“To make empirical reality the flowering of the Truth” — Manuel Sarkisyants on the fundamental goal of Russian thought in his Russia and Messianism.^[1]

“Pharoah is a man of large spiritual reservoir. He’s always trying to reach out to truth” — John Coltrane explaining why he included tenor saxophonist Pharoah Sanders into his music.^[2]

Introduction

I would like to suggest that the attraction of America’s greatest musician, the extraordinary jazz saxophonist John Coltrane, is gaining increasing traction in Russia not just by dint of the greater space taken by jazz in Russia’s musical culture after the Cold War but because of the spirituality or religiosity, an aspiration to wholeness or, in Russian, ‘tselostnost’’ of various kinds, and transcendentalism expressed in Coltrane’s music and life philosophy, which resonate with such elements in Russian thought and culture.

These qualities have long been impressed on many an American mind since Coltrane’s transformation of jazz and music beginning in the 1960s. American jazz critic Gary Giddins once said: “John Coltrane’s music takes you out of the conventional world,” and “When he died, it was like reading a mystery thriller and the last chapter had been torn out. Where in the hell was he going? Clearly, there was a greater and greater accent on a kind of religious, cosmic, thematic undercurrent.”^[3]

This ‘accent’ was more than an ‘undercurrent.’ Coltrane’s pianist in the classic quartet, the monumental pianist of Coltrane’s classic quartet, the similarly religious McCoy Tyner, spoke of Coltrane helping people to “see the light.”^[4]Successor to Coltrane’s spiritual approach to jazz and life, his second wifeAlice Coltrane, who was part of Coltrane’s post-classic quartet groups and orchestras, relays that Coltrane “talked about cosmic sounds, higher dimensions, astral levels and other worlds, and realms of music and sound that I could feel.”^[5] His band members were as if apostles to their leader. In an article preceding an interview with Coltrane French music critic Jean Clouzet repeats a comment about the Trane “building a ‘cathedral.’”^[6] Perhaps not surprisingly then, Coltrane inspired the foundation of a church, the Orthodox Church of John Coltrane, located in San Francisco.^[7] The church’s leader describes the first time he heard Coltrane in person: “It was as though he was speaking in tongues and there was fire coming from heaven — a sound baptism… That began the evolutionary, transitional process of us becoming truly born-again believers in that anointed sound that leaped down from the tone of heaven out of the very mind of God, stepped from the very wall of creation and took on a gob of flesh, and we beheld his beauty as one that was called John.” For the John Coltrane Orthodox Church, the magical saxophonist is “more than a saint.”^[8]

To be sure, Coltrane was on a religious quest in both his music and life, and music was his life. Beginning in the early 1960s until his untimely death in July 1967, he lived almost as a monk, almost all of his time spent reaching out to God through devotion to music as prayer to a non-sectarian God. Also, Coltrane’s search was a product of what those who knew him best describe as his nearly divine personality. The great polyrhythmic drummer in his ‘classic quartet’, Elvin Jones, said of Coltrane: He was like an angel on earth. He struck me that deeply. This is not an ordinary person, and I am enough of a believer to think very seriously about that.” Coltrane, Jones said, “put spiritual content into everything he did”, and this was “(s)omething everyone could recognize.”^[9] Swedish journalist Bjorn Fremer also described Coltrane as “like an angel.”^[10] McCoy Turner spoke of “spiritual feelings” between the members of the quartet and said that playing with him was “a spiritual experience every night.”^[11] The quartet’s members reminisce about their deceased leader as if apostles or followers of some religious teacher or saint.

Coltrane’s humble nature – a saintly characteristic in the Russian Orthodox tradition as discussed further below – would have led him to be embarrassed by such worship, but the spiritual phenomenon noted by fellow musicians as well as listeners time and time again and similar if more moderate transformations demonstrates that his goal of inspiring spirituality and devotion to God clearly had a powerful effect on hundreds of thousands in his homeland, speaking to some sort of spiritual aspect in his work.

So why not in Russia and elsewhere? Indeed, it might have been predicted that once the hyper-rationalistic, materialistic communist experiment collapsed in the Soviet Union, Russia would rediscover its religious roots in Russian Orthodox Christianity and its spiritual legacy in other spheres and eagerly imbibe those of other cultures from across the globe, particularly given the world’s greater interconnectedness and Russia’s own universalist responsiveness (obzyvchivost’) as Russia’s most honored poet, the half-African Aleksandr Pushkin intoned. And so it has. A powerful foreign seeker of the spirit such as Coltrane – a truth-seeker or ‘God-seeker’ in twilight Imperial Russian Silver Age religious-philosophical terms – therefore indeed should have broken more forcefully into Russian culture or Russian thinkers’ discourse at least about jazz and music if not creativity, spirituality and much more. And so he has.

Of course, some Russian reactions to, and commentaries on Coltrane’s work are rather aesthetic, even functional in orientation, focusing mostly on the artistic beauty and genius of his music and the enormous technical facility and playing energy of the greatest of all saxophonists. For example, in a lecture at Philharmonic Society of St. Petersburg Society Vladimir Feyertag offered high praise: “For those who play the saxophone Coltrane is the main icon, because he discovered all the possibilities for how to use this instrument.”^[12] Other Russian commentary similarly give secondary, even tertiary place to the religious aspects and spiritual power of Coltrane’s creations. While addressing the latter in his lectures, Kirill Gladkov leads with Coltrane’s musical genius and discoveries, noting: “Coltrane notonly achieved maximum possibilities in improvisational technique, but also made a ‘breakthrough’ inthe field of new expressive possibilities of the instrument.”^[13] However, for most Russian thinkers who have addressed Coltrane and his music, the admiration and kinship are driven by far more than the great Coltrane’s incredible musical prowess. In this article, I hypothesize that Coltrane has entered the post-Soviet Russian universe and most often precisely because of several spiritual and religio-philosophical elements expressed in his music and worldview.

Russian Responsiveness to Coltrane’s Spiritualism

The weight of Russian thought and admiration for Coltrane and his work emphasizes the spiritual aspect and magnitude of his music and, to some extent, his philosophy of music, life, and humanity’s fate. This corresponded nicely with the Russian attraction to spiritual aspects of life and existence, rooted in good part in its Russian Christian Orthodox traditions and its manifold offshoots, and its thinkers’ nearly obsessive concern for humankind’s fate and salvation.

The Russian Jazz Academy notes: “More than half a century has passed since the death of saxophonist John Coltrane, and no figures of comparable scale have yet been born. Throughout these decades, the pinnacle achievements in jazz improvisation were often measured by the degree of approximation to Coltrane’s level, and not only in playing technique, as it sometimes seems to young musicians — although Coltrane raised the technique of playing the saxophone to unprecedented heights. It’s about the spiritual level, about the ‘extra—musical’ content that cannot be reflected in musical notation, about the mystery that makes music – music, the highest manifestation of the human spirit, and not just an ordered set of sounds.”^[14]

Jazz scholar Leonid Auskern, writing in Russia’s journal Jazz-Kvadrat (Jazz Quartet), elaborates: “The ocean is vast, multifaceted, and changeable. Describing the ocean, it is difficult, almost impossible, to cover all forms of manifestation of its vital activity. A hydrologist will talk about water, a navigator will talk about currents and reefs, an ichthyologist will talk about fish, an artist will talk about colors, and so on. John Coltrane is the Ocean.”^[15]

A Russian blogger notes: “John Coltrane is a musician of incredibly spiritual power; a man who decidedto know God and Truth through His Majesty Sound, through his own Creation of this most divine sound.And now, listening to his 1964 studio album ‘Crescent’ for the umpteenth time, I’m plunging intonirvana over and over again, in an amazing, exalted state, as if Someone Supreme and Incomprehensibleis talking to you.”^[16] The Russian jazz website ‘Jazzpeople.ru’ calls Coltrane the “Holy Saxophonist.”^[17] Russian jazz lecturer Kirill Gladkov dubs Coltrane the “High Priest of the Jazz Avantgarde.”^[18]

The spiritual compatibility between Coltrane and Russia’s greatest thinkers runs deep, because there is a deep compatibility between Russian thinkers’ and Coltrane’s own spiritual quest. While Dostoevskii delved deeply into the dark mind of humanity and revolutionary utopian aspirations to expose them as the antithesis of the divine, good, truth, and beauty, Coltrane’s music enters the soul and seeks to transform it towards the divine, washing it in beauty. Dostoevskii’s focus on beauty is an offshoot of his and, many would say, his countrymen’s preference for the spiritual over the material, feeling over thinking. Coltrane’s focus on the beauty in music similarly reflects the prioritization of the spiritual over the material. The former, Dostoevskii’s, is the result of Russia’s roots in Orthodox Christianity, which combines beauty with divinity, and of Coltrane’s both Christian and universalistic search for beauty, truth, the good and God. The latter, Coltrane’s, is a search with Christian roots and reminiscent of the late 19^th-early 20^th century religious and philosophical movement within the Russian Religious renaissance, the God-seeking movement. For Coltrane came to see beauty, particularly in the form of music, as having healing qualities for the soul and humankind, uniting them and in turn them with God.

Whether playing post-bop, Miles Davis’s cool, or smoking hot jazz in the 1950s, his innovations on hardbop in the late 1950s and early 1960s, free jazz, or his spiritual jazz, represented most astoundingly in his monumental ‘A Love Supreme’, John Coltrane shook the soul and the music world and can be regarded as perhaps America’s greatest musical genius. However, in the early and mid-1950s Coltrane was struggling with alcoholism, drug and cigarette addiction, which complicated his relations with Miles Davis, under whose leadership the saxophonist as a force in jazz. After leaving Davis’s famous quintet and immersed in personal crisis, Coltrane said he turned to God to help him make the world happy and even save the world. So he abandoned these vices and strove to purify himself.

From the late 1950s, therefore, Coltrane’s music took a decidedly religious turn following a spiritual awakening that led him to devote his music to God and the betterment of humankind—to save the world. In some sense, this awakening was a religious return or reawakening, since he was brought up in a deeply Christian atmosphere of black North Carolina and both his grandfathers were pastors. In the liner notes of his 1965 magnum opus, ‘A Love Supreme’, Coltrane references his 1957 spiritual awakening: “(B)y the grace of God, a spiritual awakening which was to lead me to a richer, fuller, more productive life. At that time, in gratitude, I humbly asked to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music. I feel this has been granted through His grace. ALL PRAISE TO GOD”.^[19] Coltrane would move beyond the goal of ‘merely’ making people happy, and his search for God would resonate in America, Russia, and beyond. Coltrane’s and Russian religio-philosophic discourse – something that bleeds into the general culture through the Orthodox faith and the spiritual place the arts hold in Russian culture – are compatible in the emphasis they place on artistic beauty and the divine nature of beauty.

