CHRISTIAN STATEHOOD IN THE AGE OF PROTEST
From the Fall of
Constantinople to Peter the Great (1453-1700)
Vladimir Moss
CONTENTS
Introduction…………………………………………………………3
Part
I. The Age of Protest (1453-1589)
1. The West: The
Assault on the Church…….………………..………5
1492 and the Jews - The Lure of
Freedom – Humanism - Rationalism – Luther, Müntzer and Charles V - Henry
VIII and Sir Thomas More – The Counter-Reformation and Spanish Absolutism –
Protestant Democratism: Calvin and Browne – The Church of England
2. The East: The Riurik
Tsars…………………….……………..……….44
The Path to the Third Rome – The Heresy of the
Judaisers – Russian Caesaropapism and its Critics – Ivan the Terrible: (1) The
Orthodox Tsar – Ivan the Terrible: (2) The Bloodthirsty Tyrant - St. Philip of
Moscow
Part
II. The Age of Revanche (1589-1700)
3.
The West: The Assault on the Monarchy…………………………75
Holland: the First Capitalist
State - The Anglican Monarchy - The Old Testament in the New World - The
English Revolution – The Killing of the King – John Milton - Hobbes’ Leviathan
– Locke’s Theory of the Social Contract - A Critique of Social Contract Theory
- French Absolutism – The Forerunners of the Enlightenment - The Idea of
Religious Toleration - Capitalism and the Jews - Protestantism and the
Scientific Outlook – Sir Isaac Newton
4. The East: Patriarchal Russia………….………………………….…140
The Moscow Patriarchate – Poles, Cossacks and Jews –
Orthodoxy and the Unia - Boris Godunov - The Time of Troubles – The Hereditary
Principle – Tsar, Patriarch and People –The Schism of the Old Believers –
Patriarch Nicon of Moscow – The Swansong of the Moscow Patriarchate – From Holy
Rus’ to Great Russia
FOREWORD
This book
is designed as a successor to my previous book, The Ideal of Christian Statehood,
which studied the theory and practice of Christian Statehood in the ancient and
medieval worlds, until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The present volume
aims to take this story on into the early modern period, through the
Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the early anti-monarchical
revolutions, to the threshold of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. As in
the earlier book, I have found it useful to construct my narrative in pairs of
chapters, with one chapter in each pair describing developments in the Catholic
and Protestant West, and the other – in the Orthodox East. The chapters on the
West describe the gradual dissolution of the “symphonic” ideal of Christian
statehood, and its replacement by pagan democratic, on the one hand, and absolutist
models, on the other, under the impact of Humanism, Protestantism and
Rationalism. The chapters on the East describe the resurrection of the ideal in
Muscovite Russia, until the abolition of the patriarchate under Peter the
Great.
October 22 / November 4, 2002.
Kazan Icon of the Most Holy
Mother of God.
PART I. THE AGE OF PROTEST (1453-1589)
1.
THE WEST: THE ASSAULT ON THE CHURCH
As free, and not
using your liberty
As a cloak of
maliciousness,
But as the servants of God.
I Peter 2.16.
A Christian man is a perfectly free lord, subject
to none [of the princes of the Church].
Martin Luther.
A Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of
all, subject to all [of the princes of this world].
Martin Luther.
With the
fall of New Rome in 1453, and the re-acquaintance of the West with the
political ideas of antiquity during the Renaissance, the way was open for the
development of a completely new theory of politics, a theory based, not on
theology and the order ordained by God, but on nature, especially fallen
human nature, with the aim of creating a new order that would satisfy the
demands of that nature. Of course, the Christian (in the broad sense of that
word) understanding of politics did not disappear overnight; and the new era
was distinguished both by fervent attempts to justify revolutionary and
democratic forms of government on the basis of Holy Scripture and by the
explicitly religious and anti-democratic theory known as the Divine Right of
Kings. Nevertheless, the general tendency, which began in the Renaissance (if
not in the 13th century) and has continued to develop vigorously
until the modern day, has been to disconnect
politics from religion – or, at any rate, from the Christian religion – with
enormous consequences for the theory and practice of government.
1492 and the Jews
If the fall of
Constantinople in 1453 marked the end of the ancient and medieval worlds, then
the events that took place simultaneously in Spain in 1492 may be said to mark
the beginning of the modern world. As Karen Armstrong writes: “In 1492, three
very important things happened in Spain. The events were experienced as
extraordinary at the time, but with hindsight we can see that they were
characteristic of the new society that was, slowly and painfully, coming to
birth in Western Europe during the lat-fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth
centuries. These years saw the development of our modern Western culture, so
1492 also throws light on some of our own preoccupations and dilemmas. The
first of these events occurred on January 2, when the armies of King Ferdinand
and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs whose marriage had recently united
the old Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, conquered the city-state of
Granada. With deep emotion, the crowd watched the Christian banner raised
ceremonially upon the city walls and, as the news broke, bells pealed
triumphantly all over Europe, for Granada was the last Muslim stronghold in
Christendom [more accurately: Western Christendom]. The Crusades against Islam
in the Middle East had failed, but at least the Muslims had been flushed out of
Europe. In 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain were given the option of
conversion to Christianity or deportation, after which, for a few centuries, Europe
would become Muslim-free. The second event of this momentous year happened on
March 31, when Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Edict of Expulsion, designed
to rid Spain of its Jews, who were given the chance of baptism or deportation.
Many Jews were so attached to ‘al-Andalus’ (as the old Muslim kingdom had been
called) that they converted to Christianity and remained in Spain, but about
80,000 Jews crossed the border into Portugal, while 50,000 fled to the new
Muslim Ottoman empire, where they were given a warm welcome. The third event
concerned one of the people who had been present at the Christian occupation of
Granada. In August, Christopher Columbus, a protégé of Ferdinand
and Isabella, sailed from Spain to find a new trade route to India but discovered
the Americas instead.”[1]
If the
conquest of Granada and the voyage of Christopher Columbus signified the new
power, self-confidence and global reach of Western civilization, the expulsion
of the Jews rather signified its ultimate future failure. For the Jews who were
expelled – called the Sephardic Jews after their word for Spain, “Sefarad” –
spread throughout the West, bringing with them ideas and influences that were
to be of enormous importance in the development of the West and in the eventual
destruction of its Christian character. These influences can be divided into
three kinds: those deriving from the Talmud, those deriving from the Cabbala,
and those deriving from the adoption by Jewish conversos (those forcibly
converted to Christianity, but never really believing in it) of Western
rationalism and scepticism about religion in general.
(i) The
Talmud. Now the Jews were an “alien, apparently indigestible element in
society”; they were “always and everywhere in
society and in the state, but never properly of either one or the other”.[2]
The reasons given for this alienation of the Jews in the course of history have
basically been of two diametrically opposing kinds. According to the Christians
and those who are called by the Jews “anti-semites”, the Jews were alien
because they wanted to be alien,
because their law, the Talmud, which has only the most strained and tangential
relationship to God’s revelation in the Old Testament, ordered them to be alien and hostile to all non-Jews, whom they
exploited through their money-lending activities and against whose political
authorities they very often rebelled. In other words, Christian anti-semitism
was the regrettable but fully understandable consequence of Jewish
anti-Gentilism. The Jewish and pro-semitic view, on the other hand, it was the
Christians who imposed this alienation upon the Jews, forcing them to live in
ghettoes, to take up money-lending as a profession, to rebel out of
self-defence.
Be that as
it may, it is indisputable that almost every society that received the Jews
felt compelled to expel them after a time. Thus as a result of their political
intrigues, they were expelled from “the market of Chalcis”, the Jewish quarter
of Constantinople, by the Emperors Theodosius II and Justin II. Then, in 1040,
the Muslims expelled them from Mesopotamia, which had been their homeland for
many generations, the seat of their government-in-exile and the place where the
Babylonian Talmud, the real “Bible” of Judaism, received its finished form.
Then Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh expelled them from Russia in the twelfth
century. In 1290 they were expelled from England, in 1306 from France, in 1349
from Saxony, in 1360 from Hungary, in 1370 from Belgium, in 1380 from Bohemia,
in 1480 from Austria, in 1444 from the Netherlands; in 1492 from Spain, in 1495
from Lithuania, in 1497 from Portugal, in 1498 from Salzburg, Wurtemburg and
Nuremburg, in 1540 from Sardinia and Naples, and in 1551 from Bavaria.
Even
earlier than the expulsion of the Jews themselves came the banning and
destruction of their evil anti-Christian and anti-Gentile books, especially the
Talmud. Thus “the struggle with the Talmud,” writes Platonov, “began as early
as the reign of the emperor Justinian in 556. He permitted the Jews to read
only the Bible in the synagogue, but strictly forbade the Mishna. The Byzantine
emperors were unconditional opponents of the Talmud, forbidding the Talmud on
their territory. In this policy the Russian sovereigns followed the Byzantine emperors.
Right until the end of the 17th century the import of the Talmud
into Russia was forbidden under pain of death.
“The tradition of the non-allowance of the Talmud onto the territory of Christian states was broken after the falling away of the Western church from Orthodoxy and the strengthening of papism. The mercenary Roman popes and cardinals for the sake of gain often entered into agreements with the Jews and looked through their fingers at the widespread distribution of the Talmud in Europe. Nevertheless, amidst the Roman popes there were found those who tried to fight with this ‘book worthy of being cursed’, from the reading of which ‘every kind of evil flows’.
“Popes
Gregory IX in 1230 and Innocent IV in 1244 ordered all Talmudic books to be
burned. In England in 1272 during the expulsion of the Jews searches for copies
of the Talmud were carried out in their homes and they were handed over to be
burned…”[3]
(ii) The
Cabbala. Nesta Webster writes: “The modern Jewish Cabala presents a dual
aspect – theoretical and practical; the former concerned with theosophical
speculations, the latter with magical practices. It would be impossible here to
give an idea of Cabalistic theosophy with its extraordinary imaginings on the
Sephiroths, the attributes and functions of good and bad angels, dissertations
on the nature of demons, and minute details on the appearance of God under the
name of the Ancient of Ancients, from whose head 400,000 worlds receive the
light. ‘The length of this face from the top of the head is three hundred and
seventy times ten thousand worlds. It is called the “Long Face”, for such is
the name of the Ancient of Ancients.’ The description of the hair and beard
alone belonging to this gigantic countenance occupies a large place in the
Zoharic treatise, Idra Raba.
“According
to the Cabala, every letter in the Scriptures contains a mystery only to be
solved by the initiated. By means of this system of interpretation passages of
the Old Testament are shown to bear meanings totally unapparent to the ordinary
reader. Thus the Zohar explains that Noah was lamed for life by the bite of a
lion whilst he was in the ark, the adventures of Jonah inside the whale are
related with an extraordinary wealth of imagination, whilst the beautiful story
of Elisha and the Shunamite woman is travestied in the most grotesque manner.
“In the
practical Cabala this method of ‘decoding’ is reduced to a theurgic or magical
system in which the healing of diseases plays an important part and is effected
by means of the mystical arrangement of numbers and letters, by the
pronunciation of the Ineffable Name, by the use of amulets and talismans, or by
compounds supposed to contain certain occult properties.
“All these
ideas derived from very ancient cults; even the art of working miracles by the
use of the Divine Name, which after the appropriation of the Cabbala by the
Jews became the particular practice of Jewish miracle-workers, appears to have
originated in Chaldea…”[4]
How could
this paganism ever have entered Judaism? One may well ask. The prosemite author
Paul Johnson writes: “The sages were both fascinated and repelled by this
egregious superstition. The anthropomorphism of God’s bodily measurements went
against basic Judaic teaching that God is non-created and unknowable. The sages
advised Jews to keep their eyes firmly fixed on the law and not to probe
dangerous mysteries… But they then proceeded to do just that themselves; and,
being elitists, they tended to fall in with the idea of special knowledge
conveyed to the elect: ‘The story of creation should not be expounded before
two persons, and the chapter on the chariot [Ezekiel 1] before even one
person, unless he is a sage, and already has an independent understanding of
the matter.’ That was the Talmud; indeed the Talmud and other holy writings
contained a good deal of this suspect material…”[5]
In the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries a conflict arose between the rationalists, led
by Maimonides, who rejected this paganism, and the “mystics”, led by
Nahmanides, who accepted it. “Nahmanides,” writes Johnson, “made it possible
for kabbalists to pose as the conservatives, tracing the origin of their ideas
back to the Bible and Talmud, and upholding the best and most ancient Jewish traditions.
It was the rationalists who were the innovators, bringing to the study of the
Torah the pagan ideas of the ancient Greeks. In this respect, the campaign
against the works of Maimonides could be described as the last squeak of the
anti-Hellenists.
“Nahmanides
himself never joined the witch-hunt against rationalism – on the contrary, he
opposed it – but he made it possible for the kabbalists to escape similar
charges of heresy, which in fact would have been much better grounded. For
kabbalah not only introduced gnostic concepts which were totally alien to the
ethical monotheism of the Bible, it was in a sense a completely different
religion: pantheism. Both its cosmogony – its account of how creation was
conceived in God’s words – and its theory of divine emanations led to the
logical deduction that all things contain a divine element. In the 1280s, a
leading Spanish kabbalist, Moses ben Shem Tov of Guadalajar, produced a summa
of kabbalistic lore, the Sefer-ha-Zohar, generally known as the Zohar,
which became the best-known treatise on the subject. Much of this work is
explicitly pantheist: it insists repeatedly that God ‘is everything’ and
everything is united in Him, ‘as is known to the mystics’. But if God is
everything, and everything is in God, how can God be a single, specific being,
non-created and absolutely separate from creation, as orthodox Judaism has
always emphatically insisted? There is no answer to this question, except the
plain one that Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind…”[6]
During the
Renaissance, however, the floodgates of Jewish influence were opened and both
Jewish and pagan literature became far more available. The influence of
Greco-Latin paganism on the West has been well documented and recognized,
largely because it came from above, with the official sanction of leaders in
both Church and State. The influence of Jewish paganism has been less
recognized, largely because it came from below, from the underground, and
entered in spite of the resistance (at first) of the powers that be.
Thus to
cite just one example: through contact with Jewish bankers interested in art
and literature, writes Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “the Florentine Christian philosopher
Pico della Mirandola was able to engage in kabbalistic study, making use of the
concept of the sefirot in his compositions. He and other Christian
humanists believed that the Zohar contained doctrines which support the
Christian faith. In this milieu Judah Abravanel composed a Neoplatonic work
which had an important impact on Italian humanism.”[7]
However,
the Jews themselves were looking for stronger medicine: “after the Spanish
disaster,” writes Armstrong, “Kabbalists found that the rational disciplines of
philosophy, which had been popular among the Jews of al-Andalus, could not
address their pain. Life seemed drained of meaning, and without meaning in
their lives, human beings can fall into despair. To make life bearable, the
exiles turned to mythos and mysticism…”[8]
The result
was a new form of Cabbala invented by an Ashkenazi Jew, Isaac ben Solomon
Luria, which incorporated the motif of exile in an exotic new synthesis. “Like
most kabbalists,” writes Johnson, “he believed that the actual letters of the
Torah, and the numbers which they symbolized, offered means of direct access to
God. It is a very potent brew once swallowed. However, Luria also had a cosmic
theory which had an immediate direct bearing on belief in the Messiah, and
which remains the most influential of all Jewish mystical ideas. The kabbalah
listed the various layers of the cosmos. Luria postulated the thought that
Jewish miseries were a symptom of the breakdown of the cosmos. Its shattered
husks, or klippot, which are vile, none the less contain tiny sparks, tikkim,
of the divine light. This imprisoned light is the Exile of the Jews. Even the
divine Shekinah itself is part of the trapped light, subject to evil
influences. The Jewish people have a dual significance in this broken cosmos,
both as symbols and as active agents. As symbols, the injuries inflicted on
them by the gentiles show how evil hurts the light. But as agents they have the
task of restoring the cosmos. By the strictest observance of the Law, they can
release the sparks of light trapped in the cosmic husks. When this restitution
has been made, the Exile of the Light will end, the Messiah will come and
Redemption will take place.”[9]
The spread of these messianic ideas –
according to Armstrong, “by 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement,
the only theological system to win such general acceptance among Jews at this
time”[10]
- led to the appearance of at least one false messiah. According to
Cohn-Sherbok, Shabbatai Zevi was first proclaimed Messiah by his false prophet,
Nathan Benjamin Levi, who “then sent letters to Jews throughout the diaspora
requesting that they repent and recognize Shabbatai Zevi as their deliverer.
According to Nathan, Shabbatai would bring back the lost tribes and inaugurate
the period of messianic redemption. After a short period in Jerusalem,
Shabbatai travelled to Smyrna, where he encountered fierce opposition from
various local rabbis. In response he declared that he was the Anointed of the
God of Jacob and criticized those who refused to accept him. This act provoked
hysterical response from his followers: a number fell into trances and had
visions of him crowned on a royal throne as the King of Israel.
“In 1666 he went to Istanbul, where he was
arrested and put into prison. Soon the prison quarters were transformed into a
messianic court, and pilgrims from throughout the Jewish world travelled to
Constantinople to join in messianic rituals and ascetic activities. Hymns were
composed in Shabbatai’s honour and new festivals introduced. The same year
Shabbatai met the Polish kabbalist Nehemiah ha-Kohen, who denounced him to the
Turkish authorities. When Shabbatai was brought to the Turkish court, he was
given the choice between conversion and death. Given this alternative,
Shabbatai converted to Islam…”[11]
(iii) The Conversos. The Spanish
monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella had defined itself through its struggles
with the Jews. Unable to absorb the new and substantial Jewish population that
it inherited after the conquest of Granada, it first forced the Jews into
accepting Christianity. Then, finding that this did not prevent riots against
the conversos (or marranos, “pigs”, as the “Old Christians”
called them), and disturbed by reports that the conversos continued to
practice their old faith in secret, the monarchy called in the Inquisition to
determine the truth by means of torture. However, this solution was also
abandoned in favour of the Edict of Expulsion. “Spanish Jewry was destroyed,”
writes Armstrong. About 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to
be plagued by the Inquisition; the remaining 130,000, as we have seen went into
exile.”[12]
Some of the conversos who remained
in Spain were able to identify wholly with Catholicism – Teresa of Avila is the
best-known example. But those who could not, and wanted to practise Judaism in
secret, “had no means of learning about Jewish law or ritual practice. In
consequence, they had no real allegiance to any faith. Long before secularism,
atheism, and religious indifference became common in the rest of Europe, we
find instances of these essentially modern attitudes among the Marrano Jews of
the Iberian peninsula”.[13]
From Spain many of these conversos
migrated to Portugal, and when Portugal also turned against them, to Amsterdam.
The most famous Jew to be born in Amsterdam, and one of the first true
modernists of history, was Baruch Spinoza. “His
parents had lived as Judaizing Marranos in Portugal, and had managed to make
the transition to Orthodox Judaism when they arrived in Amsterdam. Spinoza,
therefore, had never been hunted or persecuted. He had always lived in liberal
Amsterdam, and had access to the intellectual life of the gentile world and the
opportunity to practise his faith unmolested. He had received a traditional
education at the splendid Keter Torah school, but had also studied modern
mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Destined for a life in commerce, Spinoza
had seemed devout, but in 1655,… he suddenly stopped attending services in the
synagogue and began to voice doubts. He noted that there were contradictions in
the biblical text that proved it to be of human not divine origin. He denied
the possibility of revelation, and argued that ‘God’ was simply the totality of
nature itself. The rabbis eventually, on July 27, 1656, pronounced the sentence
of excommunication upon Spinoza, and… Spinoza did not ask to remain in the
community. He was glad to go, and became the first person in Europe to live
successfully beyond the reach of established religion…
“In his concentration on this world and in
his denial of the supernatural, Spinoza became one of the first secularists of
Europe. Like many modern people, Spinoza regarded all formal religion with
distaste… He dismissed the revealed faiths as a ‘compound of credulity and
prejudices’, and ‘a tissue of meaningless mysteries’. He had found ecstasy in
the untrammeled use of reason, not by immersing himself in the biblical text…
Instead of experiencing it as a revelation of the divine, Spinoza insisted that
the Bible be read like any other text. He was one of the first to study the
Bible scientifically, examining the historical background, the literary genres,
and the question of authorship. He also used the Bible to explore his political
ideas. Spinoza was one of the first people in Europe to promote the ideal of a
secular, democratic state which would become one of the hallmarks of Western
modernity. He argued that once the priests had acquired more power than the
kings of Israel, the laws of the state became punitive and restrictive.
Originally, the kingdom of Israel had been theocratic but because, in Spinoza’s
view, God and the people were one and the same, the voice of the people had
been supreme. Once the priests seized control, the voice of God could no longer
be heard. But Spinoza was no populist. Like most premodern philosophers, he was
an elitist who believed the masses to be incapable of rational thought. They
would need some form of religion to give them a modicum of enlightenment, but
this religion must be reformed, based not on so-called revealed law but on the
natural principles of justice, fraternity, and liberty.”[14]
The Lure of Freedom
Liberty:
this has been the keyword of European civilisation since the Renaissance, and
therefore of most of the world today insofar as European civilisation has
spread throughout the world. “Imagine,” writes Fernand Braudel, “that it might
be possible to assemble the sum total of our knowledge of European history from
the fifth century to the present, or perhaps to the eighteenth century, and to
record it (if such a recording were conceivable) in an electronic memory.
Imagine that the computer was then asked to indicate the one problem which
recurred most frequently, in time and space, throughout this lengthy history.
Without a doubt, that problem is liberty, or rather liberties. The word liberty
is the operative word.
“The very
fact that, in the twentieth-century conflict ideologies, the Western world has
chosen to call itself ‘the free world’, however mixed its motives, is both fair
and appropriate in view of Europe’s history during these many centuries.
“The word
liberty has to be understood in all its connotations, including such pejorative
senses as in ‘taking liberties’. All liberties, in fact, threaten each other:
one limits another, and later succumbs to a further rival. This process has
never been peaceful; yet it is one of the secrets that explain Europe’s
progress.”[15]
Of course,
as we have seen, freedom was an important concept in antiquity: the Greeks
defeated the Persians in the name of freedom, and Brutus killed Caesar in the
name of freedom. And the revival of its importance in the Renaissance owed much
to the general revival of the ideas and values of pagan antiquity caused by the
flight of classical scholars from Byzantium to the West. However, there were
several other important factors.
First there
was the gradual increase in economic
freedom. Thus beginning already in the twelfth century we see the rise of
free crafts, guilds and lodges (such as the stonemasons’ lodges, which
developed into Freemasonry). These first chinks in the prison of feudal
servitude appeared in the towns, which consequently began to acquire
independent or semi-independent status, especially in North Italy, the
Netherlands and Germany.
The liberty
of the towns was by no means an unmixed blessing. “Egoistic, vigilant and
ferocious, towns were ready to defend their liberties against the rest of the
world, often with very great courage and sometimes without any concern for the
liberties of the others. Bloodthirsty wars between cities were the forerunner
of the national wars to come.”[16]
Now the
towns were built on commerce, and
commerce was built on the commercial
contract. Therefore it is not surprising that the dominant theory of
politics developed by town-dwellers came to be the theory of the social contract. Just as the basic
form of relationship between men in the Middle Ages had been the feudal one
between lord and vassal, which was reflected in the medieval feudal theory of
politics (i.e. the pope is the supreme lord, and the princes are his vassals),
so the basic form of relationship between men in the early modern period became
(although not immediately and by no means everywhere) the more egalitarian one
between buyer and seller, which was correspondingly reflected in the more
egalitarian and exchange-based theories of the social contract (i.e. the people
have entered into a contract with their rulers whereby they buy security in
exchange for obedience).
Of course,
the idea of the social contract was not invented in the early modern period. As
McClelland writes, “it is certainly easy enough to find contract-sounding
notions in the political thought of Europe before the Reformation. Socrates
himself is supposed to have said that the reason why he did not use the
opportunity to escape from the rigour of the Athenian justice which had
condemned him was that he had always lived in the city and so had implicitly
agreed to abide by its laws. The coronation rituals of medieval kings were shot
through with contract notions. Kings received the blessing of Holy Church in
return for promising to protect true religion and the Church as its earthly
embodiment, received the homage of the barons in return for confirming them in
their privileges, and were acclaimed by the people who expected kings to
protect them from the wilder vagaries of men and nature. And all oaths of
allegiance are to some extent contractual. In this sense feudalism was riddled
with contract, but feudal contracts were not free in any real sense because
sons always claimed the right to make contract with feudal superiors on the
same terms as their fathers… Of course, there is no end to the business of
finding contract notions in political thought before the Reformation, but the
fact remains that before then contract was never given as the basis for
political society (with the great exception of the Jews, of which more later).
“It might
also be said that before the Reformation there was never a serious case to be
made out for disobedience. This does not mean that everyone before then was
always satisfied with the political authority which required their obedience,
but it might mean that before the rise of social contract there was always a
presumption in favour of obedience. The common law of Christendom was supposed
to be binding on all men, rulers and ruled, and being God’s Law, there could
never be a case for disobedience. Matters became slightly more complicated, but
not much, at the level of political practice. Suppose that the laws which
require my obedience imperfectly express God’s Law. How does that affect my
duty to obey? At first sight, it might appear that it affects my duty to obey a
great deal. I might be tempted to say that human law which imperfectly embodies
God’s Law is no law at all. That would be to say that I would obey no ruler
except God Himself, and that would turn me into a millenarian, obedient to
no-one on earth until Christ and His Saints return to rule for a thousand
years. A refusal to obey any earthly law would effectively make me into an
anarchist. Besides, what I would be forgetting is that earthly law is, by definition, an imperfect embodiment
of God’s Law. No matter how well-intentioned earthly rulers are, no matter how
mindful of the Church’s teaching, no matter how saintly the king, all law made
or declared by earthly law-givers is going to be, sub specie aeternitatis,
bad law. Some laws are better than others, and medieval thinkers had in fact
disagreed about how good law which was not God’s Law could be, but none could
be wholly good. In these circumstances, the purist would always be in the
position of saying that at best he was almost, but not quite, bound by law, so
he would be almost, but not quite, bound to obey. Either you obey or you don’t
(you can’t almost, but not quite, obey) so you would either be always bound to
obey, in which case political obligation would not be a problem, or you would
never obey, in which case political obligation is not a problem either. Neither
complete acceptance, nor complete rejection is really an attempt to deal with
political obligation: either you would always obey or you would never obey, and
that would be that.
“Political
obligation, then, only becomes a problem – something worth thinking seriously
about – when there is a serious case for disobedience in the minds of men who
are prepared to obey law, even though law is imperfect, but not that law, or not that law made by him. Law becomes in some sense a matter
for negotiation between rulers and subjects; in short, a matter of agreement or
contract…”[17]
Of course,
the idea that politics was based on a contract between rulers and ruled did not
immediately bring political liberalisation in its train. On the contrary, in
many countries it elicited a reaction in the opposite direction: absolutism, the idea that the ruler is
under no obligations to his people
and is above any law, human or Divine. Absolute monarchies ruled throughout our
period, not only in Catholic countries such as Spain and France, but even in
Protestant countries such as England and Northern Germany, where the collapse
of papism enabled the ruler to take control of the Church as well as the State.
The
collapse of papal authority in most of northern Europe elicited another important
libertarian idea: the idea of religious
freedom. This was very closely linked with freedom of the mind and conscience. The seeds of this had already
been sown in the scholastic and conciliar movements of the later Middle Ages,
and in heretical movements such as the French Albigensians, the English
Lollards and the Czech Hussites. But the decisive impulse came in the fifteenth
and sixteenth centuries, as a result of Humanism and the Reformation.
The period
under discussion (1453-1700) was an epoch of greatly increasing complexity and
variety in European culture. The dominant ideas of medieval Europe had been
basically two: Catholicism and Feudalism, as in the earlier period they had
been two: Orthodoxy and Autocracy. But any list of the dominant ideas of early
modern Europe must include, in addition to these, the various ideas of
economic, social, political and religious freedom mentioned above, together
with perhaps the most revolutionary idea of all - scientific method.
This
extreme cultural richness and diversity explains in part what may appear to be
a puzzle to many: why Europe, under the influence of these new libertarian
ideas, did not move immediately to more democratic forms of government, but
even evolved despotic governments more powerful than any seen in medieval
times, such as the England of Elizabeth I, the Spain of Philip II or the France
of Louis XIV.
The point
is, as K.N. Leontiev has explained, that cultural richness and diversity
require a strong autocratic power to hold them together and give them form, as
it were. “As long as there are estates, as long as provinces are not similar,
as long as education is different in various levels of society, as long as
claims are not identical, as long as tribes and religions are not levelled in a
general indifferentism, a more or less centralized power is a necessity.”[18]
It was the French revolution of 1789 that, by making the status of the
bourgeois “middle man” the standard for all, brought in a new, more simplified,
but less rich and diverse age, the age of democracy and the common man….
Humanism
“The
Renaissance,” writes Norman Davies, “did not merely refer to the burgeoning
interest in classical art and learning, for such a revival had been gathering
pace ever since the twelfth century. Nor did it involve either a total
rejection of medieval values or a sudden return to the world view of Greece and
Rome. Least of all did it involve the conscious abandonment of Christian
belief. The term renatio or ‘rebirth’ was a Latin calque for a Greek
theological term, palingenesis, used in the sense of ‘spiritual rebirth’
or ‘resurrection from the dead’. The essence of the Renaissance lay not in any
sudden rediscovery of classical civilisation but rather in the use which was
made of classical models to test the authority underlying conventional taste
and wisdom. It is incomprehensible without reference to the depths of disrepute
into which the medieval Church, the previous fount of all authority, had
fallen. In this the Renaissance was part and parcel of the same movement which
resulted in religious reforms. In the longer term, it was the first stage in
the evolution which led via the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution to
the Enlightenment. It was the spiritual force which cracked the mould of
medieval civilisation, setting in motion the long process of disintegration
which gradually gave birth to ‘modern Europe’.
“In that
process, the Christian religion was not abandoned. But the power of the Church
was gradually corralled within the religious sphere: the influence of religion
increasingly limited to the realm of private conscience. As a result the
speculations of theologians, scientists, and philosophers, the work of artists
and writers, and the policies of princes were freed from the control of a
Church with monopoly powers and ‘totalitarian’ pretensions. The prime quality
of the Renaissance has been defined as ‘independence of mind’. Its ideal was a
person who, by mastering all branches of art and thought, need depend on no
outside authority for the formation of knowledge, tastes, and beliefs. Such a
person was l’uomo universale, the
‘complete man’.
“The
principal product of the new thinking lay in a growing conviction that humanity
was capable of mastering the world in which it lived. The great Renaissance
figures were filled with self-confidence. They felt that God-given ingenuity
could, and should, be used to unravel the secrets of God’s universe; and that,
by extension, man’s fate on earth could be controlled and improved…
“Humanism
is a label given to the wider intellectual movement of which the New Learning
was both precursor and catalyst. It was marked by a fundamental shift from the
theocratic or God-centred world-view of the Middles Ages to the anthropocentric
or man-centred view of the Renaissance. Its manifesto may be seen to have been
written by Pico’s treatise On the Dignity of Man[19];
and, in time, it diffused all branches of knowledge and art. It is credited
with the concept of human personality, created by a new emphasis on the
uniqueness and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history,
as the study of the processes of change, and hence of the notion of progress;
and it is connected with the stirrings of science – that is, the principle that
nothing should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In
religious thought, it was a necessary precondition for Protestant emphasis on
the individual conscience. In art, it was accompanied by a renewed interest in
the human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave
emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of
Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The sovereign
nation-state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person.
“Both in
its fondness for pagan antiquity and in its insistence on the exercise of man’s
critical faculties, Renaissance humanism contradicted the prevailing modes and
assumptions of Christian practice. Notwithstanding its intentions,
traditionalists believed that it was destructive of religion, and ought to have
been restrained. Five hundred years later, when the disintegration of
Christendom was far more advanced, it has been seen by many Christian
theologians as the source of all the rot…”[20]
Thus the
Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson defined Renaissance humanism as the
Middle Ages “not plus humanity but minus God”. This definition needs to be
heavily qualified. On the one hand, as the Reformers were to point out with
vehemence, medieval Christianity in the West was often far from fervent or
profound, being corrupt both in doctrine and in works. And on the other hand,
the Renaissance led naturally into the era of the Reformation and
Counter-Reformation, which was full of religious passion, moral earnestness and
doctrinal enquiry. Nevertheless, in essence one must agree with Braudel’s
verdict that humanism’s “acute awareness of humanity’s vast and varied
potential prepared the way, in the fullness of time, for all the revolutions of
modern times, including atheism”.[21]
Again,
Braudel writes: “The intellectual ferment of the Renaissance, and that of the
Reformation in so far as it raised the principle of individual interpretation
of revealed truth, laid the bases for freedom of conscience. Renaissance
humanism preached respect for the greatness of the human being as an
individual: it stressed personal intelligence and ability. Virtù, in fifteenth-century Italy, meant not virtue but
glory, effectiveness, and power. Intellectually, the ideal was l’uomo universale as described by Leon
Battista Alberti – an all-rounder himself. In the seventeenth century, with
Descartes, a whole philosophical system stemmed from Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist) – individual thought. The philosophical importance thus attached to
the individual coincided with the abandonment of traditional values…”[22]
The
abandonment of traditional values and thinking led to a whole series of demands
for other forms of freedom, of which the most important in this context was political freedom. Or, to be more
precise – for only the most fanatical advocated freedom from all forms of
political restraint – it was the ideal of political equality that emerged as the most powerful passion of the modern
world. This expressed itself above all in the movement of anti-monarchism.
Now while,
as I shall argue in more detail, this early modern emphasis on freedom and
equality was in essence the product of a spirit of antichristian rebellion, it
cannot be denied that it contained elements that were Christian in origin,
being based on certain Gospel truths which were felt, not without reason, to
have been neglected and even trampled upon by the political and ecclesiastical
powers of the age. Thus let us take the concept of human rights, which is so
central to modern western civilisation. On the one hand, it cannot be denied
that the doctrine of human rights is a denial of God’s rights in
relation to man. But on the other hand, it was also an affirmation of what man
as created by God and in God’s image was felt to be worth. This combination of
Christian and anti-Christian elements is what make the history of freedom in
modern times so complex and, very often, paradoxical.[23]
Thus the
Protestant Reformation protested against undoubted, and extremely important
abuses. As Jacques Barzun writes: “The priest, instead of being a teacher, was
ignorant; the monk, instead of helping to save the world by his piety, was an
idle profiteer; the bishop, instead of supervising the care of souls in his
diocese was a politician and a businessman. One of them here or there might be
pious and a scholar – he showed that goodness was not impossible. But too often
the bishop was a boy of twelve, his influential family having provided early
for his future happiness. The system was rotten…”[24]
However,
instead of returning to the norm of Christian life from which these were
evident deviations and corruptions, western man chose, in effect, to cast off
from the shores of Christianity altogether, in fact if not in name. As
Burckhardt said in his Judgements on History, the Reformation was an
escape from discipline. Reason, not Holy Tradition, became the arbiter of truth
and justice - reason, that is, not in the sense of the Divine Logos, “the mind
of Christ”, as revealed in the truly confessing Church, “the pillar and ground
of the Truth” (I Timothy 3.15), but fallen human reason, “liberated” now
from the “fetters” of tradition, having been absolved by the natural law
tradition from all sin.
This dual
character of the modern quest for freedom – both Christian protest and
antichristian rebellion – has been emphasized by Archbishop Averky of Syracuse.
He considered the epoch of the “Renaissance” to be “a reaction to the perverted
Christianity of the West” since the fall of the papacy in the eleventh century.
But at the same time it “was in essence a denial of Christianity and a return
to the ideals of paganism. It proclaimed the cult of a strong, healthy,
beautiful human flesh, and to the spirit of Christian humility it opposed the
spirit of self-opinion, self-reliance, and the deification of human 'reason'.
"As a
protest against perverted Christianity, on the soil of the same humanistic
ideal that recognised 'reason' as the highest criterion of life, there appeared
in the West a religious movement which received the name of 'Protestantism'.
Protestantism with its countless branches of all kinds of sects not only
radically distorted the whole teaching of true Christianity, but also rejected
the very dogma of the Church, placing man himself as his own highest authority,
and even going so far as to deny faith in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the
Founder of the Church.
"Puffed-up human pride finally falls completely away from God, and begins boldly to deny even the very existence of God, and man proclaims himself to be as it were a god. Seized with pride, self-opinion and reliance on his own limitless powers, possibilities and capacities, man brought up on the ideals of the 'Renaissance' no longer sees any obligation for himself to strive for the spiritual perfection enjoined by the Gospel, and by a natural progression descends deeper and deeper into the abyss of spiritual fall and moral corruption. Into the foreground there steps the service of the flesh, as a consequence of which spiritual demands are more and more stifled, suppressed and, finally, so as once and for all to finish with the unpleasant voice of conscience which lives in the spirit of man, the spirit itself is declared to be non-existent.
"In
this way, there appears 'materialism' - a natural child of 'humanism', a
natural and logical development of its idea. The ideal of the full stomach,
covered by the raucous 'doctrine' going by the name of 'the ideal of social
justice', 'social righteousness', became the highest ideal of humanity which
had denied Christ. And this is understandable! The so-called 'social question'
could not have taken hold if people had remained faithful to true Christianity
incarnate in life.
"On
the soil of materialism, in its turn, there naturally grew, as a strictly
logical consequence, the doctrines of 'Socialism' and 'Marxism-Communism'.
Humanism and materialism, having denied the spiritual principle in man,
proclaimed man himself to be a 'god' and legitimised human pride and animal
egoism as self-sacrificing, and came to the conclusion that savage struggle
should be made the law of human life, on the soil of the constant conflict of
interests of egoistical human beings. As a result of this so-called 'struggle
for existence', stronger, cleverer, craftier people would naturally begin to
constrain and oppress the less strong, less clever and less crafty. The law of
Christ, which commands us to bear one another's burdens (Galatians 6.2),
and not to please ourselves (Acts 15.29), but to love one's neighbour as
oneself (Matthew 22.39), was expelled from life. And so so-called
'social evil' and 'social injustices' began to increase and multiply, together
with the 'social ulcers' of society. And since life was made more and more
intolerable, as a consequence of the ever-increasing egoism and violence of
people towards each other, there was naturally some reason to think about
establishing for all a single tolerable and acceptable order of life. Hence
'Socialism', and then its extreme expression, 'Communism', became fashionable
doctrines, which promised people deliverance from all 'social injustices' and
the establishment on earth of a peaceful and serenely paradisal life, in which
everyone would be happy and content. But these teachings determined to cure the
ulcers of human society by unsuitable means. They did not see that the evil of
contemporary life is rooted in the depths of the human soul which has fallen
away from the uniquely salvific Gospel teaching, and naively thought that it
would be enough to change the imperfect, in their opinion, structure of
political and social life for there to be immediately born on earth prosperity
for all, and life would become paradise. For this inevitable, as they affirmed,
and beneficial change, the more extreme Socialists, as, for example, the
Communists, even proposed violent measures, going so far as the shedding of
blood and the physical annihilation of people who did not agree with them. In
other words: they thought to conquer evil by evil, this evil being still more
bitter and unjust because of their cruelty and mercilessness.
"'The
Great French Revolution', which shed whole rivers of human blood, was the first
of their attempts. It clearly demonstrated that men are powerless to build
their life on earth without God, and to what terrible consequences man is drawn
by his apostasy from Christ and His saving teaching."[25]
Rationalism
Spinoza wrote: “Let everyone believe what
seems to him to be consonant with reason”[26],
and the most important of the various kinds of freedom proclaimed at the
Renaissance was the idea of the freedom and autonomy of the human mind, the
belief that the human mind and human reason are autonomous, and do not need to
be checked against any higher authority, which is known as Rationalism. Rationalism came in different forms, Jewish, Catholic
and Protestant. We have seen the origins of Jewish rationalism. Protestant
rationalism was born in the soil of Catholic rationalism, which consisted in
placing the mind of one man above the Catholic consciousness of the Church, the
Mind of Christ. Protestantism rejected Papism, but did not reject its
underlying principle. Thus instead of placing the mind of one man above the Church, it placed the mind of every man, every believer, above it. As
Luther himself declared: “In matters of faith each Christian is for himself
Pope and Church, and nothing may be decreed or kept that could issue in a
threat to faith.”[27]
Thus Protestantism, as New Hieromartyr Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) puts it,
“placed a papal tiara on every German professor and, with its countless number
of popes, completely destroyed the concept of the Church, substituting faith
with the reason of each separate personality.”[28]
However,
Protestant rationalism went further than the Catholic variety, and came close
to the Jewish variety, in its rejection of sacraments, and in
general in its iconoclastic rejection of the possibility that matter can be
sanctified by the Spirit. Icons, relics, holy water and all the symbols and
ceremonies of Catholic worship were rejected and destroyed. The sacrament of
the Eucharist, according to the Protestants, was not the Body and Blood of
Christ, but only a service of remembrance, and there was no such thing as a
specially ordained priesthood. One would have expected that the Protestants
would at least have held on to the sacredness of the Holy Scriptures, since
their whole faith was built on them alone. But Luther reduced the number of
canonical books, rejecting the so-called “apocryphal” books of the Old
Testament and casting doubt on such New Testament books as the Epistle of
James. Moreover, it was from the Protestants (and, as we have seen, the Jews
such as Spinoza) that the terribly destructive so-called “Higher Criticism” of
the Bible began. No thing was sacred for the Protestants, but only the
disembodied mind of the individual believer.
But in
order to understand Protestantism we must go beyond the intellectual pride that
it inherited from its Papist and Renaissance humanist predecessors to the emotional vacuum that it sought to fill
– and filled with some success, although the new wine it proposed to pour into
the old bottles of Christendom turned out to be distinctly vinegary. For it was
not their protests against the abuses of Papism that made Luther and Calvin
such important figures: Wycliff and Hus, Machiavelli and Erasmus and many
others had been exposing these abuses long before Luther nailed his theses to
the church door in Worms. What distinguished Luther and Calvin was that they
were able to offer hungry hearts that no longer believed in the certainties of
Holy Tradition or the consolations of Mother Church another kind of certainty –
that offered by justification by faith
alone, and another consolation – that offered by predestination to salvation. All that was necessary was to say: I believe, and the believer could be
sure that he was saved![29]
Thus was
Western thought directed along a path of ever-increasing individualism,
subjectivism and, eventually, sheer madness, as evidenced by the philosophy of
Nietzsche. The first truly modern philosopher Descartes’ axiom, “I think,
therefore I am” was only a desiccated, secularised and intellectualised
reduction of this primary axiom of Protestantism. The difference between Luther
and Descartes was the difference between theological rationalism and
philosophical rationalism: the Protestant deduced the certainty of salvation
from his personal faith and certain passages of Scripture, while the
philosopher derived the certainty of his existence from his personal thought.
The one deduction was momentous in its consequences and the other was trivial;
the one had an emotional charge and the other had none (or very little); but in
other respects they were very similar. Even the apparent advantage of
objectivity that citing Scripture brought to Luther’s syllogism was illusory;
for it was a cardinal tenet of Protestantism that each individual believer
could interpret the meaning of Scripture for himself, which removed the
possibility of finding any objective criterion of true faith – “I believe”
could mean just about anything that the individual believer wanted it to mean.
Thus
philosophical rationalism was born in the soil of Protestant rationalism, and
philosophical individualism and subjectivism – in the soil of Protestant
individualism and subjectivism. Descartes would have been impossible without
Calvin, and Kant – without Luther. Just as Luther allowed the individual believer
to define for himself what true faith was, so Kant allowed the individual
decision-maker to define for himself what right and wrong was – for the
“categorical imperative” was entirely personal and subjective.
L.A.
Tikhomirov writes: “According to the Christian understanding, although man is
by nature capable of a free existence and free self-determination, he does not
have autonomy, nor does he presume to seize it (recognising that he is in the
hands of God, and subject to Him), but carries out His commands and follows
that mission which is indicated to him by God. To declare oneself autonomous
would be equivalent to falling away from obedience to God, to breaking with
Him. But if separated Christians were capable of that, it would be almost impossible
to incite Christians as a whole to do this for a thousand reasons. Of these the
most important is that, in submitting to God, the Christian feels that he is
submitting, not to some foreign principle or other, but to that which he
recognises to be the Source of his highest capabilities, his Father… The
striving for knowledge, which is so powerful in man, is set on a firmer ground
precisely when a boundary is clearly delineated between the Divine world, which
cannot be known by reason, and the created world, which is accessible to
experimental knowledge through the senses. In making this delineation the
Christian faith served both exact science and the spiritual life to an
identically powerful degree…
“It goes
without saying that when the conviction emerged that the autonomy of man is
real in some point of his existence, this naturally entrained with it the
thought that autonomy is therefore possible and fruitful also in other
respects, and this led to the search for new spheres of autonomy with a gradually
increasing ‘liberation from God’.
“In this
way the original point of ‘liberation from God’ is rationalism, a tendency based on the supposed capacity of reason (ratio)
to acquired knowledge of the truth independently of Divine Revelation, by its
own efforts. In fact this is a mistake, but it is engendered by the huge power
of human reason and its capacity to submit everything to its criticism. And so
it seems to man that he can reject everything that is false and find everything
that is real and true. The mistake in this self-confidence of reason consists
in the fact that in fact it is not the source of the knowledge of facts, which are brought to the attention of man,
not by his reason, but by his feelings – both physical and mystical. The real
role of reason consists only in operations on the material provided by these
perceptions and feelings. If they did not exist, reason would have no
possibility of working, it would have not even a spark of knowledge of
anything. But this controlling, discursive power is so great that it easily
leads man to the illusion of thinking that the reason acquires knowledge
independently. This inclination to exaggerate the power of reason has always
lived and always will live in man, since the most difficult work of the reason
is self-control, the evaluation of
the reality of its own work. This self-control not only easily weakens in man,
but is deliberately avoided by him, because it leads him to the burdensome
consciousness of the limitations and relativity of those of his capacities
which by their own character appear to be absolute.
“To the
extent that reason’s self-control reveals to him the necessity of searching for
the absolute Source of his relative capacities and in this way
leads to the search for Divine Revelation, to the same extent the weakening of
self-control leads to the false feeling of the human capacity for autonomy in
the sphere of cognitive thought.
“It goes
without saying that there always have been the seeds of this exaggeration of the
powers of reason, that is, the seeds of rationalism, in the Christian world.
But historically speaking rationalism was promoted by Descartes. In principle
his philosophy did not appear to contradict Christianity in any way. The
rationalism of Descartes did not rise up against the truths of the faith, it
did not preach any other faith. Descartes himself was personally very religious
and even supposed that by his researches he was working for the confirmation of
the truths of Christianity.[30]
In fact, of course, it was quite the other way round. Descartes’ philosophical
system proceeded from the supposition that if man in seeking knowledge had no
help from anywhere, - nor, that is, from God, - he would be able to find in
himself such axiomatic bases of knowledge, on the assertion of which he could
in a mathematical way logically attain to the knowledge of all truth.
L.A.
Tikhomirov writes: “As… V.A. Kozhevnikov points out in his study of mangodhood,
‘the Cartesian: “I think, therefore I am” already gave a basis for godmanhood
in the sense of human self-affirmation.’ In fact, in that all-encompassing
doubt, which was permitted by Descartes before this affirmation, all knowledge
that does not depend on the reasoning subject is rejected, and it is admitted that
if a man had no help from anyone or anything, his mind would manage with its
own resources to learn the truth. ‘The isolation and self-sufficiency of the
thinking person is put as the head of the corner of the temple of philosophical
wisdom.’ With such a terminus a quo, ‘the purely subjective attainment
of the truth, remarks V. Kozhevnikov, ‘becomes the sole confirmation of
existence itself. The existent is
confirmed on the basis of the conceivable, the real – on the intellectual…
The purely human, and the solely human, acquires its basis and justification in
the purely human mind. The whole evolution of the new philosophical thinking
from Descartes to Kant revolves unfolds under the conscious or unnoticed, but
irresistible attraction in this direction.’[31]
“The first
step of the Reformation,” writes V.A. Zhukovsky, “decided the fate of the
European world: instead of the historical abuses of ecclesiastical power, it
destroyed the spiritual, so far untouched, power of the Church herself; it
incited the democratic mind to rebel against her being above judgement; in
allowing revelation to be checked, it shook the faith, and with the faith
everything holy. This holiness was substituted by the pagan wisdom of the
ancients; the spirit of contradiction was born; the revolt against all
authority, Divine as well as human, began. This revolt went along two paths: on
the first – the destruction of the authority of the Church produced rationalism (the rejection of the
Divinity of Christ), whence came… atheism
(the rejection of the existence of God); and on the other – the concept of
autocratic power as proceeding from God gave way to the concept of the social contract. Thence came the concept of the
autocracy of the people, whose first step is representative democracy, second step – democracy, and third step – socialism
and communism. Perhaps there is also a fourth and final step: the destruction of the family, and in
consequence of this the exaltation of humanity, liberated from every obligation
that might in any way limit its personal independence, to the dignity of
completely free cattle. And so two
paths: on the one hand, the autocracy of the human mind and the annihilation of
the Kingdom of God; on the other – the dominion of each and every one, and the
annihilation of society.”[32]
In case these
consequences seem far-fetched, and not to follow naturally from their causes,
it will be worth briefly looking at a characteristically Renaissance literary
genre, the Utopias – specifically, Thomas More’s Utopia, Tommaso
Campanella’s City of the Sun, and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis.
