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.” (St. Ivan Vyshensky of Athos, 1619)

This online journal is a compilation of the academic essays of Professor Matthew Raphael Johnson. Given 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 and globalization more generally. In 2009, Dr. Johnson created The Orthodox Nationalist, a well-known series of lectures on all facets of Russian Orthodox history and philosophy. Beginning in March of 2016, TON was reborn under the sponsorship of the Traditionalist Youth Network.

Johnson’s work centers around the delegitimization of the new, globalized capitalist system. This Leviathan is a demonic, serpentine dominion spreading the postmodern acid of American mass-zombification to the world. The neurotic American capitalist has “liberated the individual” so as to create the isolated mass-man, a crippled, malformed cipher largely incapable of higher-order thought. It is the “average American.”

In 1999, Dr. Johnson completed his doctorate at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln as a recipient of the Clare and Marguerite MacPhee Fellowship. He focused on anti-modernist social philosophy and defended his dissertation that detailed Michael Oakeshott’s critique of Positivism. 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, the famed renegade journal of European history.

Dr. Johnson is the author of seven books which include five from Hromada Books, including 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 and The Foreign Policy of Mass Society: The Failure of Western Engagement in the Middle East. And two published by The Barnes Review, The Third Rome: Holy Russia, Tsarism and Orthodoxy ; ; and Russian Populist: The Political Thought of Vladimir Putin. His latest book is also under Hromada Books, Officially Approved Dissent: Alasdair MacIntyre’s Strategic Ambiguity in His Critique of Modernity.

The Orthodox Nationalist Lecture Series Podcast

A New Page for Archived Broadcasts (2009-2012) is Now Available

Dr. Johnson’s Patreon page is now live. It features essays that will not be published anywhere else. Very soon, it might even feature videos on geopolitics and philosophy to subscribers. This will be an ongoing project dealing with all facets of international relations

Dr. Johnson, due to an ugly divorce he didn’t want, is now substantially in debt. Furthermore, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, the IRS has levied a considerable debt on him as well. Every dime raised from this site is used exclusively for research expenses or debt service. Dr. Johnson’s substantial and growing body of work was accomplished with no institutional support. The continued existence of his work is dependent on your generosity. He despises asking for money and didn’t even want us to put this section up, but in this case, it’s a humiliating necessity.