Omorphialism: Beauty Will Save the World

Coltrane’s pursuit of beauty in the name of God and humankind resonates with a powerful strand in Russian religious, philosophical, and literary discourse. Russia’s most popular quintessential Christian Orthodox writer, Fyodor Dostoevskii, wrote in a letter: “Christ – 1) beauty, 2) none better…”^[20] And, of course, for Dostoevskii, Christ is to save the world. Coltrane wrote in A Love Supreme’s ‘Psalm’: “God is beautiful.”^[21] Dostoevskii’s soteriological sense about beauty was a consequence of his deep Russian Orthodox faith. He is said to have stood in the corner of a church in glorious St. Petersburg during services crying over the crucifixion of Christ. The Eastern and Russian Orthodox traditions attribute to beauty a divine quality. Indeed, Russians are said to have been drawn to Eastern Orthodoxy rather than Catholicism, Islam, or Judaism by dint of the beauty of Constantinople’s Orthodox churches, including their musical splendor — “by the aesthetic appeal of its liturgy, not the rational shape of its theology,” according to the great historian of Russian culture, James H. Billington.^[22]

Sights, sounds, even fragrances concocted a dizzying sensual experience that enticed the Russian, with musical beauty holding a special place in the liturgy: “Just as the icon was but one element in the pictorial culture that included the fresco, the illuminated holy text, and the illustrated chronicle, so the bell was only part of a torrent of sound provided by interminable chanted church services, popular hymns and ballads, and the secular improvisations of folk singers armed with a variety of stringed instruments. Sights and sounds pointed the way to God, not philosophical speculation or literary subtlety.”^[23] Thus, music’s role was essential: “There was a hypnotic quality to the cadences of the church chant; and the hollow vaselike indentations (golosniki) in the early Kievan churches produced a lingering resonance which obscured the meaning but deepened the impact of the sung liturgy.”^[24]Similarly, the Orthodox Church’s bell traditions raised the people toward God: “The exalted ‘rejoicing of the (blagovestie) of the bells used an overlapping series of sounds similar to that which was used in the many-voiced church chant-producing an effect that was at the same time cacophonous and hypnotic. … The forging and ringing of bells was a sacramental act in Muscovy.”^[25] Thus, not just beauty in general but music – the ‘lingering resonance’ of the chanted prayer and the simultaneous ringing of numerous bells — was a key element of beauty drawing Russians to their new religion, to God. Coltrane similarly sought God through ‘torrents of sound’ (called by jazz commentators ‘sheets of sound’ referring to his use of rapid runs and overtones), ‘overlapping series of sounds,’ and tones that were simultaneously both ‘cacophonous and hypnotic.’

In Russian theological and philosophical discourse, beauty, together with good and truth, is seen as emanating from God and the Divine and united in the Russian Orthodox tradition. Recently, a group of Russian scholars dedicated an entire monograph to the unity of good, truth, and beauty in the Russian religio-philosophical tradition.^[26] From the Eastern Orthodox-venerated 1^st century ‘holy father’ Dionysius Areopagite (converted by St. Paul in Athens and one of the seventy Apostles) to the great 14^th century Russian Orthodox missionary St. Sergii Radonezh to the 16^th century’s Iosif Volotskii or Joseph of Volokolamsk, a prominent Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) theologian and early ideologist of tsarist autocracy, who led the ROC faction of ‘possessors’ defending monastic landownership in the dispute with the non-possessors (nestazhateli)] to Volotskii’s theological opponent and the non-possessors’ leading light, Nils Sorskii, to Dostoevskii to the numerous late Imperial and Silver Age religious philosophers from to many post-Soviet Russian thinkers – Russian religious teachers have seen Beauty as a reflection, if not an act of God and the divine.^[27]

For perhaps Russia’s greatest religious philosopher, Vladimir Solovev (1853-1900), the three absolutes – good, truth, and beauty – were integrated, filled in their entirety by love. “Good is the unity of everything or all.” “Truth is the same as love, i.e. the unity of everything, but already being objectively represented as an ideal unity. Finally, beauty is that same love (that is, the unity of all), but manifested or tangible—this is real unity. In other words, the good is unity in positive possibility, strength, or power (accordingly, the divine will can be designated as an immediately creative or powerful principle), truth is the same unity as necessary (unity), and beauty – it is as real (unity).”^[28]For another religious philosopher Father Pavel Florenskii (1882-1937), discussed in more detail below, Truth, Good, and Beauty were metaphysically one process, originating from one source: God.^[29] The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevskii thought Beauty in the form of Christ will save the world. As we shall see in several places below, Coltrane also saw beauty in music to be much like divine love, as a ‘force for good’ and the unification of the universe.

Coltrane, a Christian who was interested in philosophy at the beginning of his musical life, shares Christian roots and its soteriological aspirations with Russians. This commonality forms a key foundation for Russians’ attraction to Coltrane. Coltrane’s first religious spark that music could be offered to “make others happy” was the kernel of his eventual belief that music – beauty – could change, if not save the world. He noted in a 1966 interview that “music is an instrument. It can create the initial, just, the thought patterns, that can create the changes, you see, in the thinking of the people.”^[30]Thus, in both the Russians’ and Coltrane’s religious world there was a common devotion to ‘omorphialism’ or a belief in the value of beauty, including musical beauty, as divine element that can heal, better and purify humankind.

Coltrane expressed his belief that beauty could improve, save, and/or unite the world numerous times. He noted in one interview, he wanted “to produce beautiful music, music that does things to people that they need. Music that will uplift and make them happy.”^[31] In a later interview, he noted: “It’s more than beauty that I feel in music—that I think musicians feel in music. What we know we feel we’d like to convey to the listener. … But, overall, I think the main thing a musician would like to do is give a picture to the listener of the many wonderful things he knows of and senses in the universe. That’s what music is to me—it’s just another way of saying this is a big, beautiful universe we live in, that’s been given to us, and here’s an example of just how magnificent and encompassing it is. That’s what I would like to do.”^[32] In another he expressed again his desire to uplift people by way of music: “To inspire them to realize more and more of their capabilities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning in life. … There is never any end. There are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always, there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are. In that way, we can give to those who listen the essence, the best of what we are. But to do that at each stage, we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.”^[33]

And just as Russian thinkers have seen unity between good, beauty, and the truth, we find them united in Coltrane’s philosophical proclamations. A year before his untimely death, Coltrane noted: “I want to be a force for real good. I know that there are bad forces. You know, I know there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be a force that is truly for good.”^[34] And early on, even before his spiritual reawakening, he talked of his own developing interest in philosophy and his and other jazz musicians’ search for the truth: “I think the majority of musicians are interested in truth…because a thing, a musical thing is a truth. If you play and make a statement, a musical statement, and it’s a valid statement, that’s a truth right there in itself…, and all the musicians are striving to get as near perfection as they can get. That’s truth there, you know. So in order to play those kind of things, to play truth, you’ve got to live with as much truth as you possibly can, you know.”^[35] Later, in 1965, he noted that he would “continue to look for truth in music as I see it, and I’ll draw on all the sources of music I can, all the areas of music, all the things there are in the world around us to inspire me.”^[36] Playing music is devoted to creating beauty as well as well as truth in support of the ‘force for good,’ so Good, Beauty, and Truth are united in Coltrane as they are in Russian intellectual, especially religious and religious-philosophical discourse.

One of many examples from Russian discourse is found in God-seeker, Father Pavel Florenskii, who emphasized the “Light of the Truth” as evidence of the divine in various miracles. He devoted an entire chapter or ‘Letter’ to this subject in his groundbreaking philosophical-theological work The Pillar and the Ground of Truth (Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny).^[37]The light of truth is like Coltrane’s Truth and Beauty, shining a light into men’s souls to bring good. But Coltrane’s search for Good, Beauty, and Truth comprise just one of many links between Russian thinkers and Coltrane. A hint can be gleaned from Coltrane’s reference noted above to ‘all the sources of music, all the areas of music, all the things there are in the world around us.’

Coltrane and the Russian God-Seekers

Coltrane’s search for truth and beauty quickly evolved into a search for God, various forms of unity, and transcendence of various limits both in music, life, and existence. In this, he had much in common with the late Imperial Russian Silver Age’s and Russian Religious Renaissance’s religious-philosophical ‘God-seekers.’ Perhaps Russia’s greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev, emphasized the penchant for utopian transcendence or ‘God-seeking’ among the Russian educated classes or ‘intelligentsia’, which he saw not just as prevalent in religious circles but also as one of the drivers of Russia’s revolutionaries in the late Imperial era.^[38]

The God-seeking movement, which encompassed not just many of the religious figures and philosophers but also spread across various trends in poetry, prose, painting, and music and most notably in the Symbolist movement, prominent particularly in Russian poetry at the time. God-seeking was steeped in religiosity, spiritualism, mysticism, the imminence of the divine world, and the aspiration to tselostnost’, wholeness or unity in Russian, between the divine and material, in humankind, and in social and even political life (see below).

Russian religious thought was re-invigorated with new energy in the directions of theology and religious philosophy and mysticism by the God-seekers’ (Vladimir Solovev, Pavel Florenskii, Sergei Bulgakov, among others) and in philosophy by the ‘intuitivists’, most notably Nikolai Losskii and Semyon Frank. The ideas regarding ‘all-unity’ (vseedinstvo) put forward in the religio-philosophical work of Solovev, the ‘father’ of the God-seeking trend, refashioned and even reified the ideas of Heaven-earth, God-humankind, spirit-matter integrality in 19^th century Russian discourse, while promoting tselostnost’ for humankind, social organization, and national political life. Theosophists such as Yelena Blavatskaya, traditionalist theologians such as Georgii Florovskii and Georgii Fedotov, and liberal Christians like Fyodor Stepun and Pyotr Struve also issued monist, universalist, communalist, and national solidarist forms of tselostnost’. Symbolism in poetry and prose – most notably, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Zinaida Gippius, Andrei Bely and Aleksandr Blok – displayed much God-seeking. Even Russia’s perhaps greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev, could be considered to have been a part of this movement, if on its margins. An advancing Russian scientific tradition mixed with these mystical theologies and idealist philosophies to produce a distinctive Russian cosmism in Nikolai Fyodorov, who also articulated tselostnost’ in several forms. His universalist project envisioned uniting mankind in projects to master and deploy nature for mankind’s benefit and to overcome death in an immortalist utopia, presaging today’s transhumanist movement. Earlier, Russia’s greatest writers from Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol’ to Lev Tolstoy and most of all Dostoevskii, as well as composers such as Alexander Scriabin articulated in poetry, prose, and music a longing for, or faith in monism, universalism, communalism, wholenes and solidarism with a Russian face.

A signature figure of the trend might be considered to be the genius priest, Father Pavel Florenskii (1882-1937). Florenskii, perhaps more than Russia’s 18^th century scientist Mikhail Lomonosov deserves the moniker—Russia’s Leonardo da Vinci. Also, called the ‘Theologian of the Silver Age,’ Florenskii was the author of groundbreaking theological-philosophical works, a symbolist poet of Russia’s Silver Age, a professor a Moscow Theological Academy, an astronomist, a mathematician, a physicist, an electrical engineer, author of a history of art, a musician, an inventor, and multilingual (Latin, ancient Greek, a majority of the European languages, and languages of the Caucasus, Iran, and India). Florenskii circulated in many of the mystic religious and artistic circles that made the Silver Age: the God-seekers, the Religious Philosophical Society, the Moscow Mathematical Philosophical Society, the Christian Brotherhood for Struggle, the journal Balans (The Balance), the Symbolists, Mir Isskustva, and the Circle of Seekers of Christian Knowledge.

Florenskii’s theology reflected a complex, nuanced monism and cosmological integrality. Vseedinstvo or tselostnost’ was everywhere he looked, held together by God’s Love. The “diversity of the universe, enclosed in unity, indicates a united, free, creative Will.” ^[39] The source of Truth is unity: “If there is Truth, then it is real rationality and rational reality; it is finite infinity and infinite finiteness, or, – to put it mathematically, – actual infinity; infinite, conceivable as an integral Unity, as a single, complete Subject in itself.”^[40] For Florenskii, Truth (Istina) was action serving God or others, leads to unity, and sin and the absence of truth lead to disunity.^[41] Unity could be found only in Love and divine salvation, not reason: “True love is the renunciation of reason.”^[42] Except for Florenskii’s focus on defining the separation between Heaven and Earth, his Christian metaphysics and epistomology are imbued with monist tselostnost’. This is nowhere more evident than in his landmark theological and philosophical study Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny (The Pillar and Ground of Truth). For Florenskii and for much of Russian and Eastern religion and philosophy, from which Coltrane also learned, “a basic and characteristic proposition” is that cognition is a two-way and all-integrating act.^[43] Florenskii regarded the perception or representation, symbol, even the name of an object or entity to be that object or entity in different form, a view he derived from Orthodoxy’s belief about icons.^[44] The perception of objects therefore became direct intuition or “direct contemplation of living reality as it is in itself.”^[45] This reminds one of Coltrane’s view of the role of music reflecting all that is or ‘is happening.’ Coltrane would have had much to talk and agree about with Florenskii, who is being put forward for canonization by the ROC, having been executed by the Bolsheviks in 1937 for his faith.