Each of these contain astonishingly modern visions of society – thoroughly
secular, this-worldly visions. Thus Barzun writes: “To make existence better,
which for these three Humanists means not more godly, but happier, each drives
at a main goal. More wants justice through democratic equality; Bacon wants
progress through scientific research; Campanello wants permanent peace, health,
and plenty through rational thought, brotherly love, and eugenics. All agree on
a principle that the West adopted late: everybody must work.”[33]
The problem
for all secular utopias is how to control the fallen nature of man. From the
Christian point of view there is only one solution: the acceptance of the true
Christian faith and its incarnation in life. But the Utopians thought
differently: “The great argument used to sustain right conduct is: ‘Live
according to Nature. Nature is never wrong and we err by forgetting it.’ Nature
here replaces God’s commandments, but although Nature is His handiwork, His
commandments are a good deal cleaner than Her dictates…
“If we ask
what the eutopian legacy has been it may be summed up in five points: social
equality is more humane than hierarchy… Next, everybody must work and earn his
living or his honors. Then, rulers should be chosen by the people: it fosters a
more willing obedience. In addition, marriage and divorce need accomodation to
actual experience: adultery is not the sole cause of hopeless disunion. Finally,
the existing order is not fixed forever by divine fiat and doomed to be evil by
original sin. Clear thought and strong wills can improve the human lot.
Humanism takes it for granted that this worldly aim is legitimate…”[34]
Luther, Müntzer and
Charles V
However,
all these far-reaching consequences took their origin in the rebellion against
the Church, to which we now return…
Almost from
the beginning, there were significant differences between the Protestant
Reformers in the degree and thoroughness of their rejection of the old ways.
The most important differences were between the Lutherans and the Calvinists.
With regard to the vital question of the sources of the faith, for example,
both parties rejected Tradition and held to Sola Scriptura. But while
the Lutherans taught that a custom was godly if it was not contrary to the
Bible, the Calvinists went further and asserted that only that which was
explicitly taught by the Bible was godly. A little later, the Anglicans, in the
person of Richard Hooker, took a slightly different, but ultimately no less
rationalist line: that was godly which was in accordance with the Bible and
natural law.
Closely
related to the question of the sources of the faith was that of the Church.
Since the Protestants rejected the authority of the papist church, and paid no
attention to the claims of the Orthodox Church, they were logically committed
to the thesis that the historical Church had perished, and that they were recreating it. Apostolic succession was
not necessary – the people could take the place of the Apostles, since there
were no true successors of the apostles left.
In
practice, the conservative Protestants – the Lutherans and the Anglicans – held
on to bishops, priests and the semblance of apostolic succession. And yet, in
the last analysis it was the democratic assembly of believers, not the bishop
standing in an unbroken chain of succession from the apostles, who bestowed the
priesthood upon the candidates. Thus Luther wrote: “The only thing left is
either to let the Church of God perish without the Word or to allow the
propriety of a church meeting to cast its votes and choose from its own
resources one or as many as are necessary and suitable and commend and confirm
these to the whole community by prayer and the laying-on of hands. These should
then be recognised and honoured as lawful bishops and ministers of the Word, in
the assured faith that God Himself is the Author of what the common consent of
the faithful has so performed – of those, that is, who accept and confess the
Gospel…”[35]
The Calvinists were more thorough-going in their rejection of apostolic succession. Calvin himself was not a priest and the Calvinists were so averse to the traditional notion of the priesthood that they dropped the word “priest” in favour of the less sacramental-, more democratic-sounding “presbyter” and “elder”.
In his
treatises, On the Liberty of the Christian (1520) and On Temporal
Authority (1523), Luther made a very sharp distinction between the
spiritual and the temporal, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. As
Dagron interprets his thought: “the Christian, being at the same time part of
the spiritual kingdom and of the temporal kingdom is at the same time
absolutely free and absolutely enslaved. If God has instituted two kingdoms, it
is because only a very small élite of true Christians participate in His
Kingdom; the great mass needs the ‘temporal sword’ and must submit to in
accordance with the teaching of Paul (Romans 13.1: ‘there is no
authority that is not of God’) and of Peter (I Peter 2.13: ‘Submit
yourselves to every human authority’). But if the temporal princes hold their
power from God and they are often Christian, they cannot pretend to ‘govern in
a Christian manner’ and in accordance with the Gospel. ‘It is impossible for a
Christian kingdom to extend throughout the world, and even over a single
country.’ No accommodation is possible between a religion that is conceived as
above all personal and a State defined as above all repressive; and Luther is
ironic about the temporal sovereigns ‘who arrogate to themselves the right to
sit on the throne of God, to rule the consciences and the faith and to… guide
the Holy Spirit over the pews of the school’, as also about the popes or
bishops ‘become temporal princes’ and pretending to be invested with a ‘power’
and not with a simple ‘function’. This radical distinction between the temporal
and the spiritual did not, therefore, lead to the recognition of two powers,
‘since all the Christians truly belong to the ecclesiastical state’ and there
is no reason to deny Christian princes the ‘titles of priest and bishop’.“[36]
Luther’s
principles were tested in the 1520s, when Thomas Müntzer led a German
Peasants’ War against all authorities. The only authority for him was the
people. Matheson writes: “He addressed his lords and masters as ‘brothers’, if,
that is, they were willing to listen to him. They are part of his general
audience, on the same level as everyone else… Everything has to come out into
the open, to be witnessed by the common people. Worship has to be intelligible,
not some ‘mumbo-jumbo’ that no one could understand. The holy Gospel has to be
pulled out from under the bed where it has languished for four hundred years. Preaching
and teaching and judgement can no longer be a hole-and-corner affair, for God
has given power and judgement to the common people. In the Eucharist, for
example, the consecration of the elements is to be ‘performed not just by one
person but by the whole gathered congregation’. He encourages popular
participation in the election of clergy. In the Peasants’ War a kind of crude
popular justice was executed ‘in the ring’. ‘Nothing without the consent of the
people’; their visible presence as audience is the guarantor of justice… The
audience of the poor is not beholden to prince or priest. Liturgies are no
longer subject to the approval of synods. A liberating Gospel, taking the lid
off corruption and exploitation, is bound to be polemical, and doomed to meet
persecution. ‘Hole-in-the-corner’ judgements by courts and universities have to
be replaced by accountability to the elect throughout the world.”[37]
Luther
supported the State against the revolutionaries; he wrote an appeal “Against
the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants”, quoting Romans 11 on
obedience to secular authorities, and his call on the authorities to destroy
the peasants led to the massacre or exile of some 30,000 families. But, like
all revolutionaries who do not go all the way, he was accused of inconsistency
at best, and betrayal at worst, by the more radical-minded. Thus Müntzer
called him “Dr. Liar”.[38]
In truth,
however, Luther had no alternative. If he had relied solely on the power of his
word and the hands of the simple people, his Reformation would have been
quickly crushed by the troops of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who
rejected his call to rise up against the pope on behalf of “the glorious
Teutonic people”. It was the Protestant Princes of Germany that saved Luther.
In any case, if there were no sacramental, hierarchical priesthood, and all the
laity were in fact priests, the Prince as the senior layman was bound to take
the leading role in the Church. For, as Luther’s favourite apostle in his favourite
epistle says, the Prince “beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister
of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans
13.4).
The problem
was, however, that in relying on the power of “the godly prince”, and in the absence
of an established church structure with its own independent source of
authority, Lutheranism tended to give him excessive power in church life.
“According to the teaching of Luther,” writes Tikhomirov, “the Church consists
of completely equal members, with no difference of hierarchical gifts of grace.
Episcopal power belongs to it collectively. The grace of the priesthood belongs
to each Christian. Ecclesiastical power belongs to the same society to which
State power also belongs, so that if it entrusts this power to the Prince, it
transfers to him episcopal rights, too. The Prince becomes the possessor both
of political and of ecclesiastical power. ‘In the Protestant state,’ writes
Professor Suvorov, ‘both ecclesiastical and state power must belong to the
prince, the master of the territory (Landsherr) who is at the same time
the master of religion – Cuius est regio – ejus religio’.”[39]
Now the
Protestant Princes were aided in their struggle by a fortunate concatenation of
events. On the one hand, the Emperor Charles was suddenly faced with a very
powerful enemy without – the Turks at the peak of their power under Suleiman
the Magnificent – as well as by rebellions from within, in Italy and the
Netherlands. And on the other, the other major Catholic monarch, Francis I of
France, decided to intrigue against him, making common cause with the German
Protestant Princes and Suleiman himself. To make matters still worse for the
Catholics, Charles was at war also with the Pope in Rome. Nor did he do the Catholic
cause any good by the manner in which his generals waged that war. Thus on May
6, 1527, his troops “entered Rome and wreaked such havoc within the city that
the details were not forgotten for a hundred years. Old men were disembowelled
and young men castrated, women raped and tortured, children tossed onto the
points of swords before being butchered. The corpse of Pope Julius II was
dragged from its ornate tomb and paraded through the streets.”[40]
Nearly half the population was killed….
Henry VIII and Sir Thomas
More
But no “Catholic” monarch did more damage to Catholicism than the English King Henry VIII, the founder of the Anglican Church. By one of the great ironies of history, Henry had been awarded the title “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X for writing a defence of the seven sacraments against Luther. Luther responded with a scathing, scatological attack on the king, at which point one of the most complex, gifted and, in the end, heroic figures of post-Orthodox western history, came on to the scene – Thomas More.
At the
king’s command, More composed a reply to Luther that was to match Luther’s
language to such an extent that one eighteenth-century divine called it “the
greatest heap of nasty language that was ever put together”.[41]
However, More was no unprincipled courtier with a gift for diatribe, and his
Catholicism was much deeper and sincerer than the king’s. As Lord Chancellor he
invested great energy into protecting the realm from Lutherans, and even –
contrary to the principle of religious toleration he had proclaimed in his
youthful work, Utopia – burned a few of them at the stake.[42]
He also believed passionately in the king’s divine right to rule, and did
everything in his power to prevent the revolutionary rhetoric that was causing
such chaos in Germany from crossing the Channel.
For “Thomas
More,” writes his biographer Peter Ackroyd, “was one who needed pillars and the
security of an ordered world; he spoke and argued as a lawyer, but in the Responsio
he also introduced the concept of law as the defence against disorder and
chaos. ‘Una est ecclesia Christi’, he wrote, and that one church is
guided by the workings of the Holy Spirit; it is the manifest, visible and
historic faith of ‘the common knowen catholic church’ whose sacraments and
beliefs are derived not only from scripture but also from the unwritten
traditions transmitted by generation to generation.
“What is
that Luther wrote? ‘Hic sto. Hic maneo. Hic glorior. Hic triumpho.’ Here
I stand, Here I remain. Here I glory. Here I triumph. It does not matter to me
if a thousand Augustines or Cyprians stand against me. It is one of the great
moments of Protestant affirmation and became a primary text for the
‘individualism’ and ‘subjectivism’ of post-Reformation culture, but to More it
was ‘furor’ or simple madness. Only a lunatic, a drunkard, could express
himself in such a fashion. More invoked, instead, the authority of the apostles
and the church fathers, the historical identity and unity of the Catholic Church,
as well as the powerful tradition of its teachings guided by the authority of
Christ. Where Luther would characteristically write ‘I think thus’, or ‘I
believe thus’, More would reply with ‘God has revealed thus’ or ‘ The Holy
Spirit has taught thus’. His was a church of order and ritual in which the
precepts of historical authority were enshrined. All this Luther despised and
rejected. He possessed the authentic voice of the free and separate conscience
and somehow found the power to stand against the world he had inherited. He was
attacking the king and the Pope, but more importantly he was dismissing the
inherited customs and traditional beliefs of the Church itself, which he
condemned as ‘scandala’. He was assaulting the whole medieval order of
which More was a part…
“More moved
easily within any institution or hierarchy to which he became attached; Luther
was seized by violent fits of remorse and panic fear in any fixed or formal
environment. It is hard to imagine More screaming out ‘Non sum!’ during
the Mass. More obeyed and maintained all the precepts of the law; Luther wished
to expel law altogether from the spiritual life. More believed in the communion
of the faithful, living and dead, while Luther affirmed the unique significance
of the individual calling towards God. More believed in the traditional role of
miracles; Luther saw visions…”[43]
However,
More would feel called upon to defend the Church and the law not only against
Luther, but also against his Catholic king when he tried to get his marriage to
Catherine of Aragon annulled in spite of the Pope’s resistance. English
Lutherans such as Tyndale and Fish wanted the king to take control over the
Church, as the Lutheran princes were doing in Germany, in order to root out the
corruption of the clergy. But More, while repeatedly emphasising the power and
authority of the king, would not accept any attack on the priesthood. He
believed that this attack “was a partially concealed attempt to introduce
Lutheran heresies within the kingdom, so that the wreckage of the clergy would
be followed by the destruction of the Mass and the sacraments. And what then
would follow but the riot and warfare which had already afflicted Germany? The
seizure of church lands would be succeeded by the theft of other property, and
the assault upon the Church would encourage an attack upon all forms of
authority…”[44]
The
struggle moved into a critical phase with the king’s dismissal, in 1529, of the
Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, who, though a prince of the church, had
preferred serving his secular prince, as he recognised in the famous words: “If
I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, He would not have given
me over in my grey hairs.”
The king
now quickly moved to subdue parliament and the Church to his will. The Church
under Archbishop Warham duly surrendered[45]
– that is, it accepted the king’s adulterous second marriage and, through the
Act of Supremacy, accepted that the king was the supreme head of the English
Church on earth at the expense of all papal jurisdiction. But Thomas More, who
had already resigned his post after the Church surrendered, refused to sign the
Act and was executed…
Thomas
More’s defence of the Church’s independence against Henry VIII is reminiscent
of Thomas Beckett’s similar defence of the Church against Henry II in the
twelfth century. And the immediate upshot was the same: the execution of the
Church’s champion by the king. In the long run, however, the result was
different: whereas Thomas Beckett was vindicated, not only by his veneration as
a martyr but also by the first article of Magna Carta, which asserted
the independence of the Church from State power, Thomas More’s death has not
been followed by any resurgence of the Church’s influence in the affairs of
England…
Though More
was a faithful member of the papist church, he cannot be said to have died for
papal infallibility. He was, after all, a friend of Erasmus, that scathing
critic of the papacy, and the emphasis in his writings is less on papal
authority than on “the general counsel of Christendom”[46].
His main argument was “that if a parliamentary statute offends against the law
of God it is ‘insufficient’, and cannot be imposed upon any Christian subject”.[47]
His last public request, uttered on the scaffold, was that the people should
earnestly pray for the King, “that it might please God to give him good
counsel, protesting that he died the King’s good servant but God’s first.”[48]
Thus he died for what, in an Orthodox country, would have been called the
symphony of powers, that the Church should be supreme in the spiritual sphere
as the king was supreme in the political sphere. He foresaw that giving the
king supremacy over the Church would lead not only to the suppression of the
Church but its eventual replacement by a new religion altogether. Indeed, he
saw it as opening the way to the Antichrist – and he was not far from the
truth…
The Counter-Reformation and
Spanish Absolutism
The
increased individualism introduced by the Renaissance and the Reformation was
accompanied, paradoxically, by an increased power of the State. Now the power
of the State in western society had been increasing since at least the middle
of the fourteenth century. It had been growing through a mixture of (i) wars of
liberation from foreign despotism – as when France freed herself from the
Anglo-Norman kings, (ii) the resolution of internal conflicts leading to a
territorial increase and consolidation of the State – as when the Wars of the
Roses came to an end in England, and the union of Isabella and Ferdinand united
Castile and Aragon in Spain, and (iii) a gradual weakening of the major
trans-national power, the papacy. Nation-states became consolidated by drawing
clear boundaries between each other, on the one hand, and between themselves
and the papacy, on the other.
The papacy, however, was not finished yet;
and from the mid-sixteenth century, having recovered from the shock of the
Reformation, it undertook a thorough reformation of its own that restored it to
the front rank of the absolutist states. With the powerful aid of the Spanish
kings and the Spanish-led Jesuit order, it expanded its power swiftly and
ruthlessly eastwards and westwards – eastwards into Orthodox Eastern Europe,
India and the Far East, and westwards into the New World of the Americas. This
successful coalition between the Vatican and Spain then stimulated the
development of similarly absolutist or semi-absolutist States fighting under
the banner of the Reformation, such as England.
The
union between Spain and the Vatican was symbolised above all by the notorious
Inquisition, “the first institution of united Spain”[49],
which, while officially an ecclesiastical institution against heresy, served
the desire of the Spanish state for uniformity within its dominions so well
that “henceforth treason and heresy were virtually indistinguishable"[50].
As we have
seen, Columbus’ discovery of America opened a new world to the Spanish
conquerors who followed him. Their conquests brought them vast wealth and
power, making Spain, for a century or so, the most powerful state in the world.
Central and South America now came under the dominion of a despotism hardly
less cruel than the pagan despotisms that had preceded it.
“The
cruelty of the Spaniards [in the New World], writes Kamen, “was
incontrovertible; it was pitiless, barbaric and never brought under control by
the colonial regime”.[51]
Thus the South-American empire of the Incas, which before the Spanish conquest
numbered some seven million people, within 50 years after the conquest had been
reduced to two million. The decimation of the Mexican empire of the Aztecs was
hardly less horrifying. And if many of the victims fell to European diseases
such as smallpox introduced by the conquerors rather than to war and execution,
the cruelty of the Christians was nevertheless exceptional. Thus in 1546, when
15 colonists in the Yucatan were killed by the Mayas, the Spaniards responded
by enslaving 2000 Maya men, hanging their women and burning six of their
priests.
This may
have been historical justice for the child-sacrifice practiced over centuries
by the pagan empires. But it also witnessed to the dehumanizing effect of
centuries of papal propaganda justifying the extermination of heretics and in
general all non-Catholics. Christianity had changed the morals of men by
teaching them to see in every man the image of God and therefore an object of
love and respect. The “Christianity” of Roman Catholicism turned the clock back
by teaching Catholics to treat other classes of men as in effect subhuman.
Sixteenth-century Spain recalled the ancient pagan despotisms not only
in her cruelty and the absolutism of her institutions, but also in her enormous
wealth and self-confidence. “The serenity and splendour of the Spanish throne,”
writes the Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, “the magnificence of its externals,
expressed in ritual, in every detail of comportment, still more in
architecture, profoundly affected the mind of Europe: and rightly so; they
remain to-day to astonish us. I may be thought extravagant if I say that the
Escorial, that huge block of dark granite unearthly proportioned, is a parallel
to the Pyramids… At any rate there is nothing else in Europe which so presents
the eternal and the simple combined… But the Escorial is not a mere symbol,
still less a façade; it is the very soul of the imperial name. It could
only have been raised and inhabited by kings who were believed by themselves to
be, and were believed by others to be, the chief on earth.”[52]
And yet the
dominions of Spain, according to the papist theory, were merely leased to it,
as it were, by the Pope, who was recognised by all the Catholic kings as their
true lord and master. Nor was this just theory. In 1494 the Pope arbitrated in
a dispute between Spain and Portugal and gave Brazil to the Portuguese. And the
Spanish accepted his decision.
The theory
was elaborated by the New World missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, who
wrote in 1552: “The Roman pontiff, vicar of Jesus Christ, whose divine
authority extends over all the kingdoms of heaven and earth[53],
could justly invest the kings of Castile and Leon with the supreme and
sovereign empire and dominion over the entire realm of the Indies, making them
emperors over many kings… If the vicar of Christ were to see that this was not
advantageous for the spiritual well-being of Christianity, he could without
doubt, by the same divine authority, annul or abolish the office of emperor of
the Indies, or he could transfer it to another place, as one Pope did when he
transferred the imperial crown from the Greeks to the Germans [at the
coronation of Charlemagne in 800]. With the same authority, the Apostolic See
could prohibit, under penalty of excommunication, all other Christian kings
from going to the Indies without the permission and authorisation of the kings
of Castile. If they do the contrary, they sin mortally and incur
excommunication.
“The kings
of Castile and León are true princes, sovereign and universal lords and
emperors over many kings. The rights over all that great empire and the
universal jurisdiction over all the Indies belong to them by the authority,
concession and donation of the said Holy Apostolic See and thus by divine
authority. This and no other is the juridical basis upon which all their title
is founded and established…”[54]
Thus the
Counter-Reformation sought to re-establish the full power of the papacy over
secular rulers that the Reformation had undermined. We see this in the Council
of Trent (1545-1563) which, as Dagron writes, “tried to unite that which Luther
had tried to separate. Both in the Council and around it attempts were made
rather to bring the two powers into union with each other than to separate
them. The politics of the concordats aimed to find a difficult compromise
between religious universalism and the national churches. But the Jesuits
supported the thesis of the pope’s “indirect authority” in political affairs.”[55]
Catholic Rationalism
However, it
was precisely at this time, the height of the Counter-Reformation, that the
idea of natural law, which had been
introduced into Catholic thought by Aquinas, became influential. Thus
Las Casas writes: “Among the infidels who have distant kingdoms that have never
heard the tidings of Christ or received the faith, there are true kings and
princes. Their sovereignty, dignity, and royal pre-eminence derive from natural
law and the law of nations… Therefore, with the coming of Jesus Christ to such
domains, their honours, royal pre-eminence, and so on, do not disappear either
in fact or in right. The opinion contrary to that of the preceding proposition
is erroneous and most pernicious. He who persistently defends it will fall into
formal heresy…”[56]
In this context, it is significant that
Sir Thomas More should have located his Utopia on an imaginary island
modelled, in part, on the Spanish West Indies. In the first part of this work,
More outlines the corruption of early sixteenth century England, whose
fundamental cause, in his opinion, was the misuse of private property. In the
second part he presents the opposite, an ideal (but distinctly communist)
society in which “tyranny and luxury have been abolished, private property is
unknown, and manual labour is looked upon as the sole occupation profitable to
the state.”[57]
But if
natural law, in the interpretation of the Dominican Las Casas, decreed that the
pagan kings of the Indies were true kings, in the interpretation of the Spanish
Jesuit Juan de Mariana, it was the justification for rebellion against corrupt
Christian kings. This led him to write that the assassination of the French
King Henry III was “an eternal honour to France”. But such seditious thinking
could not be tolerated; so the Jesuits forced Mariana to remove this phrase
from his book, and after the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, copies of his
book were publicly burned in Paris.
The
thoughts of this servant of absolutism were indeed dangerous for absolute
monarchs. Thus De Mariana wrote: “How will respect for princes (and what is
government without this?) remain constant, if the people are persuaded that it
is right for the subjects to punish the sins of the rulers? The tranquillity of
the commonwealth will often be disturbed with pretended as well as real
reasons. And when a revolt takes place every sort of calamity strikes, with one
section of the populace armed against another part. If anyone does not think
these evils must be avoided by every means, he would be heartless, wanting in
the universal common-sense of mankind. Thus they argue who protect the
interests of the tyrant.
“The
protectors of the people have no fewer and lesser arguments. Assuredly the
republic, whence the regal power has its source, can call a king into court,
when circumstances require and, if he persists in senseless conduct, it can
strip him of his principate.
“For the
commonwealth did not transfer the rights to rule into the hands of a prince to
such a degree that it has not reserved a greater power to itself; for we see
that in the matters of laying taxes and making permanent laws the state has
made the reservation that except with its consent no change can be made. We do
not here discuss how this agreement ought to be effected. But nevertheless,
only with the desire of the people are new imposts ordered and new laws made;
and, what is more, the rights to rule, though hereditary, are settled by the
agreement of the people on a successor…”[58]
De Mariana
was not the only Catholic – or even Jesuit – to think such heretical thoughts.
It is Suarez, according to Belloc, who “stands at the origin of that political
theory which has coloured all modern times. He it was who, completing the work
of his contemporary and fellow Jesuit, Bellarmine, restated in the most lucid
and conclusive fashion the fundamental doctrine that Governments derive their
authority, under God, from the community…”[59]
So the political consequences of rationalism were being felt even in the
citadels of what is usually considered to be the anti-rationalist camp, the
Catholic Counter-Reformation. For rationalism began, not with Luther in the
sixteenth century, but with Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh, when he placed
his “I” against the mind of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Thus
the Catholics could not hope to defeat Protestant rationalism before they had
succeeded in uprooting their own.
Protestant Democratism:
Calvin and Browne
The
radically new Protestant ideas of Church administration, writes McClelland,
“could only have radical effects on men’s attitudes to the running of the
state. On a very simple level, it could be argued that what applied to Church
government should apply straightforwardly to the state’s government on the
principle of a fortiori (the greater should contain the lesser). If the
government of the community which means most to Christian people should be
governed according to the reflection and choice of its members, then why should
the government of the state, an inferior institution by comparison, not be governed
in the same way too?”[60]
The
Protestant Reformation impacted political thought not only through the
democratism of its ideas of Church government, but also by the very fact that
it caused people to doubt whether their rulers had the true faith. “Reformed
political theory… still thought the law served good and godly ends. The social
peace, which only obedience to duly constituted authority could provide, was
always going to be pleasing in God’s sight. What was no longer so clear was
that God intended us to obey that
prince and those laws. How could God
be saying anything very clear about political obligation when Christendom was
split into two warring halves, one Catholic and one Protestant? In these
circumstances it is no surprise that thoughtful men began to wonder whether it
really was true that the laws under which they lived were instances of a
universal law as it applies to particulars. That very general unease was
sharpened by the very particular problem of what was to be done if you remained
a Catholic when your prince became a Protestant, or if you became a Protestant
and your prince remained a Catholic. The implied covenant of the coronation
stated clearly that the prince agreed to preserve true religion, and, in an age
when men felt obliged to believe that any religion other than their own was
false, the fact that your prince’s religion was not your own showed prima
facie that the original contract to preserve true religion had been broken.
It followed that a new contract could be made, perhaps with a new prince, to
preserve true religion, as in the case of John Knox and the Scottish Covenanter
movement to oust the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in favour of a Protestant
king.”[61]
Protestantism had two distinct models of Church-State relations. The
first, adopted by Luther, and before him by Wycliff, was that of realpolitik:
the king was supreme, as being the only power capable of resisting the Pope,
and in fact took the place of the Pope in many ways. The other, adopted by
Calvin, was more democratic: the people are the supreme power in both Church
and. State. This difference of approach is one reason for the alternation
between absolutism and democratism in several of the Protestant countries of
Western Europe.
Luther did
not attach an absolute authority to the Prince. As he wrote: “When a prince is
in the wrong, are his people bound to follow him then too? I answer, No, for it
is no one’s duty to do wrong; we ought to obey God who desires the right,
rather than men.”[62]
In practice, however, he refused to sanction revolution; and it is rather in
the Calvinist tendency in Protestantism that we must seek the ancestors of the
modern revolutionary movement.
Calvin
aimed at a greater independence for the Church from the State than existed in
the Lutheran States. “The Church,” he wrote, “does not assume what is proper to
the magistrate: nor can the magistrate execute what is carried out by the
Church.”[63] And
although he himself acquired the nickname “Pope of Geneva”, his Geneva, as Eric
G. Jay writes, “was not a theocracy which subordinated the temporal to the
spiritual power. That this has been so commonly assumed is a measure of the
success he achieved (after much initial opposition) in securing the
co-operation of the Genevan magistrates and the consistory.”[64]
At the same
time, it was not always easy to see where the Church ended and the State began
in Calvin’s Geneva. Thus Owen Chadwick writes: “Where authority existed among
the Protestant Churches, apart from the personal authority of individual men of
stature, it rested with the prince or the city magistrate. Calvin believed that
in organising the Church at Geneva he must organise it in imitation of the
primitive Church, and thereby reassert the independence of the Church and the divine
authority of its ministers… [However,] the boundaries between the jurisdiction
of Church and State… were not easy to define in Geneva… The consistory [the
Church authority] gave its opinions on the bank rate, on the level of interest
for war loans, on exports and imports, on speeding the law courts, on the cost
of living and the shortage of candles. On the other hand the council [the State
authority], even during Calvin’s last years, may be found supervising the
clergy and performing other functions which logic would have allotted to the
consistory. The council was not backward in protesting against overlong
sermons, or against pastors who neglected to visit the homes of the people;
they examined the proclamations by the pastors even if the proclamations called
the city to a general fast, sanctioned the dates for days of public penitence,
agreed or refused to lend pastors to other churches, provided for the housing
and stipend of the pastors, licensed the printing of theological books.”[65]
State power
protected the Calvinists from the ferocity of the Papists in several States –
the England of Elizabeth I, and the France of Henry IV, for example. And yet
Calvinists had an alarming tendency to come out against the state, splintering
off into ever more extreme movements of an apocalyptic nature that advocated
political as well as religious revolution, and were accompanied by moral
excesses directly contrary to the strait-laced image of traditional
Protestantism. The most famous example of this was the Anabaptist revolution in
Münster.
Chadwick
describes what happened: “At the end of 1533 the Anabaptist group at
Münster in Westphalia, under the leadership of a former Lutheran minister
Bernard Rothmann, gained control of the city council. Early in 1534 a Dutch
prophet and ex-innkeeper named John of Leyden appeared in Münster,
believing that he was called to make the city the new Jerusalem. On 9 February
1534 his party seized the city hall. By 2 March all who refused to be baptized
were banished, and it was proclaimed a city of refuge for the oppressed. Though
the Bishop of Münster collected an army and began the siege of his city,
an attempted coup within the walls was brutally suppressed, and John of Leyden
was proclaimed King of New Zion, wore vestments as his royal robes, and held
his court and throne in the market-place. Laws were decreed to establish a
community of goods, and the Old Testament was adduced to permit polygamy.
Bernard Rothmann, once a man of sense, once the friend of Melanchthon, took nine
wives.
“They now
believed that they had been given the duty and the power of exterminating the
ungodly. The world would perish, and only Münster would be saved. Rothmann
issued a public incitement to world rebellion: ‘Dear brethren, arm yourselves
for the battle, not only with the humble weapons of the apostles for suffering,
but also with the glorious armour of David for vengeance… in God’s strength,
and help to annihilate the ungodly.’ And ex-soldier named John of Feelen
slipped out of the city, carrying copies of this proclamation into the
Netherlands, and planned sudden coups in the Dutch cities. On a night in
February 1535 a group of men and women ran naked and unarmed through the
streets of Amsterdam shouting: ‘Woe! Woe! The wrath of God falls on this city.’
On 30 March 1535 John of Geelen with 300 Anabaptists, men and women, stormed an
old monastery in Friesland, fortified it, made sallies to conquer the province,
and were only winkled out after bombardment by heavy cannon. On the night of 10
May 1535 John of Geelen with a band of some thirty men attacked the city hall
of Amsterdam during a municipal banquet, and the burgomaster and several
citizens were killed. At last, on 25 June 1535, the gates of Münster were
opened by sane men within the walls, and the bishop’s army entered the city…”[66]
The
Anabaptist revolution in Münster came exactly a century after the
destruction of the Taborite revolution in Bohemia, which it closely imitated.
The Taborites and Anabaptists were in effect communists, and this fact shows
that there is a blood-red thread linking the revolutionary movements of late
medieval Catholicism, early Protestantism and twentieth-century militant
atheism. Thus T.L. Frazier writes: “The Taborites set about constructing a theocratic
society in their territory in southern Bohemia. In theory, there was to be no
human authority, for all were brothers and sisters. Of course, the theory was
‘modified’ somewhat to allow for the necessity of government. The older
brothers obviously needed to look after their younger siblings. It was also
supposed to be a classless society, and a primitive version of communism was
attempted. Private property, rents, taxes, and dues were abolished. Peasants
from all over Bohemia and Moravia sold all their worldly possessions to
contribute to the common purse. In the first part of 1420, chests were set up
by the Taborite clergy in which the people were expected to deposit all their
money. But here, too, reality, didn’t always conform to theory. The leadership
concentrated so much on common ownership that they took no thought of
motivating people to produce anything.
“Rather
than construct a functioning economy for their newly established Kingdom of
God, the Taborites turned to simple banditry whenever the communal chests were
empty. As the people of God, they reasoned, they had a right to all of God’s
wealth found on the earth. Conversely, those who were not of the people of God,
that is, all who were not Taborites, had no claim to the resources of the earth.
Thus raids on the property of non-Taborites were rationalized and became
common.
“According
to Taborite plans, after all of Bohemia was subjected to Taborite control, the
purification of the rest of the world would follow through conquest and domination.
This belief was deeply engrained in the Taborite movement. Norman Cohn writes:
‘As late as 1434 we find a speaker at a Taborite assembly declaring that,
however unfavorable the circumstances might be at present, the moment would
soon come when the Elect must arise and exterminate their enemies – the lords
in the first place, and then any of their own people who were of doubtful
loyalty or usefulness.’”[67]
The
immediate effect of the revolution in Münster, coming so soon after the
similar madness of Thomas Münzter and the Germans’ Peasant War, was to
strengthen the argument for the intervention of the strong hand of the State to
cool and control religious passions, if necessary by violent means. However,
the longer-term lesson to be drawn from it was that the Protestant Reformation,
by undermining the authority of the Church, had also, albeit unwittingly,
undermined that of the State. For even if the more moderate Protestants
accepted and exalted the authority of “the godly Prince”, the more extreme
Protestants felt no obligation to obey any earthly authority, but rather
created their own church-cum-state communities recognising no authority except
Christ’s alone.
Thus the
Englishman Henry Barrow (executed in 1593) wrote: “The true planted and rightly
established Church of Christ is a company of faithful people, separated from
the unbelievers and heathen of the land, gathered in the name of Christ, Whom
they truly worship and readily obey as their only King, Priest, and Prophet,
and joined together as members of one body, ordered and governed by such
offices and laws as Christ, in His last will and testament, hath thereunto
ordained…”[68]
As often as
not the more extreme Protestants were persecuted by the lawful authorities, as
the Huguenots were in 16th century France. So they felt no
obligation to obey them, and if they obeyed authorities of their own choosing,
this was an entirely voluntary, non-binding commitment. Thus the founder of the
Calvinist sect of the Congregationalists, Robert Browne, wrote in 1582: “The
Lord’s people is of the willing sorte. It is conscience, not the power of man,
that will drive us to seek the Lord’s Kingdom. Therefore it belongeth not to
the magistrate to compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a
submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties.”[69]
Again he wrote: "True Christians unite into societies of believers which
submit, by means of a voluntary agreement with God, to the dominion of God the
Saviour, and keep the Divine law in sacred communion."
These
“Separatists” (as Jay calls them) went under different names in different
countries. In England they were called Independents or Congregationalists or
Puritans. Each community was completely independent: in faith, in worship, in
the election of clergy. They were united by faith and friendship alone. Since
the clergy had no sacramental functions and were elected by laymen, they had no
real authority over their congregations.
The Church of England
In 1531,
Henry VIII was accepted by the Church of England as her “supreme Protector,
only and supreme Lord, and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even supreme
Head”. Three years later, the Act of Supremacy accorded him the title “only
supreme head in earth of the Church of England” and removed the saving
qualification: “as far as the law of Christ allows”. The only palliative to
this extreme caesaropapism lay in the fact that formally speaking Parliament
had bestowed this right, so Parliament could in theory take it away. But
Parliament was also, of course, a secular institution.
Now the
Protestantism of Henry VIII was of the most conservative, Catholic kind. For
while he wanted a divorce from his wife, which necessitated separation from an
unwilling Pope, he remained a Catholic in his personal beliefs and by no means
wanted to allow the anti-authoritarian views of the Protestants, especially the
Calvinist Protestants, into his kingdom. For, as the Scottish Calvinist John
Knox was threateningly to say, “Jehu killed two Kings at God’s commandment…”
Henry’s
solution was a kind of Catholicism without the Pope (and one or two other
things), but not a real Reformation in the continental sense insofar as, in the
words of Ralf Dahrendorf, “a falling out with the Pope is not the same as a
true Reformation”.[70]
In its origin, therefore, the English Reformation was not a religious event at
all, but a political manoeuvre to give the English king more freedom to satisfy
his carnal lusts. And the English Church and religion has retained a profoundly
political, this-worldly stamp ever since.[71]
“At first
glance,” writes Bernard, “Henry’s policies seem confused and uncertain; on
closer examination they are better described as deliberately ambiguous. For
Henry knew what he wanted well enough and was sufficient of a politician to
know when and how and when to compromise. He grasped that among churchmen and,
increasingly, among the educated laity, religious convictions were polarising.
If he were to win acceptance for the break with Rome and the royal supremacy,
the pope would have to be denounced, but if radical religious changes were to
be enforced, or even if they were simply to be advocated from the pulpits, he
risked provoking serious rebellions like the Pilgrimage of Grace. For all the
extravagant claims of the Act of Six Articles that it would abolish diversity
of opinions, Henry more realistically aimed at steering a path between the
extremes.”[72]
“Nor was
the Elizabethan religious settlement [the Act of Uniformity in 1559 and the
Thirty-Nine Articles in 1571] unequivocally protestant. Elizabeth would have
preferred something closer to her father’s catholicism, without the pope and
without egregious superstition… Henry VIII and Elizabeth.. saw the monarch as
in control of the church, appointing bishops, determining doctrine and liturgy,
and capable even of suspending an archbishop from exercising his power, a view
perhaps symbolised by the placing of royal arms inside parish churches. At the
heart of this monarchical view of the church lay a desire that was essentially
political…; a desire for comprehensiveness, for a church that would embrace all
their subjects. Religious uniformity was natural in itself; religious
dissensions wrecked social harmony and political peace. Continental experiences
– from the peasants’ war of 1525 through the French wars of religion to the
Thirty Years’ War – reinforced English rulers’ fears of the disastrous
consequences of religious divisions, and their success, until 1642, in sparing
their realm from such horrors further strengthened their conviction of the
efficacy of the policy…”[73]
“My
argument is that Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I and Charles I placed secular
and political considerations of order above purely ecclesiastical and theological
considerations…, and that from the start, from the 1530s, rulers faced
limitations because some of their subjects were papists and some of their
subjects wanted further reformation. Given the fact of religious difference,
given that rulers knew that their subjects, especially the more educated, were
divided, sometimes in response to theological debates European rather than just
national in scope, a measure of compromise and ambiguity, particularly on
points of doctrine or of local liturgical practice, was deliberately fostered.”[74]
“Larger
cracks can be papered over than one might supposed. But in extraordinary
circumstances, if contradictions with which men have long deliberately or
unconsciously lived can no longer be accommodated or overlooked, if a
monarchical church is faced by urgent demands for unambiguous, uncompromising
decisions of divisive questions, then the ensuing collapse can be violent. When
Englishmen ultimately turned to war in 1642, those differences of religion that
the monarchical church had striven to contain but to which it was always
vulnerable proved to be the most embittering determinant of men’s allegiance.”[75]
By making
the King, and later Parliament, the supreme arbiter of faith and morals, the
Act of Supremacy infused the English Church – and through it the whole English
people – with the habit and ability to compromise,
to seek and unfailingly find some middle
way between opposing opinions. This ability, while desirable in political
matters, is extremely harmful, even fatal, in questions of religious truth,
where, as St. Mark of Ephesus pointed out, there can be no middle way between
truth and falsehood. The via media was imposed upon the Church because
it had been chosen by the King, who, for political and personal reasons, wanted
some compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. It meant that henceforth
the Anglican Church represented not one
faith, but an uneasy compromise between two,
with the king as the arbiter and supreme judge over both of them.
Now “if the
State, as law and authority,” writes Tikhomirov, “departs from its connection
with a definite confession, that is, comes out from under the influence of the
religious confession on religious politics, it becomes the general judge of all
confessions and submits religion to itself. All relations between various
confessions, and their rights, must evidently be decided by the State that is
outside them, being governed exclusively by its own ideas about justice and the
good of society and the State. In this connection it obviously has the complete
right and every opportunity to be repressive in all cases in which, in its
opinion, the interests of the confession contradict civil and political
interests. Thus the situation emerges in which the State can influence the confessions, but cannot and must not be influenced by them. Such a State is already
unable to be governed in relation to the confessions by any religious
considerations, for not one of the confessions constitutes for it a lawful
authority, whereas the opinions of financiers, economists, medics,
administrators, colonels, etc. constitute its lawful consultants, so that in
all spheres of the construction of the people’s life the State will be governed
by considerations drawn precisely from these sources.
“In such an
order there can be no religious freedom for anyone. Perhaps – and this is
doubtful – there can be equal rights for the confessions. But freedom and
equality of rights are not the same thing. Equality of rights can also consist
of a general lack of rights. The State can, [for example,] on the basis of
cultural and medical considerations, take measures against circumcision and
forbid fasting; to avoid disorders or on the basis of sanitary considerations
it can forbid pilgrimages to holy places or to venerated relics; on the basis
of military demands it can forbid all forms of monasticism among Christians,
Buddhists, Muslims. The services themselves can be found to be harmful
hypnotisations of the people not only in public, but also in private prayer. In
general, there are no bounds to the State’s prohibitory measures in relation to
religions if it is placed outside them, as their general judge…”[76]
However, if
Henry had confined himself to the Act of Supremacy, England might have remained
an essentially Catholic country, with the very real possibility of reversion to
full Papism after Henry’s death. But then, in 1536, came the Dissolution of the
Monasteries. This had three very important consequences: (i) it destroyed the
economic power of the Church; (ii) it vastly increased the wealth of the landed
aristocrats who eventually took over most of the monastic lands, and (iii) it
undermined the sacredness of property and therefore law and order in general.
As
Professor Christopher Hill writes: “The long-term outcome of the [English]
Reformation was the opposite of that intended by the Machiavellians who
introduced it. Charles I’s Secretary of State, the near-papist Windebanke,
pointed out to the representative of the Pope in England the historical irony
of the situation. ‘Henry VIII committed such sacrilege by profaning so many
ecclesiastical benefices in order to give their goods to those who, being so
rewarded, might stand firmly for the king in the lower house; and now the king’s
greatest enemies are those who are enriched by these benefices… O the great
judgements of God!’ The overthrow of papal authority by Henry VIII thus looks
forward to the civil war and the execution of Charles I. The royal supremacy
yielded place to the sovereignty of Parliament and then to demands for the
sovereignty of the people. The plunder of the Church by the landed ruling class
stimulated the development of capitalism in England. The attack on Church
property by the rich led to a questioning of property rights in general…”[77]
Thus “men
learnt that church property was not sacrosanct, that traditional ecclesiastical
institutions could disappear without the world coming to an end; that laymen
could remodel not only the economic and political structures of the Church but
also its doctrine – if they possessed political power. Protestant theology
undermined the uniquely sacred character of the priest, and elevated the
self-respect of the congregation. This helped men to question a divine right to
tithes, the more so when tithes were paid to lay impropriators. Preaching
became more important than the sacraments; and so men came to wonder what right
non-preaching ministers, or absentees, had to be paid by their congregations.
It took a long time to follow out these new lines of thought to their logical
conclusions; but ultimately they led men very far indeed. By spreading ideas of
sectarian voluntarism they prepared the way for the Revolution of 1640, and
trained its more radical leaders.
“In the
Revolution episcopacy was abolished, bishops’ and cathedral lands confiscated,
the payment of tithes challenged. The radicals rejected not only Henry VIII’s
episcopal hierarchy but the whole idea of a state church. ‘O the great
judgements of God!’ Windebanke had exclaimed when contemplating the paradoxical
outcome of the Henrician Reformation. Henry VIII had denied the supremacy of
the Pope; he had confiscated church property; and he had allowed the Scriptures
to be translated into English. These challenges to the authoritarianism, to the
wealth and to the propaganda monopoly of the Church opened doors wider than was
perhaps intended. A century later the authority first of King, then of
Parliament, was challenged in the name of the people; the social justification of
all private property was called into question; and speculation about the nature
of the state and the rights of the people went to lengths which ultimately
terrified the victorious Parliamentarians into recalling King, House of Lords,
and bishops to help them to maintain law and order.”[78]
Until the
death of Henry, the English Reformation had been a mainly politico-economic
affair that affected only a small section of the population. But in the reigns
of Edward VI and Mary, religious passions came to the fore, polarising the
people between sharply opposed alternatives, and “martyrs” were made on both
sides of the conflict. During the reign of Edward, when Calvinists took over
the reins of government, the dissolution of the monasteries assumed such large
proportions and such brutal destructiveness as finally to arouse the
indignation of large parts of the population, who remained essentially Catholic
in their sympathies. And then, during the reign of Mary, a Catholic married to
King Philip of Spain who was determined to stamp out Calvinism, a persecution
of Calvinists got under way that had the good fortune (from a Calvinist point
of view) of finding a talented chronicler in the shape of John Foxe.
Foxe’s Book
of Martyrs has been called “the third Testament of the English Church”[79],
so influential was its gory descriptions of the burning and disembowelling of
leading Calvinists on future generations. As Chadwick writes: “The
steadfastness of the victims, from Ridley and Latimer downwards, baptized the
English Reformation in blood and drove into English minds the fatal association
of ecclesiastical tyranny with the See of Rome… Five years before, the
Protestant cause was identified with church robbery, destruction, irreverence,
religious anarchy. It was now beginning to be identified with virtue, honesty,
and loyal English resistance to a half-foreign government.”[80]
Thus the
still small number of Calvinists found themselves, at the beginning of the
reign of Elizabeth, with both money (from the dissolution of the monasteries)
and national sentiment (from the fact that foreigners incited the persecution)
on their side. Their advantage was greatly strengthened by two events that
finally ensured the victory of the English Reformation.
The first was
Pope Pius V’s Bull Regnans in Caelis (1570): “He that reigns in the
highest, to Whom has been given all power in heaven and earth, entrusted the
government of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church (outside which there
is no salvation) to one man alone on the earth, namely to Peter, the chief of
the Apostles, and to Peter’s successor, the Roman pontiff, in fullness of
power. This one man He set up as chief over all nations, and all kingdoms, to
pluck up, destroy, scatter, dispose, plant and build…We declare … Elizabeth to
be a heretic and an abettor of heretics, and those that cleave to her in the
aforesaid matters to have incurred the sentence of anathema, and to be cut off
from the unity of Christ’s body.… We declare her to be deprived of her pretended
right to the aforesaid realm, and from dominion, dignity and privilege
whatsoever. And the nobles, subjects and peoples of the said realm, and all
others who have taken an oath of any kind to her we declare to be absolved for
ever from such oath and from all dues of dominion, fidelity and obedience… And
we enjoin and forbid all… to obey her and her admonitions, commands, and laws.
All who disobey our command we involve in the same sentence of anathema.”[81]
This decree
immediately placed all English Catholics who recognised the Pope’s authority into the category of political
traitors as well as ecclesiastical heretics. The failure of the Spanish Armada
in 1588 removed their last chance of redemption. Although there is evidence
that Queen Elizabeth shared the Catholic sympathies of her father, she did not
have the power to resist her Calvinist advisors, especially the Cecils, father
and son. From this time, therefore, the decatholicisation of the country
proceeded apace with no significant opposition...[82]
2. THE RIURIK TSARS
The
sceptre of the Orthodox kingdom will fall from the weakening hands of the
Byzantine emperors, since they will not have proved able to achieve the
symphony of Church and State. Therefore the Lord in His Providence will send a
third God-chosen people to take the place of the chosen, but spiritually
decrepit people of the Greeks.
Greek
Prophecy of the Eighth or Ninth Century.[83]
Be on your guard and attend, O pious tsar, for all
the Christian kingdoms have been reduced to yours alone. For two Romes have
fallen, and the third stands,
And a fourth there will not be. For your Christian
kingdom will not be given to another, according to the great Theologian.
Elder Philotheus of Pskov.
What is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge
bishops, taking to himself a power which has not been given him by God?… This
is apostasy from God.
