How the housing issue went bad and what to do about it

How to protect your home? Today in our country, in accordance with the decisions of those authorized to make such decisions by history itself, the answer to this question is clear. We must turn to our patron saint. A Grigory Revzin recommends everyone to contact him and explains why.

I was born on the day of remembrance of St. Gregory Dekapolit. He was a monk who lived at the end of the 8th – beginning of the 9th century in what is now Turkey. One uninteresting text is attributed to him about the conversion of a Saracen to Christianity, a miracle about the return to the moral state of a widow from Syracuse, but mainly he became famous for his ability to cast demons out of flies.

“Succeeding in deep humility and wanting to become a perfect monk, he asked the abbot for permission to settle in a solitary cell, so that, having no worldly cares, he could spend time in silence. The abbot, foreseeing his good will, gave him one cave in a deep vertical crevice for his exploits. And the saint began to struggle even more zealously in that cave. But, not embarrassed by human rumors, he suffered great anxiety here from demons, who in every possible way embittered and tempted him, trying to drive him out of their home. Either they threatened him, shouting “Get out of our home – otherwise you will suffer a lot from us,” then they rushed at him, taking the form of terrible flies. But he remained invulnerable and undaunted. When he stood in prayer, the demons bit his arms and legs; but he disdained the plagues inflicted on him, considering them as nothing, and the demons withdrew in disgrace.”

Then he traveled a lot, ended up in Constantinople, then in Italy, in Syracuse, fell from a ship in the port, but swam to the shore (this is also considered a miracle, although, in principle, people swim there now), then he went to Greece and showed miracles everywhere expelling flies. In accordance with his wishes upon death, he was buried on Mount Olympus.

Among the Christian saints there are several Gregori – Gregory of Neocaesarea, Gregory the Theologian, Pope Gregory the Great – with whom I would like to have as my patron and with whom, through ambition and foolishness, I once found common features. Who knows, with Christian saints it is not necessary that you were born right when they are commemorated, it can be somewhere nearby, a week back and forth does not matter. However, as knowledgeable Christians explained to me, if someone was born on the same day, there are no concessions for them. For me – only to Gregory Dekapolit. Not a philosopher, not a theologian, not an effective church manager, but a saint – a practitioner of flies. But what can you do?

Most of the practical specializations of saints involve tasks for which we turn to professionals. Saint Nicholas is the patron saint of sailors, Saints Cosmas and Damian are the patrons of metallurgists, Saint Panteleimon is the patron of doctors, Saint Omobonus is the patron of weavers, and Saint Tabitha is the patron of tailors, etc. Saint Gregory the Decapolis could deservedly be considered the patron of disinfestation, a very important area of ​​​​housekeeping, – Lives tell us that demons also appeared to him in the form of scorpions, and this is close to ticks, bedbugs, etc.

But here the question arises: did he cast out demons from flies or did he drive them away as is, along with the flies. I support the second point of view. Because there must be at least some grounds for glorification! Who needs flies, even without demons? Who would remember him from the 9th century if he cast out demons and left flies to buzz for the glory of heaven?

In general, for a long time I believed that it was a matter of flies – and it was precisely his miraculous ability to drive them out that he owed his fame, and whether there were demons in them or not, people didn’t even think about it. But it is not at all necessary to understand flies only in the literal sense, although this, of course, is important in the first place. Maximilian Voloshin had a famous article that muses (lat. Musa) are mice (lat. Mus), which is often considered pure falsification, but sometimes not entirely: Vladimir Nikolaevich Toporov at one time gave arguments in favor of such an understanding of the nature of creativity from the etymology of Indo-European languages, and also drew attention to the love of music in rats related to mice, as in the myth of the Pied Piper of Hamelin (in essence, the Pied Piper and rats are the same as Apollo and the muses). But I don’t understand why there aren’t flies (Latin Musca, Latvian Musa). Flies, no less than mice, could be the prototype of muses – they buzz and do not always arrive on time. It seems to me that Gregory Dekapolit could well see some connection between flies and muses. Why else would he, a Christian saint, demand to be buried on Olympus? It would be more correct, of course, on Parnassus, but I’m not saying that flies and muses are the same thing. It’s somewhere nearby. Of course, the question of whether all muses should be driven out of the house is quite controversial, but Clio should be wary. After all, when the muse of history enters the house, the house collapses.