Coltrane the ‘God-Seeker’

Today, many Russian philosophers and other Russian thinkers, again steeped in pre-Soviet thought again after the Marxist experiment, must see or feel in Coltrane something very similar to aspects of Russia’s 19^th century God-seekers. Thus, Coltrane’s personal qualities resonate well with Russian religious-philosophical and artistic sensibilities in general as well as with the God-seeking trend diffused throughout much of Russian intellectual, artistic, and spiritual discourse. At the least, his life and music unconsciously resonate with the reflection of Russian religious mystics like many of the God-seekers in this greatest of American musicians and, indeed, men. Auskern wrote that like the African Orthodox Church in California that his music had inspired, Coltrane “strived through the universal language of music to heal the body and soul and bring them into harmony with God.”^[46]

In an interview during his 1966 tour of Japan, Coltrane himself said: “I want to be a saint.”^[47]Despite the laughing, including Coltrane’s own, that greeted this assertion, one must take him seriously in the sense that he might have understood it at the time as how a saint or Russian monk might live: with humility, modesty, kindness, and devotion to God. One can hear all these qualities in his interviews and his rare writings as well as in the testimonies of those who knew him well. His sensibility and lifestyle of seemingly ceaseless practicing, playing, composing, and thinking music is reminiscent of monastic life in constant prayer and labor in service of God. Humility is a cornerstone of proper living in Russian Orthodox monasteries and of the very Orthodox Dostoevskii’s writing. Perhaps the world’s greatest Coltrane expert, Lewis Porter, argues against taking Coltrane’s expressed desire to be a saint, reasoning that it is precisely Coltrane’s humility that precludes the possibility that the great saxophonist could take himself that seriously: “That would be way out of character. … Coltrane was a truly humble person. Most people know that one ‘should’ say humble things, but he really was humble, and he always spoke frankly of what he saw as his shortcomings.”^[48]

Those who knew Coltrane from a closer relationship with him attest to the same. In addition to Elvin Jones’ seriously considering Coltrane to have been “an angel,” he noted that he “never saw him do anything bad to anyone.” ^[49]Coltrane’s first music teacher, Isadore Granoff, apparently of Russian origins, saw in her young student a boy, who was a “humble fellow” and “wouldn’t go out of his way to show off his talent.”^[50] Alice Coltrane, who was with John when he died, spoke of “a profound inner, kind of ground that he always appeared to be in.”^[51] Jazz writer Barbara Gardner noted Coltrane’s “unembarrassed humility” and “honest love” in his relation to music.^[52] Jazz observer Michael Hennessey saw in Coltrane “great inner peace and serenity.”^[53] Others noted a monk-like asceticism: the “total self-denial this exceptional being communicates.”^[54]

Besides being a model of humility, Coltrane preached the need for humility to his listeners. In a 1964 letter to some he said about his spiritual awakening: “I humbly asked (God) to be given the means and privilege to make others happy through music.”^[55] Coltrane wrote in 1964 in a letter to his listeners, telling of a “humble prayer to God.” In his liner notes to A Love Supreme, he called the work a “humble offering” in thankfulness to God.^[56] To understand something, he said in his last years, one must “go humbly to it.” ^[57]

It seems quite likely that it is this Russian aspiration to seeking God, unity, truth, some transcendental reality (e.g., utopia), experience, existence or being that makes Coltrane so attractive to segments of the culture beyond the small Russian jazz community. The pairing of Christian religiosity and mystical spirituality brings Coltrane and intelligent Russian thinkers together.

Auskern described Coltrane essentially as a God-seeker: “John Coltrane is everything. This is openness to one’s listeners and to one’s colleagues, these are new paths in jazz, this is both reason andfeeling, but besides this it is a constant, albeit uneven rise, creative and human, this, unlike [saxophonist Charlie] Parker, is a victory over the evil within oneself, constant spiritual and creative self-improvement. And one more thing: Coltrane’s music (to clarify: mature Coltrane) is no longer just a conversation with the listener and not only high art, it’s not just a story about your feelings, but an appealto God. With his music, John Coltrane speaks to God about his love for people. And his self-expression,unlike Parker’s, is a search for contact with higher realms, a search for answers to the questions that tormented him. And in this sense, some of Coltrane’s works, most notably the famous ‘A LoveSupreme’, are no less spiritual music than the music of Bach, Purcell or Bortnyansky.”^[58] Auskern might have added liturgical or other religious music, Russian and otherwise.

Indeed, in a 1966 interview, Coltrane acknowledged: “My goal is to live the truly religious life and express it in my music. … My music is the spiritual expression of what I am—my faith, my knowledge, my being.”^[59] In a 1962 Down Beat interview he averred that music is “a reflection of the universe.” ^[60] Coltrane also stated that he wanted to “to show people the divine in a musical language that transcends words. I want to talk to their souls.”^[61]

Coltrane’s God-seeking is perhaps most evident in a poem or “Psalm” he wrote for the liner notes to his revolutionary, seminal, and transcendent magnum opus ‘A Love Supreme’ (1965). In his Psalm, Coltrane directly calls upon us to seek God: “Keep your eye on God.” … “Seek Him everyday. In all ways seek God everyday.”^[62] His liner notes in the same album, following a salutation, begin: “Let us pursue Him in the righteous path. Yes, it is true, ‘seek and ye shall find’.”^[63]

As Alice Coltrane noted, ‘John’s idea’ was that playing music was proper only in pursuit and praise of God. The call in Coltrane’s Psalm “All is God” along with the aforementioned unity of beauty, truth, and good reflect another element present in both the Russian intellectual and religious traditions as well as Coltrane’s religious and spiritual yearnings and rooted in Christianity: the aspiration to or belief in ‘integrality’ or wholeness— tselostnost’ in Russian.

Wholeness in Coltrane’s and Russian Thought

Coltrane’s goal of helping to “show people the divine” implies a belief that the divine and material world can be connected, even united. This approaches the idea of metaphysical wholeness, monist tselostnost’ or simply monism, in Russian religious-philosophical thought. As is shown in my Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics, there are at least four types of Russian wholeness or tselostnost’ defined as a preference for, aspiration to, or belief in the present condition being one that manifests or can and should be transformed into one of wholeness, unity, integrality. The first and foundational type is monist tselostnost’ or monism, which means an aspiration to, or belief in the presence of the unity of Heaven and/or God with all existence and/or mankind, of spirit with matter, and of mankind with all the rest of the cosmos. The second type, universalism favors the unity of all humankind or alternatively that with Russia of a portion of humankind (pan-Slavism, pan-Orthodox Christianity, a united Europe or West writ large, pan-Eurasianism). Communalism, the third type, seeks or assumes spiritual, social and/or socioeconomic wholeness of sub-national communities, including those of Orthodox conciliarity or sobornost’, the Russian communal village obshchina and mir, and Soviet forms of collectivism (class, labor, and the communal apartments or kommunalki). Finally, there is solidarism – the preference for, aspiration to, and/or belief in an existing nationwide political, cultural, and/or ideological unity. The kind of ‘matryoshka’ structure unites the four types of tselostnost’, I argue, with monism entailing, universalism, universal unity requiring communal and national unities (solidarism).^[64]Founded on Orthodox Christian soteriological beliefs, Russian monism – wholeness between God and Humankind and the divine and the material – is the base for the aspiration to universalism, initially the aspiration to humankind’s unity in Christ. Monism evolved into an aspiration to the unity of humankind with the universe, the Machine, and technology (synergy) and spawned or reinforced the Russian urge for unity for the whole world (universalism and internationalism), for Russia (solidarism), and for sub-national institutions and entities.

The two types of wholeness pursued most by Coltrane are: monism and universalism. In Russian culture, they are inextricably intertwined as a consequence of the connection between Christian monism and universalism—for example, the salvation of humankind through unity in God. Monism and universalism are derived in Russian thought from Orthodox Christianity, in Coltrane’s case it originates from his upbringing in the Methodist Church. The matryoshka embeddedness noted earlier is perhaps reflected in Coltrane’s thought in what Alice Coltrane called “John’s idea.” That idea was that playing music “is for all people for all the time, for the universe itself, for God. It wasn’t just for the 500 people present in that auditorium.”^[65] Coltrane articulated communalism but rarely. Therefore, his thinking seems to reflect all types of tselostnost’ but solidarism, as he was not an especially political person.^[66] Let us look at the preference for, belief in monist and universalist tselostnost’ in both Coltrane’s and Russian thought.

Russian Wholeness or “Tselostnost’”

The seminal God-seeker, Vladimir Solovev, considered by many to be Russia’s greatest philosopher, introduced the idea of all-unity or vseedinstvo of the divine and material into Russian thought among the God-seeking movement. Those whom his ideas would influence ranged from the more religious philosophers – Florenskii, his friend Sergei Bulgakov, among others – to more secular ones, in particular intuitivists (Nikolai Losskii, Semyon Frank, and Andrei Losev) to ‘cosmist’ physical scientists (Nikolai Fyodorov and Konstantin Tsiolkovskii) and many others active during the Silver Age, Russian Religious renaissance, and even among the early Bolsheviks before and after 1917 (Anatolii Lunacharskii, Aleksandr Bogdanov). Solovev and his ideas about all-unity remain at the core of much contemporary Russian monism and general tselostnost’ today. Solovev summed up his ‘free theosophy’ and non-rational knowledge of God and of all-unity in God:

“If the inner connection of everything (total unity) is truth, then in sensory experience this truth has already been lost, since here all objects are external to each other. Logical thinking expresses the subject’s desire to restore in consciousness this unity of everything that has been lost in reality; but it is understood that by itself this thinking can reestablish only the form of truth, for all content here belongs to reality, and reality here is not true. Rational thinking alone has no content, and it cannot receive from external experience what corresponds to (such content), that
is, all-unified or true content. Therefore, it must receive its content from that essential and positive knowledge, which is determined by faith and ideal contemplation. In other words, man, being rational, receives his true and positive content from his mystical or divine element; and if we call the system of rational knowledge philosophy, then we must admit that philosophy derives its content from knowledge of religion or theology, meaning by this the latter (type of) knowledge of everything in God or knowledge of the essential total unity.”^[67]

Thus, for Solovev, God is “entire completeness or wholeness of all being as its eternal essence.”^[68]This entails the idea that the divine enters all in the material world.