Patriarch Nicon of Moscow.
With the
fall of the New Rome of Constantinople in 1453, apocalyptic thoughts again
began to arise in the Orthodox world, as they had after the fall of the Old
Rome. For if the empire was no more, was not the end of the world nigh? Some
even began to give a date - 1492, the 6000th year since the creation
of the world…
The Path to the Third Rome
But
would there perhaps be a Third Rome to take the place of the Second Rome,
thereby prolonging the existence of the world and earthly Christendom?
Let us remind ourselves of the
eschatological idea on which the idea of the translatio imperii rested.
According to this idea, Rome in its various successions and reincarnations will
exist to the end of the world – or at least, to the time of the Antichrist. As
Michael Nazarov writes: “This conviction is often reflected in the patristic
tradition (it was shared by Saints: Hippolytus of Rome, John Chrysostom,
Blessed Theodoret, Blessed Jerome, Cyril of Jerusalem and others). On this
basis [the fifteenth-century] Elder Philotheus [of Pskov] wrote: ‘the Roman [Romejskoye]
kingdom is indestructible, for the Lord was enrolled into the Roman [Rimskuyu]
power’ (that is, he was enrolled among the inhabitants at the census in the
time of the Emperor Augustus). Here Philotheus distinguishes between the
indestructible ‘Roman [Romejskoye] kingdom’, whose successor was now
Rus’, and Roman [Rimskoj] power, which had gone into the past.”[84]
Nevertheless, even if the idea that Roman [Romejskoye] power
would last until the end of the world was accepted, it did not follow that
Russia was that power now, after the Fall of Constantinople. Such an idea was
very bold. St. Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire from Old Rome to
New Rome had also been bold - but that step, though radical and fraught with
enormous consequences, nevertheless had not involved going beyond the bounds of
the existing empire, and had been undertaken by the legitimate emperor himself.
Again, the Serbs and Bulgarians had each in their time sought to capture New
Rome and make it the capital of a Slavic-Greek kingdom – but this, again, had
not involved moving the empire itself, as opposed to changing its dominant
nation. The Frankish idea of the translatio imperii from New Rome to
Aachen had involved both changing the dominant nation and taking the capital
beyond the bounds of the existing empire – and had been rejected by the Greeks
as heretical, largely on the grounds that it involved setting up a second,
rival empire, where there could only be one true one.
But the
one, true empire was now in the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Could it be – a
horrific idea, but one that had to be considered - that the Ottoman conqueror
of Constantinople was the new Roman emperor! After all, there had been pagans
and heretics and persecutors of the Church on the throne, so why not a Muslim?
And that was precisely the view of the Cretan historian George Trapezuntios,
who in 1466 said to the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet II: "Nobody
doubts that you are the Roman emperor. He who is the lawful ruler in the
capital of the empire and in Constantinople is the emperor, while Constantinople
is the capital of the Roman empire. And he who remains as emperor of the Romans
is also the emperor of the whole world."[85]
However, the Ottoman Sultans could not be compared even with the
heretical Roman emperors of the past, such as the iconoclasts Leo and
Constantine Copronymus. The latter had at least claimed to be sons of
the Church, they had claimed to confess the Orthodox faith and receive
the sacraments of the Orthodox Church. But there could be no deception here:
the Ottoman Sultans made no pretence at being Orthodox. Therefore at most they
could be considered analogous in authority to the pagan emperors of Old Rome,
legitimate authorities to whom obedience was due (as long as they did not
compel Christians to commit impiety), but no more. So had the clock been turned
back? Had the Christian Roman Empire returned to its pre-Christian,
pre-Constantinian origins?
No, the clock of Christian history never
goes back, never repeats itself. The world could never be the same again after
Constantine and the Christian empire of New Rome, which had so profoundly
changed the consciousness of all the peoples living in Europe and the
Mediterranean basin. So if the Antichrist had not yet come, there was only one
alternative: the one, true empire had indeed been translated somewhere - but
not unlawfully, to some heretical capital such as Aachen or Old Rome, but
lawfully, to some Orthodox nation capable of bringing forth the fruits that the
Byzantines were no longer capable of producing.
What
could that nation be? With not only the Greeks
of Byzantium, but all the traditionally Orthodox peoples of the Balkans and the
Near East under the Turkish yoke, the answer to this question could only be
found in the north – in the forests of Holy Russia. So began the rise to the
status of a world power of the nation and state that, more than any other, has
been responsible for the survival of True Christianity into the twenty-first
century.
In fact the only real candidate for the
role of leadership in the Orthodox world was Russia. Only the Russians could be
that “third God-chosen people” of the prophecy. Only
they were able to re-express the Christian ideal of the symphony of powers on a
stronger, more popular base – as a symphony, in effect, of three powers –
Church, State and People - rather than two.
For the Russians had the advantage over the Romans and the Greeks that
they were converted to the faith as a single people, with their existing social
organisation intact, and not, as in Rome, as an amalgam of different peoples
whose indigenous social structures had already been smashed by the pagan
imperial power. Thus whereas in Rome,
as Tikhomirov writes, “the Christians did not constitute a social body”, and
“their only organisation was the Church”[86],
in the sense that it was not whole peoples or classes but individuals from many
different peoples and classes that joined the Church, in Russia the whole of
the richly layered and variegated, but at the same time socially and
politically coherent society came to the Church at one time and was baptised
together…
The
600-year history of Russia from her baptism under St. Vladimir in 988 until the
official proclamation of the Russian Empire as the Orthodox Empire by
the Ecumenical Patriarchs Joachim (in 1561) and Jeremiah II (in 1588) presents
a very striking and instructive illustration of the Lord's words: "the
last shall be first" (Matthew 20.16). For most of this period
Russia was the most populous and flourishing nation in the Orthodox commonwealth
of nations. The beauty of her churches and the piety of her people amazed all
comers. Thus at one time the famous Kiev-Caves Lavra contained more than fifty
monks capable of casting out demons. And the monastic missionary movement
inspired by St. Sergius of Radonezh in the fourteenth century came to be called
"the Northern Thebaid" because of the resemblance of its piety to
those of the Egyptian Thebaid (over 100 of Sergius' disciples were canonised).
And yet during the whole of this period the Russian Church remained no more
than a junior metropolitan district of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate!
Unlike the much smaller Serbian and Bulgarian Churches, the Russian Church
never sought autocephaly, and even when the Byzantine empire had contracted to
a very small area around the capital city, the Russian Grand-Princes looked up
to the emperors in Constantinople as to their fathers or elder brothers (the
emperors called them “nephews”)[87].
This voluntary self-limitation and
national humility on the part of the princes and people brought many blessings
to Russia. First and most important, it implanted Orthodoxy in all its purity
into the hearts of the people with no admixture of heterodoxy.[88]
Secondly, the fact that the metropolitan of the Russian Church was appointed by
Constantinople gave him the ability to arbitrate in the frequent quarrels
between the Russian princes in the Kievan period, thus preserving the spiritual
unity of the Russian nation that had been achieved under St. Vladimir. And thirdly,
it ensured the survival and resurrection of Russia as a single Orthodox nation
even after the Mongols had destroyed Kiev and subdued most of Russia in the
1240s.
The
Russians retained their loyalty to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Byzantine
emperor until the very last moment – that is, until both emperor and patriarch
betrayed the Orthodox faith at the Council of Florence in 1438-39. Even after the patriarchate’s betrayal of Orthodoxy at Florence, the
Russians did not immediately break their canonical dependence on the patriarch.
And even after the election of St. Jonah to the metropolitanate, the Great
Prince’s letter to the patriarch shows an amazing restraint and humility,
speaking only of a “disagreement” between the two Churches, and stressing that
St. Jonah had received the metropolitanate without
asking the blessing of the patriarch, but in accordance with the canons, only
out of extreme necessity – the patriarch’s blessing would again be asked once
they were assured that he adhered to “the ancient piety”.[89]
Since the
Russian Great Prince was now the only independent Orthodox ruler[90], and was supported by an independent Church,
he had a better claim than any other to
inherit the throne of the Roman Emperors and therefore call himself “Tsar”
(from “Caesar”, the Russian equivalent of the Greek Basileus). [91]
The title had been floated already before the fall of Constantinople: in
1447-48 Simeon of Suzdal had called Great Prince Basil Vasilyevich “faithful
and Christ-loving and truly Orthodox… White Tsar”.[92]
And St. Jonah wrote to Prince Alexander of Kiev that Basil was imitating his
“ancestors” – the holy Emperor Constantine and the Great-Prince Vladimir.[93] The Russian Great Princes’ claim was further
strengthened by the marriage of Great Prince Ivan Vasilyevich to the last
surviving heir of the Paleologan line, Sophia, in 1472. It was on this basis
that a letter of the Venetian Senate accorded
Ivan the imperial title.[94]
However, there were many weighty
reasons militating against the Great Prince assuming such a title at this time.
The first was the traditional respect of the Russians for their elder brothers
in Byzantium. This respect would gradually wane as the Russians gradually
became convinced that Byzantium had fallen because of its sins against the
faith, and this diminished respect was one of the main reasons for the Old
Believer schism in the seventeenth century, as we shall see. Nevertheless, in
the fifteenth century it was still strong. And there was no question that in
the consciousness of the Russian people the blessing of the Ecumenical
Patriarch was required for such a major step as the assumption of the role of
Orthodox emperor by the Russian Great Prince.
Secondly, there was the difficult problem
of the status of the Russian metropolitan. In 1451 the uniate Patriarch Gregory
Mammas of Constantinople had fled to Rome, where he consecrated Gregory
Bolgarin, a former deacon of Isidore’s, as metropolitan of Kiev in opposition
to St. Jonah. This was justified by the Latins not only on the grounds that
there was no communion between themselves and the Orthodox of Muscovy, and the
Pope had called St. Jonah “the schismatic monk Jonah, son of iniquity”, but
also because a large part of the Russian population was now living within the
domain of King Casimir of Poland-Lithuania, who was a Roman Catholic. Thus the
fall of the Greek Church into uniatism led directly to a schism in the Orthodox
Russian Church, which had the former consequence that the Russian Great Prince
could not count on the obedience even of all the Russian people – hardly a
strong position from which to be proclaimed emperor of all the Orthodox
Christians! Moreover, even when both Gregory Bolgarin and the later Patriarchs
of Constantinople beginning with Gennadius Scholarius returned to Orthodoxy
(the unia was officially and synodically renounced in Constantinople in 1480),
the schism continued in the Russian lands, with one metropolitan, that of Kiev,
under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, and the other, that of Moscow,
independent of Constantinople.[95]
The Greeks argued that, now that the unia had been renounced, the Russian
Church of the independent Muscovite kingdom should return into obedience to the
Ecumenical Patriarchate. But would have meant the subjection of the free
Russian Church living under a free and Orthodox sovereign to a metropolitan
living under a hostile Roman Catholic king a patriarch living under a hostile
Muslim sultan!
Thirdly, before the Russian Great Prince
could assume the title of Tsar, or Emperor, he had to reunite all the Russian
lands under his dominion, and then, if possible, all the lands of the Orthodox
East. This point can be better appreciated if it is remembered that when the
Emperor Constantine transferred the capital of the empire from Old Rome to the
New Rome of Constantinople, he was already the undisputed ruler of the whole of
the Roman empire, in which the great majority of Orthodox Christians lived. The
Russian Great Prince, by contrast, was ruler only of one northern section of
the Orthodox lands, which included none of the traditional territories of the
Roman empire, and not even “the mother of Russian cities”, the ancient capital
of Kiev.
Moreover, there were other Russian princes with claims to be “the new Constantine”, “the saviour of Orthodoxy” – “for instance,” writes Meyendorff, “the prince Boris of Tver, who had also sent a representative to the council [of Florence] and now, after rejecting the Lating faith, was said by one polemicist to deserve an imperial diadem. Furthermore, in Novgorod, under Archbishop Gennadius (1484-1509), there appeared a curious Russian variation on the Donation of Constantine, the Legend of the White Cowl. According to the Legend, the while cowl (klobuk; Gr. epikalimaukon) was donated by Constantine the Great to pope Sylvester following his baptism; the last Orthodox pope, foreseeing Rome’s fall into heresy, sent the cowl for safe-keeping to patriarch Philotheus of Constantinople, who eventually (also foreseeing the betrayal of Florence), sent the precious relic to the archbishop of Novgorod. Thus, not only Moscow, but also Tver and Novgorod, were somehow claiming to be the heirs of ‘Rome’, the center of the true Christian faith…”[96]
It was in
this Novgorodian legend dating to 1490 that the first use of the expression
“the third Rome” is encountered: “The old Rome has lost its glory and has
lapsed from the Christian faith out of pride and self-will. In the new Rome,
which is in Constantinople, the Christian faith will also perish through the
violence of the sons of Hagar. But in the third Rome, that stands in the
Russian land, the grace of the Holy Spirit shall shine out. And know well,
Philotheus, that all Christian lands shall come together in the one Russian
kingdom for the sake of the true faith.”[97]
At about the same time the same theme
was eagerly taken up by Metropolitan Zosima, who was later condemned as
Judaiser. Ya.S. Lurye writes: “The first attempts to think through the new
situation that arose after the break with the patriarch were undertaken by
people with very independent ideological positions. The idea of ‘Moscow – the
new city of Constantine’ was put forward by Zosima, who was linked with the
heretical movement [of the Judaisers] at the end of the 15th century;
Zosima boldly referred the New Testament prophecy, ‘the first shall be last,
and the last first’ to the Greeks and the Russians…”[98]
A generation later, Elder Philotheus of Pskov took up the theme, writing to the Pskov
delegate of Great Prince Basil, Munechin: “I would like to say a few words
about the existing Orthodox empire of our most illustrious, exalted ruler. He
is the only emperor on all the earth over the Christians, the governor of the
holy, divine throne of the holy, ecumenical, apostolic Church which in place of
the Churches of Rome and Constantinople is in the city of Moscow, protected by
God, in the holy and glorious Dormition church of the most pure Mother of God.
It alone shines over the whole earth more radiantly than the sun. For know
well, those who love Christ and those who love God, that all Christian empires
will perish and give way to the one kingdom of our ruler, in accord with the
books of the prophet [Daniel 7.14], which is the Russian empire. For two
Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will never be a fourth.”[99]
However,
thus far Moscow was only an embryonic Third Rome: several tasks needed to be
carried out before the embryo could become a man. The first task was that of
becoming truly independent rulers – independent, that is, of their Tatar
overlords. This aim was more or less achieved by 1480, when Moscow first
refused to give tribute to the Horde. Of course, the Tatars did not take this
lying down, and they continued to be a threat to the Russian State until well
into the eighteenth century. But being under threat from a State is not the
same as being in subjection to it. By the end of the fifteenth century Muscovy
was a fully independent State for the first time in her history, and for this
reason alone the Great Princes had the right to call themselves “tsar”, that
is, “autocrat”.
Their second task was the gathering of the Russian lands, the building up of a national kingdom uniting all the Russias, which involved at least three major stages: (i) the uniting of the free Russian princedoms under Moscow, (ii) the final liberation of the Eastern and Southern Russian lands from the Tatar-Mongol-Turkish yoke, and (iii) the liberation of the Western Russian lands from the Catholic yoke of Poland-Lithuania. Steady progress towards these ends was made throughout the sixteenth century until the major crisis of “The Time of Troubles”, which shook the Russian State to its foundation. Progress was resumed after the enthronement of the first Romanov tsar in 1613. The gathering of the Russian lands was finally accomplished in 1915, when Tsar Nicholas II conquered Galicia from the Catholic Austrians.
Their third task was the gathering of
the Orthodox lands, including the Greek and Semitic lands of the Eastern
Mediterranean. The Muscovite State first turned its attention seriously to this
aim under the Grecophile Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nicon. At this
moment, however, the Muscovite autocracy suffered its most severe crisis and
was transformed into the “Orthodox absolutism” of Peter the Great, whose ideal
was rather the First Rome of the Caesars and Augusti.
During the reign of Tsar Alexander II the
idea of Moscow the Third Rome began to be revived, and Orthodox Christians
again began to see this as the role that Divine Providence had entrusted to
Russia.[100] The wars
waged by Russia for the liberation of Bulgaria in 1877-78 and Serbia in 1914-17
can be seen as prefiguring the full realization of that role. But then came the
revolution, in which the Third International represented a grotesque parody of
the noble ideal of the Third Rome, an ideal that has yet to be realised in its
fullness….
The Heresy of the Judaisers
The greatest internal threat to the Muscovite kingdom in this period was provided by the heresy of the Judaisers. Since this heresy is sometimes considered to be the spiritual ancestor of the Russian revolution, it is worth pausing to examine its roots and history in detail.
Russia
first came into conflict with the Jews in the form of the Khazars, a Turkic
people inhabiting the Volga basin whose leaders had converted to Judaism in
about 679, thus becoming “the thirteenth tribe” of Israel. In 965-969 Russian
pagan armies under Great Prince Syatoslav destroyed the Khazar capital at Itel.
His victory proved impermanent, but it propelled the Khazars to begin their
migration towards Western Russia, where they were joined, at the beginning of
the sixteenth century, by large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in
Italy, Provence and Germany.[101]
From this time the Jewish community in Poland and the Russian territories under
Polish dominion in Ukraine and Belorussia began to multiply rapidly…
The
Hungarian Jew Arthur Koestler writes that the Khazars were branching out
"long before the destruction of the Khazar state by the Mongols - as the
ancient Hebrew nation had started branching into the Diaspora long before the
destruction of Jerusalem. Ethnically, the Semitic tribes on the waters of the
Jordan and the Turko-Khazar tribes on the Volga were of course 'miles apart',
but they had at least two important formative factors in common. Each lived at
a focal junction where the great trade routes connecting east and west, north
and south intersect; a circumstance which predisposed them to become nations of
traders, of enterprising travellers, or 'rootless cosmopolitans' - as hostile
propaganda has unaffectionately labelled them. But at the same time their
exclusive religion fostered a tendency to keep to themselves and stick
together, to establish their own communities with their own places of worship,
schools, residential quarters and ghettoes (originally self-imposed) in
whatever town or country they settled. This rare combination of wanderlust and
ghetto-mentality, reinforced by Messianic hopes and chosen-race pride, both
ancient Israelites and medieval Khazars shared - even though the latter traced
their descent not to Shem but to Japheth."[102]
The Russian
princes placed restrictions on the Jews and their money-lending practices.
Vladimir Monomakh even expelled them from the country. However, they crept back
in, and according to Platonov, the Jews Anbal and Ofrem Moizovich played a
leading part in the murder of Andrew of Bogolyubovo in the twelfth century.
Platonov writes: “The transformation of Russia into the spiritual centre of
Christian civilisation almost exactly coincided in time with the establishment
of a secret Jewish Talmudic centre in the West Russian lands, which were
occupied at that time by Poland and Lithuania. Although the entrance of Jews
into Russia was cut off by a temporary frontier, their gradual secret assault
on the stronghold of the Christian world was realised inexorably through the
appearance of various Jewish heretical movements.” [103]
The most
important of these movements was the heresy of the Judaisers, when "the
whole Russian Church," as General Nechvolodov writes, "had at her
head a Judaizer, and the immediate entourage of the sovereign, those whom he
loved, were also Judaizers."[104]
The roots of the heresy of the Judaisers,
writes a publication of the Moscow Patriarchate, "go deeper than is
usually imagined. The part played by national elements in the heresy, which
exploded like epidemics onto medieval Europe, has not yet been sufficiently
clarified. The acts of the inquisition demonstrate that most of the sects were
Judeo-Christian in character with a more or less pronounced Manichaean
colouring. The flourishing of the Albigensian heresy in France has been
directly linked by historians with the rise of Jewish influence in that
country. The heresy of the Templars, 'the knights of the Temple', who were
condemned in 1314, was linked with esoterical Judaism and blasphemy against
Christ...
"Judaisers were also known in the Orthodox East. In Salonica in the
first third of the 14th century 'there existed a heretical Judaising society in
the heart of the Greek population' which had an influence on 'the Bulgarian
Judaisers of the 40s and 50s of the same century'. In 1354 a debate took place
in Gallipoli between the famous theologian and hierarch of the Eastern Church
Gregory Palamas, on the one hand, and the Turks and the Chionians, i.e the
Judaisers, on the other. In 1360 a council meeting in Turnovo, the then capital
of the Bulgarian patriarchate, condemned both the opponents of Hesychasm (the
Barlaamites) and those who philosophise from the Jewish heresies.
"The
successes of the heresy in Russia could be attributed to the same cause as its
success in France in the 14th century. Jews streamed into the young state of
the Ottomans from the whole of Western Europe.[105]
Thereafter they were able to penetrate without hindrance into the Genoan
colonies of the Crimea and the Azov sea, and into the region of what had been
Khazaria, where the Jewish sect of the Karaites had a large influence; for they
had many adherents in the Crimea and Lithuania and were closely linked with
Palestine. As the inscriptions on the Jewish cemetery of Chuft-Kale show,
colonies of Karaites existed in the Crimea from the 2nd to the 18th centuries.
The Karaites were brought to Lithuania by Prince Vitovt, the hero of the battle
of Grunwald (1410) and great-grandfather of Ivan III Vasilievich. From there
they spread throughout Western Russia.
"... One has to admit that the
beginning of the polemic between the Orthodox and the heretics was made, not in
Byzantium, but in Russia. Besides, the polemic began... in the time of
Metropolitan Peter (+1326), the founder of the Muscovite ecclesiastical centre.
In the life of St. Peter it is mentioned among his other exploits for the good
of the Russian Church that he 'overcame the heretic Seit in debate and
anathematised him.’ The hypothesis concerning the Karaite origin of the
'Judaisers' allows us to see in Seit a Karaite preacher.
"...
The heresy did not disappear but smouldered under a facade of church life in
certain circles of the Orthodox urban population, and the Russian church, under
the leadership of her hierarchs, raised herself to an unceasing battle with the
false teachings. The landmarks of this battle were: Metropolitan Peter's
victory over Seit in debate (between 1312 and 1326), the unmasking and
condemnation of the strigolniki in Novgorod in the time of Metropolitan
Alexis (1370s), the overcoming of this heresy in the time of Metropolitan
Photius (+1431), and of the heresy of the Judaisers - in the time of Archbishop
Gennadius of Novgorod (+1505) and St. Joseph of Volotsk (+1515).
"'From
the time of the holy Prince Vladimir, the Baptizer of Rus', who rejected the
solicitations of the Khazar Rabbis, wrote St. Joseph of Volotsk, 'the great
Russian land has for 500 years remained in the Orthodox Faith, until the enemy
of salvation, the devil, introduced the foul Jew to Great Novgorod. On St.
Michael's day, 1470, there arrived from Kiev in the suite of Prince Michael
Olelkovich, who had been invited by the veche [the Novgorodian
parliament], 'the Jew Scharia' and 'Zachariah, prince of Taman. Later the
Lithuanian Rabbis Joseph Smoilo Skaryavei and Moses Khanush also arrived.
"The
heresy began to spread quickly. However, 'in the strict sense of the word this
was not merely heresy, but complete apostasy from the Christian faith and the
acceptance of the Jewish faith. Using the weaknesses of certain clerics,
Scharia and his assistants began to instil distrust of the Church hierarchy
into the faint-hearted, inclining them to rebellion against spiritual
authority, tempting them with 'self-rule', the personal choice of each person
in the spheres of faith and salvation, inciting the deceived to renounce their
Mother-Church, blaspheme against the holy icons[106]
and reject veneration of the saints - the foundations of popular morality -
and, finally, to a complete denial of the saving Sacraments and dogmas of
Orthodoxy concerning the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation. So they went so far
as to conduct a Jewish war against God and the substitution of Christ the
Saviour by the false messiah and antichrist.
"The
false teaching spread in secret. Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod first heard
about the heresy in 1487; four members of a secret society, while abusing each
other in a drunken frenzy, revealed the existence of the heresy in front of
some Orthodox. The zealous archpastor quickly conducted an investigation and with
sorrow became convinced that not only Novgorod, but also the very capital of
Russian Orthodoxy, Moscow, was threatened. In September 1487 he sent
Metropolitan Gerontius in Moscow the records of the whole investigation in the
original. Igumen Joseph (Sanin) of the Dormition monastery of Volotsk, who had
an unassailable reputation in Russian society at the end of the 15th and
beginning of the 16th centuries, also spoke out against the heresy.
"But
the battle with the heresy turned out to be no simple matter, for the heretics
had enlisted the support of powerful people in Moscow. Great Prince Ivan III,
who had been deceived by the Judaisers, invited them to Moscow, and made the
two leading heretics protopriests - one in the Dormition, and the other in the
Archangels cathedrals in the Kremlin. Some of those close to the Tsar, such as
Theodore Kurytsyn, who headed the government, and whose brother became the
heretics' leader, were co-opted into the heresy. The Great Prince's bride,
Helen Voloshanka, was converted to Judaism. In 1483 a correspondence between
Ivan III and the heresiarch Scharia himself was established through diplomatic
channels between Moscow and Bakhchisarai. Finally, the heretic Zosima was
raised to the see of the great hierarchs of Moscow Peter, Alexis and Jonah.
"The struggle between Archbishop
Gennadius and St. Joseph, on the one hand, and the opponents of Orthodoxy, on
the other, lasted for nineteen years.
"In
1479 St. Joseph founded the monastery of the Dormition in Volokolamsk. There he
wrote his major theological works, including 'The Enlightener', which brought
him the reputation of a great father and teacher of the Russian Church. His
fiery epistles against the heretics were widely distributed. The labours of
Igumen Joseph of Volotsk and St. Gennadius, archbishop of Novgorod, were
crowned with success. In 1494 the heretic Zosima was removed from the
metropolitan see, and in 1502-1504 councils were assembled which condemned the
most evil and impenitent heretics."[107]
So the
decade beginning in 1492, the predicted end of the world according to many
calculations, proved to be rather the end of the world in a different sense. In
Russia, as in Spain, the most powerful states of Eastern and Western
Christendom respectively, it marked the end of direct Jewish influence over
Christian society. It was not until the twentieth century that Jewish power
raised its head again in Russia, and the heresy of the Judaizers again
triumphed at the highest level of the Russian Church.[108]
Russian
Caesaropapism and its Critics
The
Judaising heresy gave the Russians a great fright; it was even seen as a sign
of the coming of the Antichrist. After all, it had penetrated both to the royal
court and to the highest hierarchical see in the land at precisely the end of
the sixth millenium of world history. The immediate result of this was a major
strengthening of the Great Prince’s power.
For
churchmen now saw in the monarchical power the major bulwark against heresy,
more important even than the metropolitanate, which, for the second time in
little more than fifty years (the first time was at the council of Florence)
had betrayed Orthodoxy. Thus Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod wrote to Bishop
Niphon of Suzdal: “You go to the Metropolitan and ask him to intercede with his
majesty the Great Prince, that he cleanse the Church of God from heresy. Again,
St. Joseph wrote: «The Tsar is by nature like all men, but in power he is
similar to the Supreme God. And just as God wishes to save all people, so the
Tsar much from preserve everything that is subject to his power from all harm,
both spiritual and bodily».[109]
According
to St. Joseph, as Zyzykin interprets him, the defence of the truth “is placed
on the tsar alone, for in his eyes it is in the monarchical power that the will
of God is reflected; he is God’s deputy. The tsar is not only the servant of
God, chosen by God and placed by Him on his throne, but he is also the
representative of God, immeasurably exalted above [ordinary] people: he is like
them only in accordance with his human nature, but in his power he is like God.
From the point of view of the aim, the manifestations of monarchical power are
analogous to those of Divine power. Just as the All-Highest wishes that all men
be saved, so the tsar must keep those entrusted to his care from spiritual and
bodily harm. For his fulfilment and non-fulfilment of his duty the tsar is
responsible only before God. His power cannot be placed beside any other power
on earth. And Joseph applies the words of Chrysostom to the tsars: ‘Hear, O
kings and princes, your dominion is given you from God, you are the servants of
God; it is for this reason that He placed you as pastor and guard over His
people to protect His flock unharmed from wolves…’ The tsar must revenge Christ
on the heretics, otherwise he will have to give an account at the terrible
judgement. He must send them to prison or tortures and submit them to death.
Heretical agreements are for Joseph worse than robbery and theft, than murder or
fornication or adultery. Those who pretended to repent of their Judaism after
the Council of 1490 deceived many, and the tsar was responsible for that before
God. The spread and fall of heresy is the cause of the fall and destruction of
a great kingdom; it is analogous to state disturbances and coups. ‘The
great kingdoms of the Armenians, Ethiopians and Romans, who fell away from the
Catholic and Apostolic Church and from the Orthodox Christian faith perished
evilly because of the negligence of the Orthodox kings and hierarchs of those
times, and these kings and hierarchs will be condemned at the terrible
judgement of Christ for this negligence.’ In 1511 Joseph persuaded Basil III to
apply his power against the heretics in the same way that he had previously
spoken with the father against the Novgorod Judaisers, so that they should not
destroy the whole of Orthodox Christianity. It was on the soil of the struggle
with heresy that the duty of the Russian Great Prince to defend the faith was
revealed. If in Byzantium the kings’ encroachment on the teaching authority
of the Church stands to the fore, in Rus’ we encounter first of all the
striving to ascribe to the tsar Archpastoral rights in the realisation of
Christianity in life.
“Joseph
gave a very broad interpretation to the range of the tsar’s rights, extending
them to all spheres of life, to everything ecclesiastical and monastic. He did
not think twice about bringing Archbishop Serapion of Novgorod to trial before
the tsar for banning him for leaving his jurisdiction, although the tsar had
permitted it.[110] For
Joseph the tsar’s power was unlimited already by virtue of its origin alone.
For him the tsar was not only the head of the state, but also the supreme
protector of the Church. He had, besides, a leadership role in relation to all
ecclesiastical institutions; not one side of ecclesiastical life was exempt
from it; the circle of his concerns included Church rites and Church
discipline, and the whole ecclesiastical-juridical order. The tsar
establishes the rules of ecclesiastical order and entrusts to bishops and
nobles the task of seeing to their fulfilment, threatening the disobedient with
hierarchical bans and punishments. One can have resort to the tsar’s court,
according to Joseph, against all ecclesiastics and monastics. This theory would
have been the exact restoration of ancient caesaropapism in Russian colours if
Joseph had not limited the king in principle by the observance of the Church
canons. In this exaltation of the tsar we see a reflection of the Byzantine
theory of the 14th century, which, while recognising the priority of
the canon over the law, nevertheless exalted the emperor to the first place
even in Church affairs.”[111]
Hieromonk Ioann (Kologrivov) writes:
“Although Joseph considered the power of the Church to be higher than that of
the sovereign in theory, in practice he extended the latter over the Church
also. For him the Tsar was the head both of the State and of the Church – the
supreme preserver and defender of the faith and the Church. The sovereign’s
concern for the Church was revealed particularly in the fact that he was always
“Christ’s avenger on the heretics. Lack of zeal for the good of the Church
constituted, in the eyes of Joseph, one of the most serious crimes the sovereign
could be guilty of, ànd it brought the wrath
of God upon the whole country. In the single person of the sovereign Joseph
thereby united both spiritual and secular power. He, and not Peter the Great,
must be considered to be the founder of “State Orthodoxy” in Russia. A little
later Ivan the Terrible, basing himself on the teaching of the abbot of
Volokolamsk, acquired the opportunity to decclare that the Tsar was “called to
save the souls of his subjects”.[112]
However, that St. Joseph was far from ascribing absolute power to the tsar is evident from the following: “The holy
apostles speak as follows about kings and hierarchs who do not care for, and
worry about, their subjects: a dishonourable king who does not care for his
subjects is not a king, but a torturer; while an evil bishop who does not care
for his flock is not a pastor, but a wolf.”[113]
St. Joseph’s theory of Church-State relations lays great – perhaps too
great - responsibility on the tsar as the representative of God on earth, and
little – probably too little – emphasis on the bishop’s duty to reprove an
erring tsar. An attempt to restore the balance was not
slow to appear. In a Council in 1503 a debate took place between the so-called
“possessors” and “non-possessors”, that is, between those who, like St. Joseph,
wished the monasteries to own vast landed estates with which to support the
poor and the State and the education of clergy, and those who, like the hermit
St. Nilus of Sora, preached the monastic ideal of non-possessiveness. St. Nilus
and his disciples wanted the dissolution of the vast land holdings not only
because they contradicted the spirit and the letter of monastic vows, but also
because this would liberate the clergy, as Zyzykin writes, “from dependence on
the secular government and would raise the Hierarchy to the position of being
the completely independent religious-moral power of the people, before which
the despotic tendencies of the tsars would bow.”[114]
St. Nilus also opposed the use of violence against the Judaisers, thus
re-emphasising the Orthodox tradition of non-violence at a time when the
persecution of heretics was becoming accepted throughout the Christian world.[115]
The dispute
over monastery lands was closely related to the Judaizing heresy. Hieromonk John (Kologrivov) writes: “In the 16th century about a third
of all the tilled agricultural land in the country belonged to them [the
monasteries]. Some monasteries owned not only villages and settlements, but
towns and whole districts. In parallel with this, a moral decline was
continuing in the monasteries, a decline which assumed alarming proportions in
the same 16th century. All those who took a serious attitude to the
monastic calling could not fail to be conscious of the crying contradiction
between the monastic vows and the real situation. Already St. Theodosius (+1074) had been a principled opponent of this
right of monasteries to possess land, and, in the words of Nestor, made
concessions only ‘because of the weakness of faith of those around him’. The same views were held by St. Sergius (+1396), St. Cyril of Belozersk, St. Dionysius of Glushitsk, Blessed Paul of
Obnora and others. At that time, in the 14th and 15th
centuries, the people were already beginning with embarrassment to take account
of the strangeness of the situation that had arisen. When the strigolniki arose in Pskov, people began to point to them as examples for monks: look, they said, these people do not steal and
do not gather riches. Society’s attitude to monastic riches became more and
more hostile: sometimes even princes allowed themselves to appropriate monastic
possessions, and when the people rebelled they did not miss the opportunity to
rob them. A little later, the Judaizers, while not rebelling directly against
monastic property, quite simply totally rejected monasticism itself. That was
the religious and moral aspect of the question, which was evident to all.
Besides this there were others: the economic aspect of the matter, the
interests of the State, and, finally, the interests of the monks themselves.
The latter were usually subjected to verbal attacks, hatred and derision
precisely because of their wealth and because of the greed with which they
collected it.”[116]
Although
St. Joseph won this argument, the Council retained its freedom of speech in
relation to the tsar, declaring that he could not transgress the Church canons
which anathematised encroachments on Church property.[117]
Moreover, St. Nilus and his disciples showed a quite different attitude to the
tsar’s power from St. Joseph. In particular, “they drew attention to the
conditions under which the tsar’s will in the administration of the kingdom
could be considered as the expression of the will of God. They drew attention
not only to the necessity of counsellors to make up the inevitable deficiencies
of limited human nature, but also to the necessity of ‘spiritual correctness’.
Thus Prince Bassian did not exalt the personality of the tsar like Joseph. He
did not compare the tsar to God, he did not liken him to the Highest King, but
dwelt on the faults inherent in the bearers of royal power which caused
misfortunes to the State.”[118]
The
boldness of St. Nilus and Monk Bassian in relation to the secular powers was
firmly in the tradition, not only of the fourth-century Fathers, but also of
the early Trans-Volga monks, such as St. Cyril of Beloozersk. Thus in 1427 St.
Cyril wrote to Prince Andrew of Mozhaisk that he “should abstain from
drunkenness and give alms according to your means; for, my lord, you are unable
to fast and are lax in praying, and thus, alms, in their place, will make up
for your deficiency”. He even gave political advice, as in this letter to Grand
Prince Basil I: “We have heard, my lord great prince, that there is trouble
between you and your friends, the princes of Suzdal. You, my lord, insist on
your right and they on theirs; for this reason great bloodshed in inflicted on
Christians. But consider closely, my lord, what are their rightful claims
against you, and then humbly make concessions; and insofar as you are right
toward them for that stand firm, my lord, as justice says. And if they begin to
ask pardon, my lord, you should, my lord, grant them what they deserve, for I
have heard, my lord, that until today they have been oppressed by you and that
is, my lord, why they went to war. And you, my lord, for God’s sake show your
love and grace that they should not perish in error amid the Tatar realms and
should not die there. For, my lord, no kingdom or principality, nor any other
power can rescue us from God’s impartial judgement.”[119]
At this time
when the influence of Byzantium was declining in Russia, the Lord sent an
Athonite monk to Russia to remind the Russians of the best Byzantine tradition
in Church-State relations - St. Maximus the Greek.
St. Maximus
“complained that among the pastors of his time there was ‘no Samuel’, ‘a Priest
of the Most High who stood up boldly in opposition to the criminal Saul’, that
there were ‘no zealots like Elijah and Elisha who were not ashamed in the face
of the most lawlessly violent kings of Samaria; there is no Ambrose the
wonderful, the Hierarch of God, who did not fear the loftiness of the kingdom
of Theodosius the Great; no Basil the Great, whose most wise teachings caused
the persecutor (of the Church) Valens to fear; no Great John of the golden
tongue, who reproached the money-loving usurer Empress Eudocia’. In accordance
with Byzantine conceptions, Maximus the Greek looked on the priesthood and the
kingdom as the two greatest gifts given by the most High Divine Goodness to
man, as two powers on whose agreement in action depended the happiness of
mankind. Among the duties laid upon the representatives of the Church, he
mentioned that they must by their most wise advice and strategems of every
kind.. always correct the royal sceptres for the better, so that they should be
alien to any fawning before secular power and should exert a restraining,
moderating influence upon it. Maximus spoke of the superiority of the spiritual
power over the secular…”[120]
St. Maximus
was in favour as long as Metropolitan Barlaam, a follower of St. Nilus of Sora,
was in power. But when Barlaam was uncanonically removed by the Great Prince
Basil III and replaced by Metropolitan
Daniel, a disciple of St. Joseph of Volotsk, his woes began…
For a while
the Great Prince continued to protect
him, even when he rebuked the vices of the nobility, the clergy and the people
and supported the position of the non-possessors against the metropolitan.
However, his enemies found the excuse they were looking for when the Grand
Prince, with the blessing of Metropolitan Daniel, put away his wife Solomonia
for her barrenness and married Elena Glinskaya (Solomonia was forcibly tonsured
in Suzdal and was later canonised under her monastic name of Sophia). Then St.
Maximus wrote him an extensive work: Instructive chapters for
right-believing rulers, which began: “O most devout Tsar, he is honoured as
a true ruler who seeks to establish the life of his subjects in righteousness and
justice, and endeavours always to overcome the lusts and dumb passions of his
soul. For he who is overcome by them is not the living image of the Heavenly
Master, but only an anthropomorphic likeness of dumb nature.”[121]
The saint was to suffer many years in
prison because of his boldness. But he had admirers and supporters both within
and outside Russia. Thus
Patriarch Mark of Jerusalem, wrote prophetically to the Great Prince: “If you
do this wicked thing, you will have an evil son. Your estate will become prey
to terrors and tears. Rivers of blood will flow; the heads of the mighty will
fall; your cities will be devoured by flames.”[122]
The prophecy was fulfilled with exactitude in the reign of his son, Ivan IV,
better known as “the Terrible”.
St. Maximus was released from prison only many years
later. But he continued his bold preaching in the face of the Princes. Thus he
refused to bless a pilgrimage of Tsar Ivan, saying that he should look after
the widows and orphans of those killed at Kazan instead. And he threatened that
if he did not, his newborn son Demetrius would die. Ivan ignored his advice,
and Demetrius died…
Fr. Gregory (Lurye) dates the beginning of the fall of the Russian Church
into “Sergianism”, that is, captivity to the State to the time of Metropolitan
Daniel and Great Prince Basil: “Still earlier they should have excommunicated – not even Ivan IV, but his
father Basil III for his adulterous ‘marriage’, which gave Russia Ivan the
Terrible. Then we wouldn’t have had Peter I. That’s what they did in such cases in Byzantium…”[123]
However, it should
be noted that St. Maximus never broke communion with Daniel, and was restored
to favour under his successor, Metropolitan Macarius. Moreover, as we shall
see, caesaropapism was by no means the rule in the Russian Church from then
onward. This episode must therefore be considered unfortunate, but not “the
beginning of the end”…
A major step forward in Russia’s path towards becoming fully the Third Rome was made in the reign of Ivan the Terrible. His coronation, on January 16, 1547, gave him an increased authority in the eyes of the Orthodox world. His grandfather, Grand Prince Ivan III, had married the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Sophia Palaeologus, and had occasionally called himself Tsar of All Russia. Then, on February 4, 1498, he had crowned his grandson Demetrius according to the rite established for the rank of Caesar in the Byzantine court, using the crown known as the Cap of Vladimir Monomakh, which the latter was believed to have received five centuries earlier from the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX. But Demetrius had died before he could succeed to throne and be crowned as Tsar. The decisive step was taken by Ivan when he was crowned and anointed Tsar of All Russia with the Cap of Vladimir Monomakh and according to a rite established by the Metropolitan.
At first,
the Ecumenical Patriarch Joasaph said that this act “has no validity, since not
only does a Metropolitan not have the right to crown, but not even every
Patriarch, but only the two Patriarchs: the Roman and Constantinopolitan”.
However, he went on to say that he granted Ivan the right to call himself Tsar
and suggested that he have the coronation repeated by Metropolitan Joasaph, the
patriarchal exarch, who would bring a gramota to Moscow. But not only
was Ivan not crowned again: he refused to ask the blessing of Metropolitan
Joasaph, saying that he had kissed the cross of the Lithuanian Catholic king on
his way to Moscow through Lithuania. It was only in September, 1562 that Ivan
received a gramota from the Patriarch confirming his title of Tsar.
Indeed, he significantly called him “our Tsar”, ascribing to him
authority over “Orthodox Christians in the entire universe”, and applying to
him the same epithets, “pious, God-crowned and Christ-loving” as had been
applied to the Byzantine Emperors.[124]
This was an important advance in Ivan’s status in the eyes of the Orthodox
world.
In view of
the fearsome reputation Ivan has acquired, not without reason, in the
historical consciousness of mankind, it is worth reminding ourselves of the
great achievements of the first half of his reign. He vastly increased the
territory of the Muscovite kingdom, neutralising the Tatar threat and bringing
Kazan and the whole of the Volga under Orthodox control; he subdued Novgorod;
he began the exploration of Siberia; he strengthened the army and local
administration; he introduced the Zemskie Sobory, “Councils of the Land”,
in which he sought the advice of different classes of the people; he subdued
the boyars who had nearly destroyed the monarchy in his childhood; he rejected
Jesuit attempts to bring Russia into communion with Rome; he convened Church
Councils that condemned heresies (e.g. the Arianism of Bashkin) and removed
many abuses in ecclesiastical and monastic life. Even the Tsar’s fiercest
critic, Prince Andrew Kurbsky, had to admit that he had formerly been ”radiant in Orthodoxy”.
It was this
“radiance in Orthodoxy” and respect for the Church that prevented Ivan from
becoming, in the first half of his reign, an absolutist ruler in the sense that
he admitted no power higher than his own. This is illustrated by his behaviour
in the famous Stoglav Church Council of 1551, which was conducted by the
Tsar putting forward questions to which the hierarchy replied. The hierarchy
was quite happy to support the tsar in extirpating certain abuses within the
Church, but when the tsar raised the question of the sequestration of Church
lands for the sake of the strengthening of the State, the hierarchs showed
their independence and refused. The tsar sufficiently respected the
independence of the hierarchy to yield to its will on this matter, and in
general the sixteenth-century Councils were true images of sobornost’.
As Metropolitan Macarius
(Bulgakov) writes: “At most of the Councils there were present, besides the
hierarchs, the superiors of the monasteries – archimandrites, igumens,
builders, also protopriests, priests, monks and the lower clergy generally.
Often his Majesty himself was present, sometimes with his children, brothers
and with all the boyars… It goes without saying that the right to vote at the
Councils belonged first of all to the metropolitan and the other hierarchs… But
it was offered to other clergy present at the Councils to express their
opinions. There voice could even have a dominant significance at the Council,
as, for example, the voice of St. Joseph of Volokolamsk at the Councils of
1503-1504… The conciliar decisions and decrees, were signed only by the
hierarchs, others – by lower clergy: archimandrites and igumens. And they were
confirmed by the agreement of his Majesty…”[125]
All this went together with a consciously worked out programme and
ideology worked out, in part, by the tsar himself, and partly by advisors such
as Ivan Semenovich Peresvetov, a minor nobleman from Lithuania who had served
in the Ottoman empire. At the base of this programme there remained the concept
of Moscow as the Third Rome. Thus in 1540 Elder Philotheus of Pskov wrote to the young tsar, who was not yet
of age, that the “woman clothed with the sun” of Revelation 12 was the
Church, which fled from the Old Rome to the New Rome of Constantinople, and
thence, after the fall of Constantinople, to the third Rome “in the new, great
Russia”. And the master of the third Rome, in both its political and
ecclesiastical spheres, was the tsar: “Alone on earth the Orthodox, great
Russian tsar steers the Church of Christ as Noah in the ark was saved from the
flood, and he establishes the Orthodox faith.”
Ya.S. Lurye writes: “The idea that Russia was the only country in the world that had kept the true faith was very majestic, but also very responsible. If the truth was concentrated with us, and the whole of the
surrounding world had spiritually ‘collapsed’, then in constructing their State
the Russians had to go along a completely individual path, and rely on the
experience of others only to a very limited degree – and rely on it as negative
experience.
“The
complexities linked with such an ideological position were very clearly
revealed in the work of the writer to whom it was entrusted, at the very
beginning of the reign of Ivan IV, to express words that might at first glance
appear to be a kind of programme of this reign. Turning to the history of the
fall of Constantinople and the victory of Mehmet the Sultan over the Greeks,
Peresvetov explained these events in terms of the ‘meekness’ of the Greek
Emperor Constantine: ‘It is not possible to be an emperor without being
threatening; as a horse without a bridle, so is an empire without
threatenings’. And he foretold to the young tsar: ‘You are a threatening and
wise sovereign; you will bring the sinful to repentance and install justice and
truth in your kingdom.’ It is important to note that ‘justice’ in this
programme was no less important than ‘threatening’; the ‘meekness’ of the Greek
Emperor consisted in the fact that he ceded power to the ‘nobles’, and they had
enslaved the people.”[126]
“Peresvetov,” writes Sir Geoffrey Hosking, “was almost certainly right.
The Ottomans owed the creation of their empire at least in large part to
reforms which weakened the native Turkish nobles who had previously formed the
backbone of its tribal confederacies. Those nobles had been supplanted at the
Ottoman court by Christian youths recruited from the Balkans and converted to
Islam under the devshirme system. They furnished both the Janissaries,
the elite corps of the army, and the principal civilian advisors. The Sultan
required all his military and governmental leaders, whatever their provenance,
to accept the status of his personal slaves, in order to separate them forcibly
from their kinship loyalties. The conquered city of Constantinople was used for
the same purpose: to give his new elite a power base remote from the native
grazing lands of the Turkish nobles.
“Such a
system had obvious attractions for a Muscovite ruler also building an empire on
vulnerable territories on the frontier between Christianity and Islam, and also
struggling to free himself from aristocratic clans. Peresvetov did not go as
far as his Ottoman model, and refrained from recommending slavery; but he did
propose that the army should be recruited and trained by the state and paid for
directly out of the treasury. This would ensure that individual regiments could
not become instruments of baronial feuding. He favoured a service nobility
promoted on the basis of merit and achievement, but he did not envisage serfdom
as a means of providing them with their livelihood: in so far as he considered
the matter at all, he assumed they would be salaried out of tax revenues.
“Peresvetov’s importance was that he offered a vision of a state able to
mobilize the resources of its peoples and lands equitably and efficiently. He
was one of the first European theorists of monarchical absolutism resting on
the rule of law. He believed that a consistent law code should be published,
and that its provisions should be guided by the concept of pravda (which
in Russian means both truth and justice): it would be the task of the ‘wise and
severe monarch’ to discern and uphold this principle, without favour to the
privileged and powerful.
“In the
early years of his reign we can see Ivan endeavouring to implement, in his own
way, some of Peresvetov’s ideas, especially where they would enhance the
strength and efficiency of the monarchy. At the same time he was trying to
reach out beyond the fractious boyars and courtiers to make contact with the
local elites of town and countryside and bind them into a more cohesive system
of rule. Together with his Chosen Council, an ad hoc grouping of boyars,
clergymen and service nobles personally chosen by him, he tried to make a start
towards removing the ‘sovereign’s affairs’ (gosudarevo delo) from the
private whims of the boyars and their agents, and bringing them under the
control of himself in alliance with the ‘land’ (zemlia).”[127]
The tsar
started putting this programme into effect in the decade 1547-1556, which was
also the decade of his great victories over the Tatars of Kazan and Astrakhan.