Then it turned out that it was all about demons. Grigory Dashevsky opened my eyes when in 2010 he translated Rene Girard’s book “The Scapegoat” with a detailed interpretation of the miracle of Jesus about casting out demons from a possessed person. The demonic Savior drove the pigs into the herd, and they rushed from the mountain into the sea. It took place in Gadara, and Gadara is a city in Jordan, which was part of the Decapolis (Ten City), where St. Grigory. I believe that these could be the same demons, endemic, so to speak. In any case, they address Jesus and Gregory Decapolitus in a similar way. To Jesus: “And behold, they cried out: What have you to do with us, Jesus, Son of God? You came here ahead of time to torment us.” To Saint Gregory: “Get out of our home, otherwise you will suffer a lot from us.” Moreover, the Gadarians were not happy with the miracle of Jesus. “The inhabitants,” as Mark tells us (5:17), “began to ask him to depart from their borders.” And he complied with their request, got into the boat and sailed away from the Decapolis – and never visited there again. Meanwhile, the demons were not protesting against moving into pigs – it was important for them that Jesus would not expel them “from this country,” that is, from the Decapolis. One can even assume that while they were flying from the cliff, they switched from pigs to flies, which often accompany pigs, and could survive that way.

Girard’s idea concerns not this possible survival of demons (he believed that Jesus had finally resolved the issue with them), but what demons actually are. He believed that people learn to desire from other people – and desire the same thing that others have, but this is precisely what cannot be desired (“thou shalt not covet your neighbor’s wife, nor male or female slave, nor ox, nor donkey… .”), and hence violence and the regulation of violence by society. Demons are desires and desires of violence over desire that fly from person to person. That is, they are the basis of sociality as a mechanism for the production of desires and their suppression (violence). Hence the “inevitably demonic order of any society.”

What a deal! Why do we need philosophy, theology, effective management now? If Saint Gregory the Decapolis knew how to drive out all this, then, of course, we must turn to him.

A long time ago, at the end of the last century, my friend Mikhail Filippov wrote an essay about a St. Petersburg apartment. The conversation there was more about Paris, where people have breakfast, read, meet, and celebrate in restaurants, cafes, bars and clubs. But in pre-revolutionary St. Petersburg it was not like that, everything happened there in apartments – the whole city was in them, everything you needed from it. The whole world, the whole St. Petersburg myth is at your home. This was his ideal, he brought it to life – and not only him. At this time, luxury interiors magazines were filled with publications of apartments that included town squares, thermal baths and winter gardens. Soviet life was over, and there were people who, for some unknown reason, dreamed of a utopia of prosperity ahead. The utopia was realized door-to-door.

I can’t vouch for it, but, in my opinion, most of the people who turned their dreams into apartments no longer live in them. Mikhail Bulgakov has a fleeting character who sighed so loudly on the tram that everyone turned to look at him. I remember him often – on the tram, on the bus, in a taxi, on foot. Now I have strange travels around Moscow, I always come across abandoned houses of friends and acquaintances. Those windows, that entrance, that balcony. We broke up. Sold. Betrayed. We left. They fled. We barely escaped, we sat in the gorge for five days… But here, I remember… I don’t know where I went. This one died three years ago. And this one just happened. I feel uncomfortable in front of people – I sigh all the time.

It is strange that houses pretend to be a symbol of a long time. In an era of change, they are symbols of lost time. However, this is no longer Ancient China; the era of change differs little from the era of stability. Get the muse of history out of the house! Drive away the flies, drive away the demonic order of society! Drive them away, don’t let them in, they’re destroying the house! Saint Gregory will help you.

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