The Christian tradition, as noted above, believes in or hopes for the unification of all in Christ and Christ’s universal love. In Russian, the word ‘blagodat’’ represents divine love and grace. The first Russian historical document we have, the epistle “Slova o Zakone i Blagodati” (“A Word on Law and Grace”) written in the years 1037-1050 by Kievan priest Illarion (Hilarion) or Illarion Kievskii, the future Russian Orthodox Church Metropolitan noted: “Christ’s Blagodat’embraced all the earth.”^[69]Eight centuries later, Solovev echoed Illarion: “Unconditional love is precisely that ideal everything, that wholeness, which constitutes the very content of the divine principle.” It is “any internal unity and any internal moving unification of the many.”^[70]

For Solovev, Christ was all of Christianity but not just through his teachings so much as in the redemptive act of his human life and death. His divine purpose on Earth was to reintegrate all existence by overcoming death and ending humankind’s separation from God. Mankind’s collective redemption will come, according to Solovev, when God’s unconditional love is matched by humankind’s own. The “world soul” must repeat Christ’s act of free will in order to attain final unity with God—humankind’s being aspiring to vseednstvo:

By a free act of the world soul, the world united by it fell away from the Divine and disintegrated within itself into a multitude of antagonistic elements; by a long series of free acts, all this rebellious multitude must make peace with themselves and with God and be reborn in the form of an absolute organism. If everything that exists (in nature or in the world soul) must unite with the Divine – and this is the goal of all being – then this unity, in order to be a real unity, obviously must be reciprocal, that is, it must go not only from God, but also from nature and be her own cause.^[71]

Another element of the Russian Religious Renaissance’s Orthodoxy was initiated by way of the unprecedented emphasis placed by Solovev and other God-Seekers, such as Florenskii and his close friend Father Sergie Bulgakov, on God’s Divine Wisdom or ‘Holy Sophia’ and around which he constructed a most complex cosmology. Solovev claimed to have had three mystical visions of ‘her.’^[72] Coltrane had a mysterious “vision” (left undescribed by him) that apparently influenced his life and music, while he was in the navy at the tail end of World War II. His wife Alice noted: “He had a vision and he couldn’t interpret the meaning at that time. It was just sort of beyond him and he didn’t know who to turn to, who could provide any answers or clarity to it. But he said that when A Love Supreme started to blow into his consciousness, he remembered the vision he had in the Navy, and then he could see everything clearly.”^[73]

Sophia is described by God-Seekers variously and ascribed many roles: mankind’s guardian angel, the Eternal Bride of ‘Logos’ (the Word of God), the primordial nature of creation, the creative Love of God.^[74] Solovev’s ‘sophiology’ revived ancient Eastern Orthodox thought on the theme, elaborated upon the sophiology in the theosophy of German Protestant preacher Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) popular in Russia, and sparked a trend that would influence numerous Russian Orthodox philosophers.^[75] Solovev’s ideas about Divine Sophia exude his vseedinstvo. She is the spiritual energy linking and permeating the Holy Trinity, God’s Kingdom, and seemingly all Creation. She is all at once the daughter of God the Father, the bride of Christ the Son, the Church, “and together with it she becomes the Mother of the Son.” “(S)he is the ideal soul of creation and beauty,” and “the trinity of Good, Truth, Beauty, the Holy Trinity in the world.”^[76]Solovev’s Sophia also symbolized “perfected Femininity,” “Eternal Femininity.” In sum, Divine Sophia enables vseedinstvo to manifest itself.^[77] For Solovev, Holy Sophia “becomes incarnate throughout the whole universe.”^[78] Another of the God-seekers, Father Sergei Bulgakov wrote: “Sophia is not just love but loves with requited love, and in this fact of mutual love she receives everything, is Everything.”^[79] We find something similar in Coltrane’s philosophical musings. He averred in a July 1966 interview in Japan that he wanted to express through music “the love that holds the universe together.”^[80]

“God is All”: Monism in Coltrane’s Thought

Christian faith formed the foundation of much of Coltrane’s thought as well, in particular in his own faith in the interconnection of everything fused by the presence of God and the divine in everything—similar to Solovev’s idea of vseedinstvo, the prime example, perhaps, of Russian monism.^[81] Since Russia’s baptism in the 10^th century under Kievan Grand Prince Vladimir the Great to the missionary work of St. Sergii Radonezh and others beginning in the 14^th century through the history of the Russian Orthodox Church in Imperial, Soviet, and todays Russia, Christian monist tselostnost’has been preached by theologians, Orthodox-believing philosophers, prose writer, poets, musicians, scientists, among many others. These Russian ‘Eulipians’, using saxophonist Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s phrase,^[82] have preached a belief in what Solovev called ‘vseedinstvo’, which he attributed to God’s and other divine elements’ interpenetration across the spiritual and material world.

Coltrane wrote in his A Love Supreme ‘Psalm’: “God is all.” ^[83] The Psalm’s text is replete with the very Russian idea of monist tselostnost’ or monism, particularly the vision of “all-unity” (vseedintsvo) proposed by the father of the God-seeking movement Vladimir Solovev. This “all-unity,” in which everything divine and material is united, is echoed in Coltrane’s Psalm for “A Love Supreme’:

“God is. He always was. He always will be.
No matter what…it is God. …

Words, sounds, speech, men, memory, thoughts,
fears and emotions — time all related…
all made from one…all made in one.
Blessed be His name.
Thought waves — heat waves-all vibrations –
all paths lead to God. Thank you God.

…

One thought can produce millions of vibrations
and they all go back to God…everything does.

…

No road is an easy one, but they all
go back to God.
With all we share God.
It is all with God.
It is all with Thee.

…

We are from one thing…the will of God…

It is true–blessed be His name–thank you God.
God breathes through us so completely…
So gently we hardly feel it…yet,
It is our everything.
Thank you God.
ELATION–ELEGANCE–EXALTATION–
All from God.”^[84]

Coltrane wrote in similarly monist terms in the liner notes for his album ‘Infinity’: “(I)t is all with God. He is gracious and merciful. His way is in Love, through which we all are. Wherever and whoever you are, always strive to follow and walk in the right Path and ask for aid and assistance…herein lies the ultimate and eternal happiness which is ours through His grace.”^[85]

In the Coltrane documentary ‘A Love Supreme’, Alice Coltrane notes John’s belief in a “oneness” rooted in the creation of all and everything by God.^[86] She herself attests to a monist reality she feels exists, relaying that one prolonged meditation brought her into unity with God.^[87] Coltrane’s monism was sometimes perceived by listeners in creative ways. One observer notes that in A Love SupremeColtrane makes a point of playing through all 12 keys in this great improvisational composition and speculated that “this was Coltrane’s way of showing that God is everywhere.”^[88] In an interview with accomplished jazz critic and author, Nat Hentoff, Coltrane himself expressed not just God-seeking – his “religious…searching in music” – but also a certain spiritual monism—a “force for unity”: “Once you become aware of this force for unity in life, you can’t ever forget it. It becomes part of everything you do. In that respect, (the album Meditations) is an extension of A Love Supreme since my conception of that force keeps changing shape. My goal in meditating on this through music, however, remains the same. And that is to uplift people, as much as I can. To inspire them to realize more and more of their capabilities for living meaningful lives. Because there certainly is meaning in life.”^[89] Thus, Coltrane’s belief in all-unity encouraged him to use the beauty in music to tap into the omnipresent divine (monism) in the service of the spread of the good and the truth to all humankind (universalism). Coltrane’s universalism is another element of tselostnost’ that he shares objectively with Russian religious and philosophical culture.

Universalism in Coltrane and Russian Thought

Coltrane’s universalism coincides with Russian universalist tselostnost’. His thought and instincts were inherently universalist, and his God-seeking led him on a long spiritual journey from his Christian roots, turning him into a religious universalist or syncreticist. He increasingly focused on Eastern religions, mirroring a similar trend during Russia’s Silver Age and Russian Religious Renaissance in the twilight years of the Russian Empire, the fall of which ushered in a new age of Russian universalism: proletarian internationalism.

Universalism in Russian Thought

The abovementioned Illarion Kievskii’s “Slova o Zakone i Blagodati” is a panegyric to the unification of mankind as a whole with God in and through Christ, and his significance for Russian religiosity and literature is difficult to overstate. He is “unanimously” regarded as the foremost theologian and preacher of both Kievan and Muscovite Rus’ and “stands at the very springs of original Russian literature.”^[90] His prayers and teachings continue to influence Russian Orthodoxy today. Illarion’s ‘Slovo’ was, in Fedotov’s words, “a theological hymn to salvation” on the “national theme interspersed with the great universal-historical picture of God’s redemptive Providence,” vividly expressing the “Russian national spirit.”^[91] In this view, the Russian national spirit is rooted in God’s Providence, which is God’s interaction with human history.^[92]

Illarion’s Slova held that history and God’s open relationship with humankind is divided into two periods. The first period begins with God’s handing down to Moses the Ten Commandments as the Law by which humanity should live. The second period begins with Christ’s salvation of man through repentance and death on the cross; the coercion of law and punishment is replaced by divine love and grace or blagodat’. Illarion hails the new era advent to the world of God’s blagodat’ through Christ’s sacrifice and Christian faith in a “Single God,” a “God United in the Trinity.” “Christ’s Blagodat’embraced all the earth.”^[93] Fedotov’s summary of Illarion’s ‘Slovo’ notes: “God’s Plan, which chose and saved the Jewish people by giving it law through Moses, was revealed as Truth and Grace in Jesus Christ to all peoples, including the last of the called – the Russian people. From this point of view, the conversion of Rus’ comes to the center of the historical canvas traced in the New Testament.”^[94] The new era was thought to culminate with the world’s salvation through the universal acceptance of God’s grace first by the Russian people in Christ. In Illarion’s seminal text, “A word about Law and Grace of Metropolitan Illarion”, we read the call: “go throughout all the world and preach the Gospel to all beings. He who believes and is baptized, will be saved. Go, teach all the peoples…” “Christian salvation is good and generously will wash across all the far reaches of the Earth.”^[95] In Illarion’s reading, grace allowed for the universalization of self-purification and the attainment of divinity, obviating the need for law and coercion.

In many Russians’ view, the Christian mission to save world became the Russians’ own, particularly after Constantinople’s fall. Moscow became the last refuge of Christian heritage, the ‘Third Rome’ in the messianic and missionary (not geopolitical) sense. Centuries later, the 19^th century’s Slavophiles would preach the futility of law as a social foundation in the West and the utility of a supposed organic Russian communalism as a universal answer to mankind’s woes. Vladimir Ulyanov-Lenin would lecture that the advent of communism and the elimination of alien classes would obviate the need for the state and law and save the world from capitalist materialism.

Thus, Russian universalism evolved over the centuries. One development was a change in vector, with Russia being seen by Russians as a eager receptor of all manner of foreign influences rather than or along with being Christian missionaries chosen to transform the world. Russia’s perhaps greatest writer and poet and the founder of Russian national literature, the part African (Ethiopian) Aleksandr Pushkin, while he was held up as the primogenitor of the ‘Great Russian Literature’ and Russia’s first true national poet, became the symbol of a universalistic, ostensible Russian responsiveness and adaptation to external influences, what Aleksandr Herzen and the great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevskii called Russians’ ‘otzyvchivost’.’ Pushkin became an icon in Russian national intellectual discourse representing Russians’ natural responsiveness (obzyvchivost’ in Russian) to foreign cultures, after Russia’s other greatest writer, Fyodor Dostoevskii proposed this view in his famous ‘Pushkin speech’ in 1880. Dostoevskii proclaimed that if only Pushkin had lived longer he might have been able to explain to Europeans, who now look down on Russia, “the whole truth of our aspirations” to “worldwide brotherhood” reflected in their obzyvchivost’.^[96] This universalistic sensibility or at least inclination among Russian thinkers was a powerful force during the Silver Age and Russian Religious Renaissance (of which God-seeing was an integral part) emerging in Dostoevskii’s last years.