However, things began to go wrong from 1558, when he began a campaign against
the Livonian Knights that was to prove expensive and unsuccessful. Then, in
1560, his beloved first wife, Anastasia, died – killed, as he suspected (and
modern scientific research has confirmed) by the boyars.
Still more
serious, the tsar’s pravda began to lose its ‘justice’ element. Lurye
writes: “Not only the free-thinkers of that time, such as the heretic Matthew
Bashkin or Peresvetov, but also the publicists of a conservatively
ecclesiastical orientation (Hermolaus Erasmus, Maximus the Greek, Vassian
Patrikeev, and partly even Joseph of Volotsk) considered it their duty to
direct attention to the serious situation of one or another group of peasants
and suggest some measures for the betterment of their life. But Tsar Ivan
Vasilyevich was not in the slightest interested in this subject, while any
freethinking ideas – such as Peresvetov’s preference of ‘justice’ to ‘faith’ – were perceived by him as heresy, to which the
tsar, who prided himself on his religious orthodoxy, related with hostility…
“The particularity of Ivan the Terrible’s
ideological position consisted in the fact that the idea of the new State
incarnating the right faith, which had ‘collapsed’ in the whole of the rest of
the world, was completely freed in him from all freethinking and
social-reformatory traits and became the official ideology of the
already-existing ‘true Orthodox Christian autocracy’. The main task, therefore,
became not reforms in the State, but its defence from all the anti-state forces which were
‘corrupting’ the country ‘with disorders and civil disturbances’. Sharing
Peresvetov’s hostility to the ‘nobles’, the tsar drew one important conclusion
from it: the unfitting and ‘traitrous’ had to be
replaced by new people…”[128]
Ivan the Terrible: (2) The Bloodthirsty Tyrant
So what threat did the boyars really pose? Before answering this question, it should be pointed out that in
Russia, unlike most West European countries, the Great Prince or Tsar was not
seen as simply the most powerful member of the noble class, but as standing
above all the classes, including the nobility. Therefore the lower
classes as often as not looked to the Great Prince or Tsar to protect them from
the nobility, and often intervened to raise him to power or protect him
from attempted coups by the nobility. There are many examples of this in
Russian history, from the time of Andrew of Bogolyubovo to the Time of Troubles
to the Decembrist conspiracy in 1825. Thus Pokrovsky wrote of the failed
Decembrist conspiracy: “The autocracy was saved by the Russian peasant in a
guard’s uniform”.[129]
And in fact the tsars, when allowed to rule with truly autocratic authority,
were much better for the peasants than the nobles, passing laws that surpassed
contemporary European practice in their humaneness.[130]
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that sixteenth-century Russia was in
many ways a less free State than 11th- or even 14th-century Russia.
The reason for this lay in the task imposed by Divine Providence on Russia –
that is, the task of defending the last independent outpost of Orthodoxy in the
world, which required, in the context of the threat posed by resurgent
Counter-Reformation Catholicism, an ever-increasing centralisation and
militarisation of society, and therefore great sacrifices from all classes of
the population. However, of all these classes, the boyars were the least
inclined to be reconciled to this situation…
The freest
class was probably the servitors of the Church. As we have seen, Ivan respected
the Church, and did not in general try to impose his will on her. And yet he
liked to emphasise that the Church had no business
interfering in affairs of State, constantly bringing the argument round to the
quasi-absolute power of the tsar – and the insubordination of the boyars:
“Remember, when God delivered the Jews from slavery, did he place above them a
priest or many rulers? No, he placed above them a single tsar – Moses, while
the affairs of the priesthood he ordered should be conducted, not by him, but
by his brother Aaron, forbidding Aaron to be occupied with worldly matters. But
when Aaron occupied himself with worldly affairs, he drew the people away from
God. Do you see that it is not fitting for priests to do the work of tsars!
Also, when Dathan and Abiron wanted to seize power, remember how they were
punished for this by their destruction, to which destruction they led many sons
of Israel? You, boyars, are worthy of the same!”[131]
The lower
classes – that is, the peasants, shopkeepers and artisans, who paid taxes and
services to the tsar and his servitors - were increasingly chained to the land
which they worked. For in the century 1550-1650, in order to prevent them from
simply disappearing into the woods or fleeing to the steppes in the south, the
tsars gradually enserfed them. They were not technically slaves (slaves do not
pay taxes); but a combination of political and economic factors (e.g. peasant
indebtedness to landlords, landlords’ liability for collecting peasants’ taxes,
the enormous demand for manpower as the state’s territory expanded) bonded them
to the land; and the hereditary nature of social status in Muscovite Russia
meant that they had little hope of rising up the social ladder.
However, it
was the boyars who lost most from the increasing power of the tsar. In medieval
Russia, they had been theoretically free to join other princes; but by the
1550s there were no independent Russian princes – Orthodox princes, at any rate
– outside Moscow. Moreover, their lands, or votchiny, were now held
conditionally on serving the Muscovite Grand Prince, and if they failed to
serve him, their lands were theoretically forfeit.
The boyars
traditionally served in the army or the administration; but state
administration, being historically simply an extension of the prince’s private
domain, was completely controlled by him. Until the reforms of the 1550s-1560s,
there was almost no local self-government. Moreover, from the 1550s the power
of the tsar was enormously increased by his immense conquests in both East and
West – the former Kazan and Astrakhan khanates in the East, and Novgorod in the
West, which became part of the monarchy’s patrimony.
However,
the boyars were still a potential problem through their clannish rivalries and
habits of freedom. For Ivan, the independent power of the boyars, which may
have been a matter of course in the western kingdoms, was incompatible with his
conception of the Russian autocracy. As he wrote to the rebellious boyar,
Prince Kurbsky in 1564: “What can one say of the godless peoples? There, you
know, the kings do not have control of their kingdoms, but rule as is indicated
to them by their subjects. But from the beginning it is the Russian autocrats
who have controlled their own state, and not their boyars and grandees!”[132]
For Ivan was not in the least swayed by the
ideology of democracy, being, as he wrote, “humble Ioann, Tsar and Great Prince
of All Russia, by God’s will, and not by the multimutinous will of man…”
Kurbsky, in his defence of the boyar
class, relied mainly on the personal valour of “the best of the mighty ones of
Israel”. In reply, Ivan pointed out that personal qualities do not help if
there is no correct “structures”: “As a tree cannot flower if its roots dry up,
so here: if there are no good structures in the kingdom, courage will not be
revealed in war. But you, without paying attention to structures, are glorified
only with courage”.
The idea that there can be more than one
power in the State is Manichaeism, according to Ivan: “[The Manichaeans] taught
the corrupt doctrine that Christ possesses only the heavens, while the earth is
ruled independently by men, and the nether regions by the devil. But I believe
that Christ possesses all: the heavens, the earth and the nether regions, and
everything in the heavens, on the earth and in the nether regions subsists by
His will, the counsel of the Father and the consent of the Holy Spirit”. And
since the tsar is anointed of God, he rules in God’s place, and can concede no
part of what is in fact God’s power to anyone else.
When, crazed by grief and suspicion at his
wife’s death, Ivan resolved finally to do away with the boyars, he resolved on
the following strategem. He designated the boyars’ lands as oprichnina,
that is, his personal realm, and ordered the oprichniki, that is, a kind
of secret police body sworn to obey him alone, to enter the boyars’ lands and
to kill, rape and pillage at will. They carried out unbridled terror and
torture on tens of thousands of the population, and were rewarded with the
expropriated lands of the men they had murdered.
By the end of his reign the boyars’ economic power had been in part destroyed, and a new class, the dvoriane, had taken their place. This term originally denoted domestic servitors, both freemen and slaves, who were employed by the appanage princes to administer their estates. Ivan now gave them titles previously reserved for the boyars, and lands in various parts of the country. However, these lands were pomestia, not votchiny – that is, they were not hereditary possessions and remained the legal property of the tsar, and could be taken back from the servitors if they fai led to render satisfactory service.
Ivan
justified his cruel suppression of the boyars through the scriptural doctrine
of submission to the secular power: “See and understand: he who resists the
power resists God; and he who resists God is called an apostate, and that is
the worst sin. You know, this is said of every power, even of a power acquired
by blood and war. But remember what was said above, that we have not seized the
throne from anyone. He who resists such a power resists God even more!”[133]
The tsar’s power does not come from the
people, but from God, by succession from the first Christian autocrat of
Russia, St. Vladimir. He is therefore answerable, not to the people, but to God
alone. And the people, being “not godless”, recognises this. Kurbsky, however,
by his rebellion against the tsar has rebelled against God and so “destroyed
his soul”.[134]
And so
many, submitting humbly to the tsar’s unjust decrees, received the crown of
life in an innocent death. There was no organised mass movement against his
power in the Russian land. Even when he expressed a desire to resign his power,
the people – completely sincerely, it seems, - begged him to return.[135]
This fact
has elicited the amazement – and sneers – of foreign historians, who have
sought for special explanations, whether in the supposedly masochistic capacity
for suffering of the Russian people or in the absolutist politics that were
almost universal in Europe at that time. But if the Russians were patient in
the reign of Ivan the Terrible, they were much less patient in later reigns, as
we shall see; so the masochist explanation is implausible. And if the sixteenth
century did see the acme of several cruel and absolutist monarchies – from that
of the Spanish kings in the West to that of the Turkish Sultans in the East –
they differed in important ways from the Russian monarchy. For not only was
Ivan’s kingship not absolutist in the strict sense, as we have seen: his
cruelties were of a different kind, too, being based not at all, as were those
of the European and Turkish rulers, on religious grounds, but rather on
personal suspiciousness, and were almost exclusively directed against his own
people rather than foreigners. “Do not leave us!” they cried; “we do not want a
Tsar other than him that has been given to us by God.”
An English
historian writes: “In other words, they would remain loyal to Ivan and obey
him, whatever he did – because he was God on earth. Any attempt to kill him
would be, for those who believed in his divinity, as unthinkable as trying to
kill God. This insect-like obedience was the result of the centuries-old
indoctrination by the Church, reinforced by brute force and the constant fear
of punishment.”[136]
This
interpretation represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the attitude of the
Orthodox Church and the Russian people of this time to their Tsars. The people
were well aware that their tsars were men, and not gods. Why, then, did they
not resist Ivan? Partly out of fear. Partly because, as we have seen, the
Russian peasants and townsfolk saw in the tsar their protector against the
depradations of the boyars. But partly, and most significantly, because they
saw in his cruelties, not violations of their “human rights”, in the manner of
the modern dissidents, but the just recompense for their sins – the sins of the
dynasty (for example, the unlawful marriage of Ivan’s father), and the sins of
the people.
For
according to Orthodox teaching, even if a ruler is unjust or cruel, he must be
obeyed as long as he provides that freedom from anarchy, that minimum of law
and order, that is the definition of God-established political authority
(Romans 13.1-6). Thus St. Irenaeus of Lyons writes: “Some rulers are given by
God with a view to the improvement and benefit of their subjects and the
preservation of justice; others are given with a view to producing fear,
punishment and reproof; yet others are given with a view to displaying mockery,
insult and pride – in each case in accordance with the deserts of the subjects.
Thus… God’s judgement falls equally on all men.”[137]
Again, St. Isidore of Pelusium writes that the evil ruler “has been allowed to
spew out this evil, like Pharaoh, and, in such an instance, to carry out
extreme punishment or to chastise those for whom great cruelty is required, as
when the king of Babylon chastised the Jews.”[138]
But there is line beyond which an evil ruler ceases to be a ruler and becomes an anti-ruler, an unlawful tyrant, who is not to be obeyed. Thus the Jews were commanded by God through the Prophet Jeremiah to submit to the king of Babylon, evil though he was; whereas they were commanded through another prophet, Moses, to resist and flee from the Egyptian Pharaoh. For in the one case the authority, though evil, was still an authority, which it was beneficial to obey; whereas in the other case the authority was in fact an anti-authority, obedience to which would have taken the people further away from God.
Tsar Ivan
was an evil man, but a true authority. The fact that the people revered and
obeyed him as the anointed of God did not mean that they were not aware that
many of his deeds were evil and inspired by the devil. But by obeying him in
his capacity as the anointed of God, they believed that they ascended from the
earthly kingdom to the Heavenly, while by patiently enduring his demonic
assaults on them they believed that they received the forgiveness of their sins
and thereby escaped the torments of hell, so far exceeding the worst torments
that any earthly ruler could subject them to.
As
Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna writes: “If a Russian person of the 14th-16th
centuries had been asked why he with complete forgetfulness of self served his
Tsar and his State, and why he considered it his ineluctable duty to serve them
in this way, then every Russian person, or in any case the overwhelming
majority of them, would have replied that they served in this way in order to
provide for themselves and for their children the possibility of living without
hindrance in accordance with the rules of Christianity, that is, the Orthodox
laws and customs, so as not to submit to a heterodox state power or one that
was indifferent to good and evil. No extra-ecclesiastical, secular or lay aims,
such as state glory, national pride, territorial size or a guaranteed life of
freedom, etc., would have been placed as an aim of state life by a Russian
person of the 14th-16th centuries; and if he sometimes
did, then in any case he would in no way have been inclined to live or die for
it.
“At the
head of life, not in a political sense, but in their capacity as generally
recognized spiritual leaders of society, stood the saints, and amongst them in
particular Saints Sergius of Radonezh and Cyril of Belozersk, and the hierarchs
Peter and Alexis, metropolitans of all Russia.
“It is in
the unbroken unity with them of the whole of the Russian people of the 14th-16th
centuries that we find the key to an understanding of the formula “Holy Rus’”.
Rus’ was never holy in the sense that the whole or a significant part of its
people were holy. But holiness was the only ideal for everyone. The Russian man
of that time knew no other ideal. He did not know the ideals of culture, good
education and heroism as ideals separate from holiness. All these separate
ideals were included for him in the single, all-embracing ideal – holiness. But
culture, heroism and the other virtues were valuable only when they were
sanctified by holiness. Not being saints themselves, but often being very
sinful, the Russian people of that time repented of their sins, felt
compunction and, in confessing their unity with their contemporary and past
saints, they recognised their infinite superiority over themselves, and asked
for their prayers for themselves…”[139]
It was this
ideal of holiness that made Russia great and led so many millions of her
children into the Heavenly Kingdom; it was the undermining of this attitude,
from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards, that led to the
Russian revolution, the disappearance of Holy Russia in the godless Soviet
Union, and the descent of still more millions of her former children into the
jaws of hell…
Having said
that, the Orthodox tradition of obedience to legitimate authorities goes hand
in hand with the tradition of protest against untruth and unrighteousness. And
in this respect there was some truth in Prince Kurbsky’s lament over the state
of Russia in Ivan’s reign: “The authority which comes from God devises
unprecedented pains of death for the virtuous. The clergy – we will not judge
them, far be that from us, but bewail their wretchedness – are ashamed to bear
witness to God before the tsar; rather they endorse the sin. They do not make
themselves advocates of widows and orphans, the poor, the oppressed and the
prisoners, but grab villages and churches and riches for themselves. Where is
Elijah, who was concerned for the blood of Naboth and confronted the king?
Where are the host of prophets who gave the unjust kings proof of their guilt?
Who speaks now without being embarrassed by the words of Holy Scripture and
gives his soul as a ransom for his brothers? I do not know one. Who will
extinguish the fire that is blazing in our land? No one. Really, our hope is
still only with God…”[140]
St. Philip of Moscow
And yet
there was one who opposed the unrighteousness of the tsar. The terror
did not pass without opposition of a spiritual, if not of a physical nature.
Thus accusers in the tradition of St. John Chrysostom and St. Ambrose of Milan
appeared in the form of the fools-for-Christ Basil the Blessed and Nicholas
Salos, and, especially, the Metropolitan of Moscow, St. Philip.
St. Philip’s ideas about the nature of tsarist power did not differ substantially from those of his predecessors. The tsar was complete master in his kingdom, and deserved the obedience of all, including churchmen, as long as he confessed the Orthodox faith. But he was bound by the ecclesiastical canons when acting in the ecclesiastical sphere.
However, it was not clear, according to this Josephite theory, to what extent the tsar was also bound in the personal, moral sphere and could rightly be rebuked by the metropolitan for personal sins. St. Philip was notable for his combination, as it were, of the theories of St. Joseph with the practice of SS. Nilus and Maximus, recognising the supremacy of the tsar while rebuking him for his personal sins. For this boldness he received the crown of martyrdom…
As a
young man he had heard the words of the Saviour: “No man can serve two
masters”. Deeply struck by them, he resolved to leave the world and become a
monk.[141] Later, as
metropolitan, at the height of the terror, he would put those words into
practice, saying to the Tsar: “Sovereign, I cannot obey your command more than
that of God.”[142]
Again he said: “Ruling tsar, you have been vested by God with the highest rank, and for that reasons you should honour God above all. But the
sceptre of earthly power was given to so that you should foster justice among
men and rule over them lawfully. By nature you are like every man, as by power
you are like God. It is fitting for you, as a mortal, not to become arrogant,
and as the image of God, not to become angry, for only he can justly be called
a ruler who has control over himself and does not work for his shameful
passions, but conquers them with the aid of his mind. Was it ever heard that
the pious emperors disturbed their own dominion? Not only among your ancestors,
but also among those of other races, nothing of the sort has ever been heard.” [143]
When the tsar angrily asked what business he had interfering in royal affairs, Philip replied: “By the grace of God, the election of the Holy Synod and your will, I am a pastor of the Church of Christ. You and I must care for the piety and peace of the Orthodox Christian kingdom.”
When the tsar ordered him to keep silence, Philip replied: “Silence is not fitting now; it would increase sin and destruction. If we carry out the will of men, what answer will we have on the day of Christ’s Coming? The Lord said: “Love one another. Greater love hath no man than that a man should lay down his life for his friends. If you abide in My love, you will be My disciples indeed.”
On another
occasion he said to the tsar: “The Tatars have a law and justice, but do not.
Throughout the world, transgressors who ask for clemency find it with the
authorities, but in Russia there is not even clemency for the innocent and the
righteous… Fear the judgement of God, your Majesty. How many innocent people
are suffering! We, sovereign, offer to God the bloodless sacrifice, while
behind the altar the innocent blood of Christians is flowing! Robberies and
murders are being carried out in the name of the Tsar…. What is our faith for?
I do not sorrow for those who, in shedding their innocent blood, have been
counted worthy of the lot of the saints; I suffer for your wretched soul: although you are honoured as the image of God,
nevertheless, you are a man made of dust, and the Lord will require everything
at your hands”.
However, even if
the tsar had agreed that his victims were martyrs, he would not have considered
this a reason for not obeying him. As he wrote to Kurbsky: “If you are just and
pious, why do you not permit yourself to accept suffering from me, your
stubborn master, and so inherit the crown of life?…”[144]
Betrayed by
his fellow-hierarchs, Philip was about to resign the metropolitanate, and said
to the tsar: “It is better to die as an innocent martyr that to tolerate
horrors and lawlessnesses silently in the rank of metropolitan. I leave you my
metropolitan’s staff and mantia. But you all, hierarchs and servers of the
altar, feed the flock of Christ faithfully; prepare to give your reply and fear
the Heavenly King more than the earthly…”
The tsar refused to accept his resignation, and after being imprisoned and escaped the appetite of a hungry bear who had been sent to devour him, on December 23, 1569 the holy metropolitan was suffocated to death by the tsar’s servant. Metropolitan Philip saved the honour of the Russian episcopate in Ivan’s reign as Metropolitan Arsenius of Rostov was to save it in the reign of Catherine the Great…
Michael
Cherniavksy has pointed to the tension, and ultimate incompatibility, between
two images of the kingship in the reign of Ivan the Terrible: that of the basileus
and that of the khan – that is, of the Orthodox autocrat and of the
pagan despot. “If the image of the basileus stood for the Orthodox and
pious ruler, leading his Christian people towards salvation, then the image of
the khan was perhaps preserved in the idea of the Russian ruler as the
conqueror of Russia and of its people, responsible to no one. If the basileus
signified the holy tsar, the ‘most gentle’ (tishaishii) tsar in
spiritual union with his flock, then the khan, perhaps, stood for the
absolutist secularised state, arbitrary through its separation from its
subjects.”[145]
If there
was indeed something of eastern absolutism as well as purely Orthodox autocracy
in Ivan’s rule, then this would explain why, only a few years after his death,
Russia descended into civil war and the Time of Troubles. For eastern
absolutism, unlike Orthodox autocracy, is a system that can command the fear
and obedience, but not the love of the people, and is therefore unstable in
essence. Hence the need to resist to it – but not out of considerations of
democracy or the rights of man, but simply out of considerations of Christian love
and justice. An Orthodox tsar has no authority higher than him in the secular
sphere. And yet the Gospel is higher than everybody, and will judge everybody
on the Day of Judgement; and in reminding Ivan of this both St. Philip and
Kurbsky were doing both him and the State a true service…
A service rejected by Ivan to his own
detriment. For at the very end of his life, he destroyed even his reputation as
a defender of Orthodoxy by encroaching on Church lands and delving into
astrology. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, therefore, that Ivan the
Terrible was indeed terrible in his impiety, and must be numbered among the
evil tyrants and persecutors of the Church.
If we
compare Ivan with another great and terrible tsar, Peter I, we see striking
similarities. Both tsars were completely legitimate, anointed rulers. Both
suffered much from relatives in their childhood; both killed their own sons and
showed streaks of pathological cruelty and blasphemy. Both were great warriors
who defeated Russia’s enemies and expanded the bounds of the kingdom. Both
began by honouring the Church; both ended by attempting to bend the Church
completely to their will.
There is
one very important difference, however. While Ivan never attempted to justify
his encroachment on the rights of the Church theoretically, Peter (or his
servant, Theophanes Prokopovich) did just that. The result was that Ivan’s
caesaropapism disappeared after his death, whereas Peter’s, as we shall see,
lasted for another 200 years…
PART II. THE AGE OF REVANCHE (1589-1700)
3. THE WEST: THE ASSAULT ON THE MONARCHY
The powers that be have been instituted by God.
Therefore he who resists the authorities resist what God has appointed, and
those who resist will incur judgement.
Romans 13.1-2.
It is lawful and
hath been held so through all ages
for anyone who has the power to call to
account a Tyrant or wicked King,
and after due conviction to depose and put him
to death.
John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.
Temporal and spiritual are two words brought into
the world make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot
obey two masters…Seeing there are no men no earth whose bodies are spiritual,
there can be no spiritual commonwealth among men that are yet in the flesh.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.
The
transition from rebellion against the Church to rebellion against all
authorities was inevitable. If Luther tried to resist it, it was nevertheless
implicit in his teaching; and the more consistent Calvinists were less afraid
to cross the Rubicon by ascribing all authority to the plebs. As Jacques
Barzun writes, “if a purer religion, close to the one depicted in the gospel,
was attainable by getting rid of superiors in the church, a better social and
economic life, close to the life depicted in the gospels, would follow from
getting rid of social and political superiors.”[146]
Nevertheless, there was something of a recovery of traditional Christian
forms of government in the seventeenth century. In Russia, the autocracy
recovered after the devastations wrought by Ivan the Terrible and the Time of
Troubles. France recovered from her civil wars with a stable Catholic
absolutist monarchy. Monarchs still ruled everywhere, even in formally
Calvinist countries such as England and Holland. At the same time the acid of
anti-monarchism did not cease to eat away at the foundations of states. While
the English Revolution did not succeed in finally abolishing the monarchy, it
undoubtedly weakened it – and scattered the seeds of liberalism into absolutist
France and elsewhere. Even in Russia there was the serious rebellion of the Old
Believers with their “theocratic democratism”, not unlike the contemporary
self-governing communities of the American Puritans…
It was the
appearance of relatively homogeneous nation-states, with their need for a
unifying symbol and centre of power, that saved monarchism for the time being.
Only Germany and Italy, still bogged down in a multitude of feudal
principalities, escaped the trend towards the monarchical nation-state. Their
time would come after the next wave of anti-monarchism had swept away the last
stronghold of Catholic absolutism in the French Revolution…
Holland: the First
Capitalist State
The age
began with a long-drawn-out struggle for national freedom that prefigured many
such struggles in the future. The Dutch Revolution, while less influential than
the English in terms of political ideas and influence on the future history of
Europe, was nevertheless extremely significant in that it constituted the
beginning of the fall of the greatest monarchical power of the age, the Spanish
Empire.[147] “The
Revolt of the Netherlands,” writes Norman Davies, “which began in 1566 and
ended in 1648, constituted a long-running drama which spanned the transition
from the supremacy of the Habsburgs to that of France. At the outset, the
seventeen provinces of the imperial Burgundian Circle that were transferred to
Spanish rule in 1551 presented a mosaic of local privileges and cultural
divisions. The feudal aristocracy of the countryside constrasted sharply with
the wealthy burghers and fishermen of the coastal towns. The francophone and
predominantly Catholic Walloons of Hainault, Namur, and Liège contrasted
with the Dutch-speaking and increasingly Calvinist population of Holland,
Zeeland, and Utrecht. The central provinces of Flanders and Brabant lay across
the main religious and linguistic divide. Over 200 cities controlled perhaps 50
per cent of Europe’s trade, bringing Spain seven times more in taxes than the
bullion of the Indies. Certainly, in the initial stages of Spanish rule, the
threat to provincial liberties and to the nobles’ control of Church benefices
gave greater cause for popular offence than the threat of activating the
Inquisition…
“Under the
regency of Margaret of Parma, 1559-67, discontent came to a head over a scheme
for ecclesiastical reform. Three protesters – William the Silent, Prince of
Orange (1533-84), Lamoral, Count of Egmont, and Philip Montmorency, Count of
Horn – petitioned the King with the Regent’s permission. They were ridiculed as
Geuzen, les Gueux, ‘the Beggars’, and in 1565, in the Edict of
Segovia, Philip indicated his refusal to authorize change. Following further
petitions for reform, and a meeting in 1566 of confederated nobles at St.
Trond, which demanded religious toleration, there occurred a serious outbreak
of rioting and religious desecrations. The action of the confederates in
helping the Regent to quell the disorders did not deter Philip from ordering
general repression. Under the regency of the Duke of Alva, 1567-73, a Council
of Tumults, the notorious Bloedbraad or ‘Blood-Council’ was set up to
try the King’s opponents. Egmont and Horn were beheaded in the square at
Brussels, their severed heads sent to Madrid in a box. William of Orange
escaped to lead the continuing fight. With the whole population of the
Netherlands condemned to death as heretics by the Church, the south rebelled as
well as the north. The ‘Sea Beggars’ attacked shipping. Haarlem, besieged,
capitulated. Spanish garrisons spread fire and plunder. Thousands perished from
random arrests, mock trials, and casual violence.
“Under the
governorships of Don Luis de Requesens, Grand Commander of Castile 1573-6, and
of Don John of Austria 1576-8 reconciliation was attempted but failed. Leyden,
besieged, survived. The sack of Antwerp during the Spanish Fury of 1576
hardened resistance. Under the regency of the Duke of Parma 1578-92, the split
became irreversible. By the Union of Arras (1578) ten southern provinces
accepted Spanish terms and recovered their liberties. By the Union of Utrecht
(1579) the seven northern provinces resolved to fight for their independence.
Thereafter, there was unremitting war…”[148]
“In 1581,”
writes Almond, “the states of the Union of Utrecht formally abjured their
loyalty to Philip II [of Spain]. They denied his divine right to rule. He had
betrayed his trust: ‘It is well known to all that if a prince is appointed by
God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a shepherd to the
guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not created by God for the sake of
the prince but rather the prince is established for his subjects’ sake for
without them he would not be a prince. Should he violate the laws, he is to be
forsaken by his meanest subjects, and to be no longer recognised as prince.’
These were revolutionary sentiments in the sixteenth century, and for some time
to come. Even their authors preferred to avoid becoming a republic and looked
around for an alternative monarch who would satisfy their demands…”[149]
Nevertheless, the new State was anything but conventional in form. As
Davies writes, “its constitution (1584) ensured that the governments of the
seven provinces remained separated from a federal council of state at the
Hague. The latter was chaired by an executive Stadholder, whose office
was generally held, together with the offices of Captain-General and
Admiral-General, by the House of Orange… Despite its peculiar, decentralised
constitution, [the Netherlands] had every reason to regard itself as the first
modern state.”[150]
“The Dutch
Republic of the ‘United Provinces of the Netherlands’ – misleadingly known to
the English as Holland – was the wonder of seventeenth-century Europe. It
succeeded for the same reasons that its would-be Spanish masters failed:
throughout the eighty years of its painful birth, its disposable resources were
actually growing. Having resisted the greatest military power of the day, it then
became a major maritime power in its own right. Its sturdy burgher society
widely practised the virtues of prudent management, democracy, and toleration.
Its engineers, bankers, and sailors were justly famed… The Dutch Republic
rapidly became a haven for religious dissidents, for capitalists, for
philosophers, and for painters.”[151]
The
creation of the Dutch Republic was the first political creation of Calvinist
Protestantism, and as such showed both the strengths and the weaknesses of such
a state. Its strengths have been enumerated. Its main weakness was that at the
root of its power lay “the root of all evil” – money. Holland was the first
“commercial society”, whose aim, as McClelland writes, is “the creation of
wealth”. Its attitude to the state, therefore, was that it “had better stop
trying to interfere with the serious business of making money.”[152]
In this
connection, it is worth examining the theory, put forward by the German social
scientist Max Weber, of a direct link between Protestantism, especially
Calvinism, and those attitudes and kinds of working habit that are conducive to
capitalism. As Belloc writes, following Weber: “If we ask what it was in
Calvin’s doctrine, apart from the opportunities of its moment and its effect
against the clergy, which gave it so much power, the answer is, I think, that
it provided an awful object of worship and that it appealed at the same time to
a powerful human appetite which Catholicism [and Orthodoxy] opposes. The novel
object of worship was an Implacable God: the appetite was the love of money… A
Philosophy which denied good works and derided abnegation let it [the love of
money] loose in all its violence.”[153]
Weber’s
theory, writes Landes, postulates “that Protestantism – more specifically, its Calvinist
branches – promoted the rise of modern capitalism.. not by easing or abolishing
those aspects of the Roman faith that had deterred or hindered free economic
activity (the prohibition of usury, for example); nor by encouraging, let alone
inventing, the pursuit of wealth; but by defining and sanctioning an ethic of
everyday behavior that conduced to business success.
“Calvinistic Protestantism, said Weber, did this initially by affirming
the doctrine of predestination. This held that one could not gain salvation by
faith or deeds; that question had been decided for everyone from the beginning
of time, and nothing could alter one’s fate.
“Such a
belief could easily have encouraged a fatalistic attitude. If behavior and
faith make no difference, why not live it up? Why be good? Because, according
to Calvinism, goodness was a plausible sign of election. Anyone could be
chosen, but it was only reasonable to suppose that most of those chosen would
show by their character and ways the quality of their souls and the nature of
their destiny. This implicit reassurance was a powerful incentive to proper
thoughts and behavior. As the Englishwoman Elizabeth Walker wrote her grandson
in 1689, alluding to one of the less important but more important signs of
grace, ‘All cleanly people are not good, but there are few good people but are
cleanly.’ And while hard belief in predestination did not last more than a
generation or two (it is not the kind of dogma that has lasting appeal), it was
eventually converted into a secular code of behavior: hard work, honesty,
seriousness, the thrifty use of money and time (both lent us by God). ‘Time is short,’ admonished the Puritan
divine Richard Baxter (1615-1691), ‘and work
is long’.
“All of
these values help business and capital accumulation, but Weber stressed that
the good Calvinist did not aim at riches. (He might easily believe, however,
that honest riches are a sign of divine favor.) Europe did not have to wait for
the Protestant Reformation to find people who wanted to be rich. Weber’s point
is that Protestantism produced a new kind of businessman, a different kind of
person, one who aimed to live and work a certain way. It was the way that mattered, and riches were at
best a by-product.
“A good
Calvinist would say, that was what was wrong with Spain: easy riches, unearned
wealth. Compare the Protestant and Catholic attitudes towards gambling in the
early modern period. Both condemned it, but Catholics condemned it because one
might (would) lose, and no responsible person would jeopardize his well-being
and that of others in that manner. The Protestants, on the other hand,
condemned because one might win, and that would be bad for character. It was
only much later that the Protestant ethic degenerated into a set of maxims for
material success and smug, smarmy sermons on the virtues of wealth…
“It is fair
to say that most historians today would look upon the Weber thesis as
implausible and unacceptable; it had its moment and it is gone.
“I do not
agree. Not on the empirical level, where records show that Protestant merchants
and manufacturers played a leading role in trade, banking, and industry. In
manufacturing centers (fabriques) in France and western Germany,
Protestants were typically the employers, Catholics the employed. In
Switzerland, the Protestant cantons were the centers of export manufacturing
industry (watches, machinery, textiles) the Catholic ones were primarily
agricultural. In England, which by the end of the sixteenth century was
overwhelmingly Protestant, the Dissenters (read Calvinists) were
disproportionately active and influential in the factories and forges of the
nascent Industrial Revolution.
“Nor on
the theoretical. The heart of the matter lay indeed in the making of a new kind
of man – rational, ordered, diligent, productive. These virtues, while not new,
were hardly commonplace. Protestantism generalized them among its adherents,
who judged one another by conformity to these standards. This is a story in
itself, one that Weber did surprisingly
little with: the role of group pressure and mutual scrutiny in assuring
performance – everybody looking at everyone else and minding one another’s
business.
“Two
special characteristics of the Protestants reflect and confirm this link. The
first was the stress on instruction and literacy, for girls as well as boys.
This was a product of Bible reading. Good Protestants were expected to read the
holy scriptures for themselves. (By way of contrast, Catholics were catechized
but did not have to read, and they were explicitly discouraged from reading the
Bible.) The result: greater literacy and a larger pool of candidates for
advanced schooling; also greater assurance of continuity of literacy from
generation to generation. Literate
mothers matter.
“The second
was the importance accorded to time. Here we have what the sociologist would
call unobtrusive evidence: the making and buying of clocks and watches. Even in
Catholic areas such as France and Bavaria, most clockmakers were Protestant;
and the use of these instruments of time measurement and their diffusion to
rural areas was far more advanced in Britain and Holland than in Catholic
countries. Nothing testifies so much as time sensibility to the ‘urbanization’
of rural society, with all that that implies for rapid diffusion of values and
tastes…
“Add to
this the growing need for fixed capital (equipment and plant) in the industrial
sector. This made continuity crucial – for the sake of continued maintenance
and improvement and the accumulation of knowledge and experience. These
manufacturing enterprises were very different in this regard from mercantile
ones, which often took the form of ad hoc mobilizations of capital and labor,
brought together for a voyage or venture and subsequently dissolved.”[154]
If
Protestantism encouraged capitalism, capitalism in turn encouraged democracy.
For, as Ian Buruma writes, “there is a link between business interests – or at
least the freedom to trade – and liberal, even democratic, politics. Money
tends to even things out, is egalitarian and blind to race or creed. As
Voltaire said about the London stock exchange: Muslims, Christians and Jews
trade as equals, and bankrupts are the only infidels. Trade can flourish if
property is protected by laws. That means protection from the state, as well as
from other individuals.”[155]
The Anglican Monarchy
England
under the Tudors achieved a degree of stability and greatness amidst the
extreme religious instability of the time under the “Virgin Queen”, Elizabeth
I. Now Susan Doran has shown that Elizabeth’s overriding preoccupation in her
correspondence on religious topics was the assertion of royal supremacy. Thus
in her letters to James VI of Scotland (later James I of England), she lashes
out “against Presbyterians and Jesuits alike for their separate attacks on
royal authority and power.” Doran claims that Elizabeth’s views had their roots
in a Christian Platonism according to which earthly rule was a reflection of
the Divine harmony and order, and that consequently “diversity, variety,
contention and vain love of singularity, either in our ministers or in the
people, must need provoke the pleasure of Almighty God.”[156]
Elizabeth’s
position as head of both Church and State was necessitated by the constant
threat of civil war between Catholics and Calvinists. It is instructive to
compare her position with that of the almost exactly contemporary Moghul
Emperor Akbar, who had to avert a similar threat of civil war between Hindus and
Muslims. Sir A.C. Lyall writes: “[Akbar] instituted a kind of metaphysical
society, over which he presided in person, and in which he delighted in pitting
against each other Persian mystics, Hindu pantheists, Christian missionaries
and orthodox Mohammedans. He even assumed by public edict the spiritual
headship of his empire, and declared himself the first appellate judge of
ecclesiastical questions. ‘Any opposition,’ said the edict, ‘on the part of
subjects to such orders passed by His Majesty shall involve damnation in the
world to come, and loss of religion and property in this life.’ The liturgy of
the Divine Faith, as it was named, was a sort of Iranian sun-worship, embodying
eclectic doctrines and the principle of universal tolerance. We may be reminded
that the Roman Emperor Julian adopted, like Akbar, the sun as the image of
all-pervading dignity; and that he also asserted pontifical authority. In each
instance the new theosophy disappeared at the death of its promulgator; for
great religious revolutions are never inaugurated by temporal authority, but
invariably begin among the people. Nothing, however, could demonstrate more
clearly the strength of Akbar’s government than the fact that he could take
upon himself spiritual supremacy, and proclaim with impunity doctrines that
subverted the fundamental law and the primary teaching of Islam. In not other
Mohammedan kingdom could the sovereign have attempted such an enterprise
without imminent peril to his throne. Akbar’s political object was to provide some
common ground upon which Hindus and Mohammedans might be brought nearer to
religious unity; though it is hardly necessary to add that no such modus
vivendi has at any time been discovered.”[157]
Elizabeth’s
task was hardly less difficult, and the attempt to contain the pressures of
conflicting religions under an absolutist monarch collapsed within forty years
of her death. However, she made a valiant attempt, clothing and obscuring the
Calvinist, and therefore anti-monarchical, creed of the State in a purely
Catholic monarchical pomp and ritualism. Thus while the 39 articles of the
Anglican Creed admitted only two sacraments, baptism and the eucharist (the
latter interpreted in a distinctly Protestant sense), and rejected the
sacrament of the priesthood, room was somehow found for a sacramental mystique
of the monarchy, as in Shakespeare’s Richard II (III, ii, 54-7):
Can wash the
balm off from an anointed king;
The deputy elected
by the Lord.
and Hamlet (IV, v, 123-4):
There’s such a
divinity doth hedge a king
That treason can
but peep to what it would…
It is worth
pondering why the monarchy could continue to exert such a mystical attraction
in a nation which was well on the way to ejecting all mysticism from its
political and ecclesiastical life. Part of the answer must lie in the upsurge
of patriotism which accompanied the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, whose
focus became the supposedly virgin Queen Elizabeth. Another part must lie in
the nostalgia for the past that was so rapidly being destroyed, a past in which
the figure of the anointed king played such an important role. Even today, when
democratism appears to have finally triumphed, the monarchy remains popular in
England. And at the heart of the democracy, Westminster Abbey, there still lies
the body of the most holy of the Orthodox kings of England, Edward the
Confessor, like a rose among thorns. It is as if the English people, even while
leading the way into the new democratic age, subconsciously feel that they have
lost something vitally important, and cling to the holy corpse with despairing
tenacity, refusing to believe that the soul has finally departed.
Thus even
such a convinced democrat as C.S. Lewis could write of the monarchy as “the
channel through which all the vital
elements of citizenship - loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the
hierarchical principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to
irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic Statecraft".[158]
And even today, hysteria can seize a whole nation on the death of a princess,
for little other reason than that she was a princess. Thus monarchism is
something deeply rooted with the human psyche which we attempt to uproot at our
peril…
Most
recently, Roger Scruton has spoken of the English monarchy as “the light above
politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted
sphere. Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot be understood as
representing the views only of the present generation. He or she is born into
the position, and also passes it on to a legally defined successor. The monarch
is in a real sense the voice of history, and the very accidental[159]
way in which the office is acquired emphasises the grounds of the monarch’s
legitimacy, in the history of a place and a culture. This is not to say that
kings and queens cannot be mad, irrational, self-interested or unwise. It is to
say, rather, that they owe their authority and their influence precisely to the
fact that they speak for something other than the present desires of
present voters, something vital to the continuity and community which the act
of voting assumes. Hence, if they are heard at all, they are head as limiting
the deomocratic process, in just the way that it must be limited if it is to
issue in reasonable legislation. It was in such a way that the English
conceived their Queen, in the sunset days of Queen Victoria. The sovereign was
an ordinary person, transfigured by a peculiar enchantment which represented
not political power but the mysterious authority of an ancient ‘law of the
land’. When the monarch betrays that law – as, in the opinion of many, the
Stuarts betrayed it – a great social and spiritual unrest seizes the common
conscience, unrest of a kind that could never attend the misdemeanours of an
elected president, or even the betrayal of trust by a political party.”[160]
Chadwick
writes: “Something about an English king distinguished him from the godly
prince of Germany or Sweden. While everyone agreed that a lawful ruler was
called of God, and that obedience was a Christian duty, it would not have been
so natural for a Lutheran to write that a divinity doth hedge a king. Offspring
of an ancient line, crowned with the anointing of medieval ritual, he retained
an aura of mystique which neither Renaissance nor Reformation at once
dispelled. It is curious to find the Catholic king of France touching the
scrofulous to heal them until a few years before the French Revolution. It is
much more curious to find the Protestant sovereigns of England, from Elizabeth
to James II, continuing to perform the same ritual cures, and to note that the
last reigning sovereign to touch was Queen Anne in 1714… King James I had been
educated in Scotland, undertook the duty reluctantly, and began his first rite
by preaching a sermon against superstition. But this reluctance faded, and
Charles I had no qualms. The supernatural aura of the anointed head was long in
dying, and must be reckoned with when judging the unusual English forms of the
divine right.”[161]
Another
factor that preserved for the Anglican kings – for the time being – a certain
mystical aura was the critical role that the kings played, as we have noted, in
preserving the balance between the Catholic and Calvinist tendencies in English
religion. For as William Pitt the Elder said in 1760, the English had “a
Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy.”[162]
This unnatural combination could only be held together by ascribing to the
monarchy a mystical aura that raised it above all factions and maintained peace
betweeen them.
The
importance of this order, of which the king was the corner-stone, was
beautifully put by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida (I, 3, 109):
In mere
oppugnancy: the bounded waters
Should lift
their bosoms higher than the shores,
And make a sop
of all this solid globe;
Strength should
be lord of imbecility,
And the rude son
should strike his father dead;
Force should be
right; or, rather, right and wrong –
Between whose
endless jar justice resides –
Should lose
their names, and so should justice too.
Elizabeth’s
successor, James I, also believed in hierarchy and the order of being, and
considered that “equality is the mother of confusion and an enemy of the Unity
which is the Mother of Order”.[163]
At the same time he acknowledged that there is an important distinction between
an autocrat, who, in King James’ words, “acknowledges himself ordained for his
people”, and a tyrant, who “thinks his people ordained for him, a prey to his
passions and inordinate appetites.” Although a king was “a little God to sit on
this throne and rule over other men”, he nevertheless had to provide a good
example to his subjects”.[164]
But from
the accession to the throne of James’ son, Charles I, the power of the monarchy
went into steep decline. For as Charles, under the influence of his Catholic
wife, while not formally abandoning the via media, leaned further to the
right, the Protestant landowners, fattened from the proceeds of the dissolution
of the monasteries, became increasingly self-confident and assertive. They were
determined never to let this wealth slip from their hands, whether through a
Catholic restoration returning their lands to the Church or through allowing
the king the right to tax their money from them…
The Old Testament in the New
World
The United
States of America was founded on strictly religious principles, the principles
of Calvinism. Its founders, fleeing persecution at the hands of the Anglican
State Church in England, found in New England almost ideal conditions in which
to put their doctrine of “theocratic democratism” into practice. These
conditions were described in the famous book by the early nineteenth-century
political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:-
“There was
a strong family likeness between all the English colonies as they came to
birth. All, from the beginning, seemed destined to let freedom grow, not the
aristocratic freedom of their motherland, but a middle-class and democratic
freedom of which the world’s history had not previously provided a complete
example…
“All the
immigrants who came to settle on the shores of New England belonged to the
well-to-do classes at home. From the start, when they came together on American
soil, they presented the unusual phenomenon of a society in which there were no
great lords, no common people, and, one may almost say, no rich or poor. In
proportion to their numbers, these men had a greater share of accomplishments
than could be found in any European nation now. All, perhaps without a single
exception, had received a fairly advanced education, and several had made a
European reputation by their talents and their knowledge. The other colonies
[including the southern English colonies such as Virginia] had been founded by
unattached adventurers, whereas the immigrants to New England brought with them
wonderful elements of order and morality; they came with their wives and
children to the wilds. But what distinguished them from all others was the very
aim of their enterprise. No necessity forced them to leave their country; they
gave up a desirable social position and assured means of livelihood; nor was
their object in going to the New World to better their position or accumulate
wealth; they tore themselves away from home comforts in obedience to a purely
intellectual craving; in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile they hoped
for the triumph of an idea.
“The immigrants, or as they
so well called themselves, the Pilgrims, belonged to that English sect whose
austere principles had led them to be called Puritans. Puritanism was not just
a religious doctrine; in many respects it shared the most democratic and
republican theories. That was the element which had aroused its most dangerous
adversaries. Persecuted by the home government, and with strict principles
offended by the everyday ways of the society in which they lived, the Puritans
sought a land so barbarous and neglected by the world that there at last they
might be able to live in their own way and pray to God in freedom.”[165]
In the imagination of the Pilgrims, their colonisation of America was like Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land. Just as the Canaanites had to be driven out before the sons of God in the Old Testament, so did the Red Indians before the sons of God in the New. Thus one New England meeting agreed:
1. The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Voted.
2. The Lord may give the earth or any part of it to His chosen people. Voted.
3. We are His chosen people. Voted.[166]
And just as Church and State were organically one in Joshua’s Israel, so it was in the Pilgrim Fathers’ America. Thus de Tocqueville writes: “Puritanism… was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine. No sooner had the immigrants landed on that inhospitable coast described by Nathaniel Morton than they made it their first care to organise themselves as a society. They immediately passed an act which stated:
“’We whose
names are underwritten … having undertaken for the glory of God, and
advancement of the Christian faith, and the honour of our king and country a
voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these
presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another,
covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our
better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid: and by
virtue hereof, do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws,
ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time, as shall be
thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which
we promise all due submission and obedience.’”[167]
This act of
1620 was the nearest practical incarnation, before or since, of the idea of the
social contract that became such a dominant political idea in the
English-speaking countries. It was made possible by the great distance of the
new colony from the English king, and by the system adopted by the Crown
whereby “a number of immigrants were given the right to form a political
society under the patronage of the motherland and allowed to govern themselves
in any way not contrary to her laws.”[168]
Also, of course, the experiment was carried out in a new world, where neither
the weight of historical institutions, such as feudalism and the official
Church, nor great differences in wealth or limitations of space or the pressure
of external enemies, hindered the development of a society that was unique in
the degree of its democratism and egalitarianism.
But this is
not to say, of course, that the Pilgrims came to America with their minds a
complete tabula rasa politically speaking. In 1648, at a synod in
Cambridge, Mass., they set out their ideas about authority in quite
sophisticated terms: “This Government of the church is a mixed Government…. In
respect of Christ, the Head and King of the church, and the Sovereign power
residing in Him, and exercised by Him, it is a Monarchy. In respect of the
body, or Brotherhood of the church, and power granted unto them, it resembles a
Democracy. In respect of the Presbytery (i.e. the Elders) and power committed to
them, it is an Aristocracy” (X, 3).”[169]
The
“theocratic democratism” of the Puritan communities became the basis of the
federal structure of the United States of America. They claimed that this
system corresponded to the practice of the early Church, and especially to the
structure of ancient Israel, with its distrust of all monarchical power. For
God had allowed Samuel to anoint the first king, Saul, only on sufferance, and
the prophets are full of denunciations of the evil deeds of the kings.
