her story is also portrayed in the documentary The Fate of Anna Abrikosova: Vow of Sacrifice (Domus Patris, n.d.).

¹² Ng explains that the original intent of cancel practices was to empower minority voices excluded from the public sphere to resist silencing. The term “canceled” marked a response to instances of “sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, racism, bullying, and related issues” (Ng, 2020, p. 623).