Not surprisingly then, in his very last commentary before his death published in January 1881, Dostoevskii proposed what in today’s geopolitical vernacular we would call an ‘Asian pivot.’ Russia ought to build two railroads; one to Central Asia and another through Siberia to the Far East, turning its back on Europe “temporarily”: “With an aspiration to Asia, we will have a rise of spirit and strength will be reborn. … In Europe we were Tatars, but in Asia we will be Europeans.”^[97]Thus, Russia should begin a “civilizing mission in Asia.”^[98]

More avantgarde artists were also looking east. The Silver Age’s symbolist poets were obsessed with the East. Poet Belyi also was fascinated by Asia as was the futurist Velemir Khlebnikov.^[99] The ‘Asian pivot’ was prevalent in philosophy as well. Like Coltrane, Solovev and Tolstoy studied eastern religions. Solovev studied Kabalism, Florenskii – the Talmud and Zoroastrian Zend-Avesta, Tolstoy – Taoism. Solovev wrote on India and China^[100] and noted the “Buddhist mood” in Russian Silver Age poetry.^[101] Mystics like Yelena Blavatskaya and Georgii Gurdzhiev steeped themselves in Buddhism and Hinduism. Numerous Silver Age poets and writers – including Anna Akhmatova’s son Nikolai Gumilev, Dmitrii Merezhkovskii, Ivan Bunin, Konstantin Bal’mont, and Khlebnikov – wrote on Buddhist themes, as did Tolstoy.^[102] All this was a manifestation of Russia’s Pushkinian universal sensibility of which Dostoevskii spoke and which clearly contradicts the Western stereotype and outright distortion of a Russia closed in on itself and antagonistic to other cultures and nations.

Under the weight of European influence and the influx of European ideas during the Tsar Alexander II’s era of glasnost’ or openness, Russian universalism, rooted in Orthodoxy’s Christian messianism and soteriology, evolved into proletarian internationalism – the unity of the working class and the emergence of a new global Soviet or ‘proletarian man’ – among many Russians. The Bolshevik takeover after the collapse of the Romanov dynasty’s reforming autocracy during World War I led to seven decades of Soviet involvement across the globe in an effort to unite the proletarians of the world against world capitalism. This internationalist-universalist imperative was infused and ubiquitous across all of the Soviet arts and sciences.^[103]

Today, Russian universalism has been reinforced by the post-Soviet return of Russian Orthodox theology and related philosophies and thinking as well as by the leftovers from Soviet internationalism. Nikolai Vasetskii, Moscow State University Professor of international sociology and one-time co-author with nationalist-populist leader of the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovskii, and his 2019 A Sociology of the History of Russia: Basic Meanings and Values (Notes of Sociologist) are good examples of religious influence on neo-Eurasianist thought that has become so influential in Moscow under President Vladimir Putin. Citing thought leaders of the pre-Soviet Russian Religious Renaissance copiously, Vasetskii offers a pan-Orthodox\neo-Eurasianist project uniting all Russian Orthodox communities around the globe behind ROC and Kremlin projects. He regards Illarion’s ‘Slovo’ not merely as the earliest artifact of “Russian sociopolitical thought and culture,” but the document that “determined the basic meaning and values of Ancient Russian civilization.” It set the “worldview of the Russian super-ethnos for a thousand years forward.”^[104]Vasetskii sees Illarion’s views as implicit legitimization of Russia’s present day foreign policy principle of the “multipolarity of the world and civilizations.”^[105] We can see this reflected in Russian foreign policy’s turn to Eurasia, the Far East, Middle East, and Africa and the founding of BRICS, now BRICS+, which unites countries from all continents of the earth in a semi-universalistic vision. Such international universalism remains prevalent in post-Soviet Russia right up to today in the arts and the culture, generally, politically and, in many ways, strategically.^[106]

Coltrane’s Universalism

Coltrane’s universalism was expressed in three ways. The first was his religious universalism. The second was metaphysical, in that he thought that music somehow reflected “the whole of human experience at any, at the particular time that it is being expressed.” ^[107] The third was reflected in his global musical interests and influences.

Coltrane’s religious universalism reminds one of the apolitical and non-confessional aspects of Russian universalism in some ways but is shorn of any confessional, no less political content. Like Russian universalism’s adoption of a second vector, Coltrane too sought to reshape the world through the beauty, truth, and good relayed by his music as well as imbibe numerous influences from across the globe both in terms of religion and music. When it came to religion, Coltrane, though perhaps nominally remaining a Christian, became as much a universalist as any Russian God-seeker, theologian, or communist, even compared with universalism’s most fervent Russian adepts. However, he rejected the parochial Orthodoxy held by some Russians, as did Solovev.

Coltrane was dedicated to the improvement not just of his homeland but of the entire world, interested in all the world’s religions, philosophies and, of course, its varieties of music. Reminiscent of the syncretic religious beliefs of another great Russian thinker, Lev Tolstoy, who was influenced by eastern religions like the great American musician, Coltrane wrote that he believed “in all religions”—that is what they taught.”^[108] In an interview during his 1966 tour of Japan he repeated what he wrote in the liner notes of his album ‘Meditations’ (1965): “I believe in all religions, the truth itself doesn’t have any name on it to me, and each man has to find it for himself.” ^[109] When Coltrane was asked to elaborate on whether he had in mind Christ’s love or sexual love when he referred in monist fashion to the ‘love that holds the universe together,’ he responded in both monist and universalist terms: “I couldn’t separate any of it. I think they all are certain degrees of that [unintelligible] of the one Christ, or maybe Buddha, or Krishna, or all of them. And all of them, I think it’s the same one, that one, that all of them (the religions) describe. It’s from which it all comes [unintelligible], path.” The ‘unintelligibles’ here resulting from bad sound or taping glitches are most unfortunate. Incidentally, Coltrane reiterated monism here by agreeing with the interviewer’s prompt that the ‘one’ “included everything.”^[110]

Coltrane also manifested religious universalism in the breadth of the religious experience that interested him and that he respected, reflecting a similar trend in twilight Russia during Russia’s Silver Age. Just as Tolstoy was syncretic religiously and turned to eastern religions far afield from Western and Russian Orthodox Christianity, so did Coltrane. Coltrane’s first wife, Naima, the subject of his beautiful ballad of the same name, converted to Islam and interested Coltrane in the religion, particularly the Ahmadiyya movement popular among Afro-Americans beginning in the 1960s.^[111] Coltrane’s stepdaughter remembered that growing up the family “had Bibles, we had the Koran, eastern teachings”, as well as books by Plato, Aristotle, Krishnamurti, Yogananda, and Zen Buddhism. His son and a great saxophonist in his own right, Ravi Coltrane, says of his father: “He studied all of these religions and understood there is something higher than that, that there’s something all these religions are saying which is universal.”^[112]

As the cultural platform ‘Fourth Floor’ has noted, Coltrane became a ‘seeker of truth’ – essentially a God-seeker — in all religion: Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism. The musical giant examined a plethora of religious, spiritual, and philosophical traditions and their texts, including The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, the Bhagavad Gita (which his second wife became wholly devoted to and taught at an ashram in California until her passing), and Hindu Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi (treating similarities between spirituality in the East and West). He studied the Qur’an, Bible, and Jewish mysticism in the Kabbalah. He also learned from non-religious movements and New Age thought such as cosmology, Jiddu Krishnamurti’s philosophy, as well as ancients Plato and Socrates. In 1965 Coltrane recorded the album ‘Om’, referring to the sacred Hindu meditating syllable and sound that represents the wholeness of the universe and the essence of the “ultimate reality” (Para Brahman). Om’s music included chants from the Bhagavad Gita and The Tibetan Book of the Dead. ^[113] Here and elsewhere, Coltrane’s religious and metaphysical universalism intersected with his musical universalism.

Coltrane reflected on his musical universalism in a 1962 interview, saying: “There’s a lot of modal music that’s played every day throughout the world. It’s particularly evident in Africa, but, whether you look at Spain or Scotland, India or China, that’s what you’ll find every moment. If you really want to look beyond differences of style, you’ll realize that there is a common base. That’s very important. Sure, British popular music is not the same as South American but take away their purely ethnic characteristics—that is to say, their folk aspects—and you’ll find yourself in the presence of the same pentatonic sound, of comparable modal structures. It’s that universal side of music which interests and drives me, and that’s where I want to go.”^[114] Coltrane was inspired by Indian music, in particular. Studying Indian classical ragas and fascinated by the water drum, he was a devotee of Indian composer and sitarist Ravi Shankar, met with, and wanted to study with him.^[115] He also listened to the Indian master musician Bismillah Khan.”^[116] The study of Indian music led Trane to believe that certain sounds and scales could “produce specific emotional meanings.”^[117]

According to Alice Coltrane, John was a devotee of the great Russian composer Igor Stravinskii’s music.^[118] He often highly praised the Spanish classical harpist Carlos Salzedo, in particular as a “universal musician.”^[119] Coltrane also listened to Chinese flute music, expressed an interest in Norwegian folk music and Japanese Koto music, and listened to Japanese temple bell music.^[120] He was already studying African rhythms and modal and planning a trip to Africa for further work, when he fell fatally ill. Coltrane compositions such as ‘India’, ‘Africa’, ‘Ole`’, among others reflected his musical universalism and were explicit attempts to capture the spirit of different peoples and cultures.

The Russians had their own experience in pursuing universalism in music. During the Silver Age, the God-seeking composer Aleksandr Scriabin penned his ‘Divine Poem’, which not only envisioned humankind’s divinization in the monist trend but was to be performed universally, beginning in Tibet and ending in England.^[121] Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov composed his Arabian ballet ‘Scheherezade’. One might say that Russian appreciation of Coltrane’s music is another example, however thin that interest might be in relation to that expressed by other peoples and that remains unknown. Even in the United States, jazz has a limited following.

Coltrane’s religious and musical universalism strongly suggests that he held to a grander universalism—one that preferred world unity in whatever ways might serve the good. This utopian vision leads us to Coltrane’s aspirations to transcendental attainments, which I hope to address in a separate article.

Transcendentalism in Russian and Coltrane’s Thought

Many have perceived a certain transcendentalism in Russian religious, philosophical, literary, and general cultural discourse as well as in certain behaviors. One of the recent decades’ leading analysts of Russian culture, James H. Billington noted, many post-Soviet Russians are inclined to seek out something transcendental, a transcendent experience.^[123] Russian literary critic I. I. Yevlampiev observed: “Pushkin expressed in a vivid artistic form the main feature of our national character – the contradictory combination and interaction in our spirituality of two intentions, two attitudes to the world: ‘admiration’ for the world, empirical reality, a clear sense of one’s inseparable belonging to this earthly reality and an equally clear sense of higher harmony, a passionate desire to join it and see the whole world transformed in accordance with an unearthly ideal.”^[124] Russians’ aspiration to transcend is also evident in its inclination to types of wholeness (tselostnost’) such as monism – the uniting of the Divine with the world – and universalism through a ‘higher harmony’ for the ‘whole world’, discussed in Part 2. There is a hope of reaching beyond the bonds of the human condition and everyday life to a higher, purer, more integral one, a transformation ‘in accordance with an unearthly ideal.’

Russian transcendentalism is part and parcel, perhaps one or the lone driver of other aspects of Russian culture: prometheanism (belief in humankind’s potential for attaining achievements that transcend standard human capacities), messianism (a Russian mission to help humankind save or transcend itself and earthly life as it is), and utopianism (belief in the possibility or even inevitability of a perfect world brought by superhuman or divine intervention). Russian transcendentalism aspires to move humankind, Russian society, and/or the individual beyond various limits: the ordinary (bourgeois) life; evil’s hindering of the good and the divine; imperfection stymying perfection whether in the form of an earthly or heavenly utopia; and Russian imperfection overcome by Russian perfection facilitating a messianic role for her. Transcendentalism seeks to overcome division, producing Russian tselostnost’ in the form of the monism, universalism, communalism, and solidarism discussed in “John Coltrane Through a Russian Prism.”

Russia’s perhaps greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev, asserted that humankind yearns for tselostnost’.^[125] Berdyaev himself wanted to overcome the divisions between the religions and planned but never completed a study of mysticism that would debunk false and affirm true mysticism and unite the religions while simultaneously being areligious!^[126] This was a task of transcendentalism if there ever was one. Schism in the world, in Russian variations, can and should be surmounted either through the eschatology, soteriology, and theology of Christianity or by the working class proletariat’s destruction of capitalism, its class divisions, and resulting human conflict. In the section I briefly trace some of the aspects of Russian transcendentalism and its offshoots – utopianism, prometheanism, and messianism (wholeness having already been discussed in Part 2 — in the course and discourse of Russian history and culture, respectively.