This claim was supported by A.P. Lopukhin:
"On examining the structure of the Mosaic State, one is involuntarily
struck by its similarity to the organisation of the state structure in the
United States of Northern America." "The tribes in their administrative
independence correspond exactly to the states, each of which is a democratic
republic." The Senate and Congress "correspond exactly to the two
higher groups of representatives in the Mosaic State - the 12 and 70
elders." "After settling in Palestine, the Israelites first (in the
time of the Judges) established a union republic, in which the independence of
the separate tribes was carried through to the extent of independent
states."[170]
However, it
needs to be said, first, that although ancient Israel was indeed a theocracy,
as such it was an embryonic form, not of the State, but of the Church; for only the Church can be said to have God alone as
its Head. The confusion between Church and State was possible in the case of
ancient Israel, which represents a very early, embryonic and unrepeatable stage
in the history of the people of God. But in the New Testament period, the
difference, if not always complete separation, between Church and State is an
indisputable fact. Christ recognised it - hence His famous words about giving
to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's. Caesar was a king, and
neither Christ nor the Apostles either deny or criticise that fact. For all
their instructions were directed towards the creation of the Church, the Kingdom
which is not of this world and which follows quite different laws from those
which obtain in this age.
Secondly,
the Church is a democracy. It is a Kingdom, the Kingdom of God on earth; and
even if we abstract God's Kingship from a consideration of its structure, the
element of monarchical hierarchy is very pronounced. For just as the 12 and 70
elders of the Mosaic Church were not elected by the people, but were appointed
by Moses, so the 12 and 70 Apostles of the New Testament Church were not elected
by the believers, but were appointed by Christ Himself. And even though the
successors of the Apostles, the Bishops, are in principle elected, it is not
their election which makes them bishops, but their consecration by other
bishops - a function that cannot be performed by laymen.
Indeed, if
one examines the structure of the Orthodox Church since apostolic times, it
resembles the federal structure of the Presbyterians or United States only in
not having a single head on earth; for each diocese is like a mini-kingdom, and
each bishop is like a king, being a regent of the King of heaven. And this is
God's appointed order for the Church in both the Old and New Testaments. Nor do
the Biblical words about the royal priesthood of all Christians (I Peter
2.9) provide a sound basis for Protestant democratism. For, as Berdyaev writes:
"This [universal royal priesthood] by no means implies a denial of the
significance of the hierarchical principle in history, as various sectarians
would have it. One can come to the universal royal priesthood only by the
hierarchical path of the Church. Indeed, the Kingdom of God itself is
hierarchical. And the universal royal priesthood is not a denial of the
hierarchical structure of existence."[171]
Be that as
it may, the Puritan colonies of New England represent a striking attempt to
reproduce the theocratic structure of Israelite society in the time of the Old
Testament Judges. Moreover, the laws of this society were taken almost entirely
from the Mosaic law. Thus in 1650 the little state of Connecticut drew up a
code of laws, which begins: “If any man after legal conviction shall have or
worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death.”
De Tocqueville continues: “There follow ten
or twelve provisions of the same sort taken word for word from Deuteronomy,
Exodus, or Leviticus. “Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and rape are punished by
death; a son who outrages his parents is subject to the same penalty. Thus the
legislation of a rough, half-civilised people was transported into the midst of
an educated society with gentle mores; as a result the death penalty has never
been more frequently prescribed by the laws or more seldom carried out.
“The framers of these penal codes were especially concerned with the maintenance of good behaviour and sound mores in society, so they constantly invaded the sphere of conscience, and there was hardly a sin not subject to the magistrate’s censure. The reader will have noticed the severity of the penalties for adultery and rape. Simple intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise harshly repressed. The judge had discretion to impose a fine or a whipping or to order the offenders to marry. If the records of the old courts of New Haven are to be trusted, prosecutions of this sort were not uncommon; under the date May 1, 1660, we find a sentence imposing a fine and reprimand on a girl accused of uttering some indiscreet words and letting herself be kissed. The code of 1650 is full of preventive regulations. Idleness and drunkenness are severely punished. Innkeepers may give each customer only a certain quantity of wine; simple lying, if it could do harm, is subject to a fine or a whipping. In other places the lawgivers, completely forgetting the great principle of religious liberty which they themselves claimed in Europe, enforced attendance at divine service by threat of fines and went so far as to impose severe penalties, and often the death penalty, on Christians who chose to worship God with a ritual other than their own. Finally, sometimes the passion for regulation which possessed them led them to interfere in matters completely unworthy of such attention. Hence there is a clause in the same code forbidding the use of tobacco. We must not forget that these ridiculous and tyrannical laws were not imposed from outside – they were voted by the free agreement of all the interested parties themselves – and that their mores were even more austere and puritanical than their laws. In 1649 an association was solemnly formed in Boston to check the worldly luxury of long hair…
“Clearly
they had a higher and more comprehensive conception of the duties of society
towards its members than had the lawgivers of Europe at that time…”[172]
And
consequently “tolerance” was not, for the Puritans, that queen among virtues
that it has become in the contemporary West. Thus in 1645 Thomas Shepard of
Newtown (Cambridge) said to Hugh Peter of Salem (where the famous witches’
trial took place): “Toleration of all upon pretence of conscience – I thank God
my soul abhors it. The godly in former times never fought for the liberty of
consciences by pleading for liberty for all.”[173]
Under the
influence of the European Enlightenment, America was to move away from its
“democratic totalitarian” beginnings to complete separation of Church and State
and liberty of conscience. In other words, it moved, in the language of Sir
Isaiah Berlin, from a society whose slogan was “freedom to” to a society
whose slogan was “freedom from”. However, it is as well to remember to
what extremes of repression the notion of religious liberty can lead when that
religion is the revolutionary one of Calvinism…
Let us now return to that society from which the Pilgrim Fathers fled, and which displayed the richest variety of conflicting religio-political conceptions.
The English Revolution
The English
revolution - “that grand crisis of morals, religion and government”, as
Coleridge called it[174]
- was, together with the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution
of 1917, the most important event of modern European history. Like the later
revolutions, if not to the same degree, it replaced a mild and moral monarch
with a bloody and immoral anarchy. Like them, too, it elicited a very broad
range of arguments on the fundamental questions of the origin and nature of the
State and its relationship to the Church, parliament and people. With the
single exception of the Orthodox symphony of powers – which, however, received
a powerful contemporary advocate in the person of Patriarch Nicon of Moscow
(see next chapter) – the pros and cons of all the major forms of government
were exhaustively discussed.
“Taking
everything together,” wrote Guizot, “the English revolution was essentially
political; it was brought about in the midst of a religious people and in a
religious age; religious thoughts and passions were its instruments; but its
chief design and definite aim were political, were devoted to liberty, and the
abolition of all absolute power.”[175]
What Guizot meant is illustrated by the
words of the revolutionary John Lilburne, clothing his communist political
programme in religious quotations: “Christ doth not choose many rich, nor many
wise, but the fools, idiots, base and contempible poor men and women in the
esteem of the world.”[176]
The English
revolution was not a revolution in the sense that it completely destroyed the
old forms, being a violent and irreversible overthrow of the existing system.
Rather, it was a “revolution” in the older sense of a cyclical movement; for it
brought things back to the status quo ante formally, if not essentially.
Thus in the space of two generations, from 1642 to 1688, England underwent
successively: an Anglican monarchy, a Calvinist parliamentocracy, the beginnings
of a communist revolution, a military dictatorship, the restoration of the
Anglican monarchy, a Catholic absolute monarchy, and the second restoration of
the Anglican (now constitutional) monarchy.
The English revolution illustrated the fact that, to misquote Dostoyevsky: “If the king does not exist, everything is permitted.” In a remarkably short space of time the initiative passed from the king and the aristocracy to the propertied gentry to the army to the army agitators, until the slide to the extreme left was halted by force – the force of Cromwell’s military dictatorship. The eventual winners were the landowning aristocracy, who succeeded in muzzling the power of the king, on the one hand, and suppressing the revolutionary commoners, on the other.
Let us
examine the two main sets of ideas that the revolution threw up: the Divine
Right of Kings, on the one hand, and the sovereignty of the people, on the
other.
Now we have
seen that the first century or so of the Protestant Reformation witnessed a
strengthening of monarchical power. This had happened for different reasons in
different countries: on the continent because the Protestants had looked to the
Princes to protect them against the Catholic powers, and because the rising
class of the bourgeoisie wanted some protection against the anti-mercantile
aristocracy[177], in
England because the king himself had initiated the break with Rome for his own
personal and political ends.[178]
But Protestantism of both the Lutheran and Calvinist varieties contained within
itself the seeds of the overthrow of all authority, both religious and
political; it threatened bishops as well as Popes, kings as well as bishops.
Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers directly attacked the special
authority of bishops and priests; but indirectly it attacked the power of
kings, too, insofar as they were perceived as receiving their authority from
God via the priesthood in the sacrament of royal anointing. Calvin’s doctrine
of the elect’s absolute assurance of salvation, and of the supremacy of
conscience over law, was as much a threat to the laws of the kings as it was to
the doctrines of the bishops. Moreover, the Calvinist doctrine contained a
frightening corollary which was rarely expressed in so many words but was about
to be expressed in many actions: the conviction, namely, that just as the elect
had absolute assurance of their own salvation, they had similar assurance of
their opponents’ damnation, and could therefore dispose of them with the
ruthlessness that befitted the knowledge of their worthlessness. Transposed
onto a more secular soil and into a less godly age, this belief would justify
the elimination of whole classes and peoples supposedly doomed to extinction by
the ruthless and irresistible onward march of history…
In England,
the Stuart kings, being conscious of at least some of these consequences of the
State’s officially Calvinist doctrine, began to move to the religious and
political “right” at the same time as their subjects began to fan out, as it
were, to the left. In international affairs, they became less unambiguously
supportive of their brethren in the Protestant International, and more
supportive of their fellow monarchs’ authority, whether they were Catholic or
Protestant (after the Restoration, James II received subsidies from the
ultramontane Louis XIV). In internal affairs, they began to act more by fiat,
consulting less with parliament and other elected assemblies, and began to
develop the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.
According
to this theory, kings, having their authority from God, and having no authority
higher than themselves on earth, cannot be convicted of wrongdoing in the
political (as opposed to the personal) sphere. As Shakespeare puts it in Richard
II:
And shall the figure of God’s majesty,
His captain, steward, deputy elect,
Anointed, crowned, planted many years,
Be judged by subject and inferior breath?
The principle that the king can do no wrong is “a logical inference,” writes Barzun, “from sovereignty itself: the ultimate source of law cannot be charged with making a wrong law or giving a wrong command. Modern democracies follow the same logic when they given their lawmakers immunity for anything said or done in the exercise of their duty; they are members of the sovereign power. Constitutions, it is true, limit lawmaking; but the sovereign people can change the constitution. There is no appeal against the acts of the sovereign unless the sovereign allows, as when it is provided that citizens can sue the state.
“Of course,
the monarch can do wrong in another sense – in a couple of senses. He can add
up a sum and get a wrong total and he can commit a wrongful act morally
speaking – cheating at cards or killing his brother. To make clear this
distinction between sovereign and human being, theorists developed quite early
the doctrine that ‘the king has two bodies’; as a man he is fallible, as king
he is not. Similarly in elective governments, a distinction is made between the
civil servant acting in his official capacity and as a private citizen…”[179]
The first
Stuart King, James I of England and VI of Scotland, wrote two books on the
Divine Right of Kings, Basilikon Doron (The Royal Gift) and The True
Law of Free Monarchies, in which the most important word was “free” (i.e.
free from all limitations). He argued: just as God is the Father of mankind,
“so the style of Pater patriae was ever, and is commonly applied to
Kings.”[180] As such,
the King does not merely represent his people: he embodies them – which is why
in his edicts he says We, not I.[181]
In its
fully developed form, writes Ashton, “the patriarchal theory of royal authority
was to prove a powerful argument both against the idea that government
originated in a political contract between ruler and ruled and against the far
more influential notion that representative government and the limitations
which it placed on the royal exercise of power were immemorial features of the
constitution…. Just as kings were little Gods, so were fathers little monarchs.
He who does not honour the king, maintained Thomas Jordan, cannot truly honour
his own parents, as the fifth commandment bids him. So, in his speech on the
scaffold in February, 1649, the royalist Lord Capel affirmed ‘very confidently
that I do die here… for obeying that fifth commandment given by God himself.’..
‘For this subordination of children is the foundation of all regal authority,
by the ordination of God himself.’”[182]
The best
known defence of the Divine Right of Kings was Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia
or the Natural Power of Kings, which was written during Cromwell’s
dictatorship, and published in 1680, during the Restoration of the Monarchy
under Charles II. His thinking was based on the idea that Adam was the first
father and king of the whole human race. “He believed,” writes Western, “that
God had given the sovereignty of the world to Adam and that it had passed by
hereditary descent, through the sons of Noah and the heads of the nations into
which mankind was divided at the Confusion of Tongues, to all the modern rulers
of the world. Adam was the father of all mankind and so all other men were
bound to obey him: this plenary power has passed to his successors.”[183]
The problem
with this view, according to John Locke in his First Treatise of Civil
Government (1681), as interpreted by McClelland, is that “the book of
Genesis does not actually say that God gave the world to Adam to rule; Adam is
never referred to as king.” However, this is not a powerful objection, because,
even if the word “king” is not used, God does say to Adam that he is to have “dominion over… every living thing that
moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1.28). But “Locke then goes on to say:
suppose we concede, for which there is no biblical evidence, that Adam really
was king by God’s appointment. That still leaves the awkward fact that Genesis
makes no mention of the kingly rights of the sons of Adam; there is simply no
reference to the right of hereditary succession. Locke then goes on to say:
suppose we concede both Adam’s title to kingship and the title of the sons of
Adam, for neither of which there is biblical evidence, how does that help kings
now to establish their titles by
Divine Right? Despite the biblical concern with genealogy, the line of Adam’s
posterity has become hopelessly scrambled. How can any king at the present time seriously claim that he is in the line
of direct descent from Adam?… Because the genealogy since Adam is scrambled, it
is perfectly possible that all the present kings are usurpers, or all the kings
except one. Perhaps somewhere the real, direct descendant of Adam is alive and
living in obscurity, cheated of his birthright to universal monarchy by those
pretending to call themselves kings in the present world.”[184]
However,
shorn of its dependence on the idea that Adam was the first king, Filmer’s
essential idea, that kingship, like fatherhood, is natural and therefore Divine
in origin, is not so easily refuted. The people, on the other hand, “are not
born free by nature” and “there never was any such thing as an independent
multitude, who at first had a natural right to a community [of goods]”.
As Harold
Nicolson writes: “‘This conceit of original freedom’, as he said, was ‘the only
ground’ on which thinkers from ‘the heathen philosophers’ down to Hobbes had
built the idea that governments were created by the deliberate choice of free
men. He believed on the contrary, as an early opponent put it, that ‘the rise
and right of government’ was natural
and native, not voluntary and conventional’.
Subjects therefore could not have a right to overturn a government because the
original bargain had not been kept. There were absurdities and dangers in the
opposing view. ‘Was a general meeting of a whole kingdom ever known for the
election of a Prince? Was there any example of it ever found in the world?’
Some sort of majority decision, or the assumption that a few men are allowed to
decide for the rest, are in fact the only ways in which government by the people
can be supposed to have been either initiated or carried on. But both are as
inconsistent as monarchy with the idea that men are naturally free. ‘If it be
true that men are by nature free-born and not to be governed without their own
consents and that self-preservation is to be regarded in the first place, it is
not lawful for any government but self-government to be in the world… To
pretend that a major part, or the silent consent of any part, may be
interpreted to bind the whole people, is both unreasonable and unnatural; it is
against all reason for men to bind others, where it is against nature for men
to bind themselves. Men that boast so much of natural freedom are not willing
to consider how contradictory and destructive the power of a major part is to
the natural liberty of the whole people.’ The claims of representative
assemblies to embody the will of the people are attacked on these lines, in a
manner recalling Rousseau. Filmer also points out that large assemblies cannot
really do business and so assemblies delegate power to a few of their number:
‘hereby it comes to pass that public debates which are imagined to be referred
to a general assembly of a kingdom, are contracted into a particular or private
assembly’. In short ‘Those governments that seem to be popular are kinds of
petty monarchies’ and ‘It is a false and improper speech to say that a whole
multitude, senate, council, or any multitude whatsoever doth govern where the
major part only rules; because many of the multitude that are so assembled… are
governed against and contrary to their wills.’”[185]
The
Royalist position was well summed up in an address presented to King Charles II
by the elders of Cambridge University in 1681: “We still believe and maintain
that our Kings derive not their title from the people, but from God; that to
Him only they are accountable; that it belongs not to subjects either to create
or censure, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to be so by a
fundamental hereditary right of succession, which no religion, no law, no fault
or forfeiture can alter or diminish.”[186]
However,
the theory of the Divine Right of Kings was dealt a fatal blow in 1688, when
the Catholic King James II was forced to flee and the Dutch Protestant William
III took power in the “Glorious Revolution” (or “Glorious Compromise”, as
Barzun puts it) that replaced Catholic absolutism with Protestant
constitutional monarchy.[187]
If the Divine Right of Kings was dealt a
fatal blow by the English Revolution, the same cannot be said of the
anti-monarchical doctrines that the revolution threw up. For, while defeated in
England, they entered the subconsciousness of European thought, emerging into
consciousness again at the time of the French revolution. The most important
doctrine was that of the Levellers, a religio-political sect that had an
important influence on Cromwell’s New Model Army.
“The
Levellers,” write Downing and Millman, “were so called because they insisted
that since all men were equal before God so should they be equal before the
law. They were never a political party in the modern sense, but they put
forward a number of Leveller programmes. On the basis of these programmes, the
Levellers gained support and allies, particularly in London where most of their
activities were centred. They were able to raise thousands of signatures for
their petitions and thousands turned out for their demonstrations; their
support ranged from religious radicals to craftsmen, small masters and
shopkeepers. In the same tradition as many religious radicals, they appealed
for freedom of religious belief. In pamphlets and petitions they demanded
liberty of conscience, the disestablishment of the Church and the abolition of
compulsory tithes. As time went on, their outlook became more secular[188]
with demands for legal reforms and for equal application of the laws, the end
of imprisonment for debt, the abolition of trade monopolies and the end of
press censorship. They appealed to many people who had expected and hoped that
the end of the war [the first Civil War, which ended in 1646] would herald a
new order but instead were faced with high taxes, economic depression and a
Parliament which abused its powers.
“The truly
revolutionary programme of the Levellers emerged from their attack on the
unrepresentativeness of England’s constitution. They looked back to the period
when the Norman conquerors had imposed their tyrannical laws on the people of
England and looked forward to a new order in which the sovereignty of the
people was central and when representative institutions were democratically
elected. The alliance with the army was not as strange as might first appear,
for the army had entered the arena of national politics and their claim that
they were ‘not a mere mercenary army’ but defenders of the people’s liberties
clearly had resonances with the Levellers. In the heady mixture of radical
ideas, stirred by unrest among the soldiers for the delay in the settlement of
their grievances, the Levellers drew up their challenge to the commanders of
the army. In October 1647 in The Case of the Army Truly Stated, they
strongly argued for actions to be taken speedily to redress the soldiers’
grievances. From the specifics relating to the army the Case moved on a
more general attack on Parliament and demands for long-term constitutional
reforms. Fairfax, the Commander-in-Chief of the New Model Army, knew that if he
was to retain unity he must respond quickly. A General Council was summoned to
a meeting at Putney church in London on 28 October 1647. These discussions, now
famous as the Putney Debates, have become historically significant because they
attempted to provide a new constitution for England. At the centre of these
debates on democracy was another Leveller manifesto, The Agreement of the People,
jointly drafter by civilian and army Levellers…
“The
Agreement called for the same freedoms as the other Leveller manifestos but
went further in its claims for the rights of the people within a new
constitutional and democratic framework. The basic principle of the new
constitution was that it was to be subscribed by the people who would elect a
representative parliament, answerable only to the people and not to the King
nor the House of Lords. ‘Therefore these things in the Agreement, the people
are to claim as their native right and price of their blood, which you obliged
absolutely to procure for them. And these being the foundation of freedom, it
is necessary that they should be settled unalterably, which can be done by no
means but this Agreement with the people.’ Controls on parliamentary power
would be effected by biennial Parliaments and the decentralization of power
from central government to local authorities, also democratically elected. To
achieve this, an extension of the franchise was imperative; althought the
Levellers were accused of speaking for ‘hobnayles, clouted shoes and leather
aprons’, they did not argue for universal suffrage – servants, apprentices,
beggars and women (the latter never even mentioned) were excluded. To twentieth-century
eyes, this is a remarkable omission but the Levellers wanted the vote for those
who were truly independent and the argument against giving it to servants,
apprentices and women was that their vote could too easily by influenced by
their ‘masters’. Even so, the Levellers programme was too radical to be
acceptable to Cromwell and the other army grandees and neither side was
prepared to make concessions…
“…A return
to fighting did not halt the progress of the radical impulse which during the
1640s and 50s opened up the possibility of a fundamental overturning of
seventeenth-century society. During 1648 the Agreement of the People
continued to be discussed and a compromise reached. Some reforms recommended by
the Levellers were adopted by the government of the new republic, the
Commonwealth, which abolished the House of Lords and the monarchy the following
year. The failure to concede the more fundamental reforms was greeted by [the
Levellers’ leaders] Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton with a series of pamphlets
denouncing the new government as hypocritical and despotic. They were all
arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Cromwell, recognizing their threat to the
stability of the new Parliament, warned ‘if you do not break them, they will
break you’.”[189]
Another revolutionary sect was the Diggers, who followed in the communist traditions of the Bohemian Taborites and German and Dutch Anabaptists. “In April 1649,” write Downing and Millman, “a group of poor men and women collected on the common on St. George’s Hill in Surrey and began to dig up the land and form a squatter community. Led by the charismatic George Winstanley their actions symbolized the assumption of ownership of common land. Winstanley believed in universal salvation and in what we would now call communist theories, that all property should be held in common. His visions of common ownership, rather than private property, also extended to equality between the sexes. Drawing on a theory of natural rights, Winstanley also quoted the Bible to support his arguments. Rejecting the traditional teachings of the Church, his was a visionary form of spirituality.
“The Digger
colony on St. George’s Hill was not unique; there were others in
Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire, as well as
in other parts of the country. The Diggers of ‘True Levellers’ produced
specific demands that confiscated Church, Crown and Royalists’ lands be turned
over to the poor. Set out in The Law of Freedom, Winstanley challenged
existing property relations in the name of true Christian freedom and put
forward his hopes for a communist Utopia. Earlier had had written: ‘they had
resovled to work and eat together, making the earth a common treasury, doth
join hands with Christ to lift up the creation from bondage, and restores all
things from the curse.’ Almost inevitably, the Digger colonies failed, some
harassed by local residents, others by local justices. However, their ideas lay
in their ideas and their actions…
“One group,
known as the Ranters, pushed toleration to the limit. In no way a sect nor an
organized congretation, this loose group of individuals provoked fear and
hostility quite out of proportion to their numbers. As individuals they were
undeniably provocative; taking their belief in the individual’s personal
relationship with God to its extreme, they broke with all traditions and moral
constraints. By the standards of their day they appeared sexually and socially
immoral….
“Mainstream
Protestantism was, however, to face its biggest challenge from the Quakers. The
Quakers of the seventeenth century had little in common with the Friends of
today, known for their pacifism and quietism. The Quakers originated in the
north of England and found adherents among farmers and artisans as well as the
poor. Like the Diggers, they believed in universal salvation and the notion of
Christ within the individual. Their success in evangelising is proved by the
numbers of converst: in 1652 they numbered about 500, by 1657 there were perhaps
50,000. Their leaders were often flamboyant and aggressive in their beliefs;
Quakers also demanded religious freedom alongside calls for social reforms.
They were to be found disrupting services in the ‘steeplehouses’, their name
for parish churches. They refused to pay tithes and challenged the authority of
local magistrates. Their belief in equality of all men in the sight of God led
them to eschew traditional forms of deference; they refused ‘hat-honour’, the
removing of hats in front of figures of authority. Equality also meant that
large numbers of women were attracted to the Quaker faith and shared in the
preaching and dissemination of the Quaker faith. The trial of James Nayler was
significant not just in the brutality of Nayler’s punishment but because it
focused the confusion around the idea of liberty of ‘godly conscience’. The
Quaker menace brought a return to an established order with an attempt to
impose compulsory religious worship on Sundays. But the national church was
split irrevocably…”[190]
The Killing of the King
The climax
of the English revolution was, of course, the trial and beheading of King
Charles I in 1649, the first
ideologically motivated and judicially executed regicide in history. Before
then, kings had been killed in abundance, and many Popes since Gregory VII had
presumed to depose kings on the basis of their priestly power to bind and
loose. But Charles I was not deposed by any Church or Pope; he was not the
victim of a simple coup; he was charged with treason against the State by his subjects, laymen like himself.
Treason by a king rather than against him?! The idea was paradoxical
in the extreme. As Christopher Hill writes: “high treason was a personal
offence, a breach of personal loyalty to the King: the idea that the King
himself might be a traitor to the realm was novel”.[191]
The king himself articulated the paradoxicality of the revolution during his
trial, declaring: “A King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on
earth.” And it was a feeling of revulsion against this paradox, this
overturning of the natural order, together with the manifest failure to
establish a stable order to replace the monarchy, that finally sealed the fate
of the revolution.
As a supposedly Shakespearean addition to the
play Sir Thomas More put it:
For to the king
God hath his office lent
Of dread of
justice, power and command,
Hath bid him
rule and willed you to obey;
And to add
ampler majesty to this,
He hath not only
lent the king his figure,
His throne and
sword, but given him his own name,
Calls him a god
on earth. What do you, then,
Rising ‘gainst
him that God himself installs
But rise ‘gainst
God?[192]
Charles had
pointed out at his trial that the king was the guarantor of his people’s
liberties: “But it is not my case alone – it is the freedom and the liberty of
the people of England. And do you pretend what you will, I will stand for their
liberties – for if a power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental
laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject can be sure of his life, or of
anything that he calls his own. Therefore, when that I came here I did expect
particular reasons to know by what law, what authority, you did proceed against
me here… My reasons why – in conscience and the duty I owe to God first and my
people next, for the preservation of their lives, liberties and estates – I
conceive I cannot answer this till I be satisfied of the legality of it.”[193]
And yet
once a new idea has been expressed and acted upon in all sincerity, it becomes
less paradoxical, less unnatural for succeeding generations. It enters the
bloodstream, as it were, of human thought, no longer warred against – or warred
against less fiercely – by the blood’s antibodies, the censorship of public
opinion. Parricide was the central theme of the most famous of ancient Greek
tragedies, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: regicide has been the real-life
tragedy of our time.
Traditionally – since Magna Carta, at any rate – it had been the
aristocrats who reined in tyrannical kings; and when King Charles was brought
to trial in January, 1649, the parallel with Magna Carta was uppermost
in his judges’ minds. Thus the court’s first meeting was held in the Painted
Chamber at the Palace of Westminster where the nobles traditionally put on
their robes. For, writes Sean Kelsey, “the revolution was portrayed as a new
chapter in the history of that aristocratic constitutionalism which had long
sustained English traditions of resistance to royal authority. In the course of
proceedings, John Bradshaw, Lord President of the High Court of Justice,
recalled the ‘Barons’ Wars’, ’when the nobility of the land did stand up for
the liberty and property of the subject and would not suffer the kings that did
invade to play the tyrant freely… But.. if they [the peers] do forbear to do
their duty now and are not so mindful of their own honour and the kingdom’s
good as the barons of England of old were, certainly the Commons of England
will not be so unmindful of what is for their preservation and for their
safety.’”[194]
But this
looking over the shoulder to the Commons was the psychological essence of the
matter. Unlike the barons in 1215, the Parliamentarians in 1649 were already a
“rump”, purged by the army’s radical lower ranks; and this rump knew that if
they did not do what the army wanted, they would be swept away. For the
revolution cannot stop half way: once legitimacy has been removed from the king
by the lords, it will not remain with the lords, but must pass on to the
Commons, and from the Commons to the people. And to the lowest of the people at
that; for, as Denzill Holles, once a leading opponent of the king, wrote in
1649: “The meanest of men, the basest and vilest of the nation, the lowest of
the people have got power into their hands; trampled upon the crown; baffled
and misused the Parliament; violated the laws; destroyed or suppressed the
nobility and gentry of the kingdom.”[195]
Almost too
late did the gentry leader of the Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, realise that he
could not give in to the demands of the Levellers, who wanted to “level”
society to its lowest common denominator. In May, 1649, only four months after
executing the king, he executed some mutinous soldiers who sympathised with the
Levellers. And four years later was forced to dissolve Parliament and seize
supreme power himself (although he refused the title of King, preferring that
of “Protector”).
Earlier,
just after his victory over the King at Naseby in 1645, he had declared: “God
hath put the sword in the Parliament’s hands, - for the terror of evil-doers,
and the praise of them that do well. If any plead exemption from that, - he
knows not the Gospel”. But when anarchy threatened, he found an exemption:
“Necessity hath no law,” he said to the dismissed representatives of the
people. Napoleon had a similar rationale when he dismissed the Directory and
the elected deputies in 1799[196],
and Lenin when he dismissed the Constituent Assembly in 1918. “Necessity” in
one age becomes the “revolutionary morality” – that is, exemption from the
rules of morality - of the next.
At the same
time, it must be admitted that Cromwell to some extent restrained the full
power of the English revolution. As Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) of
New York writes: “It bore within itself as an embryo all the typically
destructive traits of subsequent revolutions; but the religious sources of this
movement, the iron hand of Oliver Cromwell, and the immemorial good sense of
the English people, restrained this stormy element, preventing it from
achieving its full growth.[197]
Thenceforth, however, the social spirit of Europe has been infected with the
bacterium of revolution.”[198]
Another
revolutionary leader from the gentry was the poet John Milton. He set himself
the task of justifying the revolution (Engels called him “the first defender of
regicide”) in theological terms. For unlike the later revolutions, the English
revolution was still seen as needing justification in terms of Holy Scripture,
insofar as “at different times, in different places, Emperor and Anarchist
alike may find it convenient to appeal to Holy Writ”. [199]
Milton
began, in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, with a firm rejection of
the Divine Right of Kings. In fact, Charles I was to be identified with the
Antichrist, and in overthrowing him the English people had chosen God as their
King. Moreover, it was now the duty of the English to spread their revolution
overseas (Cromwell had begun the process in Scotland and Ireland in 1649-51),
for the saints in England had been “the first to overcome those European kings
which receive their power not from God but from the Beast”.[200]
“No man who
knows aught,” wrote Milton, “can be so stupid as to deny that all men naturally
were born free”. Kings and magistrates are but “deputies and commissioners of
the people”. “To take away from the people the right of choosing government
takes away all liberty”. Milton attributed the dominance of bishops and kings
to the Norman Conquest, and he bewailed men’s readiness “with the fair words
and promises of an old exasperated foe… to be stroked and tamed again into the
wonted and well-pleasing state of their true Norman villeinage.”[201] Far
better for him than the traditional Christian virtues of humility and obedience
was Satan’s adamantine pride in Paradise Lost (262-263):
To reign is
worth ambition though in hell:
Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven…
Of course,
the “inconstant, irrational and image-doting rabble”, cannot have the rule; the
better part – i.e. the gentry, people like Milton himself – must act on their
behalf. This does raise the problem, as Filmer argued against Milton, that even
if we accept that “the sounder, the better and the uprighter part have the
power of the people… how shall we know, or who shall judge, who they can be?”
But Milton brushed this problem aside.[202]
Within a
week of the king’s execution, Eikon Basilike was published by the
royalists, being supposedly the work of Charles himself. This enormously
popular defence of the monarchy was countered by the argument that the
veneration of the king was idolatry. “Every King is an image of God,” wrote
N.O. Brown. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Revolutionary
republicanism seeks to abolish effigy and show.”[203]
Milton
countered Eikon Basilike with his Eikonklastes, in which the
destruction of the icon of the king was seen as the logical consequence of the
earlier iconoclasm of the English Reformation. Hill explains: “An ikon was an
image. Images of saints and martyrs had been cleared out of English churches at
the Reformation, on the ground that the common people had worshipped them.
Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, was austerely monotheistic, and
encouraged lay believers to reject any form of idolatry. This ‘desacralisation
of the universe’ in the long run was its main contribution to the rise of
modern science.”[204]
Thus did the anti-papist, anti-monastic and anti-images iconoclasm of the
English Reformation and the Tudor monarchs reap its fruits in the
anti-monarchist iconoclasm of the English Revolution.
And yet,
writes Hill, “as the millenium failed to arrive and taxation was not reduced,
as division and feuds rent the revolutionaries, so the image of his sacred
majesty loomed larger over the quarrelsome, unsatisfactory scene… The mass of
ordinary people came to long for a return to ‘normality’, to the known, the
familiar, the traditional. Victims of scrofula who could afford it went abroad
to be touched by the king [Charles II] over the water: after 1660 he was back,
sacred and symbolic. Eikonoklastes was burnt by the common hangman
together with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates… The men of property
in 1659-60 longed for ‘a king with plenty of holy oil about him’…”[205]
The men of
property may have wanted a king with plenty of holy oil about him. And yet his
holiness was a secondary consideration. Their first priority was that he should
suppress the revolutionaries, preserve order and let them make money in peace.
A Divine Right ruler did not fit the bill because he might choose to touch
their financial interests, as Charles I’s demand for money to conduct his wars
had touched them. A constitutional ruler was the answer – that is, a ruler who
would rule within certain limitations, limitations imposed by the men of
property and agreed in a legal constitution.
Hobbes’ Leviathan
However, the working out of such a constitution necessitated a new
theory of politics, a theory that depended for its legitimacy less on God’s or
the Church’s blessing from above than on its satisfaction of human needs
pressing from below. This
divorce between political theory and theology, which became commonplace after
the English revolution, actually began much earlier, with Machiavelli’s Il
Principe (1513). Machiavelli’s was the first handbook of what has been
called Realpolitik, that is, politics conducted without any guiding
principle except the pursuit and maintenance of power. “A prince who desires to
maintain his position,” he wrote, “must learn to be good or not as needs may
require.” “War should be the only study of a prince. He should look upon peace
as a breathing space which.. gives him the means to execute military plans.”[206]
“It is not necessary for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities [the
conventional virtues], but it is very necessary to seem to have them.” Above all, he said, a prince should seem to be religious.[207]
In his
other important work, the Discourses, Machiavelli anticipated a very
important doctrine of later philosophical liberalism – the doctrine of checks
and balances. Since men are selfish and self-interested by nature, the only way
to achieve a minimum of order, enabling as many men as possible to fulfil as
many of their interests as possible, is to set them in reciprocal balance
against each other. Thus princes, nobles and people should all have a part in
the Constitution; “then these three powers will keep each other reciprocally in
check.”[208]
But it was
Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) which, drawing on the experience of the
English revolution, developed and systematised this amoral approach to
politics. Almost all contemporary theorists, whether monarchist or
revolutionary, agreed that all power was from God and was legitimate only if
sanctioned by God, differing only in their estimate of which power, the king’s
or the people’s, was the final arbiter of conflicts. But Hobbes derived his
theory of sovereignty from reason and “the principles of Nature only”, from a
social contract between men in which God had no part.
Hobbes
began from what he called the State of Nature, which, he believed, was WAR, a
state devoid of civilisation in which every man’s hand was raised against his
neighbour, and in which the life of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish,
and short.”[209] Thus “to
seek peace and ensure it”, men got together and handed over their rights to one
of their number, who thereafter possessed unlimited power over them. The State
was therefore a Leviathan, “a monster composed of men” headed by a sovereign
answerable to no man or law.
But why
should the sovereign’s power be unlimited in this way? “Since the sovereign,”
explains Roger Scruton, “would be the creation of the contract, he could not
also be party to it: he stands above
the social contract, and can therefore disregard its terms, provided he
enforces them against all others. That is why, Hobbes thought, it was so
difficult to specify the obligations of the sovereign, and comparatively easy
to specify the obligations of the citizen” [210]
Here, then, we find the Divine Right of Kings in secular garb.
And yet
were not men free and equal in the beginning? Yes, but the burden of that
liberty was too great for men to bear (Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was to
say something similar). For, as McClelland explains, intepreting Hobbes: “if
everyone has that same equal and unlimited liberty to do as he pleases in
pursuit of the literally selfish end of self-preservation, then without law
every man is a menace to every other man. Far from being an original endowment
for which men should be grateful, the unlimited liberty of the Right of Nature
is a millstone round men’s necks, of which they would be wise to unburden
themselves at the first opportunity.”[211]
And they did, by giving up their rights to the sovereign, who, however,
retained all of his.
The lack of
accountability of the sovereign is regrettable, but a necessity; and
“necessity”, as Cromwell – clearly Hobbes’ first model of the sovereign - said:
“hath no law…” Or rather, the sovereign’s will is the law, so it makes no sense to accuse the sovereign of acting
unlawfully. “It follows from this that a Sovereign may never justly be put to
death by his subjects because they would be punishing the Sovereign for their
own act, and no principle of jurisprudence could ever conceivably justify
punishing another for what one did oneself.”[212]
Hobbes
defined liberty negatively, as the absence of impediments to motion. Subjects
are free when the laws do not interfere with them – that is, when the sovereign
law-giver voluntarily concedes them some liberty of action. However, liberty is
not a right, and subjects have no right to rebel against their sovereign for
any reason except self-preservation (for that is the very purpose of the social
contract). Thus subjects have the right to refuse military service – a right
that no modern democratic government would concede to them. And they have the
right to refuse to obey a sovereign who cannot protect them against their
enemies.[213]
“Hobbes’s Leviathan,”
continues McClelland, “is certainly not the blueprint for universal monarchy
that it is sometimes taken to be. Quite the reverse. Leviathan contains
a very clear explanation of why supra-national organisations like the League of
Nations or the UN are bound to fail in their avowed purpose of keeping the
international peace, or even in their intention to provide some measure of
international co-operation which is different from traditional alliances
between states for traditional foreign policy ends. For Hobbes, there is no
peace without law, and there can be no law without a Sovereign whose command
law is. Hobbes is absolutely insistent that individuals in the State of Nature
cannot make law by agreement; all they can do by contract is to choose a
Sovereign. What applies to individuals in the State of Nature also applies to
sovereigns in their State of Nature in relation to each other. The only way
there could be a guarantee of international peace would be if all the
sovereigns of the earth, or an overwhelming majority of them, were voluntarily
to give up the right of national self-defence to some kind of super-sovereign
whose word would be law to all the nations of the earth. This the various
nations of the earth have been notoriously reluctant to do. They have tried to
make international law by agreement, but that has never stopped war. They have
tried to make international law by agreement, but that has never stopped war.
Hobbes could have told them why: covenants without the sword are but breath,
without any power to bind a man at all. No all-powerful international
Sovereign, then no international peace.”[214]
Now
Bertrand Russell criticised Hobbes on the grounds that while his model of the
absolutist state decreased anarchy and destructiveness within states, it increased
it between states. “So long as there
is international anarchy, it is by no means clear that increase of efficiency
in the separate States is in the interest of mankind, since it increases the
ferocity and destructiveness of war. Every argument that he adduces in favour
of government, in so far as it is valid at all, is valid in favour of
international government. So long as national States exist and fight each
other, only inefficiency can preserve the human race.”[215]
However,
Russell’s criticism fails to take into account the fact that Hobbes’ argument
is not about absolutism as such, but about sovereignty,
and that the sovereign, in his theory, “can be one man, a few, or many men. He
knows his ancient political theory well enough (he made a famous translation of
Thucydides) to know that states are either monarchies, aristocracies or
democracies…. He thinks that the sovereignty which is exercised by a Sovereign
is the same sovereignty, no matter how that sovereignty is in fact constituted.
The sovereignty which is exercised by a Sovereign people, as at ancient Athens
or republican Rome, does not change its nature as sovereignty just because it
is democratic. Democratic sovereignty properly understood would have the same
attributes as the sovereignty of an absolute monarch.”[216]
The logic
of Hobbes’ theory for international relations – either an international
sovereign government or continued war – may be unpalatable, but it was not
refuted by Russell. It may be that democratic governments are inherently less
“efficient” or warlike than absolutist ones. But the reason for that would not
be that they are less sovereign, but that they pursue different aims (peaceful
moneymaking as opposed to world domination, for example).
A more
serious criticism of Hobbes’ theory is that it is based on an invalid theory of
human nature, which is more social and cooperative, less viciously egoistic,
than he makes it out to be. In the next century the 3rd Earl of
Shaftesbury would ask: had not the author of Leviathan “forgot to
mention Kindness, Friendship, Sociableness, Love of Company and Converse,
Natural affection, or anything of this kind?”[217]
We shall
come to this criticism in the next section, on Locke. Before that, however, it
is worth emphasising what appears to the present writer to be the permanent
truth of Hobbes’ theory of international relations, which has particular
relevance to the modern arguments about the sovereignty of, for example,
member-states of the European Union or the United Nations – the truth, namely
that sovereignty is an absolute, not a relative concept.
This truth
can be clearly seen if we compare the political sovereignty of states to the
free will of individual human beings. A person either has free will or he does
not. His will may be weak, it may be constrained by external circumstances or
illness; but as long as the person is a person he must be acknowledged to have
free will. In the same way, a state – be it monarchical, aristocratic or
democratic – either has sovereignty or it does not. Its sovereignty can be
constrained or weakened by other states or external circumstances; but it
cannot be “pooled” or diluted as long as it remains a state worthy of the name.
The proof that a state is sovereign is its ability to wage wars; for the act of
waging war is the act of enforcing a command upon another state or of saying
“no” to another’s state’s command.
Another
very important consequence of Hobbes’ theory is his refusal of any share in
power to the Church. “Where others,” writes A.L. Smith, “reserved a coordinate
or even superior share of Divine Right to another body, the Church, Hobbes will
have no such dualism; no man can serve two masters, the civil sovereign is also
the supreme pastor”. This follows from the fact that Leviathan is “our mortal
God”, and that “there must be in every State a sovereign power, illimitable,
indivisible, unalienable; that the attempt to separate it, to set it up against
itself, to create a ‘balance of powers’ or a ‘mixed government’, is chimerical”.[218]
“Even Henry VIII is a pale shadow beside the spiritual supremacy in which the Leviathan
is enthroned. There are only two positions in history which rise to this
height; the position of a Caliph, the viceregent of Allah, with the book on his
knees that contains all law as well as all religion and all morals; and the
position of the Greek poliV where heresy was treason where the State gods and no other gods
were the citizens’ gods, and the citizen must accept the State’s standard of
virtue.”[219]
Hobbes’ theory, while admired on the
continent, elicited horror and loathing in England (Leviathan was burned
at Oxford in 1683). One reason was its implicit amoralism and irreligion, which
was unacceptable in a country that, for all its recent rebelliousness against
Church and State, was still deeply religious. For Hobbes “had made short work
of the ‘power ecclesiastical’, he had identified bishops with elders, and
reduced their office to teaching, referred their appointment to the civil
sovereign, and left their sustenance to voluntary contributions. All dogmas,
except that of the Divinity of our Lord, he had declared unessential; the idea
of life in another world than this earth, and the idea of a kingdom of God in
opposition to earthly kingdoms, he had rejected. His analysis of good and evil
into appetite and aversion, seemed to sap the foundations of morality. Above
all, his caustic humour, his malicious insinuations, were still harder to bear.
His whole tone and manner provoked more resentment than even his matter.”[220]
Another
problem with Leviathan was its perceived support for absolutism.
Actually, Hobbes’ sovereign need not have been only one man theoretically, he
was arguing only that there could be only one sovereign power in a State, not
that that sovereign power had to be a king or dictator, as opposed to an
aristocratic clique or the people as a whole. However, it was obvious that the
theory tended towards absolutism. But absolutism, as well as being behind the
times philosophically - for “even before the Reformation,” as Russell writes,
“theologians tended to believe in setting limits to kingly power”[221]
– was unsatisfactory to the capitalist landowning class in another, more
important way: it threatened to deprive them of their complete control of their
property. Of course, an absolutist government is not necessarily opposed to the
interests of capital; it may allow the capitalists to enrich themselves, while
retaining political power for itself. But it would clearly make more sense to
install from the beginning a constitutional monarch more favourable to landed
interests. Only the real sovereign now would be, not the monarch (since he is
bound by a constitution imposed by others), but a capitalist landowning
oligarchy meeting in parliament.
This end
was achieved de facto by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which
overthrew the Catholic absolutism of James II and brought to power the
Protestant constitutional monarchy of William III. Its de jure justification
was worked out by John Locke, who set out to prove that James had broken some
kind of agreement with the people, and so had been rightly overthrown, whereas
William was abiding by its terms and so should be obeyed. What was needed was
to retain the theory of the social contract (for Filmer’s patriarchalism forged
“chains for all mankind” by justifying absolutist monarchies), but rework it so
as to bring the monarch within the contract (impossible according to Hobbes),
make parliament the real sovereign, and bring God back into the picture, if
only for decency’s sake.
Like
Hobbes, Locke began his argument by positing an original State of Nature in
which all men were equal and free. But, unlike Hobbes, he considered that this
original state was not one of total anarchy and vicious egoism - might is not
right, but of some social cohesion, with men “living together according to
reason, without a common superior on earth”. “Though this (State of Nature) be
a state of liberty,” he wrote, “yet it is not a state of licence.”[222]
For, in
addition to the State of Nature, Locke also posited a “Law of Nature” inspired
by “the infinitely wise Maker” and identifiable with “reason”, which instructed
men not to infringe on the freedom of other men. Thus “the state of nature has
a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is
that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal
and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or
possessions.”[223]
In the
State of Nature every man owns the land that he tills and the product of that
labour: “Though the earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet
every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but
himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are
properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath
provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it
something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property”.[224]
The
critical words here are “property” and “possessions”. For Locke’s second aim,
after the justification of the overthrow of James II and enthronment of William
III, was to make sure that the constitutional monarchy was in the hands of the
men of property, the aristocratic landowning class. And so those who signed the
original social contract, in his view, were not all the men of the kingdom, but
those who had substantial property and therefore the right to vote for members
of parliament in elections. For “the great and chief end of men uniting into
commonwealths,” he wrote, “is the preservation of their property.”[225]
The Natural
Rights, as Locke calls them, are based on God’s own word. For, writes McClelland,
interpreting Locke, He “means us to live at his pleasure, not another’s,
therefore no-one may kill me (except in self-defence, which includes war); God
commands me to labour in order to sustain and live my life, therefore I have
the right to the liberty to do so; and God must mean what I take out of mere
nature to be mine, therefore a natural right to property originates in the
command to labour: the land I plough, and its fruits are mine. Man, being made
in God’s image and therefore endowed with natural reason, could easily work out
that this was so, and they have Holy Writ to help them.
“Men’s
natural reason also tells them two other very important things. First, it tells
each man that all other men have the same rights as he. All rights have duties
attached to them (a right without a corresponding duty, or set of duties, is a
privilege, not a right, a sinecure for instance, which carries with it the
right to a salary without the duty to work for it). Rational men are capable of
working this out for themselves, and they easily recognise that claiming
Natural Rights requires that they respect the exercise of those same rights in
others, and it is this reciprocity which makes the State of Nature social. If
everybody recognises naturally that Natural Rights are universal or they cease
to be natural, then plainly this implies that men could live together without
government. That is what Locke really means when he says that the State of
Nature is a state of liberty, not licence.
“However,
the State of Nature is still the state of fallen man. Sinful men, alas, will
sometimes invade the Natural Rights of others. From this it follows that men
have another Natural Right, the right of judgement (and punishment) when they
think their Natural Rights have been violated by others. This right is not a
substantive right, a right to something;
rather it is an energising right, or a right which gives life to the other
Natural Rights. Rights are useless unless there is a right to judge when rights
have been violated, and so the right to judgement completes the package of
Natural Rights.”[226]
The purpose
of the state is to protect Natural Rights. It follows that “society is natural
while the state is artificial. Human nature being composed as it is of certain Natural
Rights which rational men recognise that they and others possess, society
arises spontaneously. It follows that, because society is prior to the state,
both logically and as a matter of history, it is up to society to decide what
the state shall be like, and not the state which shall decided what society
shall be like. This insistence [on] the separation of society from the state,
and a society’s priority over the state, was to become the bedrock of the
doctrine which came to be known as liberalism. Put another way, Locke thinks
that what the state is like is a matter (within limits) of rational reflection
and choice, but society is a given about which men have no choice. Society is
what God meant it to be, capitalist and naturally harmonious, except that in
the real world societies tend to become a bit ragged at the edges. Offences
against Natural and positive law, murder, theft, fraud and riot for instance,
happen from time to time, and men need the special agency of the state to cope
with them.”[227]
The social
contract consists in men giving up “to the state their right to judgement when
their Natural Rights have been violated. Of course, a Natural Right being God’s
gift, part of what it is to be a human being, it is impossible to alienate it
completely. At the moment of contract, Locke’s men give up the absolute minimum
for the maximum gain: they entrust the state with their right to judgement on
the condition that the state uses the right to judge when Natural Rights have been violated in order to allow
men to enjoy their other Natural Rights, to life, liberty and property, more
abundantly.
