The Russian Orthodox Medievalist

“There is not a place left which is free of the disease of sin, all is an ulcer, all a wound, a swelling, all is putrefying, all is hellfire, all is sickness, all is sin, all is a lie, all is deceit, all is cunning, all is treachery, all is guile, all is falsehood, all is illusion, all is a dream, all is vapor, all is smoke, all is bustle, all is vanity, all is delusion.” (Ivan Vyshensky of Athos, 1619)

This online journal is a forum for some recent academic essays by Professor Matthew Raphael Johnson. Given current events in eastern Ukraine and Russia’s extraordinary rebuke to American liberal arrogance, revisionist work on Russian history is sorely needed. He was the first among English speaking Orthodox writers to understand Putin as a needed balance to the American empire. This postmodern imperium, headquartered in the US, is a demonic, serpentine dominion that spreads the postmodern acid of American mass-zombification to the world. It is Antichrist.

The Soviet empire was malignant, but what replaced it in the 1990s was worse. The Russia that survived Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin almost disappeared under liberalism. Liberal rule is more insidious and sophisticated than the USSR because it is not based on state power. Instead, it is based on the rule of private capital. The cosmopolitan and neurotic American capitalist seeks to “liberate the individual” so as to more easily enslave him to his passions. Then, this isolated mass-man — this crippled, malformed cipher of a human being — is offered the satisfaction of his passions for a fee.

From 2009 to 2012, Dr. Johnson created The Orthodox Nationalist, a series of lectures on all facets of Russian Orthodox history and philosophy. He was soon shocked to learn that it was the most accessed podcast on the old Voice of Reason network and became very influential in Russian nationalist and Orthodox circles. Beginning in March of 2016, TON was reborn under the sponsorship of the Traditionalist Youth Network. Dr. Johnson would like to thank Matthew Heimbach and DM Parrot for their generosity in supporting this project and hosting this website.
The most recent podcasts are available by clicking the icon below:

Donations are gladly accepted. Dr. Johnson, due to an ugly divorce he did not want, is now substantially in debt. He begs your assistance. Every dime raised is used exclusively for research expenses or debt service. Unfortunately, he does not have an army of grad assistants at his beck and call. It is rarely remarked that the large number of undergraduate papers that cross a professor’s desk represents quite a bit of free research. The professor is under no legal obligation to disclose its source and can assign papers that conveniently serve his research needs. Add to this department secretaries, “personal assistants” and graduate students, the professoriate is a privileged job like no other. Dr. Johnson’s substantial body of work was done with no institutional support.

Matthew Raphael Johnson is a scholar of Russian Orthodox history and philosophy. His research agenda centers around ethnic nationalism, Eurasianism and the Orthodox tradition as forms of rebellion against globalism. He has recently completed a lengthy book on the history of Ukrainian political thought from Mazepa to the present. Now, he is in the midst of a substantial book on nominalism and its condemnation by Patristic and Platonic authors.

He completed his doctorate at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln in 1999 as a recipient of the Sennen, as well as the Clare and Marguerite MacPhee Fellowships, focusing on anti-modernist social philosophy. His dissertation details Michael Oakeshott’s critique of Positivism. The central philosophical thesis running through all his philosophical work is that nominalism is the root ontological evil. It lies at the foundation of the 20th century and it is termed by Johnson as “the ontology of death.”

He is a former professor of both history and political science at the University of Nebraska (as a graduate student), Penn State University and Mount St. Mary’s University. Since 1999, he has been the editor (and is presently Senior Researcher) at The Barnes Review, a well-known renegade journal of European history. In addition, he continues to translate, write, teach and lecture in defense of the Russian Orthodox monarchist and nationalist social vision. His idiosyncratic non-conformity is many things, but unoriginal is never, ever one of them. The massive increase in writing on Russian politics over the last few years has granted him the honor of being one the most plagiarized men on the internet.

On July 28 2016, Andrew Carrington Hitchcock in London interviewed Dr. Johnson on his personal biography and background. Not comfortable with talking about himself, Dr. Johnson accepted this request for the sake of better understanding the origin of his political point of view. It also gave him the opportunity to thank the many people involved in his education. Hitchcock, in Johnson’s opinion, is one of the best and most interesting radio personalities in the west. This interview sheds a great amount of light on how this Irishman from suburban New Jersey became one of the most literate, albeit idiosyncratic, advocates of Russian Orthodox nationalism in the English-speaking world.

Dr. Johnson is the author of several books, the newest being The Foreign Policy of Mass Society: The Failure of Western Engagement in the Islamic World. His other books include Sobornosti: Essays on the Old Faith; Heavenly Serbia and the Medieval Idea; Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality: Lectures on Medieval Russia; The Ancient Orthodox Tradition in Russian Literature ; The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism and Orthodoxy ; and Russian Populist: The Political Thought of Vladimir Putin.

The first five of these books have been brought under Hromada Books, a new publishing house, using Lulu Inc. as a binder and retail intermediary. His author spotlight has been recently revised and book prices lowered. University students are mercilessly exploited by academics whose six figure salary is apparently insufficient for them. Students spend an average of $1168 on books and materials per semester. Worse, academics use graduate student serfs to change a few semicolons and then put the book out as a “new edition,” rendering the previous edition impossible to return. Students then must buy the new edition for each following semester, making buying used versions impossible. This is from an academic class that condemns “economic self seeking” on a daily basis.