Transcendentalism in Russian Discourses

In Illarion’s influential “Word” we encounter a passion for unseen wonders, miracles, heavenly and worldly transformations. Illarion’s “Word” hailed God as “great” because he is “single (united or ‘yedinyi’), creator of miracles,” mentioned thrice in the “Word.” Illarion thus lists Christ’s 17 miracles on earth as relayed from God to man in the Bible.^[127] This interpretation of the history of God’s interaction with earth and mankind persists, indeed predominates in Russian Orthodoxy. The spread of Christianity to “all the earth and to Rus” marks a transcendent miraculous transformation of the world:

“The shepherds of the verbal sheep of Christ, the bishops, stood before the holy altar, offering the Bloodless Sacrifice. Elders, and deacons, and all the clergy adorned and clothed the holy churches with molding. The apostolic trumpet and the gospel thunder sounded all the cities. Incense, lifted up to God, sanctified the air. Monasteries were erected on the mountains; the black people appeared; men and wives, both small and great – all people filled the holy churches, glorified (God), singing: One is holy, one is the Lord Jesus Christ for the glory of God the Father! Amen. Christ has won! Christ prevailed! Christ has reigned! Christ is glorified! Great are you, Lord, and wonderful are your works! Our God, glory to Thee!” ^[128]

Russian would pursue the wonderful in religion, philosophy, the arts, and sciences ever thereafter.

Russians pursued the transcendental in various utopias — Christian, pan-Slavic, communist – often by way of promethean aspirations. The eschatology, soteriology, theology, messianism and utopia of Christian salvation remained constant cultural strands throughout Russian history. The scale and duration of Russia’s mass self-immolations among the Old Believers in the 17-18 centuries, the persistent resistance to secularization, and the quasi-religious nature of Russia’s revolutionaries testify to Russia’s inclination to transcendentalism. Even when Russians, who sought to erase its Christian roots and their branches, gained the power to do so they failed miserably and instead applied the Christian paradigm in new form. Several trends in Russian thought and history reveal the transcendental tendency among Russians even in their later more secularized forms: messianism, utopianism, prometheanism, and anti-bourgeoisism. The origins of each lie in the promise of divinity in Orthodox soteriology and eschatology: the belief that the world is dominated by evil and that humankind’s salvation through the coming of the Heavenly Kingdom to earth as well as the divinization of the material world are imminent or at least potentially so. The world was to be overcome or escaped from.

Unique manifestations of this in Russian life demonstrate the power of Russian transcendentalism and its companions: tselostnost’, messianism, utopianism, and prometheanism. The great and numerous stranniki or wanderers seeking hermitic isolation from the evils of humankind and draw nearer to God and nature by traversing the vast Russian land of forests and steppe. Others pursued the same goal escape through death. Tens of thousands of Russia’s 17^th century Old Believers sought escape from the diktat of the Russian church and state to the utopia of the Heavenly Kingdom through self-immolation. Patriarch Nikon, who crafted the reforms that the Old Believers rejected, built his New Jerusalem Monastery near Moscow in an effort to create a slice of, and portal for the coming of the Heavenly Kingdom tothe world. Thus, Russia’s first emperor, Peter the Great, with his Westernizing and rationalizing goals, sought to transcend Russia’s current reality and construct a “Great Utopia, a regulated state working like the orderly mechanism of a clock, and an expansion of the limits of the ideal state.”^[129] The communists have been interpreted by some as the Marxist resurrection of Peter’s Westernizing, rationalizing project.

The great Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevskii saw the Russian people as fundamentally aspirational. He also believed that humankind or at least Russians “cannot live without “wonderful” “high moral-spiritual ideals” such as “honor, love for mankind, self-sacrifice.”^[130] “No, judge our people not by what they are but by what they wish to become,” he wrote.^[131] Dostoevskii concluded his transcendental, millennial vision of world unification under Russian Orthodoxy by noting that if it was received as “a ‘utopia’ worthy only of laughter,” then he happily would count himself “among the utopians.”^[132] In late 19^th century Russian discourse, the transcendental Dostoevskii was a leading opponent of the vengefully transcendental socialist/communist revolutionaries. The communists indeed sought to transcend economic inequality, the bourgeois lifestyle and values, international conflict, colonialism, nationalism, political and social conflict, violence, and political repression and famously failed. Perhaps Russia’s greatest thinker, Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), noted: “Our (Russians’ – GH) will to religious transformation was defeated by a sort of ill dreaming.” [133] In other words, on both sides of the great sociopolitical schism that destroyed Tsarist Russia at the turn of the 19^th and 20^th centuries were promoting projects of transcendental, utopian transformation.

Russian transcendentalism is evident in Russian thinkers’ simultaneously utopian and promethean pursuit of the humankind’s victory over death or a spiritual afterlife after death, whether through cosmism or Christianity, respectively. The 19^th century Russian cosmist and immortalist Nikolai Fyodorov (1828-1903) thought science could overcome poverty, disease, and death, even revive those who had passed. Fyodorov’s modest position, asceticism, and hermit-like lifestyle concealed a rich mind that would develop a religious-based philosophy promoting and prophesying humankind’s own role in its resurrection and divinization or ‘obozhestvlenie.’ Fyodorov is said to have often repeated that he had been “brought up by the services of the Passion Week and the Easter Matin (midnight mass).^[134] At the same time, Fyodorov’s work influenced Soviet economic and industrial planners and their fellow travelers, though he and other cosmists had expected that the Russian autocracy, not the socialist revolution, would be the agent of obozhestvlenie. His immortalism saw science and human action, not just faith in God, as generators of the fulfillment of Christianity prophecy of the resurrection of all the dead. Fyodorov’s cosmism and immortalism influenced Soviet era space exploration and the philosophy of figures like Nikolai Tsiolkovskii and lives on in contemporary adepts of artificial intelligence and belief in the synergy between humankind and technology.^[135]

Orthodox Christian-rooted Russian transcendentalism and its accompanying trends — messianism, prometheanism, utopianism, and the already discussed monist and universalist tselostnost’ – still can be seen in the thinking of political and cultural figures and opinion makers in Russia today, such as Konstantin Malofeev, Aleksandr Bokhanov, and Nikolai Vasetskii. Konstantin Malofeev (1974-present), Yurii Mamleev (1931-2015), Mikhail Nazarov (1948-present) and others put forward an Orthodox monarchism with a theurgical Orthodox mission towards an Orthodox heavenly utopia. For example, Malofeev’s Imperiya XXI Veka (2022), last book in a trilogy, puts forward Malofeev’s standard monarchist line with a healthy dose of Orthodox messianism: “(T)he main thing for the future emperor is an awareness of his high mission as tsar of the Third Rome, holding back the world from evil.” Russia is Katechon – the biblical force that restrains Satan and evil. “The mission of Katechon should be codified in the constitution.” The new Russian empire will be eternal, dying at the end of the world, he says, and then quotes Putin: “Why do we need a world in which there is no Russia?”^[136]

Aleksandr Bokhanov’s 2023 The Russian Idea gives us a “cosmological approach” and “Christ-centric perspective” in his “historiosophical” message of Russian Orthodox messianism.^[137] Again, we meet the Third Rome idea, with Russian succeeding Constantinople as the carrier of the Orthodox Empire, similarly ordained from above as in Malofeev’s vision. “Several centuries filled with heavy tribulations and national cataclysms were necessary for the idea of ‘the land’ to be transformed into the ideal of the world mission ‘land-kingdom’ in the Russian consciousness.”[40] ‘Land-kingdom’ in Russian easily connotes ‘Earth-Heaven.’ For Bokhanov, the Western icon of freedom, New York’s Statue of Liberty, pales in the face of the Russian idea of freedom “in the image of Christ, imparting the highest spiritual content to earthly existence of mankind.”[41] In discussing the Bokhanov concludes with a Russian Orthodox panegyric of transcendence beyond the worldly achievable only through the “Russian idea”:

“Father Serafim (Sarovskii) also knew something else: in the end the Lord ‘will forgive Russia and lead her by the path of suffering to great glory.’ Other holy ascetics also foretold this. That is why the Russian idea is alive, because the Light of Christ is eternal.

“She that is gifted not only by Orthodoxy, and in no way only because of it, but by it first of all. From this (comes) Russia’s universal significance and universal destiny. As a contemporary philosopher wrote: ‘The Russian idea is urgent as never before, you see humankind (and not just Russia) has approached the edge of the abyss.’

“At the beginning of the 21st century the experience of allegiance to Christ has turned out to be broadly and badly needed in Russia, and so broadly as never in other parts of the world. Precisely this Christian breakthrough once more underscores that the Russian idea never disappeared and could never could have.

Its historical realisation is in no way at all comparable to an attempt to establish God’s Kingdom on earth. Russian Christian thought never even thought about anything like it. It is a search on the road to Heavenly Jerusalem and the Eternal World and to find that which will help grace, the testament of the Savior, and the storehouse of the Holy Spirit’s legacy.”^[138]

Nikolai Vasetskii, Moscow State University Professor of international sociology and one-time co-author with nationalist-populist leader of the misnamed Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, Vladimir Zhirinovskii, and his 2019 A Sociology of the History of Russia: Basic Meanings and Values (Notes of Sociologist) argues that Illarion’s Word set the messianic mission of Russia for a thousand years to come in which Russia would unite the Eurasian landmass under Christian Orthodoxy and join with them the Slavic peoples from across the world, including distant diasporas.^[139]

One can certainly see transcendentalism in Coltrane’s endless endeavors to exceed the limits of jazz, musical expression, and the human condition and pursue higher levels of spiritual attainment for himself, those around him, and the world.

Coltrane’s Transcendentalism

Regarding Coltrane, we see transcendental tendencies in both his musical and spiritual quest. The evil in the world, the material world, and musical conventions were to be superceded by truth, beauty, good, the divine, and an ever-extending musical and spiritual development. He sought to transcend almost everything – his and his music’s present stage of development, jazz, music, the present world – and attain a cosmic spirituality, another dimension, in Christian and Russian Orthodox terms, the Heavenly Kingdom. In short, Coltrane’s transcendentalism was both spiritual and musical.

Spiritually, the titles of his spiritual and later ‘free jazz’ albums and compositions reflect his quest for something beyond our normal day-to-day, material existence, for the divine, and his struggle to transcend to a higher state of being: Ascension; Acknowledgement; Interstellar Space; Om; Cosmic Music; Stellar Regions; Sun Ship; Song of Praise; Wise One; Meditations; The Father, Son and the Holy Ghost; Offering; Seraphic Light; Out Of This World; Manifestation; and the marvelous Dear Lord, among others.