“…. Men
are capable of making a collective agreement with their rulers in the State of
Nature, either in the very beginning or in some future, imaginable emergency
when government has collapsed. In Locke’s account of the matter it is easy to
see when and why government would in fact collapse: when it violates, or is
seen to violate, enough [of] men’s Natural Rights for them justifiably to rebel
by taking back to themselves the right of judgement because government has
betrayed its trust and misused it. Men therefore have a right of rebellion, and
perhaps even a moral duty to rebel, if government begins to frustrate God’s
purpose for the world. The moment for rebellion happens when enough men are
prepared to repudiate their contract with their rulers and fall back on the
original contract of society. In all events, the Lockian Sovereign is party to
the contract to set up government. The king is king on terms.”[228]
Locke was
scornful of Hobbes’ idea that despotism was necessary to preserve peace. To
think that men should seek a peaceful life by surrendering all their power (and
property) to an absolute sovereign, he wrote, “is to think that Men are so foolish
that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or
Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions.”[229]
Therefore government should not be concentrated in the hands of one man or
institution; it should be composed of a legislative power – parliament, elected
every few years by the property-owning people, and an executive power – the
monarchy. The executive and legislative powers must be kept separate, as a
check on each other, to prevent the abuse of power.
Locke’s
disciple in the next century, Montesquieu, developed this idea in his famous Spirit
of the Laws. “Constant experience shows us that every man invested with
power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go… To
prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power
should be a check to power. A government may be so constituted, as no man shall
be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to
abstain from things which the law permits.”[230]
Thus in order to preserve liberty, said Montesquieu, it is necessary to
separate and balance the three arms of government, the executive, the
legislative and the judicial.
The
monarchy is necessary, according to Locke, because only such a power can make
laws valid and effective. But the king is not above the laws passed by
parliament, and is to that extent subject to parliament. If the king
transgresses the laws by, for example, failing to summon the legislative at the
proper times, or by setting up “his own arbitrary authority in place of the
laws”, then he can be resisted by force. Thus the king can reign, but he cannot
really rule, in Locke’s system. As Smith puts it, “Locke put government in its
proper position as a trustee for the ends for which society exists; now a
trustee has great discretionary powers and great freedom from interference, but
is also held strictly accountable, and under a properly drawn deed nothing is
simpler than the appointment of new trustees. For after all, the ultimate trust
remains in the people, in Locke’s words; and this is the sovereign people, the
irrevocable depository of all powers.”[231]
Even the
legislative power of parliament, “though its enactments superseded the
unwritten law of nature, could not be ‘absolutely arbitrary over the lives and
fortunes of the people’. It was bound to rule by ‘promulgating standing laws’
and not ‘extemporary arbitrary decrees’. It could not take away any man’s
property without his own consent, though Locke regarded taxation by a
representative assembly as conforming to this principle.”[232]
This would
appear to allow the people to rebel not only against the king, but also against
parliament. The problem is: where to draw the line? In other words, when is the
use of force against the government just and lawful? When “estates, liberties,
lives are in danger, and perhaps religion too”, was Locke’s answer. For “the
end of government is the good of mankind, and which is best for mankind, that
the people should always exposed to the boundless will of tyranny or that the
rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed? Upon the forfeiture of their
rulers, [power] reverts to the society and the people have a right to act as
supreme and place it in a new form or new hands, as they think good.”[233]
In other words, if the people feel that their Natural Rights have been violated
by king or parliament, then in theory they should be able to declare the
contract broken and take power back from their representatives – by force, if
need be. For “the Community may be said in this respect to be always the
Supreme Power”.[234]
Thus if the
prince seeks to “enslave, or destroy them”, the people are entitled to “appeal
to heaven”. But “since Heaven does not make explicit pronouncements,” writes
Russell, “this means, in effect, that a decision can only be reached by
fighting, since it is assumed that Heaven will give the victory to the better
cause. Some such view is essential to any doctrine that divides governmental
power.”[235]
But the
experience of the English revolution and Locke’s own conservative instincts led
him to countenance revolution only in extreme cases. Otherwise the right to rebel would “lay a
perpetual foundation for disorder”. “Great mistakes in the ruling part… will be
born by the People without muting or murmur”, and recourse would be had to
force only after “a long trains of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices”. For
“people are not so easily got out of their old forms as some are apt to
suggest”.[236]
“’Overturning the constitution and frame of any just government’ is ‘the
greatest crime a man is capable of’, but ‘either ruler or subject’ who forcibly
invades ‘the rights of either prince or people’ is guilty of it. ‘Whosoever
uses force without right, as everyone does in society who does it without law,
puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it… every
one has a right to defend himself and to resist the aggressor.’”[237]
So what is
the place Locke ascribes to religion in State and society? “Religion is a man’s
private concern, his belief is part of himself, and he is the sole judge of the
means to his own salvation. Persecution only creates hypocrites, while free
opinion is the best guarantee of truth. Most ceremonies are indifferent; Christianity
is simple; it is only theologians who have encrusted it with dogma.
Sacerdotalism, ritual, orthodoxy, do not constitute Christianity if they are
divorced from charity. Our attempts to express the truth of religion must
always be imperfect and relative, and cannot amount to certainty… Church and
State can be united if the Church is made broad enough and simple enough, and
the State accepts the Christian basis. Thus religion and morality might be
reunited, sectarianism would disappear with sacerdotalism; the Church would
become the nation organised for goodness…”[238]
Such
lukewarmness would hardly have satisfied a truly religious nation; but from
1688 England rapidly ceased to be religious. In general, Locke’s system
represents an uneasy compromise between older, religious ways of thinking and
the new rationalism. On the one hand, he wanted the authority that an
established church and an anointed king gives in order to protect property and
prevent the revolution that had so nearly destroyed everything a generation
before. On the other hand, he wanted to give the people the right to overthrow
a tyrant. But it is clearly the secular interests of his class, rather than
religious feeling or theology, that motivates his thinking.
A Critique of Social Contract
Theory
“In all its
forms,” writes Roger Scruton, “the social contract enshrines a fundamental
liberal principle, namely, that, deep down, our obligations are self-created
and self-imposed. I cannot be bound by the law, or legitimately constrained by
the sovereign, if I never chose to be under the obligation to obey. Legitimacy
is conferred by the citizen, and not by the sovereign, still less by the
sovereign’s usurping ancestors. If we cannot discover a contract to be bound by
the law, then the law is not binding.”[239]
As Walicki puts it: “The argument that society was founded on reason and
self-interest could of course be used to sanction rebellion against any forms
of social relations that could not prove their rationality or utility.”[240]
As a perfectly natural consequence, therefore, the rationalisation of politics
represented by social contract theory led to that terrible triumph of
irrationality, the French revolution…
A basic
objection to social contract theory put forward by Hegel is that this original
premise, that “our obligations are self-created and self-imposed”, is false. We
do not choose the family we are born in, or the state to which we belong, and
yet both family and state impose undeniable obligations on us. Of course, we
can rebel against such obligations; the son can choose to say that he owes
nothing to his father. And yet he would not even exist without his father; and
without his father’s nurture and education he would not even be capable of
making choices. Thus we are “hereditary bondsmen”, to use Byron’s phrase. In
this sense we live in a cycle of freedom and necessity: the free choices of our
ancestors limit our own freedom, while our choices limit those of our children.
The idea of a social contract entered into in a single generation is therefore
not only a historical myth (as many social contract theorists concede); it is
also a dangerous myth. It is a myth that distorts the very nature of society,
which cannot be conceived as existing except over several generations.
But if
society exists over several generations, all generations should be taken into
account in drawing up the contract. Why should only one generation’s interests
be respected? For, as Scruton continues, interpreting the thought of Edmund
Burke, “the social contract prejudices the interests of those who are not alive
to take part in it: the dead and the unborn. Yet they too have a claim, maybe
an indefinite claim, on the resources and institutions over which the living so
selfishly contend. To imagine society as a contract among its living members,
is to offer no rights to those who go before and after. But when we neglect
those absent souls, we neglect everything that endows law with its authority,
and which guarantees our own survival. We should therefore see the social order
as a partnership, in which the dead and the unborn are included with the
living.”[241]
“Every
people,” writes Tikhomirov, “is, first of all, a certain historical whole, a
long row of consecutive generations, living over hundreds or thousands of years
in a common life handed down by inheritance. In this form a people, a nation,
is a certain socially organic phenomenon with more or less clearly expressed
laws of inner development… But political intriguers and the democratic tendency
does not look at a people in this form, as a historical, socially organic
phenomenon, but simply in the form of a sum of the individual inhabitants of the country. This is the second point
of view, which looks on a nation as a simple association of people united into
a state because they wanted that, living according to laws which they like, and
arbitrarily changing the laws of their life together when it occurs to them.”[242]
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow criticised social contract theory as
follows: “It is obligatory, say the wise men of this world, to submit to social
authorities on the basis of a social contract, by which people were united into
society, by a general agreement founding government and submission to it for
the general good. If they think that it is impossible to found society
otherwise than on a social contract, - then why is it that the societies of the
bees and ants are not founded on it? And is it not right that those who break
open honeycombs and destroy ant-hills should be entrusted with finding in them…
a charter of bees and ants? And until such a thing is done, nothing prevents us
from thinking that bees and ants create their societies, not by contract, but
by nature, by an idea of community implanted in their nature, which the Creator
of the world willed to be realised even at the lowest level of His creatures.
What if an example of the creation of a human society by nature were found?
What, then, is the use of the fantasy of a social contract? No one can argue
against the fact that the original form of society is the society of the
family. Thus does not the child obey the mother, and the mother have power over
the child, not because they have contracted between themselves that she should
feed him at the breast, and that he should shout as little as possible when he
is swaddled? What if the mother should suggest too harsh conditions to the
child? Will not the inventors of the social contract tell him to go to another
mother and make a contract with her about his upbringing? The application of
the social contract in this case is as fitting as it is fitting in other cases
for every person, from the child to the old man, from the first to the last.
Every human contract can have force only when it is entered into with
consciousness and good will. Are there many people in society who have heard of
the social contract? And of those few who have heard of it, are there many who
have a clear conception of it? Ask, I will not say the simple citizen, but the
wise man of contracts: when and how did he enter into the social contract? When
he was an adult? But who defined this time? And was he outside society before
he became an adult? By means of birth? This is excellent. I like this thought,
and I congratulate every Russian that he was able – I don’t know whether it was
from his parents or from Russia herself, - to agree that he be born in powerful
Russia… The only thing that we must worry about is that neither he who was born
nor his parents thought about this contract in their time, and so does not
referring to it mean fabricating it? And consequently is not better, as well as
simpler, both in submission and in other relationships towards society, to
study the rights and obligations of a real birth instead of an invented
contract – that pipe-dream of social life, which, being recounted at the wrong
time, has produced and continues to produce material woes for human society.
‘Transgressors have told me fables, but they are not like Thy law, O Lord’ (Psalm
118.85).”[243]
In spite of
these contradictions, social contract theory has remained the dominant model of
society in Anglo-Saxon countries. Thus probably the most influential
contemporary work of political philosophy, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice,
is in essence a variation on Lockean social contract theory with one or two
original twists. One of these is the idea that people enter into the social
contract from a so-called “original position” in which they are covered with a
“veil of ignorance”. That is, “they are denied knowledge of everything which
makes them who they are: their class, skills, age, gender, sexuality, religious
views and conceptions of the good life. Rawls argues that the principles which
these people would choose to regulate their relations with one another are
definitive of justice… The veil of ignorance is meant to ensure that our views
on justice are not distorted by our own interests. 'If a man knew that he was
wealthy, he might find it rational to advance the principle that various taxes
for welfare measures be counted unjust; if he knew that he was poor, he would
most likely propose the contrary principle…’”[244]
This theory
escapes the objection that people entering into a social contract are simply
choosing their self-interest. It does this by completely abstracting from the
concrete human being with his concrete desires and interests. Thus not only is
the original social contract a historical myth in the strictest sense of the
word: those who enter into it are not even human beings!
Particularly to be noted is the idea that such abstract “human beings”
must be postulated to have no religious views – because Rawls champions the
abstract idea of human rights as against all “perfectionist” or communitarian
theories “which look to the state to advance a common value system… Rawls
contends that the state should remain neutral between different conceptions of
how to live, simply safeguarding the freedoms which allow us to live according
to our own conception of what makes it valuable.”[245]
Rawls’ teacher Locke had argued that religion was a private matter, and that
people should be allowed as far as possible to mind their own business; but he
drew the line at Catholics and atheists. Rawls goes further in making the State
completely value-free (we are tempted to say: value-less) – and Catholics and
atheists are equally welcome!
Thus social
contract theory, while not explicitly anti-religious, actually leads, in its
modern variants, to the purest secularism: the original social contract must be
postulated to be between irreligious people and to lead to a state that is
strictly irreligious, relegating religion entirely to the private sphere. But
such a state will be accepted only by a society for which religion has ceased
to be the primary focus of life, and has become merely one “interest” or “need”
among many others. Such a society was England after the English revolution.
French Absolutism
So far in
this chapter we have reviewed the rise of liberalism in the countries of
Northern Europe and North America. For this was the wave of the future, and
these ideas would in time conquer almost the whole world. However, the
seventeenth century was, in political and cultural terms, the century of France;
so it is to the more conservative society of France that we now turn.
If we
compare the English monarchy in the 16th, 17th and 18th
centuries with the French one in the same period, we see a striking contrast.
In England a powerful monarchy becomes apparently stronger and stronger,
defeating the most powerful despotism of the day in the Spanish Armada, only to
be gradually overcome by the wealthier classes and reduced, finally, to the
position of symbolic head of an essentially aristocratic society. The vital
changes here, as we have seen, were the rejection of the papacy and the
dissolution of the monasteries, which caused both the temporary increase in the
monarchy’s power and its longer term descent into impotence, especially after
Charles I’s loss of the power of taxation.
In France,
on the other hand, the reverse takes place: a weak monarchy besieged by a
semi-independent nobility within and the united Hapsburg domains of Germany,
Italy and Spain from without, gradually recovers to reach a pinnacle of fame
and power under the sun king, Louis XIV. The vital factors here were: (i) the
retention of Catholicism as the official religion, (ii) the monarchy’s
retention, in accordance with its Concordat with the Vatican, of control of the
Church’s appointments and lands, and (iii), last but not least, the monarchy’s
retention of the power of general taxation.
Both
countries had consolidated their internal unity by the end of the period, but
in different ways that gave to each the complex character of the modern
nation-state. In England, the monarchy, after first taking alternate sides in
the religious conflict, eventually (from 1688) firmly adopted the Anglican
middle ground. In France, on the other hand, the monarchy took the Catholic
side (Paris, as Henry IV said when he converted to Catholicism, was worth a
mass), from which it did not waver until the revolution of 1789. In England,
while the Protestant aristocracy first persecuted and then tolerated the
diminished and tamed Catholic minority, the latter’s eventual absorption within
the State left a permanently traditionalist stamp on the English national
character. In France, on the other hand, while the Catholic monarchy first
tolerated and then expelled the Protestant (Huguenot) minority, the latter’s
cultural heritage left a permanent rationalist stamp on the French national
character.
The
problems of keeping the nation-state together when it is being torn apart by
religious passions was discussed in Jean Bodin’s Six Books on the Republic
(1576). Bodin was one of the earliest apologists of the absolutist monarchy in
modern times. He believed that such a monarchy was necessary in France to
balance the claims of the nobles and the Huguenots in the interests of the
state as a whole. He allowed only one check on monarchy – the Estates General,
an assembly representing clergy, nobles and commoners which met irregularly to
vote new taxes and of which he was the secretary in 1576. Ironically, it was
the Estates General that brought down the monarchy in 1789…
“Bodin,”
writes McClelland, “is probably the first important political thinker to offer
what is recognisably a modern theory of sovereignty, and in essence this theory
is very simple: a well-ordered state needs an absolute and legitimate sovereign
centre. Bodin’s motives for saying that are much more intelligible than his
arguments. We can see that the France of the sixteenth century civil wars,
those wars being based on differences of religious opinion, needed a
strengthening of the monarchy if France was to survive as a political
community. By harking back to Aristotelian precedents, Bodin took the theory of
sovereignty out of Divine Right theology and tied it to a view of what a
political community needed in its own best interest. Bodin is impeccably
classical in his recognition that states are typically destroyed by faction,
and the fact that these factions are religious factions does not alter this
truth at all… Bodin’s defence of sovereignty is really a defence of rule
against faction. He defends the division of Christendom’s individual kingdoms
into Protestant and Catholic as an accomplished fact. The problem is then how
it can ever be that a realm divided into contending religious factions, each of
which would coerce the other if it could, could possibly live at peace with
itself and prosper…
“For all
his Aristotelianism, Bodin recognises that the ancient city-state cannot be
identified with the sixteenth-century realm of France. That is why the state’s
law must be supreme over other potentially competing systems of law, whether
law means manners, morals, customs, or the law which defines minority or local
privilege… Sovereignty is absolute and undivided. All surviving law-bound
corporations – religious bodies, municipalities, commercial companies and
guilds – owe their rights and privileges to the sovereign. It follows,
therefore, that estates and parliaments exist only to advise the sovereign, and
it also follows that the sovereign cannot be bound to take their advice… Bodin
was anti-feudal where competing jurisdictions got in the way of the exercise of
sovereignty. Far from thinking that the king’s position was at the head of a
hierarchy whose justification was the hierarchy itself, Bodin looked at the
matter from the top down, and attempted to show that all subordinate
authorities derived from the supreme sovereign.”[246]
The same
tendency to place the interests of the nation-state above those of the faith is
discernible in the career of the greatest French statesman of the period, and
the architect of her rise to pre-eminence in Europe, Cardinal Richelieu. What
would have been more natural than for a powerful and sincerely believing
Catholic Churchman such as Richelieu to work, in concert with the great
Catholic Hapsburg power of Spain and Germany, for the triumph of Counter-Reformation
Catholicism in Europe? But that would have meant subordinating the interests of
the French monarchy to those of the Hapsburgs. And this Richelieu was not
prepared to do. For “he had no zeal,” writes Belloc, “such as had so many men
of his time, for the triumph of Catholicism; he did not consider Europe as a
battlefield between tradition and revolution in doctrine and philosophy. He
considered the conflict between them mainly as one by the right manipulation of
which the interests of the French monarchy might be advanced. It is probable
that he hardly understood, he certainly never yielded to, the instinctive
feeling [of] all around him – that unless French policy were whole-heartedly
Catholic in that critical moment 1620-40, Europe would never be reunited. He
presumably thought the ultimate reunion of Europe, that is, the ultimate
triumph of Catholicism, certain, and would not, to accelerate it, sacrifice one
detail of his policy. He abandoned, and at last combated, the effort to restore
Catholicism throughout Europe. He devoted himself to the consolidation and
aggrandisement of the nation he governed. Hence toleration at home and alliance
with Protestantism abroad against the Catholic Powers. Hence his nickname of
‘the Cardinal of the Huguenots’. Hence the worship by those who accept the new
religion of Nationalism and have forgotten, or think impossible, the idea of
[Roman Catholic] Christendom.”[247]
Thus just
as the idea of natural law preached by the Jesuits Las Casas and De Mariana,
Suarez and Bellarmine, was the worm in the apple of the theology of Catholic Absolutism, so the nationalism so successfully
practised by Cardinal Richelieu was the blow that finally put paid to the politics of Catholic Absolutism. Already
the attempts by Francis I to limit the power of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles
V in the middle of the sixteenth century had injured Catholic unity in the
vital first stage of the struggle with Protestantism. Now, when Catholicism had
reorganized itself at the Council of Trent and was back on the offensive in
Germany especially, it was Richelieu’s anti-Catholic diplomacy, driving a
nationalist wedge into the united internationalist offensive of the Hapsburg
Catholic monarchs against the Protestant princes, that guaranteed the survival
of German Protestantism. As the Pope said on hearing of his death: “If there be
a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If there be
none, why, he lived a successful life.”[248]
The fruit
of Bodin’s theories and Richelieu’s politics was the reign of the Sun King,
Louis XIV, a true despot in that, like every despot, he tried to gain control
of two forces: the Church and the nobility. Like Ivan the Terrible in Russia,
Louis had only partial success in relation to the Church. But he tamed the
nobility – by means of tactics that were notably more subtle than Ivan’s.
“The
position of the French nobility,” writes Ridley, “had greatly changed during
the previous hundred years. In the sixteenth century the great noble houses of
Guise and Bourbon, with their power bases in eastern and south-west France, had
torn the kingdom apart by thirty years of civil war; and the fighting between
the nobility had started up again in the days of the Fronde, when Louis XIV was
a child. But when he came of age, and established his absolute royal authority,
he destroyed the political power of the nobles by bribing them to renounce it.
He encouraged them to come to his court at Versailles, to hold honorific and
well-paid sinecure offices – to carve for the King at dinner, or to attend his petit
levé when he dressed in the morning, and hand him his shirt, his
coat and his wig. He hoped that when the nobles were not engaged in these
duties at court, they would be staying in their great mansions in Paris. He
wished to prevent them as far as possible from living on their lands in the
country, where they could enrol their tenants in a private army and begin a new
civil war.
“The King
governed France through middle-class civil servants, who were mostly lawyers.
The provincial Parlements had limited powers, most of which were
judicial rather than legislative; but the King could veto all their decrees.
The government was administered by the intendants, who had absolute
authority in their districts, and were subject only to the directives of their
superiors, the surintendants, who were themselves subject only to the
King’s Council, where the King presided in person, and might either accept or
reject the advice given to him by his councillors.
“The nobles
had the privilege of having their seigneurial courts in which they exercised a
civil and a criminal jurisdiction over their tenants; but the presiding judges
in the seigneurial courts were the same middle-class lawyers who presided in
the King’s courts, which could on appeal override the decisions of the
seigneurial courts.”[249]
As for the
lower nobility, their energies were channelled into army service, in accordance
with their medieval conception of themselves as the warrior class. War
therefore became a constant feature of Louis’ reign, together with the
crippling burden of taxation that war brings. But this did not disturb the
nobility, who paid no taxes. Thus “the nobility developed a growing confidence
that their needs were best served within rather than against the state. This
compact would survive for as long as the élites remained sure that the
monarchy was protecting their vital interests.”[250]
The other
major estate of the land that needed to be controlled was the Church. Here
Louis had two aims: to make the Catholic Church in France a national, Gallican
Church under his dominion, and not the Pope’s; and to destroy the protected
state within the state that the Edict of Nantes (1594) had created for the
Protestant Huguenots. In this way he would have “one faith, one king, one law”.
“For thirty
years,” writes Norman Davies, “Louis was a true Gallican – packing the French
bishoprics with the relatives of his ministers, authorising the Declaration of
the Four Articles (1682), and provoking in 1687-8 an open rupture with the
Papacy. The Four Articles, the purest formulation of Gallican doctrine, were
ordered to be taught in all the seminaries and faculties of France:
1. The authority of the Holy
See is limited to spiritual matters.
2. The decisions of Church
Councils are superior to those of the Pope.
3. Gallican customs are
independent of Rome.
4. The Pope is not
infallible, except by consent of the universal Church.
But then, distressed by his isolation from the
Catholic powers, Louis turned tail. In 1693 he retracted the Four Articles, and
for the rest of his life gave unstinting support to the ultramontane [extreme
papist] faction…
“In his
policy towards the Protestants, Louis passed from passive discrimination
through petty harassment to violent persecution… [In 1685] the King revoked the
[Nantes] edict of toleration. Bishop Bossuet awarded him the epithet of the
‘New Constantine’. Up to a million of France’s most worthy citizens were forced
to submit or to flee amidst a veritable reign of terror…”[251]
Absolutism
reached its height under Louis XIV, who famously stated: “I am the State”, L’état, c’est moi. His most
determined opponent, the Dutch King William, said that Louis’ aim in Europe was
to establish “a universal monarch and a universal religion”.[252]
Louis’
philosophy was followed by his successor, Louis XV, who said: “It is in my
person alone that sovereign power resides… It is from me alone that my courts
derive their authority; and the plenitude of this authority, which they
exercise only in my name, remains always in me… It is to me alone that
legislative power belongs, without any dependence and without any division… The
whole public order emanates from me, and the rights and interests of the
nation… are necessarily joined with mine and rest only in my hands.”[253]
The
difference between Orthodox autocracy and Catholic (or any other kind of)
absolutism is that while the former welcomes and profits from the existence of
independent institutions, such as the Church, and institutions with limited
powers of self-government, such as provincial administrations or guilds, the
latter distrusts all other power bases and tries to destroy them. The result is
that, as the absolutism weakens (as weaken it must), institutions spring up to
fill the power vacuum which are necessarily opposed to the absolutist power and
try to weaken it further, leading to violent revolution. The art of true
monarchical government consists, not in ruling without support from other
institutions (for that is impossible in the long run), but in ruling with their
support and with their full and voluntary recognition of the supremacy of the
monarchy. Moreover, the supremacy of the monarchy must be recognised de jure,
and not merely de facto. When the majority of the people ceases to
believe that their monarch has the right to rule them, or when he believes that
his right to rule is limited by nothing except his own will, then his regime is
doomed, whatever the external trappings of its power.
As Guizot
writes: “By the very fact that this government had no other principle than
absolute power, and reposed upon no other base than this, its decline became
sudden and well merited. What France, under Louis XIV, essentially wanted, was
political institutions and forces, independent, subsisting of themselves, and,
in a word, capable of spontaneous action… The ancient French institutions, if
they merited that name, no longer existed: Louis XIV completed their ruin. He
took no care to endeavour to replace them by new institutions, they would have
cramped him, and he did not choose to be cramped. All that appeared conspicuous
at that period was will, and the action of central power. The government of
Louis XIV was a great fact, a fact powerful and splendid, but without roots… No
system can exist except by means of institutions. When absolute power has
endured, it has been supported by true institutions, sometimes by the division
of society into strongly distinct castes, sometimes by a system of religious
institutions. Under the reign of Louis XIV institutions were wanting to power
as well as to liberty… Thus we see the government helping on its own decay. It
was not Louis XIV alone who was becoming aged and weak at the end of his reign:
it was the whole absolute power. Pure monarchy was as much worn out in 1712 as
was the monarch himself: and the evil was so much the more grave, as Louis XIV
had abolished political morals as well as political institutions.”[254]
This view
of the importance of independent institutions, and especially of the Church, is
quite compatible with true monarchism, according to which sovereign power in
the State abides in the monarch alone. It must be sharply distinguished from
the view that sovereignty belongs to the people. This latter view became potent
only with the Protestant and liberal revolutions; and French absolutism fell
only after the ideas at the root of these revolutions had been popularised and
developed by the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
The Forerunners of the
Enlightenment
But the basic ideas of the philosophes
were already in vogue. Especially their attacks on Holy Scripture. Thus if
Protestantism began the process of Biblical criticism, it was the Dutch Jew
Spinoza who, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), argued that
it was necessary to approach the Bible in a scientific spirit, treating it as a
natural phenomenon like any other.
Seventeenth-century continental
rationalism also anticipated the eighteenth in political ideas – and without
any influence from Locke. Thus F.F. Willert writes: “Natural equality, nature
and her law, which is prior and superior to all civil enactments, the Social
Contract and the indefeasible sovereignty of the people – all these were
conceptions familiar to jurists and publicists and even to politicians before
the eighteenth century. That which is characteristic of the French authors of
that period is their faith in reason, and their conviction that, since all this
is amiss is due to imperfect institutions, all would speedily come right were
those imperfections remedied. This delusion was encouraged by the influence of
the classics, with their exaggerated faith in the power of the legislator. If
Lycurgus, by imposing a few rules of life, could turn men into Spartans, it must
be comparatively easy to turn Frenchmen into men. It was not yet a commonplace
that we ourselves, our characters, prejudices, and habits, as well as the laws
and institutions under which we live, are the result of a long process of
evolution. When this truth is half recognised, as it is by Rousseau himself,
who holds that the work done by Calvin in Geneva is impossible in a larger
State, the conclusion drawn is that things must go on as they are, and that
only partial palliatives are possible. The idea of progress, of gradual
emelioration, is never suggested, except by Turgot in a prize essay; and,
although Utopias are not wanting, no writer before the Revolution made any
systematic attempt to forecast the probably future of society, the direction in
which it would advance.
“We should far exceed our limits were we
to attempt to trace the history of the idea of nature, her rights, and her law,
from the Sophistic antithesis of nature and convention, from the doctrine of
the Stoics, popularised by Cicero and applied by the Roman lawyers, through the
writings of the theologians and jurists of the Middle Ages down to the days of
Grotius and Selden. But it must not be forgotten that many of what are called
the principles of 1789 were recognised and used as convenient weapons against
the authority of the Crown during the sixteenth century both by Catholics and
Huguenots; by none more emphatically than by the priest Boucher and the Jesuit
Mariana.[255]
“Men, said Boucher, are by nature free.
The people choose their prince and confer upon him their sovereignty; but they
who delegate their authority remain the superiors of their representative.
Civil law gives the ward a remedy against an unjust guardian; the King is the
guardian and patron of his people and may be deposed if he oppresses them. It
is the duty of subjects to resist a prince who violates God’s law, the
theological equivalent for the philosopher’s Law of Nature. Mariana, in his
celebrated apology for tyrannicide, also asserts that the derived authority of
the prince is subordinated to the popular sovereignty; for we cannot suppose
that all the members of the State would voluntarily have stripped themselves of
their rights and have handed themselves over unconditionally to the good-will
of an individual.
“Such doctrines, advanced by the
apologists of intolerance and persecution, the partisans of Spain, and the
enemies of national independence, were not attractive to the majority of
Frenchmen. Weary of civil strife and anarchy, of political and theological
controversy, disgusted by the selfish and unpatriotic intrigues of princes and
nobles, the people were led by a sound instinct to rally round the monarchy,
the centre and the symbol of national life. This conservatism is conspicuous in
the writings of that genius who more perhaps than any other undermined in
France the foundations of belief. Montaigne (1533-93) drew from his conviction,
that human reason cannot attain to truth, and that every argument may be met by
another equally cogent, the practical conclusion that to make reason arbiter in
social and political questions must lead to anarchy, and that therefore a wise
man will not by innovations weaken all laws and institutions. It is better, he
says, to endure a bad law than by altering it to impair the authority of habit.
The evils of change, the miseries of revolution, are indisputable; the
advantages of this or that form of government are debateable. Why encounter a
most certain evil for the sake of a most doubtful good?
“But, while Montaigne’s belief that truth
is unattainable led him also to deprecate any attack on the doctrines of the
Church, of which he believed the effects to be wholesome, he again and again
suggested a destructive criticism of those doctrines and placed the most deadly
arms in the hands of others, who like Voltaire, believed their effects to be
evil. The ‘Libertines’, as they were called, Epicurean free-thinkers and
sceptics, avowed followers of Montaigne, one of the best known and last of whom
was Saint-Évremond (1613c.-1703), the friend of Ninon de
l’Enclos, continued the tradition of incredulity during the seventeenth
century. They held faith to be the negation of reason and that we should follow
our natural impulses and instincts. Rightly consulted and understood our nature
is a law to itself. But it was from Bayle (1646-1706), and not from them, that
Voltaire and the other assailants of orthodoxy and tradition borrowed their
most effective weapons.
“There may, at first sight, appear to be
but little of the spirit of the eighteenth century in Bayle’s writings. Like
Montaigne he rejects the authority of reason, in which alone the ‘philosophers’
believed; and unlike Montaigne, who holds that if little better than animals we
are little worse, and as prone to virtue as to vice, he maintains with Pascal
that man’s nature is essentially evil. Virtue is a perpetual struggle of will
against natural instincts; and the history of civilisation is, according to
him, the history of man’s successful efforts to overcome and rise above his
nature. As for a golden age, that, he asserts, must be sought,not prior to
civil society, but prior to creation; for then, and then only, pain and sorrow,
moral and physical evil, were unknown.
“In politics, moreover, Bayle was a timid
conservative, wholly averse from revolutionary principles. Yet his Dictionary
was the storehouse from which the philosophers of the following generation
derived their method and no small part of their ideas and their facts. The
irreverent banter or ironical reverence with which the most solemn subjects are
treated, the skill with which the reader is insensibly led to the conviction
that he is far less certain about things than he imagined, the insidious
suggestion that, although all reason is against such a creed, it is perhaps as
well to believe in God, in Providence, and in immortality – if you are fool
enough – all this in Bayle breathes the very spirit of ‘philosophism’. The
method of the Encyclopédie as described by Diderot is the
method of Bayle’s Dictionary. ‘Articles dealing with respectable
prejudices must expound them deferentially; the edifice of clay must be
shattered by referring the reader to other articles in which the opposite
truths are established on sound principles. This method of enlightening the
reader has an immediate influence on those who are quick of apprehension, an
indirect and latent influence on all.’ It was from Bayle that writers, anxious
not to give too sudden a shock to prejudice or to avoid consequences unpleasant
to themselves, learnt the art of suggesting the most extreme conclusions from
seemingly innocent premises. Yet one liberal principle was openly advocated by
the cautious and conservative Bayle – that of toleration. His Commentaire
philosophique sur le Compelle Intrare was published in 1685, three years
before Locke’s Letters on Toleration. Free thought is, he argues, a
natural right, since neither religious creeds nor philosophic theory admit of
demonstration, but are matters of conjecture. Nor is it dangerous to allow one
to exercise this right, for even an atheist is not necessarily a bad citizen.
Society could exist without religion…”[256]
The Idea of Religious
Toleration
The idea of
religious toleration propounded by Locke and Bayle appeared as the era of the
wars of religion was coming to an end. Of course, some relaxation of religious
persecution was only to be expected, when in Germany, for example, as a result
of the Thirty Years War, between a third and a half of the population lay dead.[257]
No society can continue to take such losses without disappearing altogether.
Believers
on both sides of the conflict were exhausted. They longed for a rest from
religious passions and the opportunity to rebuild their shattered economies in
peace. It was as a result of this cooling of religious passions, and rekindling
of commercial ones, that the idea of religious toleration was born.
Or rather, reborn.
For even the fiercest of ancient despotisms of the past had gone through phases
of religious toleration – for example, the Roman empire in the late third
century. And the first Christian emperor, St. Constantine the Great, who is
unjustly blamed by many Protestants for introducing Christian intolerance into
the State, declared: “It is one thing to undertake the contest for immortality
voluntarily, another to compel others to do it likewise through fear of
punishment.”[258]
Non-violence to the persons of heretics
combined with mercilessness to the heresies themselves was especially
emphasised by St. John Chrysostom, who wrote: “Christians above all men are
forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force… It is necessary to
make a man better not by force but by persuasion. We neither have authority
granted us by law to restrain sinners, nor, if it were, should we know how to
use it, since God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by
force, but by choice.”[259]
Again, Hieromonk Patapios writes: “As we can see from the many occurrences of
the phrase ‘stop the mouths of the heretics’ in his writings, St. John showed
not the slightest indulgence towards false teachings; indeed, much of his life
as a preacher was devoted to combatting such heretics as the Eunomians, the
Judaizers, and the Manichaeans. However, he was resolutely opposed to the use of
violence by the authorities to subdue heretics. And it is this reservation of
his that must be carefully understood, if one is to grasp what may seem to be a
contradictory view of heretics. He knew from pastoral experience that heretics
were far more likely to be turned aside from their errors by prayer: ‘And if
you pray for the Heathens, you ought of course to pray for Heretics also, for
we are to pray for all men, and not to persecute. And this is good also for
another reason, as we are partakers of the same nature, and God commands and
accepts benevolence towards one another’ (Homilies on the First Epistle to
St. Timothy, 7). Near the end of this homily on the dangers of
anathematizing others, he says that ‘we must anathematize heretical doctrines
and refute impious teachings, from whomsoever we have received them, but show
mercy to the men who advocate them and pray for their salvation.’ In other
words, we must love the heretic, but hate the heresy.”[260]
The first
manifesto in favour of toleration was penned by Sir Thomas More. This may seem
paradoxical, for More, as we have seen, was a martyr for papal supremacy,
burned a few heretics himself, and wrote a blueprint for a communist state in
his Utopia. However, Utopia contains the following interesting
argument in favour of toleration: “For King Utopus, even at the first beginning
hearing that the inhabitants of the land were before his coming thither at
continual dissension and strife among themselves for their religions,
perceiving also that this common dissension (whiles every several sect took
several parts in fighting for his country) was the only occasion of his
conquest over them all, as soon as he had gotten the victory, first of all made
a decree that it should be lawful for every man to favour and follow what
religion he would, and that he might do the best he could to bring other to his
opinion, so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly, and soberly, without
hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against others. If he could not
by fair and gentle speech induce them unto his opinion, yet he should use no
kind of violence, and refrain from displeasant and seditious words. To him that
would vehemently and fervently in this cause strive and contend was decreed
banishment or bondage.
“This law
did King Utopus make, not only for the maintenance of peace, which he saw
through continual contention and mortal hatred utterly extinguished, but also
because he thought this decree should make for the furtherance of religion…
Furthermore, though there be one religion which alone is true, and all other
vain and superstitious, yet did he well foresee (so that the matter were
handled with reason and sober modesty) that the truth of its own power would at
the last issue out and come to light. But if contention and debate in that
behalf should continually be used, as the worst men be most obstinate and
stubborn and in their evil opinion most constant, he perceived that then the
best and holiest religion would be trodden underfoot and destroyed by most vain
superstitions, even as good corn is by thorns and weeds overgrown and choked.”[261]
More seems
to be hovering here between two contrary propositions: that free debate will
ultimately lead to the triumph of truth (“the truth of its own power would at
the last issue out and come to light”), and that this freedom will used by the
worst men for the triumph of heresy (“then the best and holiest religion would
be trodden underfoot”). Not only in his time, but for nearly two hundred years
thereafter, it would be the second proposition that would be believed by the
majority of men. However, the beginning of a politics of toleration can be seen
in Germany in 1555, when the bitter struggle between Catholicism and
Lutheranism was brought to an end by the Peace of Augsburg, which enshrined the
cuius regio eius religio formula: the religion of a country, whether
Catholic or Lutheran, was determined by the faith of its ruler. This Peace may
not have been much comfort to a Catholic living in a Lutheran state, or to a
Lutheran living in a Catholic state, but it least recognised a plurality of
religions in Germany as a whole.
Then, after
the still bitterer Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 modified
this framework further to allow Calvinism as a third religious alternative for
rulers, acknowledging that “subjects whose religion differs from that of their
prince are to have equal rights with his other subjects” (V. 35).[262]
As many have recognised, this was a landmark in political history. The goal was
no longer unanimity, but unity – or rather, an agreement to “live
and let live”…
And yet the
idea of religious toleration had not yet penetrated the popular consciousness.
As late as 1646 Thomas Edwards wrote: “Religious toleration is the greatest of
all evils; it will bring in first scepticism in doctrine and looseness of life,
then atheism”.[263]
It was the English Revolution and the triumph of Cromwell that finally pushed
the idea into the forefront of political debate. For, as Winstanley wrote in The
Law of Freedom (1651), Cromwell “became the main stickler for liberty of
conscience without any limitation. This toleration became his masterpiece in
politics; for it procured him a party that stuck close in all cases of
necessity.”[264]
Cromwell’s supporter, Milton, produced a whole tract, Areopagitica (1646)
in favour of freedom of speech and the abolition of censorship. For “how”, he
asked ironically, “shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unlesse we
can conferr upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the
Land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”[265]
But, as
Barzun writes, “diversity, inside or outside his army, could not be reduced.
Cromwell’s toleration was of course not complete – nobody’s has ever been or
ought to be: the most tolerant mind cannot tolerate cruelty, the most liberal
state punishes incitement to riot or treason. To all but the Catholic minority
in England, the church of Rome was intolerable.”[266]
Nor was Calvinism an inherently tolerant creed, insofar as “the Calvinist dogma
of predestination,” as Porter points out, “had bred ‘enthusiasm’, that awesome,
irresistible and unfalsifiable conviction of personal infallibility”.[267]
Religious
toleration needed a philosophical justification. This was provided by Hobbes
and Locke, especially the latter.
Hobbes’ Leviathan
(1651), published during Cromwell’s Protectorate, at first sight seems a recipe
for intolerance – indeed, the most complete tyranny of the State over the
religious beliefs of its citizens. For religious truth, according to Hobbes,
was nothing other than that which the sovereign ruler declared it to be: “An
opinion publicly appointed to be taught cannot be heresy; nor the Sovereign
Princes that authorise them heretics.”[268]
Being in favour of the absolute power of the sovereign, Hobbes was fiercely
opposed to the other major power in traditional societies, religion, which he
relegated to an instrument of government; so that the power of censorship
passed, in his theory, entirely from the Church to the State.
However,
Hobbes was not opposed to dissent so long as it did not lead to anarchy, “for
such truth as opposeth no man’s profit nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.”[269]
In fact, he did not believe in objective Truth, but only in “appetites and
aversions, hopes and fears”, and in the power of human reason to regulate them
towards the desired end of public and private tranquillity. He was not
anti-religious so much as a-religious.
Hobbesean
indifference to religion was a step towards its toleration, but it did not go
very far. It was Locke, according to Roy Porter, who became the real “high
priest of toleration”. “In an essay of 1667, which spelt out the key principles
expressed in his later Letters on Toleration, Locke denied the prince’s
right to enforce religious orthodoxy, reasoning that the ‘trust, power and
authority’ of the civil magistrate were vested in him solely to secure ‘the
good preservation and peace of men in that society’. Hence princely powers
extended solely to externals, not to faith, which was a matter of conscience.
Any state intervention in faith was ‘meddling’.
“To
elucidate the limits of those civil powers, Locke divided religious opinions
and actions into three. First, there were speculative views and modes of divine
worship. These had ‘an absolute and universal right to toleration’, since they
did not affect society, being either private or God’s business alone. Second,
there were those – beliefs about marriage and divorce, for instance – which
impinged upon others and hence were of public concern. These ‘have a title also
to toleration, but only so far as they do not tend to the disturbance of the
State’. The magistrate might thus prohibit publication of such convictions if
they would disturb the public good, but no one ought to be forced to forswear
his opinion, for coercion bred hypocrisy. Third, there were actions good or bad
in themselves. Respecting these, Locke held that civil rulers should have
‘nothing to do with the good of men’s soul or their concernments in another
life’ – it was for God to reward virtue and punish vice, and the magistrate’s
job simply to keep the peace. Applying such principles to contemporary
realities, Locke advocated toleration, but with limits: Papists should not be
tolerated, because their beliefs were ‘absolutely destructive of all
governments except the Pope’s’; nor should atheists, since any oaths they took
would be in bad faith.[270]
“As a
radical Whig in political exile in the Dutch republic, Locke wrote the first Letter
on Toleration, which was published, initially in Latin, in 1689. Echoing
the 1667 arguments, this denied that Christianity could be furthered by force.
Christ was the Prince of Peace, his gospel was love, his means persuasion;
persecution could not save souls. Civil and ecclesiastical government had
contrary ends; the magistrate’s business lay in securing life, liberty and
possessions, whereas faith was about the salvation of souls. A church should be
a voluntary society, like a ‘club for claret’; it should be shorn of all
sacerdotal pretensions. While Locke’s views were contested – Bishop
Stillingfleet, for example, deemed them a ‘Trojan Horse’ – they nevertheless
won favour in an age inclined, or resigned, to freedom of thought and
expression in general.”[271]
It was
ironic, in view of Locke’s lack of tolerance for Catholics, that the first
ruler who legislated for tolerance was the Catholic King James II, who bestowed
freedom of religion on Catholics, Anglicans and Non-Conformists in his Declaration
of Indulgence (1688), declaring: “We cannot but heartily wish, as it will
easily be believed, that all the people of our dominions were members of the
Catholic Church; yet we humbly thank Almighty God, it is and has of long time
been our constant sense and opinion (which upon divers occasions we have
declared) that conscience ought not to be constrained nor people forced in
matters of mere religion: it has ever been directly contrary to our
inclination, as we think it is to the interest of government, which it destroys
by spoiling trade, depopulating countries, and discouraging strangers, and
finally, that it never obtained the end for which it was employed…”[272]
The generosity shown by James to
non-Catholics was not reciprocated by his Protestant successors, who, through
the Toleration Act (1689) and Declaration of Indulgence
(1690), reimposed restrictions on the
Catholics while removing them from the Protestants. The justification given for
this was purely secular: “Some ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise
of religion” was to be granted, since this “united their Majesties’ Protestant
subjects in interest and affection…” In other words, tolerance was necessary in
order to avoid the possibility of civil war between the Anglicans and the Non-Conformist
Protestants.
For, as Porter goes on, “the so-called
Toleration Act of 1689 had an eye first and foremost to practical politics, and
did not grant toleration. Officially an ‘Act for Exempting their Majesties’
Protestant Subjects, Dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties
of Certain Laws’, it stated that Trinitarian Protestand Nonconformists who
swore the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance and accepted thirty-six of the
Thirty-nine Articles [the official confession of the Anglican Church] could
obtain licences as ministers or teachers. Catholics and non-Christians did not
enjoy the rights of public worship under the Act – and non-Trinitarians were
left subject to the old penal laws. Unitarians, indeed, were further singled
out by the Blasphemy Act of 1697, which made it an offence to ‘deny any one of
the persons in the holy Trinity to be God’. There was no official Toleration
Act for them until 1813, and in Scotland the death penalty could still be
imposed – as it was in 1697 – for denying the Trinity.
“Scope for prosecution remained.
Ecclesiastical courts still had the power of imprisoning for atheism, blasphemy
and heresy (maximum term: six months). Occasional indictments continued under
the common law, and Parliament could order books to be burned. Even so,
patriots justly proclaimed that England was, alongside the United Provinces,
the first nation to have embraced religious toleration – a fact that became a
matter of national pride. ‘My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very
rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, how
like a king I looked,’ remarked Defoe’s castaway hero, Robinson Crusoe; ‘we had
but three subjects, and they were of different religions. My man Friday was a
pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed liberty
of conscience throughout my dominions’.
“Two developments made toleration a fait
accompli: the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695[273],
and the fact that England had already been sliced up into sects. It was,
quipped Voltaire, a nation of many faiths but only one sauce, a recipe for
confessional tranquillity if culinary tedium: ‘If there were only one religion
in England, there would be danger of despotism, if there were only two they
would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live in peace’ [Letters
concerning the English Nation].”[274]
The more religious justifications of
tolerance offered in, for example, More’s Utopia or Milton’s Areopagitica,
were no longer in fashion. In the modern age that was beginning, religious
tolerance was advocated, not because it ensured the eventual triumph of the
true religion, but because it prevented war.
And war, of course, “spoiled trade”.
“To enlightened minds,” writes Porter,
“the past was a nightmare of barbarism and bigotry: fanaticism had precipitated
bloody civil war and the axing of Charles Stuart, that man of blood, in 1649.
Enlightened opinion repudiated old militancy for modern civility. But how could
people adjust to each other? Sectarianism, that sword of the saints which had
divided brother from brother, must cease; rudeness had to yield to refinement.
Voltaire saw this happening before his very eyes in England’s ‘free and
peaceful assemblies’:
‘Take a view
of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many
courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the
benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact
together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of
Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the
Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. And all are
satisfied’. [Letters concerning the English Nation].
This passage
squares with the enlightened belief that commerce would unite those whom creeds
rent asunder. Moreover, by depicting men content, and content to be content –
differing, but agreeing to differ – the philosophe pointed towards a
rethinking of the summum bonum, a shift from God-fearingness to a
selfhood more psychologically oriented. The Enlightenment thus translated the
ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be
happy?’”[275]
Capitalism and the Jews
The
beginning of English capitalism had been symbolically marked by Cromwell’s
invitation to the Jewish bankers of Amsterdam to set up house in London.
