Theoaesthetics

An Interview

The following is the recording of an interview conducted with me more than two and a half years ago by a member of the Theoaesthetics Institute in Moscow, now dissolved (since the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the subsequent clamp-down upon civil society). The interviewer took the photograph of me that appears below; I may look like I had been living in the forest for the past two years, nourished solely on acorns and mushrooms, but the truth is that I was simply curious to see how far my beard might go if I left it to its own devices. The conversation covered many topics—Orthodoxy in the West, Hell, theological aesthetics, to name a few—and it does definitely contain a few willful provocations.

One correction: At one point, not hearing myself it seems, I use the word “saṃnyāsa” when I mean to say “sākṣin.” I am desolate with shame.