His associates attest to his eternal pursuit of the next horizon. McCoy Tyner noted in regard to the achievement of ‘A Love Supreme’ – Coltrane’s first of many recorded prayers to God: “John was into spiritual meanings and stuff like that. He wanted to dig deep and bring us up to another level. And that’s what he did.”^[140] African drummer Babatunde Olatunji wrote of Coltrane’s musical transcendentalism in metaphysically transcendental terms: “(Coltrane) had to explore other sources if he was to reach…the universal truth of a universe in perpetual motion of an unending horizon.” ^[141]

In an August 1966 interview less than a year before his death, Coltrane, if in a somewhat disconnected way, discussed his determination to transcend spiritual horizons: “(T)here are things which as far as spirituality are concerned, which are very important to me at this time, and I’ve got to grow through certain, you know, phases of this to other understandings and more, you know, consciousness and awareness of just what it is that I’m supposed to, you know, understand about it, and I’m sure all this will be part of the music, which is, to me, you know, I feel I want to be a force for good.” ^[142]

Those who observed Coltrane’s musical searching from a more distant perch, spoke and wrote of him as one transcending or seeking to transcend like some Promethean figure. One French observer, Jean-Claude Zylberstein (Dargenpierre) indeed called him “a musically modern Faust or Prometheus.” ^[143] Another French music critic, Jean Clouzet noted: “(I)f he slowed his pace forward to let us catch up with him, the Grail that he pursues would certainly disappear over the horizon.” ^[144] He described Coltrane’s quest as “a magnificent and enriching journey through landscapes that, without him, we would certainly not have imagined existed.”^[145] Alice Coltrane noted in an interview on Polish television that John “was always concentrating, meditating, seeking for a higher sound, a higher music, a higher experience, a higher creativity in music.^[146]

Coltrane himself saw music as “an expression of the highest, you see, higher ideals.^[147] Expression he sought to raise higher. He was constantly changing, improving, searching for a new sound and musical experience. In one interview article, we read:

“Perfect that which you have introduced, he is asked today. Coltrane himself surveys his lot and answers in confusion:

“‘I haven’t found it yet. I’m listening all the time, but I haven’t found it.’

“Where is it? What is it? How will he know when he has it?

“’I don’t know what I’m looking for, he answers frankly. ‘Something that hasn’t been played before. I don’t know what it is. I know I’ll have that feeling when I get it. I’ll just keep searching.’” ^[148]

In a 1966 interview with the famous jazz critic Nat Hentoff, Coltrane reiterated the eternal nature of his journey, when asked if there will ever be a stopping point for him, noting: No. … You just keep going all the way, as deep as you can. You keep trying to get right down to the crux.” Hentoff added: “The crux of music. The crux of life. For Coltrane there is no separation between the two.” ^[149]

Coltrane’s music became steeped in a metaphysical mysticism; an atmosphere that pervaded around him and many of those who were touched by his creations. One observer interpreted Coltrane’s work as a “plunge into music-as-being.”^[150] If it is true that music can be or communicate ‘being’, then its power is unlimited. Indeed, Coltrane saw music in metaphysical and mystical terms, with its spiritual power potentially shaping the material world— becoming the instrument of a God-seeker committed to bringing truth and good through beauty. In a November 1962 interview we get a sense of ‘miraculous works’ and Fyodorovian prometheanism in this regard, as Coltrane integrates his spiritual and musical transcendentalism:

“I want to be able to bring something to people that feels like happiness. I would love to discover a process such that if I wanted it to rain, it would start raining. If one of my friends were sick, I would play a certain tune and he would get better; if he were broke, I would play another tune and immediately he would receive all the money he needed. But what those pieces are, and what way do you have to go to arrive at knowing them. I don’t know, the true powers of music are still unknown. To be able to control them should be, I think, the ambition of every musician. The knowledge of these forces fascinates me. I want to provoke reactions in my audience, to create a real atmosphere. That’s the direction that I want to go in, and to go as far as possible. I hope that everything I’ve done up to now is just the beginning.” ^[151]

One cannot help but see an almost Christ-like passion to help those who need help through the miracle of music in his belief that there might be a discoverable ‘process’ whereby one could literally heal a person’s physical ailments by playing a still unknown musical pattern.

Conclusion

Coltrane’s first music teacher was a Russian. Moreover, according to Alice, there is another ‘Russian connection’ to Coltrane; he was a devotee of the great Russian composer Igor Stravinskii’s music.^[122] Perhaps, there is something to Coltrane’s and Russians’ mystical belief in tselostnost’, and the interconnectedness or all-unity. But to be sure, there is a compatibility, closeness, even a certain unity between the great American musician John Coltrane’s spiritual approach to music, life and faith with the depths of the Russian religious and philosophical experience of beauty, truth, existence, being, and religion.

Nowadays it would seem an odd juxtaposition to compare the work, life, and thought of John Coltrane with those of Russian thinkers. Biases and prejudices of the kind that plagued Coltrane’s people during his lifetime now afflict Russia and the Russian people as a result of propaganda serving various participants in another of the great geopolitical struggles that have plagued the history of humankind.

It is precisely the imperfection of earthly life that led Coltrane and the most moral of Russia’s great thought leaders — Berdyaev, Solovev, Dostoevskii, Fyodorov, among the many others mentioned herein – in their search for higher meaning in the arts, philosophy, and God. Russian religious thinkers, poets, novelists, and composers sought Truth, Beauty, Good, wholeness, transcendence, and God. Others have sought different prjects, and it is in part the result of those that Russia still remains mired with the rest of us in the bitter fruits of conflict.

Coltrane sought a new musical spirit, which he hoped could draw on the divine to heal humankind. Coltrane’s pursuit of Truth, Beauty, Good, wholeness, transcendence, and God drove him to a single-minded pursuit that consumed his all too short life. In the process he led most of those who have followed his quest and washed in his music to new levels of spiritual and/or musical experience. Nevertheless, his people and homeland too remain mired in conflict both within and across our broken world.

---

FOOTNOTES

^[1] Manuel’ Sarkisyants, Rossiya i messiamizm: K ‘russkoi idee’ N. A. Berdyaeva, translated from German (Saint Petersburg: Saint Petersburg State University, 2005), pp 23-4.

^[2] Chris DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The Coltrane Interviews (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010), p. 171.

^[3] www.jerryjazzmusician.com/mccoy-tyner-talks-about-john-coltrane-and-the-recording-of-a-love-supreme/ and www.jerryjazzmusician.com/conversations-with-gary-giddins-on-john-coltrane/.

^[4] www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJVYRcJGpMU.

^[5] Ashley Kahn, The House That Trane Built: The Story of Impulse Records (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), p. 187.

^[6] Chris DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The Coltrane Interviews (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010), p. 171.

^[7] www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/t-magazine/john-coltrane-church.html and www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAgJ-igwuSQ.

^[8] www.nytimes.com/2021/12/03/t-magazine/john-coltrane-church.html.

^[9] www.dailymotion.com/video/xes2qq.

^[10] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 61.

^[11] https://tedpanken.wordpress.com/2011/12/11/a-jazziz-article-on-mccoy-tyner-from-2003-plus-interviews/.

^[12] www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0vzRW3omJE&list=RDt0vzRW3omJE&start_radio=1&t=228s.

^[13] https://magisteria.ru/jazz-history/john-coltrane-in-search-of-higher-love-high-priest-of-jazz-avant-garde?ysclid=meyf41wllc145974321; for a similar example, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDwP8Te4uSw.

^[14] www.jazzacademy.ru/_info/541576.

^[15] Leonid Aushkern, “Bog, Lyubov’, Muzika” (God, Love, and Music), Jazz-Kvadrat, Nos. 3-4, 2000, https://jazzquad.ru/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=55.

^[16] https://vladimirdar.livejournal.com/341705.html?ysclid=mf5sqlr46u29412305.

^[17] https://jazzpeople.ru/jazz-in-faces/svyatoy-saksofonist-dzhon-koltreyn/?ysclid=meyf4n6h7j773579662.

^[18] https://magisteria.ru/jazz-history/john-coltrane-in-search-of-higher-love-high-priest-of-jazz-avant-garde?ysclid=meyf41wllc145974321.

^[19] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 225.

^[20] V. V. Dudin, “’Iz slavy v slavu’: Esteticheskaya stoeriologiya F. M. Dostoevskogo (na materiale Romanov ‘Prestuplenie i nakazanie’ i ‘Besy’,” in N. K. Syundyukov, ed. Edinstvo dobra, istiny i krasoty v russkoi religio-filosofskoi traditsii (Saint Petersburg: RKhGA, 2023), pp. 78-88, at p. 85).

^[21] The Psalm’s text can be found on the A Love Supreme album jacket and here: https://toutelaculture.com/musique/a-love-supreme-john-coltrane-et-la-religion/. From here on cited as: Coltrane, ‘Psalm’.

^[22] James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), p. 9 and G. P. Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., in G. P. Fedotov, Sobranie sochinenii v 12 tomakh, Vol. 10 (Moscow: ‘Matris’ Sam & Sam, 2001), p. 59.

^[23] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, p. 38.

^[24] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, p. 8.

^[25] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, p. 39.

^[26] Syundyukov, Edinstvo dobra, istiny i krasoty v russkoi religio-filosofskoi traditsii.

^[27] A. V. Malyshev, “Bogoslovie krasoty Prp. Iosifa Volotskogo kak katafaticheskoe bogoslovie: K postanovke problemy,” in Syundyukov, Edinstvo dobra, istiny i krasoty v russkoi religio-filosofskoi traditsii), pp. 89-101.

^[28] Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, p. 110.

^[29] Pavel Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny: Opyta pravoslavnoi teoditsiei v dvadtsati pis’makh (The Pillar and Ground of Truth) (Moscow: Put’, 1914), p. 56.

^[30] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 287.

^[31] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The Coltrane Interviews, p. 118.

^[32] DeVito, ed. Coltrane on Coltrane: The Coltrane Interviews, p. 152.

^[33] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 263-4.

^[34] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 311.

^[35] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 14-15.

^[36] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 336.

^[37] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, pp. 53-79.

^[38] Nikolai Berdyaev, “Russkie bogoiskateli,” in Nikolai Berdyaev, Dukhovnyi krizis intelligentsia: Stati po obshchestvennoi i religioznoi psikhologii, 1907-1909 (Saint Petersburg, 1910), http://www.odinblago.ru/berd_rus_bogoisk.

^[39] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 281.

^[40] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 43.

^[41] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 159.

^[42] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 168.

^[43] “Cognition is the real emergence of the knower from himself or, what is the same, – the real entry of that which is cognized (known) into that which cognizes (the knower), – the real union of the cognizer and the cognized.” Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 73.

^[44] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, pp. 74-5 and 324-6.

^[45] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 75.

^[46] Auskern, “Bog, Lyubov’, Muzika.”

^[47] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 269-70 and www.wildmusic-jazz.com/jcr_interviews.htm#jcr660709saint.

^[48]

https://lewisporter.substack.com/p/coltrane-did-not-want-to-be-a-saint.

^[49] www.dailymotion.com/video/xes2qq.

^[50] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 374.

^[51] www.detroitartistsworkshop.com/alice-coltrane-enduring-love/.

^[52] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 146.

^[53] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 237.

^[54] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 242.

^[55] www.johncoltrane.com/biography.

^[56] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 226.

^[57] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 314.

^[58] Leonid Auskern, “Bog, Lyubov’, Muzika,” (God, Love, Music), Jazz-Kvadrat, Nos. 3-4, 2000, https://jazzquad.ru/index.pl?act=PRODUCT&id=55.

^[59] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 337.

^[60] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 155.

^[61] https://toutelaculture.com/musique/a-love-supreme-john-coltrane-et-la-religion/.

^[62] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 227-8. See also https://toutelaculture.com/musique/a-love-supreme-john-coltrane-et-la-religion/ or https://www.lionsroar.com/awakening-with-a-love-supreme/.

^[63] De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 225.

^[64] Gordon M. Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics (London: Europe Books, 2022).

^[65] www.detroitartistsworkshop.com/alice-coltrane-enduring-love/.

^[66] Comments reflecting communalism or collectivism regarding unity at sub-national levels in society were few and far between. Coltrane spoke of the need for “brotherhood” which can subsume levels below the universal, international level to include attitudes, beliefs, and ideas tied to the unity of some sub-national group – communalism – as well as universal brotherhood. DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 287. For other Coltrane comments reflecting communalist thinking, see DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 24,46, and 246.

^[67] Solovev, Kritika otvlechennykh nachal in Solovev and E. L. Radlov, eds., Sobranie Sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom vtoroi: 1873-1877, p. 345. It is worth noting here that the limits of knowledge expressed by Solovev in the quotation above mirrors the view of two French interviewers of Coltrane and that of Coltrane himself regarding the limits of knowledge for tapping into the Coltrane’s music. The interviewers noted: “Having great musical knowledge does not increase one’s chances of entering into John Coltrane’s universe.” De Vito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 172.