Now the
Jews have influenced modern Europe through three major channels: economic,
religious and political. Economically, the Jews played a decisive part in the
development of capitalism in Europe, and in the breaking down of the Christian
beliefs and habits which hindered the full emergence of that socio-economic
system that now dominates the world. Religiously, Cabbalistic Judaism greatly
influenced a whole series of heretical sects and magical practices that flooded
Western Europe from the time of the Templars. From the beginning of the
eighteenth century these sects and practices began to converge into the
movement known as Freemasonry. Politically, from the second half of the
eighteenth century the Jews began to harness the economic power they wielded
through the banks, and the religious power they wielded through the masonic
lodges, to create that vast phenomenon which we shall simply call the Revolution.
Let us
consider here the economic influence of the Jews, their part in the rise of
capitalism.
Capitalism
on the grand scale flourishes only where there is avarice, the love of money,
which St. Paul called “the root of all kinds of evil” (I Timothy 6.10).
Of course, avarice was not invented by the Jews or the modern capitalists, but
has been a trait of fallen man since the beginning. However, in most historical
societies, while many men might dream of great wealth, only very few could have
a realistic hope of acquiring it. Or rather, those few who had great wealth did
not acquire it so much as inherit it.
For they were the sons of the great landowning aristocratic families. Most
ordinary people, on the other hand, were born as peasants. A peasant might
dream of wealth, but his bondage to his landowning master and the necessity of
spending all his time tilling the soil and bringing in the harvest, condemned
his dreams to remain no more than that - dreams. This was especially the case
in the feudal society of the medieval West – and indeed in almost all societies
before the sixteenth century, insofar as almost all societies were based on a
rural economy.
However,
the growth of towns in the Renaissance, and especially the growth of capitalism and banking, made a certain measure of wealth not just a dream, but a
real possibility for a rapidly increasing proportion of the population. And it
was the Jews who very quickly came to dominate the burgeoning capitalism of the
West. The reason for this was that the Talmud has a specific economic doctrine
that favours the most ruthless kind of capitalist exploitation. According to
Platonov, it “teaches the Jew to consider the property of all non-Jews as
‘gefker’, which means free, belonging to no one. ‘The property of all non-Jews
has the same significance as if it had been found in the desert: it belongs to
the first who seizes it’. In the Talmud there is a decree according to which
open theft and stealing are forbidden, but anything can be acquired by deceit
or cunning…
“From this
it follows that all the resources and wealth of the non-Jews must belong to
representatives of the ‘chosen people’. ‘According to the Talmud,’ wrote the
Russian historian S.S. Gromeka, “God gave all the peoples into the hands of the
Jews” (Baba-Katta, 38); “the whole of Israel are children of kings; those who
offend a Jew offend God himself” (Sikhab 67, 1) and “are subject to execution,
as for lèse-majesté” (Sanhedrin 58, 2); pious people of other
nations, who are counted worthy of participating in the kingdom of the Messiah,
will take the role of slaves to the Jews’ (Sanhedrin 91, 21, 1051). From this
point of view, … all the property in the world belongs to the Jews, and the
Christians who possess it are only temporary, “unlawful” possessors, usurpers,
and this property will be confiscated by the Jews from them sooner or later.
When the Jews are exalted above all the other peoples, God will hand over all
the nations to the Jews for final extermination.’[276]
“The
historian of Judaism I. Lyutostansky cites examples from the ancient editions
of the Talmud, which teaches the Jews that it is pleasing to God that they
appropriate the property of the goyim. In particular, he expounds the
teaching of Samuel that deceiving a goy is not a sin…
“Rabbi
Moses said: ‘If a goy makes a mistake in counting, then the Jew,
noticing this, must say that he knows nothing about it.’ Rabbi Brentz says: ‘If
some Jews, after exhausting themselves by running around all week to deceive
Christians in various places, come together at the Sabbath and boast of their
deceptions to each other, they say: “We must take the hearts out of the goyim
and kill even the best of them.” – of course, if they succeed in doing this.’
Rabbi Moses teaches: ‘Jews sin when they return lost things to apostates and
pagans, or anyone who doesn’t reverence the Sabbath.’…
“To attain
the final goal laid down in the Talmud for Jews – to become masters of the
property of the goyim – one of the best means, in the opinion of the
rabbis, is usury. According to the Talmud, ‘God ordered that money be lent to
the goyim, but only on interest; consequently, instead of helping them
in this way, we must harm them, even if they can be useful for us.’ The tract
Baba Metsiya insists on the necessity of lending money on interest and advises
Jews to teach their children to lend money on interest, ‘so that they can from
childhood taste the sweetness of usury and learn to use it in good time.’”[277]
Now the Old
Testament forbids the lending of money for interest to brothers, but allows it
to strangers (Exodus 22.25; Levicticus 25.36; Deuteronomy
23.24). This provided the Jews’ practice of usury with a certain justification
according to the letter of the law. However, as the above quotations make
clear, the Talmud exploited the letter of the law to make it a justification
for outright exploitation of the Christians and Muslims.
Paul
Johnson, while admitting that some Talmudic texts encouraged exploitation of
Gentiles, nevertheless argues that the Jews had no choice: “A midrash on the
Deuteronomy text [about usury], probably written by the nationalistic Rabbi
Akiva, seemed to say that Jews were obliged to charge interest to foreigners.
The fourteenth-century French Jew Levi ben Gershom agreed: it was a positive
commandment to burden the gentile with interest ‘because oen should not benefit
an idolater… and cause him as much damage as possible without deviating from
righteousness’; others took this line. But the most common justification was
economic necessity:
“’If we
nowadays allow interest to be taken from non-Jews it is because there is no end
of the yoke and the burden kings and ministers impose upon us, and everything
we take is the minimum for our subsistence; and anyhow we are condemned to live
in the midst of the nations and cannot earn our living in any other manner
except by money dealings with them; therefore the taking of interest is not to
be prohibited.’
“This was
the most dangerous argument of all because financial oppression of Jews tended
to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by
concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the unpopularity – and so, of
course, the pressure – would increase. Thus the Jews became an element in a
vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned
interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practised it were
excommunicated. But the Christians also imposed the harshest financial burdens
on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian
laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the
hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph Colon, who knew both France and Italy
in the second half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the Jews of both
countries hardly engaged in any other profession..."[278]
Whichever
was the original cause – the Talmud’s encouragement of usury as a weapon to
exploit the Gentiles, or the Christians’ financial restrictions on the Jews –
that fact was it was through usury that the Jews came to dominate the
Christians economically.
“Therefore,” writes Platonov, “already in the Middle Ages the Jews,
using the Christians’ prejudice against profit, the amassing of wealth and
usury, seized many of the most important positions in the trade and industry of
Europe. Practising trade and usury and exploiting the simple people, they
amassed huge wealth, which allowed them to become the richest stratum of
medieval society. The main object of the trade of Jewish merchants was
slave-trading. Slaves were acquired mainly in the Slavic lands[279],
whence they were exported to Spain and the countries of the East. On the
borders between the Germanic and Slavic lands, in Meysen, Magdeburg and Prague,
Jewish settlements were formed, which were constantly occupied in the slave
trade. In Spain Jewish merchants organized hunts for Andalusian girls, selling
them into slavery into the harems of the East. The slave markets of the Crimea
were served, as a rule, by Jews. With the opening of America and the
penetration into the depths of Africa it was precisely the Jews who became
suppliers of black slaves to the New World.
“From
commercial operations, the Jews passed to financial ones, to mortgages and
usury, often all of these at once. Already from the 15th century
very large Jewish fortunes were being formed. We can judge how big their
resources were from the fact that in Spain merchants kept almost a whole army
of mercenaries who protected their dubious operations – 25,000 horsemen and
20,000 infantry.
“’The great
universal historical event,’ wrote the Jewish historian V. Zombardt, author of
the book ‘The Jews and Economic Life’, ‘was the expulsion of the Jews from
Spain and Portugal (1492 and 1497). It must not be forgotten that on the very
day that Columbus sailed from Palos to discover America (August 3, 1492),
300,000 Jews were expelled to Navarra, France, Portugal and the East, and that
in the years in which Vasco da Gama was discovering the sea route to East
India, the Jews were also being expelled from other parts of the Pyrenean
peninsula.’ According to Zombardt’s calculations, already in the 15th
century the Jews constituted one third of the numbers of the world’s
bourgeoisie and capitalists.
“In the 16th
to 18th centuries the centre of Jewish economics became Amsterdam,
which the Jews called ‘the new, great Jerusalem’…”[280]
Jews also
became influential in Germany, in spite of Luther’s strong opposition to
Judaism. Thus “in the seventeenth century,” writes Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “the court
Jew came to play a crucial role in state affairs. Each royal or princely court
had its own Jewish auxiliary. Throughout the country court Jews administered
finances, provisioned armies, raised money, provided textile and precious
stones to the court… Such court Jews stood at the pinnacle of the social scale,
forming an elite class.”[281]
The
migration of the Sephardic Jews from Catholic Spain and Portugal to Protestant
Holland and England marked the beginning of the ascent of these latter powers
to the status of world powers. It may be wondered why such a zealous Christian
as Cromwell decided to readmit the Jews to England. The reason, according to
R.A. York, was that “quite a strong philo-semitic tendency was developing in
English Puritanism at this time. Puritanism encouraged the return to the text
of the Bible, in particular to the Old Testament. This in turn encouraged
greater interest in the study of Hebrew and the Jews themselves.
“Part of the reason for this interest was
proselytising. The Jews had long been resistant to Christianity, but they might
be more attracted to a purer, more Judaic form…”[282]
But the
main reason was undoubtedly: money. Thus “in Holland,” continues Platonov, “the
Jews became key figures in government finance. The significance of the Jewish
financial world in this country went beyond its borders, for during the 17th
and 18th centuries it was the main reservoir out of which all
monarchs drew when they needed money…
“In the
course of the 17th and 18th centuries the dominant
influence of the Jews became evident also in the sphere of English finance. In
England the monetary needs of the ‘Long Parliament’ served as the first impulse
towards attracting rich Jews there. Long before Cromwell sanctioned their
admittance, many rich Jews had migrated to England, mainly from Spain and
Portugal through Amsterdam; in 1643 there was a particularly strong influx of
them.[283] Their
focus was the house of the Portugese ambassador in London, Antonio de Souza,
who was also a marrano [convert from Judaism]. Among them there
particularly stood out Antonio Fernando Karvayal, who was equally well-known as
a creditor and a supplier; he was, as a matter of fact, the main financier of
the British empire. The contingent of rich English Jews increased under the
younger Stuarts, especially under Charles II…
“Beginning
from the 17th century, the bankers of the Viennese Court were only
Jews.[284] The same
situation could be observed in many German principalities.
“In France
under Louis XIV and XV the leading position in the financial world was occupied
by the Jewish banker Samuel Bernard, about whose help to France contemporaries
said that ‘his whole merit consisted in the fact that he supported the State,
as a string supports that which hangs on it.’”[285]
Jewish
power increased during the three great wars of the seventeenth century: the
Thirty Years War in Germany, during which Jews supplied both the Catholics and
the Protestants; the Austrians’ wars against France and then Turkey, during
which Samuel Oppenheimer was the Imperial War Purveyor to the Austrians; and
the wars against Louis XIV, when Oppenheimer was again the chief organizer of
the finances of the anti-French coalition.[286]
“William of
Orange,” notes Johnson, “later William III of England, who led the coalition
from 1672 to 1702, was financed and provisioned by a group of Dutch Sephardic
Jews operating chiefly from the Hague.”[287]
And yet, as
we have seen, Louis XIV was himself served by a Jewish banker. So the Jews
profited whichever side won…
Thus, as
the well-known Jewish publicist Hannah Arendt writes, with the rise of
capitalism, “Jewish banking capital became international. It was united by
means of cross-marriages, and a truly international caste arose,” the
consciousness of which engendered “a feeling of power and pride”.[288]
After centuries of exile, the Jews were back at the heart of the Gentile world,
a position they have not surrendered to the present day.
Nor was it
only in the East that Jewish money ruled. In the sixteenth century, a French
diplomat who lived in Constantinople under Suleyman the Magnificent, Nicolas de
Nicolay, wrote: “They now have in their hands the most and greatest traffic of
merchandise and ready money that is conducted in all the Levant. The shops and
stalls best stocked with all the varieties of goods which can be found in
Constantinople are those of the Jews. They also have among them very excellent
practitioners of all the arts and manufactures, especially the Marranos not
long since banished and expelled from Spain and Portugal who to the great
detriment and injury of Christianity have taught the Turks several inventions,
artifices and machines of war such as how to make artillery, arquebuses,
gunpowerd, cannon-balls and other arms.”[289]
Protected
by the Ottoman Turks from the attacks of the Christians, the Constantinopolitan
Jews intrigued against the West European States. Thus Joseph Nasi, a banker and
entrepreneur, through contacts in western Europe was able, according to Philip
Mansel, “to maintain an international network which helped him obtain revenge
on Spain and France. It is possible that, from the banks of the Bosphorus, he
encouraged the revolt of the Netherlands against Philip II of Spain. An envoy
from the rebel leader, the Prince of Orange, came to see him in 1569. The
historian Famianus Strada wrote: ‘As regards the Flemings, Miches’s [i.e.
Nasi’s] letters and persuasions had no little influence on them.’ However no
letters have come to light.”[290]
A more
prosemite interpretation is given to Jewish economic success by Paul Johnson,
who writes: “The dynamic impulse to national economies, especially in England
and the Netherlands, and later in North America and Germany, was provided not
only by Calvinists, but by Lutherans, Catholics from north Italy and, not
least, by Jews.
“What these
moving communities shared was not theology but an unwillingness to live under
the state regimentation of religious and moral ideas at the behest of the
clerical establishments. All of them repudiated clerical hierarchies, favouring
religious government by the congregation and the private conscience. In all
these respects the Jews were the most characteristic of the various
denominations of emigrants…
“Capitalism, at all its stages of development, has advanced by
rationalizing and so improving the chaos of existing methods. The Jews could do
this because, while intensely conservative (as a rule) within their own narrow
and isolated world, they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as
a whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being
demolished without a pang – could, indeed, play a leading role in the process
of destruction. They were thus natural capitalist entrepreneurs…
“It was the
unconscious collective instinct of the Jews both to depersonalize finance and
to rationalize the general economic process. Any property known to be Jewish,
or clearly identifiable as such, was always at risk in medieval and early
modern times, especially in the Mediterranean, which ws then the chief
international trading area. As the Spanish navy and the Knights of Malta
treated Jewish-chartered ships and goods as legitimate booty, fictitious
Christian names were used in the paperwork of international transactions,
including marine insurance. These developed into impersonal formulae. As well
as developing letters of credit, the Jews invented bearer-bonds, another
impersonal way of moving money. For an underprivileged community whose property
was always under threat, and who might be forced to move at short notice, the
emergence of reliable, impersonal paper money, whether bills of exchange or,
above all, valid banknotes, was an enormous blessing.
“Hence the
whole thrust of Jewish activity in the early modern period was to refine these
devices and bring them into universal use. They strongly supported the
emergence of the institutions which promoted paper values: the central banks,
led by the Bank of England (1694) with its statutory right to issue notes, and
the stock exchanges…
“In
general, financial innovations which Jews pioneered in the eighteenth century,
and which aroused much criticism then, became acceptable in the nineteenth.
“…Jews were
in the vanguard in stressing the importance of the selling function… [and] were
among the leaders in display, advertising and promotion…
“They aimed
for the widest possible market. They appreciated the importance of economies of
scale…
“Above all,
Jews were more inclined than others in commerce to accept that businesses
flourished by serving consumer interests rather than guild interests. The
customer was always right. The market was the final judge. These axioms were
not necessarily coined by Jews or exclusively observed by Jews, but Jews were
quicker than most to apply them.
“Finally, Jews were exceptionally adept at
gathering and making use of commercial intelligence. As the market became the
dominant factor in all kinds of trading, and as it expanded into a series of
global systems, news became of prime importance. This was perhaps the biggest
single factor in Jewish trading and financial success…”[291]
Protestantism and the
Scientific Outlook
Perhaps the
most important of the new ideas fashioning our modern outlook that became
fashionable towards the end of the seventeenth century, was the scientific
outlook, or empiricism, which declares that the only reliable way of
attaining non-mathematical truth is by inferences from the evidence of the
senses. This principle, first proclaimed by Francis Bacon in his Advancement
of Learning (1605), rejects the witness of non-empirical sources – for
example, God or intuition or so-called “innate ideas”. The reverse process –
that is, inferences about God and other non-empirical realities from the
evidence of the senses – was admitted by the early empiricists, but rejected by
most later ones.[292]
Thus in time empiricism became not only a methodological or epistemological, but
also an ontological principle, the principle, namely, that reality not only is
best discovered by empirical means, but also is empirical, i.e.
material, and that non-empirical reality does not exist. By contrast, religion
is occupied mainly with non-empirical reality, and makes no radical cleavage
between empirical and non-empirical truth, accepting evidence of the senses
with regard to the existence and activity of God and the witness of God Himself
with regard to the nature of empirically perceived events.
In
accordance with this difference in the kinds of truth they seek, there is a
difference in the nature and structure of the authority that science (in its
more “advanced”, materialist form) and religion rely on. Science relies on the
authority of millions of observations that have been incorporated into a vast
structure of hypotheses which are taken as “proved” – although in fact no
hypothesis can ever be proved beyond every possible doubt, and science advances
by the systematic application of doubt to what are thought to be weak points in
the hypothetical structure; for, as John Donne said, “new philosophy calls all
in doubt”.[293] Religion,
on the other hand, relies on no other ultimate authority than the Word of God
Himself as communicated either directly to an individual (for example, Moses)
or, collectively, to the Church, “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I
Timothy 3.15), which preserves and nurtures the individual revelations.
Doubt has no place within the true
religion, but only when one is still in the process of seeking it, when
different religious systems are still being approached as possible truths – in other words, as hypotheses. Having cleaved to the true religion by faith, however, - and faith is defined
as the opposite of doubt, as “the certainty
of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1), - the religious believer advances by
the deepening of faith, by ever
deeper immersion in the undoubted truths of religion.
When the
differences between science and religion are viewed from this perspective, the
perspective of Orthodox Christianity, there are seen to be important
differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. For from this perspective,
Catholicism is more “religious”, and Protestantism – more “scientific”. For
Protestantism arose as a protest against, and a doubting of, the revealed
truths of the Catholic religion. From an Orthodox point of view, some of these
doubts were justified, and some not. But that is not the essential point here.
The essential point is that Protestantism arose out of doubt rather than faith,
and, like Descartes in philosophy, placed
doubt at the head of the corner of its new theology.
How? First,
by doubting that there is any organization that is “the pillar and ground of
the truth”, any collective vessel of God’s revelation. So where is God’s
revelation to be sought? In the visions and words of individual men, the
Prophets and Apostles, the Saints and Fathers? Yes; but – and here the
corrosive power of doubt enters again – not all that the Church has passed down
about these men can be trusted, according to the Protestants. In particular,
the inspiration of the post-apostolic Saints and Fathers is to be doubted, as
is much of what we are told of the lives even of the Prophets and Apostles. In
fact, we can only rely on the Bible – Sola Scriptura. After all, the
Bible is objective; everybody can
have access to it, can touch it and read it; can analyse and interpret it. In
other words, it corresponds to what we would call scientific evidence.
But can we
be sure even of the Bible? After all, the text comes to us from the Church,
that untrustworthy organization. Can we be sure that Moses wrote Genesis,
or Isaiah Isaiah, or John John, or Paul Hebrews? To answer
these questions we have to analyze the text, subject it to scientific
verification. Then we will find the real
text, the text we can really trust, because it is the text of the real author – the author we know (from
tradition) to have been inspired.
But suppose
we cannot find this real text? Or the real author? And suppose we come to the
conclusion that the “real” text of a certain book was written by tens of
authors, none of whom was the “inspired” author, spread over hundreds of years?
Can we then be sure that it is the Word of God? But if we cannot be sure that
the Bible is not the Word of God, how can we be sure of anything?
Thus Protestantism, which begins with the doubting of authority, ends with the loss of truth itself. Or rather, it ends with a scientific truth which dispenses with religious truth, or accepts religious truth only to the extent that it is “confirmed by the findings of science”. It ends by being a branch of the scientific endeavour of systematic doubt, and not a species of religious faith at all.
If we go
back to the original error of Protestantism, we will find that it consists in
what we may call a false reductionist
attitude to Divine Revelation. Revelation is given to us in the Church, “the
pillar and ground of the truth”, and consists of two indivisible and mutually
interdependent parts – Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Scripture and
Tradition support each other, and are in turn supported by the Church, which
herself rests on the rock of truth witnessed to in Scripture and Tradition. Any
attempt to reduce Divine Revelation
to one of these elements, any attempt to make one element essential and the
other inessential, is doomed to end with the loss of Revelation altogether. The
Truth is one irreducible whole.
Where does
this false reductionist attitude come from? Vladimir Trostnikov has shown that
it goes back as far as the 11th century, to the nominalist thinker
Roscelin. Nominalism, which had triumphed over its philosophical rival,
universalism, by the 14th century, “gives priority to the particular
over the general, the lower over the higher”. As such, it is in essence the
forerunner of reductionism, which insists that the simple precedes the complex,
and that the complex can always be reduced, both logically and ontologically,
to the simple.[294]
Thus the
Catholic heresy of nominalism gave birth to the Protestant heresy of
reductionism, which reduced the complex spiritual process of the absorption of
the truth of God’s revelation in the life of the Church to the unaided
rationalist reading and dissection of a single element in that life, the book
of the Holy Scriptures. As Trostnikov explains, the assumption – against all
the evidence – that reductionism is true has led to a series of concepts which
taken together represent a summation of the contemporary world-view: that
matter consists of elementary particles which themselves do not consist of
anything; that the planets and all the larger objects of the universe arose
through the gradual condensation of simple gas; that all living creatures arose
out of inorganic matter; that the later forms of social organization and
politics arose out of earlier, simpler and less efficient ones; that human
consciousness arose from lower phenomena, drives and archetypes; that the
government of a State consists of its citizens, who must therefore be
considered to be the supreme power.
We see,
then, why science, like capitalism, flourished especially in the Protestant
countries. Protestantism, according to Landes, “gave a big boost to literacy,
spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of
authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor. The Catholic
countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”[295]
However, it
is misleading to make too great a contrast between science-loving,
anti-authoritarian religion and science-hating authoritarian religion. Much
confusion has been generated in this respect by Galileo’s trial, in which a
Pope who falsely believed that the earth was flat and that the sun circled the
earth persecuted Galileo, who believed on empirical evidence that the earth
circled the sun. [296] This
trial by no means proved the superiority of science to religion, but only the
stupidity of a supposedly infallible Pope.
In truth
both science and religion depend on authority – that is, the reports of
reliable men about what they have seen, touched and heard. And just as false
reports can lead to false religion and superstition, so can they produce false
science. Moreover, the reports on which both religion and science are based may
have an empirical character: the emptiness of a tomb or the touch of a pierced
side, on the one hand; the falling of an apple or the bending of a ray of
light, on the other. Both seek truth, and both rely on authority. The
difference lies, first of all, in the kinds of truth they seek, and secondly,
in the nature and structure of the authority they rely on.
Returning
to the period under consideration, it is worthy of note that perhaps the
greatest scientist of the time - in the view of some, of all time – Sir Isaac Newton, was not a reductionist in the full
modern sense. Far from dividing
religion and science into separate, hermetically sealed compartments in
accordance with the modern scientistic world-view, Newton was, in White’s
words, “interested in a synthesis of all knowledge and was a devout seeker of
some form of unified theory of the principles of the universe. Along with many
intellectuals before him, Newton believed that this synthesis – the fabled prisca
sapientia – had once been in the possession of mankind.” [297]
In this
respect he was akin in his thinking to Bacon, who declared that science was to
be compared to the knowledge of the essence of creatures which Adam had before
the fall – “the pure knowledge of nature and universality, a knowledge by the
light whereof man did give names unto other creatures in Paradise, as they were
brought to him”.[298]
As J.M.
Roberts writes, Bacon “seems to have been a visionary, glimpsing not so much
what science would discover as what it would become: a faith. ‘The true and
lawful end of the sciences’, he wrote, ‘is that human life be enriched by new
discoveries and powers.’ Through them could be achieved ‘a restitution and reinvigorating (in great part) of man to
the sovereignty and power… which he had in his first creation.’ This was
ambitious indeed – nothing less than the redemption of mankind through
organised research; he was here, too, a prophetic figure, precursor of later scientific
societies and institutes.”[299]
Of course,
there was a large element of hubris in this programme, a hubris
that Newton shared: just as Bacon thought that the “pure knowledge of nature
and universality” would lead to power (“knowledge is power”, in his famous
phrase) and to “the effecting of all things possible”[300],
so Newton vaingloriously gave himself the pseudonym “’Jeova Sanctus Unus’ – One
Holy God – based upon an anagram of the Latinised verson of his name, Isaacus
Neuutonus”.[301] However,
the pride of the programme is not the point here. The important point is that
the greatest scientist in history refused to see religious truth as sharply
segregated from scientific truth, still less that religious truth needed to be
“verified” by science.
So far was
Newton from segregating the two that he in fact spent – to the puzzlement of
his admirers ever since - many years in the study of alchemy and the Holy
Scriptures. For “they who search after the Philosophers’ Stone,” he wrote,
“[are] by their own rules obliged to strict & religious life. That study
[is] fruitful of experiments.”[302]
“A strict
and religious life” “fruitful of experiments”?! Considering that no one was
more fruitful in scientific experimentation and theorizing than Newton, one
might have expected many modern scientists to have followed his advice. But
they have not, because, while admiring his science, they have rejected his
philosophy of science, preferring instead their own atheist, reductionist
scientific outlook.
Newton’s philosophy
of science was based on the fact that, as Maynard Keynes said, “He regarded the
universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty”.[303]
If the Almighty set the cryptogram, then only one who was pleasing to the
Almighty could be expected to understand it. Hence “his belief that the
emotional and spiritual state of the individual experimenter was involved
intimately with the success or failure of the experiment.”[304]
And hence his quoting Hermes Trismegistus: “I had this art and science by the
sole inspiration of God who has vouchsafed to reveal it to his servant. Who
gives those that know how to use their reason the means of knowing the truth,
but is never the cause that any man follows error & falsehood.”[305]
Now if the
universe is a cryptogram written by God, there should be no conflict between
the universe and that other cryptogram – the prophetic writings of the Old and
New Testaments. And so Newton set about studying the Holy Scriptures,
especially Ezekiel, Daniel and the Book of Revelation. “He reasoned that
because God’s work and God’s word came from the same Creator, then Nature and
Scripture were also one and the same. Scripture was a communicable
manifestation or interpretation of Nature, and as such could be viewed as a
blueprint for life – a key to all meaning.”[306]
In
accordance with this principle, Newton set about interpreting the prophecies,
concluding, for example, that the Jews would return to reclaim Jerusalem in
1899, that the world would end in 1948 and that the plan of the Temple of Solomon
(Ezekiel 40-48) was a paradigm for the entire future of the world.[307]
Evidently he was less inspired as an interpreter of Scripture than as a
scientist, and we know that he was far from Orthodox in his theology (he was
probably an Arian and most likely a Unitarian). However, it is not as a
religious thinker that his example is important, but as showing that great
scientific achievement, far from being incompatible with religious
“fundamentalism” (Newton believed in the literal truth of the Creation story,
rejecting the idea that living creatures came into being by chance) and the
belief that the true science comes from Divine inspiration, may actually be
nourished by it.
But such
examples become increasingly rare after Newton’s death. (Perhaps the most
famous one is Einstein’s extremely “unscientific” statement that “God does not
play with dice”.) For he lived just before the “Age of Enlightenment” began to
radically change the way men thought. And it changed it, first of all, by
making scientific reasoning and the scientific method the measure of all
things.
The
difference is illustrated by a remark of Bertrand Russell: "Almost
everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is
attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the
seventeenth century."[308]
Michael Polanyi confirms this judgement: "Just as the three centuries
following on the calling of the Apostles sufficed to establish Christianity as
the state religion of the Roman Empire, so the three centuries after the
founding of the Royal Society sufficed for science to establish itself as the
supreme intellectual authority of the post-Christian age. 'It is contrary to
religion!' - the objection ruled supreme in the seventeenth century. 'It is unscientific!'
is its equivalent in the twentieth."[309]
Newton was almost the last man who
believed with equal passion in reason and revelation, and sought the answers to
his quest equally in both. But after his death, a certain Rubicon in western
consciousness was crossed; scientific doubt would no longer be simply one tool
among others to probe the mysteries of God’s universe. It would be the tool used to “demonstrate” that the
universe is neither mysterious, nor God’s…
4. THE EAST: PATRIARCHAL RUSSIA
He who conquers and keeps My
works until the end,
I will give him power over the
nations,
And he shall rule them with a
rod or iron.
Revelation 2.26-27.
In truth, pious tsar, the Holy
Spirit dwells in you, and this thought is from God, and will be realised by
you. For the Old Rome fell to the Apollinarian heresy, and the Second Rome,
Constantinople, is in the possession of the grandsons of the Hagarenes, the
godless Turks: but your great Russian kingdom, the Third Rome, has exceeded all
in piety. And all the pious kingdoms have been gathered into your kingdom, and
you alone under the heavens are named the Christian tsar throughout the
inhabited earth for all Christians.
Patriarch Jeremiah II of
Constantinople.
The main duty of the tsar is
to care for the Church, for the dominion of the tsar can never be firmly
established and prosperous when his mother, the Church of God, is not strongly
established, for the Church of God, most glorious tsar, is thy mother.
Patriarch Nicon of Moscow.
In the eyes
of the world Russia began her ascent to great-power status in the reign of the
talented, but terrible Ivan. In the eyes of the Orthodox, however, Russia
became the clear successor to the Empire of New Rome only at the coronation of
Ivan’s son, the supposedly half-witted, but pious Theodore Ivanovich. For it
was this tsar who was both crowned according to the full Byzantine rite for
emperors, receiving communion under both forms within the altar, and had the
metropolitanate of Moscow raised to patriarchal status with the blessing of the
Eastern Patriarchs.
The
opportunity for the exaltation of the Russian Church came in 1589, with the
visit to Moscow on an alms-raising trip of the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II
(Trallas).[310]
Jeremiah was one of the outstanding hierarchs of this period of the Church's
history, one of the few who could justly be said to have been ecumenical in his
vision and his activities. In 1583, in a Pan-Orthodox Council which included
two other patriarchs, he had anathematised the new calendar which Pope Gregory
XIII had introduced in the West and which led to intensified persecution of the
Russian Orthodox in Poland-Lithuania.[311]
Later, he politely but firmly rejected the confession of the Lutheran Church in
a dialogue with Augsburg. And shortly after his trip to Moscow he made an
important tour of the beleagured Orthodox in the Western Russian lands,
ordaining bishops and blessing the lay brotherhoods.
The raising
of the Russian Muscovite Church to the status of a patriarchate was timely for
many reasons. First, the Muscovite Church had been de facto
autocephalous since the council of Florence nearly 150 years before, and this
autocephaly needed to be regularised by a Pan-Orthodox Council Secondly, it was
now obvious – and especially after the unia of Brest-Litovsk in 1596 - that
Divine Providence had singled out the Church in Muscovy, rather than that in
Poland-Lithuania, as the centre and stronghold of Russian Orthodoxy as a whole,
and this needed to be emphasised. Thirdly, in the coming “Time of Troubles” the
Autocracy would come near to annihilation, and would only be saved by the
exceptional authority enjoyed by the Patriarch of Moscow.
The
exceptional importance of the Autocracy, not only for Russia but for the whole
Orthodox world, and the necessity of preserving its power and authority by all
means, had just been highlighted by the terrible plight of the Orthodox Kingdom
of Georgia. For, as Ioseliani writes, “oppressed by internal discord, and by
the dissensions of ambitious and unsettled princes, Georgia was again exposed
to a severe persecution on the part of the Persians. These enemies of the
Christian name ceased not to lay their sacrilegious hands on the riches of
Iberia. The messengers of King Alexander to Moscow lamented the fearful
misfortunes of their country, and represented how the great Shah-Abbas, having
endeavoured to leave to himself the protection of the kingdom of Georgia, made
in reality the Georgians enemies of the Russian Tzar.
“In the
year 1587 King Alexander II, having declared himself a vassal of Russia, sent
to Moscow the priests Joachim, Cyril, and others; and, pressed on all sides as
he was by the Persians and the Turks, entreated with tears the Russian Tzar
Theodore Iohannovitch to take Iberia under his protection, and thus to rescue
her from the grasp of infidels. ‘The present disastrous times,’ wrote he, ‘for
the Christian faith were foreseen by many men inspired by God. We, brethren of
the same faith with the Russians, groan under the hand of wicked men. Thou,
crowned head of the Orthodox faith, canst alone save both our lives and our
souls. I bow to thee with my face to the earth, with all my people, and we
shall be thine forever.’ The Tzar Theodore Iohannovitch having taken Iberia
under his protection, busied himself earnestly in rendering her assistance and
in works of faith. He sent into Georgia teachers in holy orders for the
regulation of Church ceremonies, and painters to decorate the temples with
images of saints; and Job, patriarch of all the Russias, addressed to the
Georgian king a letter touching the faith. King Alexander humbly replied that
the favourable answer of the Tzar had fallen upon him from Heaven, and brought
him out of darkness into light; that the clergy of the Russian Church were
angels for the clergy of Iberia, buried in ignorance. The Prince Zvenigorod,
ambassador to Georgia, promised in the name of Russia the freedom of all
Georgia, and the restoration of all her churches and monasteries.”[312]
Because of
her own internal and external troubles, Russia was not able to offer
significant military aid to Georgia for some time, and the persecution of the
Georgian Church continued.[313]
Nevertheless, the Russian tsar and patriarch were now in exactly the same
relationship with Georgia as the Constantinopolitan emperors and patriarchs had
been centuries before. This showed clearly that the Russia had taken the place
of Constantinople in God’s Providential Plan for His Church, a fact which the
Eastern Patriarchs were now ready to accept. Thus on acceding to the tsar’s
request for a patriarchate of Moscow, Patriarch Jeremiah said: “In truth, pious
tsar, the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and this thought is from God, and will be
realised by you. For the Old Rome fell to the Apollinarian heresy, and the
Second Rome, Constantinople, is in the possession of the grandsons of the
Hagarenes, the godless Turks: but your great Russian kingdom, the Third Rome,
has exceeded all in piety. And all the pious kingdoms have been gathered into
your kingdom, and you alone under the heavens are named the Christian tsar
throughout the inhabited earth for all Christians.”[314]
The
Patriarch’s language here (if it is truly his) is very reminiscent of that of
the famous prophecy of Elder Philotheus of Pskov in 1511. In particular, the
Patriarch follows the elder in ascribing the fall of Old Rome to “the
Apollinarian heresy”. Now the Apollinarian heresy rarely, if ever, figures in
lists of the western heresies. And yet the patriarch here indicates that it is the
heresy as a result of which the First Rome fell. Some have understood it to
mean the Latin practice of using unleavened bread in the Eucharist.
However, to
understand why the patriarch should have spoken of it as the heresy of
the West, we need to look for some matching in form, if not in substance,
between the Apollinarian and papist heresies. Smirnov's definition of the
heresy gives us a clue: "accepting the tripartite composition of human
nature - spirit, irrational soul, and body - [Apollinarius] affirmed that in
Christ only the body and the soul were human, but His mind was Divine."[315]
In other words, Christ did not have a human mind like ours, but this was
replaced, according to the Apollinarian schema, by the Divine Logos. A parallel
with Papism immediately suggests itself: just as the Divine Logos replaces the
human mind in the heretical Apollinarian Christology, so a quasi-Divine,
infallible Pope replaces the fully human, and therefore at all times fallible
episcopate in the heretical papist ecclesiology.
The root
heresy of the West therefore consists in the unlawful exaltation of the mind of
the Pope over the other minds of the Church, both clerical and lay, and its
quasi-deification to a level equal to that of Christ Himself. From this root
heresy proceed all the heresies of the West. Thus the Filioque with its
implicit demotion of the Holy Spirit to a level below that of the Father and
the Son becomes necessary insofar as the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth Who
constantly leads the Church into all truth has now become unnecessary - the
Divine Mind of the Pope is quite capable of fulfilling His function. Similarly,
the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the Holy Gifts, is
also unnecessary - if Christ, the Great High Priest, sanctified the Holy Gifts
by His word alone, then His Divine Vicar on earth is surely able to do the same
without invoking any other Divinity, especially a merely subordinate one such
as the Holy Spirit.
The
exaltation of the Russian Church and State to patriarchal and “Third Rome”
status respectively shows that, not only in her own eyes, but in the eyes of
the whole Orthodox world, Russia was now the chief bastion of the Truth of
Christ against the heresies of the West. Russia had been born as a Christian
state just as the West was falling away from grace into papism in the eleventh
century. Now, in the sixteenth century, as Western papism received a bastard
child in the Protestant Reformation, and a second wind in the Catholic
Counter-Reformation, Russia was ready to take up leadership of the struggle
against both heresies as a fully mature Orthodox nation.
However, at the Pan-Orthodox Council convened by Jeremiah on his return to Constantinople, the Eastern Patriarchs, while confirming the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate, made it only the fifth in seniority, after the four Greek patriarchates. This was to prove a prudent reservation, for in the century that followed, the Poles briefly conquered Moscow during the “Time of Troubles”, necessitating the continued supervision of the Western and Southern Russian Orthodox by Constantinople. And by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Russian patriarchate was no more, having been abolished by Peter the Great.
Nevertheless, the elevation of the head of
the Russian Church to the rank of patriarch was to prove providential now, in
the early seventeenth century, when the Autocracy in Russia was shaken to its
foundations and the patriarchs took the place of the tsars as the leaders of
the Russian nation. We witness a similar phenomenon in 1917, when the
restoration of the Russian patriarchate to some degree compensated for the fall
of the tsardom. In both cases, the patriarchate both filled the gap left by the
fall of the state (up to a point) and kept alive the ideals of true Orthodox
statehood.
Poles,
Ñossacks
and Jews
Just as the Russian State was beginning to
recover its former strength, it came into contact again with the Jews.
Paul Johnson writes: “The Russian barrier
to further eastern penetration led to intensive Jewish settlement in Poland,
Lithuania and the Ukraine… By 1575, while the total population [of Poland] had
risen to seven million, the number of Jews had jumped to 150,000, and
thereafter the rise was still more rapid. In 1503 the Polish monarchy appointed
Rabbi Jacob Polak ‘Rabbi of Poland’, and the emergence of a chief rabbinate,
backed by the crown, allowed the development of a form of self-government which
the Jews had not known since the end of the exilarchate. From 1551 the chief
rabbi was elected by the Jews themselves. This was, to be sure, oligarchic
rather than democratic rule. The rabbinate had wide powers over law and
finances, appointing judges and a great variety of other officials… The royal
purpose in devolving power on the Jews was, of course, self-interested. There
was a great deal of Polish hostility to the Jews. In Cracow, for instance,
where the local merchant class was strong, Jews were usually kept out. The
kings found out they could make money out of the Jews by selling to certain
cities and towns, such as Warsaw, the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. But
they could make even more by allowing Jewish communities to grow up, and
milking them. The rabbinate and local Jewish councils were primarily
tax-raising agencies. Only 30 per cent of what they raised went on welfare and
official salaries; all the rest was handed over to the crown in return for
protection.
“The association of the rabbinate with
communal finance and so with the business affairs of those who had to provide
it led the eastern or Ashkenazi Jews to go even further than the
early-sixteenth-century Italians in giving halakhic approval to new methods of
credit-finance. Polish Jews operating near the frontiers of civilization [!]
had links with Jewish family firms in the Netherlands and Germany. A new kind
of credit instrument, the mamram, emerged and got rabbinical approval. In 1607
Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania were also authorized to use heter
iskah, an inter-Jewish borrowing system which allowed one Jew to finance
another in return for a percentage. This rationalization of the law eventually
led even conservative authorities, like the famous Rabbi Judah Loew, the
Maharal of Prague, to sanction lending at interest.
“With easy access to credit, Jewish
pioneer settlers played a leading part in developing eastern Poland, the
interior of Lithuania, and the Ukraine, especially from the 1560s onwards. The
population of Western Europe was expanding fast. It needed to import growing
quantities of grain. Ambitious Polish landowners, anxious to meet the need,
went into partnership with Jewish entrepreneurs to create new wheat-growing
areas to supply the market, take the grain down-river to the Baltic ports, and
then ship it west. The Polish magnates – Radziwills, Sovieskis, Zamojkis,
Ostrogskis, Lubomirskis – owned or conquered the land. The ports were run by
German Lutherans. The Dutch Calvinists owned most of the ships. But the Jews
did the rest. They not only managed the estates but in some cases held the
deeds as pledges in return for working capital. Sometimes they leased the
estates themselves. They ran the tolls. They built and ran mills and
distilleries. They owned the river boats, taking out the wheat and bringing
back in return wine, cloth and luxury goods, which they sold in their shops.
They were in soap, glazing, tanning and furs. They created entire villages and
townships (shtetls), where they lived in the centre, while peasants (Catholics
in Poland and Lithuania, Orthodox in the Ukraine) occupied the suburbs.
“Before 1569 [recte: 1596]
when the Union of Brest-Litovsk made the Polish settlement of the Ukraine
possible, there were only twenty-four Jewish settlements there with 4,000
inhabitants; by 1648 there were 115, with a numbered population of 51,325, the
total being much greater. Most of these places were owned by Polish nobles,
absentee-landlords, the Jews acting as middlemen and intermediaries with the
peasants – a role fraught with future danger. Often Jews were effectively the
magnates too. At the end of the sixteenth century Israel of Zloczew, for
instance, leased an entire region of hundreds of square miles from a consortium
of nobles to whom he paid the enormous sum of 4,500 zlotys. He sub-let tolls,
taverns and mills to his poorer relatives. Jews from all over Europe arrived to
take part in this colonizing process. In many settlements they constituted the
majority of the inhabitants, so that for the first time outside Palestine they
dominated the local culture. But there were important at every level of society
and administration. They farmed the taxes and the customs. They advised
government. And every Polish magnate had a Jewish counsellor in his castle,
keeping the books, writing letters, running the economic show…
“In 1648-49, the Jews of south-eastern
Poland and the Ukraine were struck by catastrophe. This episode was of great
importance in Jewish history for several reasons… The Thirty Years War had put
growing pressure on the food-exporting resources of Poland. It was because of
their Polish networks that Jewish contractors to the various armies had been so
successful in supplying them. But the chief beneficiaries had been the Polish
landlords; and the chief losers had been the Polish and Ukrainian peasants, who
had seen an ever-increasing proportion of the crops they raised marketed and
sold at huge profit to the ravenous armies. Under the Arenda system, whereby
the Polish nobility leased not only land but all fixed assets such as mills,
breweries, distilleries, inns and tolls to Jews, in return for fixed payments,
the Jews had flourished and their population had grown rapidly. But the system
was inherently unstable and unjust. The landlords, absentee and often
spendthrift, put continual pressure on the Jews by raising the price each time
a lease was renewed; the Jews in turn put pressure on the peasants….
“The Ukrainian peasants finally rose in
the late spring of 1648, led by a petty aristocrat called Bogdan Chmielnicki,
with the help of Dnieper Cossack and Tartars from the Crimea. His rising was
fundamentally aimed at Polish rule and the Catholic church, and many Polish
nobles and clergy were among the victims. But the principal animus was directed
against Jews, with whom peasants had the most contact, and when it came to the
point the Poles always abandoned their Jewish allies to save themselves.
Thousands of Jews from villages and shtetls scrambled for safety to the big
fortified towns, which turned into death-traps for them. At Tulchin the Polish
troops handed over the Jews to the Cossacks in exchange for their own lives; at
Tarnopol, the garrison refused to let the Jews in at all. At Bar, the fortress
fell and all the Jews were massacred. There was another fierce slaughter at
Narol. At Nemirov, the Cossacks got into the fortress by dressing as Poles,
‘and they killed about 6,000 souls in the town’, according to the Jewish
chronicle; ‘they drowned several hundreds in the water and by all kinds of
cruel torments’. In the synagogue they used the ritual knives to kill Jews,
then burned the building down, tore up the sacred books, and trampled them
underfoot, and used the leather covers for sandals.”[316]
Orthodoxy
and the Unia
Still more dangerous enemies than the Jews
for the beleagured Orthodox population of the western regions were the Jesuits.
«At the end of the 16th centuy,” writes Protopriest Peter Smirnov,
“the so-called Lithuanian unia took place, or the union of the Orthodox
Christians living in the south-western dioceses in separation from the Moscow
Patriarchate, with the Roman Catholic Church.
“The reasons for this event, which was so
sad for the Orthodox Church and so wretched for the whole of the south-western
region were: the lack of stability in the position and administration of the
separated dioceses; the intrigues on the part of the Latins and in particular
the Jesuits; the betrayal of Orthodoxy by certain bishops who were at that time
adminstering the south-western part of the Russian Church.
“With the separation of the south-western
dioceses under the authority of a special metropolitan, the question arose: to
whom were they to be hierarchically subject? Against the will of the initiators
of the separation, the south-western metropolia was subjected to the power of
the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the patriarchs, in view of the dangers
presented by the Latins, intensified their supervision over the separated
dioceses.”[317]
Before continuing with the story in
Russia, let us briefly examine the situation of the Patriarchate of
Constantinople, under which the great majority of non-Russian Orthodox
Christians lived, and which now undertook the leadership in the battle against
the unia.
There had been
one immediate and major gain from the fall of the Empire in 1453: the conqueror
of Constantinople gave the patriarchate into the hands of St. Gennadius
Scholarius, a disciple of St. Mark of Ephesus and a firm opponent of the unia.
However, in almost every other respect the Christians of the Greek lands and
the Balkans suffered greatly from their new rulers. Since the
Constantinopolitan patriarch was made both civic and religious leader of all
the empire's Orthodox, his throne became the object of political intrigues
involving not only Turkish officials, but also Greek merchants, Georgian kings,
Romanian princes and, increasingly, Western ambassadors. And since each new
patriarch had to pay a large sum, as well as an annual tribute, to the Sublime
Porte, this meant that, with rare exceptions, the candidate with the biggest
purse won. This in turn led to frequent depositions, even murders, of
patriarchs, and the extortion of ever-increasing sums from the already
impoverished Christians.[318]
In the towns and villages, conditions also
deteriorated. Gradually, more and more churches were converted into mosques;
bribes and intrigues were often necessary to keep the few remaining churches in
Christian hands, and these usually had to have drab exteriors with no visible
domes or crosses. On the whole, Christians were allowed to practise their
faith; but all influential positions were restricted to Muslims, and conversion
from Islam to Christianity was punishable by death. Many of the martyrs of this
period were Orthodox Christians who had, wittingly or unwittingly, become
Muslims in their youth, and were then killed for reconverting to the faith of
their fathers.[319]
The general level of education among the Christians plummeted, and even the
most basic books often had to be imported from semi-independent areas such as
the Danubian principalities or from Uniate presses in Venice.
It was only to be expected that the West
would attempt to benefit from the weakened condition of the Orthodox. The
Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 with the specific aim of buttressing the
Counter-Reformation papacy, and was soon mounting a formidable war, not only
against Protestantism, but also against Orthodoxy. The Jesuits' methods ranged
from crude force, which they used with the connivance of the Polish landlords
in the West Russian lands, to the subtler weapon of education, which was particularly
effective among the sons of Greek families who went to study in the College of
Saint Athanasius in Rome or the Jesuit schools of Constantinople. Soon this
pressure was producing results: in addition to the unia of Brest-Litovsk, at
which five Russian bishops joined Rome, several Antiochian metropolitans
apostasized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nor did the Protestant
reformers fail to make gains, especially in Romania.[320]
Amidst all this turmoil, and with the
bishops so often wavering in faith or bound by political pressures, it was
often left to the lower clergy or the laypeople to take up the banner of
Orthodoxy. Thus the unia was fought by hieromonks, such as St. Job of Pochaev,
lay theologians such as the Chiot Eustratios Argenti[321],
aristocratic landowners such as Prince Constantine Constantinovich Ostrozhsky,
and lay brotherhoods such as those which preserved Orthodoxy in
uniate-dominated towns such as Lvov and Vilnius for centuries.[322]
Many monks wandered around the Orthodox lands strengthening the Christians in
the faith of their fathers and receiving martyrdom as their reward, such as the
exarch of the Constantinopolitan patriarch Nicephorus, who was killed by the
Poles, and St. Athanasius of Brest, who was tortured to death by the Jesuits,
and St. Cosmas of Aitolia, who was killed by the Turks in Albania.[323]
The Turks,
paradoxically, provided some protection for Orthodox Christians from the
depradations of western missionaries in the Balkan lands. And the Muscovite
tsars, of course, provided even more in their territories. But the Russian
lands from Kiev westwards were largely deprived of protection.