^[68] V. S. Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, pp. 100-2.

^[69] “Slovo o Zakone i Blagodati Mitropolita Illariona,” http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=4868, last accessed on 31 July 2020.

^[70] Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, p. 109.

^[71] Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, p. 147.

^[72] Solovev had his first vision of Sophia at the age of ten. The second came after graduation, when he travelled to London, taking up work in the London Museum. Yearning for another encounter, Solovev heard an inner voice telling him to go to Egypt where “it will be.” Hurrying to Cairo and journeying about in Western clothes and a top hat, he encountered Bedouins who robbed him. Lying in the desert in despair, he experienced his third vision with Sophia. Losskii, Istoriya russkoi filosofii, pp. 93-4. For Solovev’s poem “Three Meetings,” see Vladimir Solovev, “Tri svidaniya,” Stikhi-rus.ru, http://www.stihi-rus.ru/1/Solovev/88.htm, last accessed on 3 December 2020.

^[73] https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/the-gifts-god-gave-him/.

^[74] Florenskii, Stolp i utverzhdenie Istiny, p. 329.

^[75] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, pp. 466-7. It should be noted that the idea of Sophia is also part of the Jewish faith, and Khokhma is included in the Old Testament. Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, p. 58.

^[76] Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii: Sozertsaniya i umozreniya, pp. 213-14.

^[77] Solovev, Chtenie o Bogochelovechestve in Solovev and Radlov, Sobranie sochinenii Vladimira Sergeevicha Solov’eva, Tom III, p. 121.

^[78] Vladimir Solovev, Russia and the Universal Church (London: The Centenary Press, 2017), p. 173.

^[79] Bulgakov, Svet nevechernii: Sozertsaniya i umozreniya, p. 212.

^[80] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 267.

^[81] Coltrane was influenced in this through his study of Islam, Hinduism, Taoism, and other eastern religions.

^[82] Rahsaan Roland Kirk, “Theme for the Eulipians,” Warner Brothers, 1976, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avAQrOydurQ.

^[83] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 226.

^[84] The Psalm’s text can be found on the ’A Love Supreme’ album jacket as well as in De Vito, eds., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 227-8 and at https://toutelaculture.com/musique/a-love-supreme-john-coltrane-et-la-religion/.

^[85] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 338.

^[86] See the relevant excerpt from the ‘A Love Supreme’ documentary beginning at approximately the 00:15 mark, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eylAhnXKcEo.

^[87] See the relevant excerpt from the ‘A Love Supreme’ documentary beginning at approximately the 4:00 minute mark, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVLKEwPb95s.

^[88] www.wbgo.org/music/2020-07-17/a-deep-dive-into-john-coltranes-a-love-supreme-by-his-biographer-lewis-porter-pt-1.

^[89] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 263-4.

^[90] Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., p. 86.

^[91] Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., pp. 88 and 91.

^[92] Illarion’s effort was rewarded by Prince Yaroslav the Wise by his appointment as Kiev’s first metropolitan, the first Russian to hold this post (previous Kievan metropolitans were Greek) and the first to be appointed in Kiev and not the Constantinople patriarch. Kiev’s emerging conflict with Constantinople came as Rus’ reached the apex of its power, and the ‘national party’ in Kiev was led by Illarion himself. Despite his stature, Illarion soon disappeared from the historical chronicles, and the Russian Church neglected the memory of Illarion as a historical personality, despite his having been one of the first and “most remarkable archpastors.” Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., p. 86.

^[93] “Slovo o Zakone i Blagodati Mitropolita Illariona,” http://lib.pushkinskijdom.ru/Default.aspx?tabid=4868, last accessed on 31 July 2020.

^[94] Fedotov, Russkaya religioznost’- Chast’ 1: Khristianstvo Kievskoi Rusi, X-XIII vv., p. 88.

^[95] “Slovo o Zakone i Blagodati Mitropolita Illariona.”

^[96] F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya (Saint Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2001), p. 678.

^[97] Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, p. 725.

^[98] Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, p. 726.

^[99] Salomon Mirsky, Der Orient im Werk Velimir Chlebnikovs (Munich: Sagner, 1975).

^[100] V. S. Solovev, “Indiiskaya filosofiya,” Stat’ya iz Entsiklopedicheskogo Slovar’, http://odinblago.ru/soloviev_10/4_35, last accessed on 2 April 2021 and V. S. Solovev, “Kitai i Yevropa,” 1890, http://odinblago.ru/soloviev_6/4, last accessed on 2 April 2021.

^[101] See “Buddhiiskoe nastroenie v poezii,” Sochinenii gr. Golenishcheva-Kutuzova, Tom 2, (St. Petersburg, 1894), http://odinblago.ru/soloviev_7/4, last accessed on 2 April 2021.

^[102] For an overview of Buddhist representations in Russian Silver Age literature, see L. V. Dubakov, “Buddhism v russkoi literature, https://docviewer.yandex.com/view/0/?page=6&*=9aK2CJrW5RcYD%2BjJLtOhKR5ps6t7InVybCI6InlhLWRpc2stcHVibGljOi8vNEhVd2xrUUJKK3FkTmNCUnRsamt2Wjd2VzBJK2s0MkZXcHE1elo2WTBjRT0iLCJ0aXRsZSI6ImR1YmFrb3ZfYnVkZGl6bV9ydXNfbGl0LmRvY3giLCJub2lmcmFtZSI6ZmFsc2UsInVpZCI6IjAiLCJ0cyI6MTYxNzM5OTcwMjg2NCwieXUiOiI4Njk3MzYwOTkxNjE3Mzk5NTUwIn0%3D, last accessed on 2 April 2021.

^[103] Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics, pp. 400-486.

^[104] N. A. Vasetskii, Sotsiologiya istorii Rossii: Bazoviye smysly i tsennosti (Zapiski sotsiolog) (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2019), pp. 36-7.

^[105] In arguing the contemporary neo-Eurasianist and Putin era Russian policy position that U.S. and Western neo-liberal hegemony maintains an undemocratic international order and threatens civilizational diversity and traditionalist civilizations such as Russia’s own, Vasetskii asserts that Illarion’s “Word” introduced the idea of the equality of all nationalities, nullifying the idea of a “chosen people.” Vasetskii, Sotsiologiya istorii Rossii: Bazoviye smysly i tsennosti (Zapiski sotsiolog), pp. 38-9.

^[106] See Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics, pp. 487-531.

^[107] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 282.

^[108] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 263.

^[109] These words were preceded in the interview with the following: “I am (Christian) by, as fas as birth – my mother was, and my father was, and so forth, and my early teachings were of the Christian faith. Now, as I look out upon the world—and its’ always been a thing with me— to feel that all men know the truth, see? So therefore I’ve always felt that even though a man was not a Christian, he still had to know the truth some way. Or if he was a Christian , he could know the truth—or he could not.” Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 277.

^[110] DeVito, ed., Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 270.

^[111] www.thefourthfloor.co.uk/culture/the-coltranes-spirituality-in-jazz.

^[112] www.philosophyforlife.org/blog/john-and-alice-coltranes-ecstatic-perennialism.

^[113] www.thefourthfloor.co.uk/culture/the-coltranes-spirituality-in-jazz.

^[114] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 181.

^[115] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 230.

^[116] https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/the-gifts-god-gave-him/.

^[117] www.thefourthfloor.co.uk/culture/the-coltranes-spirituality-in-jazz.

^[118] https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/the-gifts-god-gave-him/.

^[119] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 206.

^[120] Coltrane on Coltrane, pp. 208 and 278 and https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/the-gifts-god-gave-him/.

^[121] Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture, p. 483.

^[122] https://jazztimes.com/features/interviews/the-gifts-god-gave-him/.

^[123] James Billington, Rossiya v poiskakh sebya (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005), [translated into Russian from the English-language publication James H. Billington, Russia in Search of Itself (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)], p. 163.

^[124] I. I. Yevlampiev, Istoriya russkoi metafisiki v XIX-XX vekakh (St. Petersburg: RKhGA, 2020), p. 66.

^[125] Nikolai Berdyaev, Sud’ba Rossii (Saint Petersburg: Azbuka, 2016), p. 406.

^[126] Berdyaev, Sud’ba Rossii, pp. 409-12.

^[127] “Slovo o Zakone i Blagodati Mitropolita Illariona”

^[128] “Slovo o Zakone i Blagodati Mitropolita Illariona”

^[129] Yakov Gordin, Tsar’ I Bog: Pyotr Velikii i ego utopia (St. Petersburg: Vita Nova, 2023), p. 12.

^[130] F. M. Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, 1873-1881 (St. Petersburg: Lenizdat, 2001), p. 209.

^[131] Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, 1873-1881, p. 145.

^[132] Dostoevskii, Dnevnik pisatelya, 1873-1881, pp. 254-5.

[133] Berdyaev, Smysl’ istorii: opyt’ filosofii chelovecheskoi sud‘by, p. 268.

^[134] N. F. Fyodorov, Sobranie sochinenii v chetyrekh tomakh, tom pervyi (Moscow: Progress, 1995), pp. 7-8.

^[135] For more on Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet cosmism and immortalism, see Hahn, Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Culture, Thought, History, and Politics, pp. 130-8, 253-63, 328-40, 423-6, 488-9, and 735-6.

^[136] Konstantin Malofeev. Imperiya: Nastoyashchee i budushchee (Moscow: AST, 2022), p. 480.

^[137] Aleksandr Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya: Istoriya i istoriosofiya gosudarstva Rossiiskogo (Moscow: Prospekt, 2023), pp. 7-8, 13, and 82.

^[138] Bokhanov, Russkaya ideya: Istoriya i istoriosofiya gosudarstva Rossiiskogo, p. 554.

^[139] N. A. Vasetskii, Sotsiologiya istorii Rossii: Bazoviye smysly i tsennosti (Zapiski sotsiolog) (Moscow: Akademicheskii proekt, 2019), pp. 36-9 and 189-93.

^[140] https://jazztimes.com/features/lists/mccoy-tyner-great-moments/.

^[141] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 324.

^[142] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 311.

^[143] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 126.

^[144] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 171.

^[145] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 173.

^[146] View from approximately the 3:30 mark in Alice Coltrane’s interview on Polish television. “Alice Coltrane – Interview, 1987 (Jazz Jamboree)”, Youtube.com, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gk6SLbAnbDE

^[147] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 287.

^[148] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 145.

^[149] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 321.

^[150] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 320.

^[151] Coltrane on Coltrane, p. 182.

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About the Author –

Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an Expert Analyst at Corr Analytics, www.canalyt.com. Websites: Russian and Eurasian Politics, gordonhahn.com and gordonhahn.academia.edu

Dr. Hahn is the author of the new book: Russian Tselostnost’: Wholeness in Russian Thought, Culture, History, and Politics (Europe Books, 2022). He has authored five previous, well-received books: The Russian Dilemma: Security, Vigilance, and Relations with the West from Ivan III to Putin (McFarland, 2021); Ukraine Over the Edge: Russia, the West, and the “New Cold War” (McFarland, 2018); The Caucasus Emirate Mujahedin: Global Jihadism in Russia’s North Caucasus and Beyond (McFarland, 2014), Russia’s Islamic Threat (Yale University Press, 2007), and Russia’s Revolution From Above: Reform, Transition and Revolution in the Fall of the Soviet Communist Regime, 1985-2000 (Transaction, 2002). He also has published numerous think tank reports, academic articles, analyses, and commentaries in both English and Russian language media.

Dr. Hahn taught at Boston, American, Stanford, San Jose State, and San Francisco State Universities and as a Fulbright Scholar at Saint Petersburg State University, Russia and was a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS), Akribis Group.