“In such a situation,” continues Smirnov,
“the Jesuits appeared in the south-western dioceses and with their usual skill
and persistence used all the favourable circumstances to further their ends,
that is, to spread the power of the Roman pope. They took into their hands
control of the schools, and instilled in the children of the Russian boyars a
disgust for the Orthodox clergy and the Russian faith, which they called
‘kholop’ (that is, the faith of the simple people). The fruits of this
education were not slow to manifest themselves. The majority of the Russian
boyars and princes went over to Latinism. To counter the influence of the
Jesuits in many cities brotherhoods were founded. These received important
rights from the Eastern Patriarchs. Thus, for example, the Lvov brotherhood had
the right to rebuke the bishops themselves for incorrect thinking, and even expel
them from the Church. New difficulties appeared, which were skillfully
exploited by the Jesuits. They armed the bishops against the brotherhoods and
against the patriarchs (the slaves of the Sultans), pointed out the excellent
situation of the Catholic bishops, many of whom had seats in the senate, and
honours and wealth and power. The Polish government helped the Jesuits in every
way, and at their direction offered episcopal sees to such people as might
later turn out to be their obedient instruments. Such in particular were Cyril
Terletsky, Bishop of Lutsk, and Hypatius Potsey, Bishop of
Vladimir-in-Volhynia....
“The immediate excuse for the unia was
provided by the following circumstance. Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople, during his journey through the south of Russia to
Moscow to establish the patriarch, defrocked the Kieven Metropolitan
Gnesiphorus for bigamy, and appointed in his place
Michael Ragoza, and commanded him to convene a council, by his return, to
discuss another bigamist who had been accused of many crimes, Cyril Terletsky. Ìichael Ragoza was a kind person, but weak in character, he did not convene a council
inflicted unnecessary delays and expenses on the patriarch. The Patriarch,
summoned out of Russia by his own affairs, sent letters of attorney to Ragoza
and Bishop Meletius of Vladimir (in Volhynia) for the trial of Teretsky. Both
these letters were seized by Cyril, and the affair continued to be dragged out.
Meanwhile, Meletius died, and Cyril Terletsky succeeded in presenting the
Vladimir see to his friend, Hypatius Potsey. Fearing the appointment of a new trial on himself from
the patriarch, Cyril hastened to act in favour of the unia, and made an ally
for himself in Hypatius, who was indebted to him.
“In 1593 they openly suggested the unia to
the other south-western bishops in order to liberate themselves from the power
of the patriarch and the interference of laymen in the affairs of the
ecclesiastical administration. In December, 1595 they were already in Rome, kissed
the slipper of Pope Clement VIII, recognised the procession of
the Holy Spirit from the Son, the supreme authority of the Roman first-priest,
the teaching on indulgences and purgatory. The Pope received them with joy,
appointed a great festivity in honour of the union that had been achieved, and
ordered a coin to be minted. On this coin they portrayed the Pope and a Russian
falling at his feet, with the words: «In memory of the reception of the
Russians».
The whole affair was carried through, as
was the custom of the Jesuits, with various forgeries and deceptions. Thus, for example, they took the signatures of the two
bishops on white blanks, supposedly in case there would be unforeseen petitions
before the king on behalf of the Orthodox, and meanwhile on these blanks they
wrote a petition for the unia. Potsej and Terletsky made such concessions to the Pope in Rome as they had not been
authorised to make even by the bishops who thought like them. Terletsky and
Potsej had hardly returned from Rome before these forgeries were exposed, which
elicited strong indignation against them on the part of some bishops (Gideon of
Lvov and Michael of Peremysl) the Orthodox princes (Prince Ostrozhsky) and
others.
“At the end of 1596 there was council in
Brest in order to come to a decision about the unia, at which, besides the
south-western bishops, there were two patriarchal exarchs, Nicephorus from the
Constantinopolitan Patriarch and Cyril Lukaris from the Alexandrian. From the
very beginning of the council the Orthodox separated themselves from the uniate
party and opened special sessions. At the head of the Orthodox stood the
exarchs, six bishops and Prince Ostrozhsky. Four bishops were firmly behind the
unia, but they were supported by the king. The metropolitan behaved
indecisively and did not know where to go until the Jesuits drew over to their
side and against Orthodoxy. The supporters of the unia triumphantly read out
the Pope’s bull and the act of union. But the Orthodox, from their side, signed
a decree: not to obey the metropolitan and the apostate bishops and consider
them defrocked; and not to undertake anything in relation to the faith without
the consent of the Patriarch of Constantinople.
“From this time there began persecutions
against the Orthodox. The uniate bishops removed the Orthodox priests and put
uniates in their place. The Orthodox brotherhoods were declared to be mutinous
assemblies, and those faithful to Orthodoxy were deprived of posts and
oppressed in trade and crafts. The peasants were subjected to all kinds of
indignities by their Catholic landlords. The [Orthodox] churches were forcibly
turned into uniate ones or were leased out to Jews. The leaseholder had the
keys to the church and extracted taxes for every service and need. Ìany of the Orthodos fled from
these restrictions to the Cossacks in the steppes, who rose up in defence of
the Orthodox faith under the leadership of Nalivaiki. But the Poles overcame
them and Nalivaiki was burned to death in a brazen bull. Òhen a fresh rebellion broke out under Taras.
But, happily for the Orthodoxy, their wrathful persecutor Sigismund III died.
His successor, Vladislav IV, gave the Orthodox Church privileges, with the help of
which she strengthened herself for the coming struggle with the uniates and
Catholics...
“However, although Vladislav was
well-disposed towards the Orthodox, the Poles did not obey him and continued to
oppress them. The Cossacks several times took up arms, and when they fell into
captivity to the Poles, the latter subjected them to terrible tortures. Some
were stretched on the wheel, others had their arms and legs broken, others were
pierced with spikes and placed on the rack. Children were burned on iron grills before the eyes of
their fathers and mothers.”[324]
Boris Godunov
The Brest unia made the necessity of a
strong autocracy in Moscow more essential than ever. And yet it is from this
time, and in particular from the coronation of Boris Godunov on September 1,
1598, that the Muscovite autocracy began to waver. Boris was the first Russian
tsar to be crowned and anointed by a full patriarch, and there was no serious
resistance to his ascending the throne. But he acted from the beginning as if
not quite sure of his position, or as if seeking some confirmation of his
position from the lower ranks of society. This was perhaps because he was not a
direct descendant of the Rurik dynasty (he was brother-in-law of Tsar
Theodore), perhaps because (according to the Chronograph of 1617) the dying
Tsar Theodore had pointed to his mother’s nephew, Theodore Nikitch Romanov, the
future patriarch, as his successor, perhaps because he had some dark crime on
his conscience…
In any case, the extraordinary thing was,
as Stephen Graham writes, that “Boris without reading Sir Thomas More – he was
still illiterate – and probably without converse on the subject had arrived at
the idea of Utopia, the democratic conception of the Golden Age, even
interrupting the liturgy of the coronation to proclaim the equality of man.
It was a striking interruption of the ceremony. The Cathedral of the Assumption
was packed with a mixed assembly such as never could have found place at the
coronation of a tsar of the blood royal. There were many nobles there, but
cheek by jowl with them merchants, shopkeepers, even beggars. Boris suddenly
took the arm of the holy Patriarch in his and declaimed in a loud voice: ‘Oh,
holy father Patriarch Job, I call God to witness that during my reign there
shall be neither poor man nor beggar in my realm, but I will share all with my
fellows, even to the last rag that I wear.’ And in sign he ran his fingers over
the jewelled vestments that he wore. There was an unprecedented scene in the
cathedral, almost a revolutionary tableau when the common people massed within
the precincts broke the disciplined majesty of the scene to applaud the
speaker.”[325]
How different was this tsarist democratism
from the self-confidence of Ivan the Terrible: “I boast of nothing in my pride;
indeed I have no need of pride, for I perform my kingly task and consider no
man higher than myself.”[326]
And again: “The Russian autocrats have from the beginning had possession of all
the kingdoms, and not the boyars and grandees…”[327]
And again, this time to the (elected) king of Poland: “We, humble Ivan, tsar
and great prince of all Rus’, by the will of God, and not by the stormy will of
man…”[328]
And indeed, Ivan the Terrible’s attitude
to his own power was much closer to the attitude of the Russian people as a
whole than was Boris Godunov’s. For, as St. John Maximovich writes, “the
Russian sovereigns were never tsars by the will of the people, but always
remained Autocrats by the Mercy of God. They were sovereigns in accordance with
the dispensation of God, and not according to the ‘multimutinous’ will of man.”[329]
Sensing that Tsar Boris was not sure of
his legitimacy, the people paid more heed to the rumours that he had murdered
the Tsarevich Demetrius, the Terrible’s youngest son, in 1591 – which, if true,
would certainly have made him a usurper in their eyes. But then came news that
a young man claiming to be Demetrius Ivanovich was marching at the head of a
Polish army into Russia. If this man was truly Demetrius, then Boris was, of
course, innocent of his murder. But paradoxically this only made his position
more insecure; for in the eyes of the people the hereditary principle was
higher than any other – an illegitimate but living son of Ivan the Terrible was
more legitimate for them than Boris, even though he was an intelligent and experienced
ruler, the right-hand man of two previous tsars, and fully supported by the
Patriarch, who anathematised all the false Demetrius and all those who followed
him. Support for Boris collapsed, and in 1605 he died, after which Demetrius,
who had promised the Pope to convert Russia to Catholicism, swept to power in
Moscow.
How was such sedition against their tsar
possible in a people that had patiently put up with the terrible Ivan?
Solonevich, points to the importance that the Russian people attached to the legitimacy
of their tsars, in sharp contrast to the apparent lack of concern for
legitimacy which he claims to find among the Byzantines. “Thus in Byzantium out
of 109 reigning emperors 74 ascended onto the throne by means of regicide. This
apparently disturbed no one. In Russia in the 14th century Prince
Demetrius Shemyaka tried to act on the Byzantine model and overthrow Great
Prince Basil Vasilyevich – and suffered a complete defeat. The Church cursed
Shemyaka, the boyars turned away from him, the masses did not follow him: the
Byzantine methods turned out to be unprofitable. Something of this sort took
place with Boris Godunov. The dynasty of the Terrible had disappeared, and
Boris Godunov turned out to be his nearest relative. Neither the lawfulness of
his election to the kingdom, nor his exceptional abilities as a statesman, can
be doubted… With Boris Godunov everything, in essence, was in order, except for
one thing: the shade of Tsarevich Demetrius. And the Muscovite oligarchy led by
Basil Shuisky found his weakest point – the only weak point in the reign
of Godunov: they created a legend about Boris Godunov being the murderer of the
lawful heir to the throne. And the shade of Tsarevich Demetrius began to wander
across the land… Who in Byzantium would have worried about the fate of a child
killed twenty years earlier? There might created right, and might washed away
sin. In Rus’ right created might, and sin remained sin.”[330]
Solonevich exaggerates the contrast
between Byzantium and Rus’ here. And his remark that “in Muscovite Rus’ there
was no regicide at all” can only be accepted if the mob’s murder of Tsar
Theodore, son of Godunov, and then of Tsar Basil Shuisky, is not considered
regicide. Moreover, the mob’s understanding of legitimacy differed from that of
the Church, which supported the legitimacy of Tsars Boris Godunov, Theodore
Godunov and Basil Shuisky against the mob’s choice of the first and second
false Demetriuses, who very nearly brought about the downfall of the Orthodox Autocracy.
Thus the Zemskiy Sobor of 1613 called the mob’s killing of Tsar Basil Shuisky
“a common sin of the land, committed out of the envy of the devil” [331]
Nevertheless, the point
concerning the importance of legitimacy in Muscovite Russia is well taken and
important. “As regards who had to be tsar,” writes St. John Maximovich, “a tsar
could hold his own on the throne only if the principle of legitimacy was
observed, that is, the elected person was the nearest heir of his
predecessor. The legitimate Sovereign was the basis of the state’s
prosperity and was demanded by the spirit of the Russian people.”[332]
It is this insistence on legitimacy that constitutes the main difference
between the Russian and the Byzantine understandings of autocratic power.
The Time of Troubles
The best representatives of the Russian
people, in the persons of the holy Patriarchs Job and Hermogen, stood
courageously for those Tsars who had been lawfully anointed by the Church and
remained loyal to the Orthodox faith, regardless of their personal virtues or
vices. Conversely, they refused to recognise (even at the cost of their sees
and their lives) the pretenders to the tsardom who did not satisfy these
conditions – again, regardless of their personal qualities. Most of the Russian
clergy accepted the first false Demetrius. But “in relation to the second false
Demetrius,” writes Fr. Lev Lebedev, “[they] conducted themselves more
courageously. Bishops Galacteon of Suzdal and Joseph of Kolomna suffered for
their non-acceptance of the usurper. Archbishop Theoctistus of Tver received a
martyric death in Tushino. Dressed only in a shirt, the bare-footed
Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov, the future patriarch, was brought by the Poles
into the camp of the usurper, where he remained in captivity. Seeing such
terrible events, Bishop Gennadius of Pskov ‘died of sorrow…’” [333]
There were other champions of the faith:
the monks of Holy Trinity – St. Sergius Lavra, who heroically resisted a long
Polish siege, and the great chain-bearing hermit, St. Irinarchus of Rostov.
In the life of the latter we read: “Once
there came into the elder’s cell a Polish noble, Pan Mikulinsky with other
Pans. ‘In whom do you believe?’ he asked. ‘I believe in the Holy Trinity, the
Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit!’ ‘And what earthly king do you have?’ The
elder replied in a loud voice: ‘I have the Russian Tsar Basil Ioannovich
[Shuisky]. I live in Russia, I have a Russian tsar – I have nobody else!’ One
of the Pans said: ‘You, elder, are a traitor; you believe neither in our king,
nor in [the second false] Demetrius!’ The elder replied: ‘I do not fear your
sword, which is corruptible, and I will not betray my faith in the Russian
Tsar. If you cut me off for that, then I will suffer it with joy. I have a
little blood in me for you, but my Living God has a sword which will cut you
off invisibly, without flesh or blood, and He will send your souls into eternal
torment!’ And Pan Mikulinsky was amazed
at the great faith of the elder…”[334]
The Time of Troubles nearly produced, as
Geoffrey Hosking explains, a Russian Magna Carta. “An analogous agreement was
mooted in February, 1610 when protagonists of the second pretender switched
their support to the Polish crown. They presented King Sigismund with a set of
conditions on which they were prepared to accept his son Wladyslaw as Tsar. The
first was that the Orthodox faith should remain inviolate. Then came
stipulations on the rights of individual estates, for example, not to be
punished or to have property confiscated without trial before a properly
constituted court, not to be demoted from a high chin [rank] without clear and
demonstrable fault. The document implied a state structure in which supreme
authority would be shared with a combined boyar assembly and zemskii sobor (duma boiar i vseia zemli), in agreement with which questions of taxes, salaries of
service people and the bestowal of patrimonial and service estates would be
decided. Such a document might have laid for the basis for a constitutional
Muscovite monarchy in personal union with Poland.
“However, it never took effect, since
Wladyslaw did not come to claim his throne. Instead, Sigismund declared his
intention of doing so himself. This prompted the Patriarch, Hermogen, to issue
a stern injunction that the Russian people were not to ‘kiss the cross before a
Catholic king’.”[335]
And the authority of the Patriarch was
enough to scupper the plans of the Polish king and Russian nobles. For when the
Russian nobles brought the document to the Polish headquarters at Smolensk,
where a Russian embassy led by Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov had already been
for some time, then, as Lebedev writes, “on not seeing the signature of the
Patriarch on the document, this embassy recognized it to be unlawful. To
this the boyars objected, saying that ‘the patriarch must not interfere in
affairs of the land’. And they received the following reply: ‘From the
beginning affairs were conducted as follows in our Russian State: if great
affairs of State or of the land are begun, then our majesties summoned a
council of patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops and conferred with them.
Without their advice nothing was decreed. And our majesties revere the
patriarchs with great honour… And before them were the metropolitans. Now we
are without majesties, and the patriarch is our leader (that is – the main
person in the absence of the tsars! – author’s note). It is now unfitting
to confer upon such a great matter without the patriarch… It is now impossible
for us to act without patriarchal documents, and only with those of the
boyars…’”[336]
Two months later, St. Hermogen was starved
to death by the Poles in the Kremlin. However, his appeals had already ignited
a national army of liberation led by the nobleman Demetrius Pozharsky (whom St.
Irinarchus blessed for his exploit) and the butcher Cosmas Minin from Nizhni
Novgorod. In 1612 this army drove the Poles out of Moscow. And so St. Hermogen,
who at one time stood almost alone in his refusal to accept a Catholic tsar, saved
not only Russian Orthodoxy from Catholicism but also the Russian autocracy from
western-style constitutional monarchy.
The history of the 17th and
18th centuries showed without a doubt which was the superior political
principle. Thus while Russia went from strength to strength, finally liberating
all the Russian lands from the oppressive tyranny of the Polish landlords,
Poland grew weaker and weaker under its powerless elective monarchy. Finally,
by the end of the eighteenth century it ceased to exist as an independent
State…
At the same time local government across
the country had shown initiative and responsibility. It was they who rejected
foreign candidates for the tsardom and insisted that the tsar be Russian and
Orthodox. They were, in Lebedev’s words, “extremely suspicious of both boyars
and Cossacks, but nevertheless cooperated with individuals from both categories
when that seemed necessary for the common good. The outcome… suggested that
Russians identified themselves with strong authority, backed by the Orthodox
Church and unrestrained by any charter or covenant, such as might prove
divisive and set one social group against another… The zemlia had for the first
time constituted itself as a reality, based on elective local government
institutions, and had chosen a new master…”[337]
Not for the first or last time in Russian history local initiative – in effect,
the peasants and smaller townsfolk - had upheld the autocracy, rejecting the
ambitions of the aristocratic boyars and the self-will of the freewheeling
Cossacks, which groups had shown themselves to be unfaithful to Orthodoxy and
the fundamental principles of Russian Statehood during the Time of Troubles.
Thus on February 7, 1613, Michael Romanov
was elected tsar by a Zemskij Sobor in Moscow. In recognition of
the fact that it was largely the nation’s betrayal of legitimate autocratic
authority that had led to the Time of Troubles, the delegates at this Sobor
swore eternal loyalty to Michael Romanov and his descendants, calling a curse
upon themselves if they should ever break this oath. The curse duly fell upon
the people when they renounced the last and greatest of the Romanovs,
Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, in February, 1917…
“The Time of Troubles,” writes Lebedev,
“illuminated the profound basis of the interrelationship of ecclesiastical and
royal power. This problem was reflected, as if in magnifying glass, in the
above-mentioned quarrels of the Russian ambassadors with regard to the absence
of Patriarch Hermogen’s signature on the document of the capitulation of
Russia. It turns out that both the Russian hierarchs and the best statesmen
understood the relationship of the tsar and the patriarch in a truly Christian,
communal sense. In the one great Orthodox society of Russia there are two
leaders: a spiritual (the patriarch) and a secular (the tsar). They are both
responsible for all that takes place in society, but each in his own
way: the tsar first of all for civil affairs (although he can also take
a very active and honourable part in ecclesiastical affairs when that is
necessary), while the patriarch is first of all responsible for
ecclesiastical, spiritual affairs (although he can also, when necessary, take a
most active part in state affairs). The tsars take counsel with the patriarchs,
the patriarchs – with the tsars in all the most important questions.
Traditionally the patriarch is an obligatory member of the boyars’ Duma
(government). If there is no tsar, then the most important worldly affairs are
decided only with the blessing of the patriarch. If in the affair of the
establishment of the patriarchate in Russia it was the royal power that was
basically active, in the Time of Troubles the royal power itself and the whole
of Russia were saved by none other than the Russian patriarchs! Thus the
troubles very distinctly demonstrated that the Russian ecclesiastical
authorities were not, and did not think of themselves as being, a 'legally
obedient’ arm of the State power, as some (A.V. Kartashev) would have it. It
can remain and did remain in agreement with the State power in those
affairs in which this was possible from an ecclesiastical point of view, and to
the extent that this was possible.
“In this question it was important that
neither side should try to seize for itself the prerogatives of the other side,
that is, should not be a usurper, for usurpation can be understood not
only in the narrow sense, but also in the broad sense of the general striving
to become that which you are not by law, to assume for yourself those functions
which do not belong to you by right. It is amazing that in those days there
was no precise juridical, written law (‘right’) concerning the
competence and mutual relations of the royal and ecclesiastical powers.
Relations were defined by the spiritual logic of things and age-old tradition…”[338]
The
Hereditary Principle
And so, with the enthronement of the first
Romanov tsar, the Muscovite kingdom was established on the twin pillars of the
Orthodox Faith and Hereditary succession. The requirement of Orthodoxy had been
passed down from the Byzantines. Hereditary Succession was not a requirement in
Rome or Byzantium (which is one reason why so many Byzantine emperors were
assassinated by usurpers)[339].
But in Russia, as in some Western Orthodox autocracies (for example, the
Anglo-Saxon), it was felt to be a necessity. Both pillars had been shaken
during the Time of Troubles, after the death of the last Ryurik tsar. But
Orthodoxy had been restored above all by the holy Patriarchs Job and Hermogenes
refusing to recognise a Catholic tsar, and then by the national army of
liberation that drove out the Poles. And the Hereditary Principle, already
tacitly accepted if mistakenly applied by the people when they followed the
false Demetrius, had been affirmed by all the estates of the nation at the Zemskij Sobor in 1613.
Since the hereditary principle is commonly
considered to be irrational as placing the government of the State “at the
mercy of chance”, it may be worth pausing to consider its significance in
Russian Orthodox statehood in the thinking of three Russian writers: I. L.
Solonevich, St. John Maximovich and Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow.
First,
while it cannot be denied that the Zemskij Sobor of 1613 was in some
sense an election, it was by no means a democratic election in the
modern sense, but rather a recognition of God’s election of a ruler on
the model of the Israelites’ election of Jephtha (Judges 11.11). For, as
Solonevich writes, “when, after the Time of Troubles, the question was raised
concerning the restoration of the monarchy, there was no hint of an ‘election
to the kingdom’. There was a ‘search’ for people who had the greatest
hereditary right to the throne. And not an ‘election’ of the more worthy. There
were not, and could not be, any ‘merits’ in the young Michael Fyodorovich. But
since only the hereditary principle affords the advantage of absolutely
indisputability, it was on this that the ‘election’ was based.”[340]
Moreover,
after “electing” the first Romanov tsar (whom St. Hermogen had been the first
to point to), the people retained no right to depose him or any of his
successors. On the contrary, they elected a hereditary dynasty, and
specifically bound themselves by an oath to be loyal to that dynasty forever.
St. John Maximovich writes: “What drew the
hearts of all to Michael Romanov? He had neither experience of statecraft, nor
had he done any service to the state. He was not distinguished by the state
wisdom of Boris Godunov or by the eminence of his race, as was Basil Shuisky.
He was sixteen years old, and “Misha Romanov”, as he was generally known, had
not yet managed to show his worth in anything. But why did the Russian people
rest on him, and why with his crowning did all the quarrels and disturbances
regarding the royal throne come to an end? The Russian people longed for a
lawful, “native” Sovereign, and was convinced that without him there could be
no order or peace in Russia. When Boris Godunov and Prince Basil Shuisky were
elected, although they had, to a certain degree, rights to the throne through
their kinship with the previous tsars, they were not elected by reason of their
exclusive rights, but their personalities were taken into account. There was no
strict lawful succession in their case. This explained the success of the
pretenders. However, it was almost impossible to elect someone as tsar for his
qualities. Everyone evaluated the candidates for their point of view. However,
the absence of a definite law which would have provided an heir in the case of
the cutting off of the line of the Great Princes and Tsars of Moscow made it
necessary for the people itself to indicate who they wanted as tsar. The
descendants of the appanage princes, although they came from the same race as
that of the Moscow Tsars (and never forgot that), were in the eyes of the
people simple noblemen, “serfs” of the Moscow sovereigns; their distant kinship
with the royal line had already lost its significance. Moreover, it was
difficult to establish precisely which of the descendants of St. Vladimir on
the male side had the most grounds for being recognised as the closest heir to
the defunct royal line. In such circumstances all united in the suggestion that
the extinct Royal branch should be continued by the closest relative of the
last “native”, lawful Tsar. The closest relatives of Tsar Theodore Ioannovich
were his counsins on his mother’s side: Theodore, in monasticism Philaret, and
Ivan Nikitich Romanov, both of whom had sons. In that case the throne had to pass
to Theodore, as the eldest, but his monasticism and the rank of Metropolitan of
Rostov was an obstacle to this. His heir was his only son Michael. Thus the
question was no longer about the election of a Tsar, but about the recognition
that a definite person had the rights to the throne. The Russian people,
tormented by the time of troubles and the lawlessness, welcomed this decision,
since it saw that order could be restored only by a lawful “native” Tsar. The
people remembered the services of the Romanovs to their homeland, their
sufferings for it, the meek Tsaritsa Anastasia Romanova, the firmness of
Philaret Nikitich. All this still more strongly attracted the hearts of the
people to the announced tsar. But these qualities were possessed also by some other
statesmen and sorrowers for Rus’. And this was not the reason for the election
of Tsar Michael Romanovich, but the fact that in him Rus’ saw their most lawful
and native Sovereign.
“In the acts on the election to the
kingdom of Michael Fyodorovich, the idea that he was ascending the throne by
virtue of his election by the people was carefully avoided, and it was pointed
out that the new Tsar was the elect of God, the direct descendant of the last
lawful Sovereign.”[341]
The hereditary tsar’s rule is inviolable.
As Metropolitan Philaret writes: “A government that is not fenced about by an
inviolability that is venerated religiously by the whole people cannot act with
the whole fullness of power or that freedom of zeal that is necessary for the
construction and preservation of the public good and security. How can it
develop its whole strength in its most beneficial direction, when its power
constantly finds itself in an insecure position, struggling with other powers
that cut short its actions in as many different directions as are the opinions,
prejudices and passions more or less dominant in society? How can it surrender
itself to the full force of its zeal, when it must of necessity divide its
attentions between care for the prosperity of society and anxiety about its own
security? But if the government is so lacking in firmness, then the State is
also lacking in firmness. Such a State is like a city built on a volcanic
mountain: what significance does its hard earth have when under it is hidden a
power that can at any minute turn everything into ruins? Subjects who do not
recognise the inviolability of rulers are incited by the hope of licence to
achieve licence and predominance, and between the horrors of anarchy and
oppression they cannot establish in themselves that obedient freedom which is
the focus and soul of public life.”[342]
There are certain laws, like that
concerning the hereditary principle itself, which are fundamental, that
is, which even the tsar cannot transgress, insofar as they define the very
essence of the Orthodox hereditary monarchy. In general, however, the
hereditary autocrat is above the law. For, as Solonevich writes: “The
fundamental, most fundamental idea of the Russian monarchy was most vividly and
clearly expressed by A.S. Pushkin just before the end of his life: ‘There must
be one person standing higher than everybody, higher even than the law.’
“In this formulation, ‘one man’, Man is
placed in very big letters above the law. This formulation is completely unacceptable
for the Roman-European cast of mind, for which the law is everything: dura lex,
sed lex. The Russian cast of mind places, man, mankind, the soul higher
than the law, giving to the law only that place which it should occupy: the
place occupied by traffic rules. Of course, with corresponding punishments for
driving on the left side. Man is not for the sabbath, but the sabbath for man.
It is not that man is for the fulfilment of the law, but the law is for the
preservation of man…
“The whole history of humanity is filled
with the struggle of tribes, people, nations, classes, estates, groups,
parties, religions and whatever you like. It’s almost as Hobbes put it: ‘War by
everyone against everyone’. How are we to find a neutral point of support in
this struggle? An arbiter standing above the tribes, nations, peoples, classes,
estates, etc.? Uniting the people, classes and religions into a common whole?
Submitting the interests of the part to the interests of the whole? And placing
moral principles above egoism, which is always characteristic of every
group of people pushed forward the summit of public life?”[343]
The idea that the tsar is higher than the
law, while remaining subject to the law of God, is also defended by
Metropolitan Philaret: “The tsar, rightly understood, is the head and soul of
the kingdom. But, you object to me, the soul of the State must be the law. The
law is necessary, it is worthy of honour, faithful; but the law in charters and
books is a dead letter… The law, which is dead in books, comes to life in acts;
and the supreme State actor and exciter and inspirer of the subject actors is
the Tsar.”[344]
But if the tsar is above the law, how can
he not be a tyrant, insofar as, in the famous words of Lord Acton, “power
corrupts, and absolute power absolutely corrupts”?
First, as we have seen, the tsar’s power
is not absolute insofar as he is subject to the law of God and the fundamental
laws of the kingdom, which the Church is called upon to defend. Secondly, it is
not only tsars, but rulers of all kinds that are subject to the temptations of
power. Indeed, these temptations may even be worse with democratic rulers; for
whereas the tsar stands above all factional interests, an elected president
necessarily represents the interests only of his party at the expense of the
country as a whole. “Western thought,” writes Solonevich, “sways from the
dictatorship of capitalism to the dictatorship of the proletariat , but no
representative of this thought has even so much as thought of ‘the dictatorship
of conscience’.”[345]
“The distinguishing characteristic of
Russian monarchy, which was given to it at its birth, consists in the fact that
the Russian monarchy expressed the will not of the most powerful, but the will
of the whole nation, religiously given shape by Orthodoxy and politically given
shape by the Empire. The will of the nation, religious given shape by Orthodoxy
will be ‘the dictatorship of conscience’ Only in this way can we explain the possibility
of the manifesto of February 19, 1861 [when Tsar Alexander II freed the
peasants]: ‘the dictatorship of conscience’ was able overcome the terribly
opposition of the ruling class, and the ruling class proved powerless. We must
always have this distinction in mind: the Russian monarchy is the expression of
the will, that is: the conscience, of the nation, not the will of the
capitalists, which both French Napoleons expressed, or the will of the
aristocracy, which all the other monarchies of Europe expressed: the Russian
monarchy is the closes approximation to the ideal of monarchy in general. This
ideal was never attained by the Russian monarchy – for the well-known reason
that no ideal is realisable in our life. In the history of the Russian
monarchy, as in the whole of our world, there were periods of decline, of
deviation, of failure, but there were also periods of recovery such as world
history has never known.”[346]
Now State power, which, like power in the
family or the tribe, always has an element of coercion, “is constructed in
three ways: by inheritance, by election and by seizure: monarchy [autocracy],
republic [democracy], dictatorship [despotism]. In practice all this changes
places: the man who seizes power becomes a hereditary monarch (Napoleon I), the
elected president becomes the same (Napoleon III), or tries to become it
(Oliver Cromwell). The elected ‘chancellor’, Hitler, becomes a seizer of power.
But in general these are nevertheless exceptions.
“Both a republic and a dictatorship
presuppose a struggle for power – democratic in the first case and necessarily
bloody in the second: Stalin – Trotsky, Mussolini-Matteotti, Hitler-Röhm.
In a republic, as a rule, the struggle is unbloody. However, even an unbloody
struggle is not completely without cost. Aristide Briand, who became French
Prime Minister several times, admitted that 95% of his strength was spent on
the struggle for power and only five percent on the work of power. And even
this five percent was exceptionally short-lived.
“Election and seizure are, so to speak,
rationalist methods. Hereditary power is, strictly speaking, the power of
chance, indisputable if only because the chance of birth is completely
indisputable. You can recognise or not recognise the principle of monarchy in
general. But no one can deny the existence of the positive law presenting the
right of inheriting the throne to the first son of the reigning monarch. Having
recourse to a somewhat crude comparison, this is something like an ace in
cards… An ace is an ace. No election, no merit, and consequently no
quarrel. Power passes without quarrel and pain: the king is dead, long live the
king!”[347]
We may interrupt Solonevich’s argument
here to qualify his use of the word “chance”. The fact that a man inherits the
throne only because he is the firstborn of his father may be “by chance” from a
human point of view. But from the Divine point of view it is election.
As Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov writes: “There is no blind chance! God rules
the world, and everything that takes place in heaven and beneath the heavens
takes place according to the judgement of the All-wise and All-powerful God.”[348]
Moreover, as Bishop Ignatius writes, “in blessed Russia, according to the
spirit of the pious people, the Tsar and the fatherland constitute one whole,
as in a family the parents and their children constitute one whole.”[349]
This being so, it was only natural that the law of succession should be
hereditary, from father to son.
Solonevich continues: “The human
individual, born by chance as heir to the throne, is placed in circumstances
which guarantee him the best possible professional preparation from a technical
point of view. His Majesty Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich was probably one of
the most educated people of his time. The best professors of Russia taught him
both law and strategy and history and literature. He spoke with complete
freedom in three foreign languages. His knowledge was not one-sided.. and was,
if one can so express it, living knowledge…
“The Russian tsar was in charge of
everything and was obliged to know everything
- it goes without saying, as far as humanly possible. He was a
‘specialist’ in that sphere which excludes all specialisation. This was a
specialism standing above all the specialisms of the world and embracing them all.
That is, the general volume of erudition of the Russian monarch had in mind
that which every philosophy has in mind: the concentration in one point of the
whole sum of human knowledge. However, with this colossal qualification, that
‘the sum of knowledge’ of the Russian tsars grew in a seamless manner from the
living practice of the past and was checked against the living practice of the
present. True, that is how almost all philosophy is checked – for example, with
Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler – but, fortunately for humanity, such checking
takes place comparatively rarely….
“The heir to the Throne, later the
possessor of the Throne, is placed in such conditions under which temptations
are reduced.. to a minimum. He is given everything he needs beforehand. At his
birth he receives an order, which he, of course, did not manage to earn, and
the temptation of vainglory is liquidated in embryo. He is absolutely provided
for materially – the temptation of avarice is liquidated in embryo. He is the
only one having the Right – and so competition falls away, together with
everything linked with it. Everything is organised in such a way that the
personal destiny of the individual should be welded together into one whole
with the destiny of the nation. Everything that a person would want to have for
himself is already given him. And the person automatically merges with the
general good.
“One could say that all this is possessed
also by a dictator of the type of Napoleon, Stalin or Hitler. But this would be
less than half true: everything that the dictator has he conquered, and
all this he must constantly defend – both against competitors and against the
nation. The dictator is forced to prove every day that it is precisely he who
is the most brilliant, great, greatest and inimitable, for if not he, but
someone else, is not the most brilliant, then it is obvious that that other
person has the right to power…
“We can, of course, quarrel over the very
principle of ‘chance’. A banally rationalist, pitifully scientific point of
view is usually formulated thus: the chance of birth may produce a defective
man. But we, we will elect the best… Of course, ‘the chance of birth’
can produce a defective man. We have examples of this: Tsar Theodore Ivanovich.
Nothing terrible happened. For the monarchy ‘is not the arbitratriness of a
single man’, but ‘a system of institutions’, - a system can operate temporarily
even without a ‘man’. But simple statistics show that the chance of such
‘chance’ events are very small. And the chance of ‘a genius on the throne’
appearing is still smaller.
“I proceed from the axiom that a genius in
politics is worse than the plague. For a genius is a person who thinks up
something that is new in principle. In thinking up something that is new in
principle, he invades the organic life of the country and cripples it, as it
was crippled by Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler…
“The power of the tsar is the power of the
average, averagely clever man over two hundred million average, averagely
clever people… V. Klyuchevsky said with some perplexity that the first
Muscovite princes, the first gatherers of the Russian land, were completely
average people: - and yet, look, they gathered the Russian land. This is quite
simple: average people have acted in the interests of average people and the
line of the nation has coincided with the line of power. So the average
people of the Novgorodian army went over to the side of the average people of
Moscow, while the average people of the USSR are running away in all directions
from the genius of Stalin.”[350]
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow expressed
the superiority of the hereditary over the elective principle as follows: “What
conflict does election for public posts produce in other peoples! With what
conflict, and sometimes also with what alarm do they attain the legalisation of
the right of public election! Then there begins the struggle, sometimes dying
down and sometimes rising up again, sometimes for the extension and sometimes for
the restriction of this right. The incorrect extension of the right of social
election is followed by its incorrect use. It would be difficult to believe it
if we did not read in foreign newspapers that elective votes are sold; that
sympathy or lack of sympathy for those seeking election is expressed not only
by votes for and votes against, but also by sticks and stones, as if a man can
be born from a beast, and rational business out of the fury of the passions;
that ignorant people make the choice between those in whom wisdom of state is
envisaged, lawless people participate in the election of future lawgivers,
peasants and craftsmen discuss and vote, not about who could best keep order in
the village or the society of craftsmen, but about who is capable of
administering the State.
“Thanks be to God! It is not so in our
fatherland. Autocratic power, established on the age-old law of heredity, which
once, at a time of impoverished heredity, was renewed and strengthened on its
former basis by a pure and rational election, stands in inviolable firmness and
acts with calm majesty. Its subjects do not think of striving for the right of
election to public posts in the assurance that the authorities care for the
common good and know through whom and how to construct it.”[351]
“God, in accordance with the image of His
heavenly single rule, has established a tsar on earth; in accordance with the
image of His almighty power, He has established an autocratic tsar; in
accordance with the image of His everlasting Kingdom, which continues from age
to age, He has established a hereditary tsar.”[352]
We may now define more precisely why the
hereditary principle was considered by the Russian people to be not simply
superior to the elective principle, but as far superior to it as heaven is to
the earth. For while an elected president is installed by the will of man, and
can be said to be installed by the will of God only indirectly, insofar as God
has allowed it, without positively willing it; the determination
of who will be born as the heir to the throne is completely beyond the power of
man, and so entirely within the power of God. The hereditary principle
therefore ensures that the tsar will indeed be elected – but by God, not by
man.
The first Romanov tsar, Michael
Fyodorovich, had his own natural father, Philaret Nikitich, as his Patriarch.
This unusual relationship, in which both took the title “Great Sovereign”, was
profoundly significant in the context of the times. It was “unique, according
to Lebedev, “not only for Russian history, but also for the universal history
of the Church, when a natural father and son become the two heads of a single
Orthodox power!”.[353]
The sixteenth century had seen the power
of the tsar, unchecked now by the non-Russian power of the Ecumenical
Patriarch, leaning dangerously towards caesaropapism in practice, if not in
theory. However, the Time of Troubles had demonstrated how critically the
Orthodox Autocracy depended on the legitimising and sanctifying power of the
Church. In disobedience to her, the people had broken their oath of allegiance
to the legitimate tsar and plunged the country into anarchy; but in penitent
obedience to her, they had succeeded in finally driving out the invaders. The
election of the tsar’s father to the patriarchal see both implicitly
acknowledged this debt of the Autocracy and People to the Church, and indicated
that while the Autocracy was now re-established in all its former power and
inviolability, the tsar being answerable to God alone for his actions in the
political sphere, nevertheless he received his sanction and sanctification from
the Church in the person of the Patriarch, who was as superior to him in his
sphere, the sphere of the Spirit, as a father is to his son, and who, as the Zemskij Sobor of 1619 put it, “for this reason [i.e. because he was
father of the tsar] is to be a helper and builder for the kingdom, a defender
for widows and intercessor for the wronged.”[354]
Thus on the firm basis of this quasi-filial relationship between Church and
State, there began, slowly but surely, the recovery of Russia to her former
greatness – and more.
The Church’s recovery of her independence
and prestige was reflected in the more frequent convening of Church Councils.
If we exclude the false council of 1666-67 (of which more anon), these were
genuinely free of interference from the State, and the tsar was sometimes
forced to submit to them against his will. Thus a Church Council in 1621
decreed that the proposed Catholic bridegroom for the Tsar’s daughter would
have to be baptised first in the Orthodox Church.
However, seventeenth-century Russia not
only displayed a rare symphony of Church and State. It also included in this
symphony the People in the sense that all classes of the population took
part in the Zemskii Sobory, “Councils of the Land”,
which were such a striking characteristic of the period. Again, this owed much
to the experience of the Time of Troubles; for, as we have seen, the People
played a large part at that time in the re-establishment of lawful autocratic
rule. Thus in the reign of Tsar Michael Fyodorovich, who died in 1645, all the
most important matters were decided by Councils, which, like the first Council
of 1613, were Councils “of the whole land” – that is, they contained
representatives of all classes of the people from all parts of the country.
Such Councils continued to be convened until 1689.
The symphony between Tsar and People was
particularly evident in judicial matters, where the people jealously guarded
their ancient right to appeal directly to the Tsar for justice. Of course, as
the State became larger it became impossible for the Tsar personally to judge
all cases, and he appointed posadniki, namestniki and volosteli to administer
justice in his name. At the same time, the Tsars always appreciated the
significance of a direct link with the people over the heads of the
bureaucracy; and in 1550 Ivan the Terrible created a kind of personal office to
deal with petitions called the Chelobitnij Prikaz, which lasted until Peter the
Great. It was also Ivan who convened the first Zemskii Sobory.
The bond between Tsar and People was
maintained throughout the administration. The central administrative
institutions were: (a) the Prikazi, or Ministries, over each of
which the Tsar appointed a boyar with a staff of secretaries (dyaki), (b)
the Boyar Duma, an essentially aristocratic institution, which, however, was
broadened into the more widely representative (c) Councils of the Land for
particularly important matters. This constituted a much wider consultative base
than prevailed in contemporary Western European states.
To the local administration, writes
Tikhomirov, “voyevodas were sent, but
besides them there existed numerous publicly elected authorities. The
voyevodas’ competence was complex and broad. The voyevoda, as representative of
the tsar, had to look at absolutely everything: ‘so that all the tsar’s affairs
were intact, so that there should be guardians everywhere; to take great care
that in the town and the uyezd there should be no fights, thievery, murder,
fighting, burglary, bootlegging, debauchery; whoever was declared to have
committed such crimes was to be taken and, after investigation, punished. The voyevoda
was the judge also in all civil matters. The voyevoda was in charge generally
of all branches of the tsar’s administration, but his power was not absolute,
and he practised it together with representatives of society’s
self-administration… According to the tsar’s code of laws, none of the
administrators appointed for the cities and volosts could judge any matter
without society’s representatives…
“Finally, the whole people had the
broadest right of appeal to his Majesty in all matters in general. ‘The
government,’ notes Soloviev, ‘did not remain deaf to petitions. If some mir [village
commune] asked for an elected official instead of the crown’s, the government
willingly agreed. They petition that the city bailiff.. should be retired and a
new one elected by the mir: his Majesty ordered the election, etc. All in all,
the system of the administrative authorities of the Muscovite state was
distinguished by a multitude of technical imperfections, by the chance nature
of the establishment of institutions, by their lack of specialisation, etc. But
this system of administration possessed one valuable quality: the broad
admittance of aristocratic and democratic elements, their use as communal
forces under the supremacy of the tsar’s power, with the general right of
petition to the tsar. This gave the supreme power a wide base of information
and brought it closer to the life of all the estates, and there settled in all
the Russias a deep conviction in the reality of a supreme power directing and
managing everything.”[355]
For "in what was this autocratic
power of the Tsar strong?” asks Hieromartyr Andronicus, Archbishop of Perm. “In
that fact that it was based on the conscience and on the Law of God, and was
supported by its closeness to the land, by the council of the people. The
princely entourage, the boyars’ Duma, the Zemskij Sobor - that is what preserved the power of the Tsars in its
fullness, not allowing anyone to seize or divert it. The people of proven
experience and honesty came from the regions filled with an identical care for
the construction of the Russian land. They raised to the Tsar the voice and
counsel of the people concerning how and what to build in the country. And it
remained for the Tsar to learn from all the voices, to bring everything
together for the benefit of all and to command the rigorous fulfilment for the
common good of the people of that for which he would answer before the
Omniscient God and his own conscience.”[356]
The Schism of the Old Believers
By the middle of the century, at a time
when the principle of monarchical rule was being shaken to its foundations in
the English revolution, the Russian Autocracy had acquired such prestige in the
Orthodox world that even the Greeks were looking to it to deliver them from the
Turkish yoke and take over the throne of the Constantinopolitan Emperor.
Thus in 1645, during the coronation of
Tsar Alexis, Patriarch Joseph for the first time read the “Prayer of Philaret”
on the enthronement of the Russian Tsar over the whole oikoumene.[357]
And in 1649 Patriarch Paisius of Jerusalem wrote to the tsar: “May the All-Holy
Trinity multiply you more than all the tsars, and count you worthy to grasp the
most lofty throne of the great King Constantine, your forefather, and liberate
the peoples of the pious and Orthodox Christians from impious hands. May you be
a new Moses, may you liberate us from captivity just as he liberated the sons
of Israel from the hands of Pharaoh.”[358]
As Fr. Gregory Lurye writes: “At that time
hopes in Greece for a miraculous re-establishment of Constantinople before the
end of the world [based on the prophecies of Leo the Wise and others], were
somewhat strengthened, if not squeezed out, by hopes on Russia. Anastasius
Gordius (1654-1729), the author of what later became an authoritative
historical-eschatological interpretation of the Apocalypse (1717-23) called the
Russian Empire the guardian of the faith to the very coming of the Messiah. The
hopes of the Greeks for liberation from the Turks that were linked with Russia,
which had become traditional already from the time of St. Maximus the Greek
(1470-1555), also found their place in the interpretations of the Apocalypse.
Until the middle of the 19th century itself – until the Greeks, on a
wave of pan-European nationalism thought up their ‘Great Idea’ – Russia would
take the place of Byzantium in their eschatological hopes, as being the last
Christian Empire. They considered the Russian Empire to be their own, and the
Russian Tsar Nicholas (not their Lutheran King Otto) as their own, to the great
astonishment and annoyance of European travellers.”[359]
Tragically, however, it was at precisely
this time, when Russia seemed ready to take the place of the Christian Roman
Empire in the eyes not only of Russians, but also of non-Russian Orthodox, that
the Russian autocracy and Church suffered a simultaneous attack from two sides
from which it never fully recovered until its destruction in 1917. From the
right came the attack of the Old Believers, who expressed the schismatic and
nationalist idea that the only true Orthodoxy was Russian Orthodoxy, and from
the left – that of the westernising Russian aristocracy and the Greek
pseudo-hierarchs of the council of 1666-67, who succeeded in removing the
champion of the traditional Orthodox symphony of powers, Patriarch Nicon of
Moscow.
The
beginnings of the tragedy of the Old Believers lay in the arrival in Moscow of
some educated monks from the south of Russia, which at that time was under the
jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. They pointed to the
existence of several differences between the Muscovite service books and those
employed in the Greek Church. These differences concerned such matters as how
the word "Jesus" was to be spelt, whether two or three
"alleluias" should be chanted in the Divine services, whether the
sign of the Cross should be made with two or three fingers, etc.
A group of
leading Muscovite clergy led by Protopriests John Neronov and Avvakum rejected
these criticisms. They said that the reforms contradicted the decrees of the
famous Stoglav council of 1551, and they suspected that the southerners
were tainted with Latinism through their long subjection to Polish rule.
Therefore they were unwilling to bow unquestioningly to their superior
knowledge.
Moreover,
beneath the issue of ritual differences between the Greek and Russian Churches
lay a deeper principle, that of the source of authority in the Orthodox Church
as a whole. The Greeks argued that, since Orthodoxy had come to Russia and the
other Orthodox nations from the Greeks, the criterion of correctness should be
the practices of the Greek Church. The Muscovite “zealots for piety”, however,
argued that the Greeks had betrayed the faith at the council of Florence, and
that the pupils might have remained more faithful over the years to the
teaching they had received than their original teachers.
This was
the situation in 1652 when the close friend of the tsar, Metropolitan Nicon of
Novgorod, was elected patriarch. Knowing of the various inner divisions within
Russian society caused by incipient westernism and secularism, on the one hand,
and Old Believerism, on the other, the new patriarch demanded, and obtained a
solemn oath from the tsar and all the people that they should obey him in all
Church matters. The tsar was very willing to give such an oath because he
regarded Nicon as his “special friend” and father, giving him the same title of
“Great Sovereign” that Tsar Michael had given to his father, Patriarch Philaret.
The
“zealots of piety” were also happy to submit to Nicon because he had been a
member of their circle and shared, as they thought, their views. However, they
were mistaken. “Not immediately,” writes Lebedev, “but after many years of
thought (since 1646), and conversations with the tsar, Fr. Stefan [Bonifatiev],
the Greek and Kievan scholars and Patriarch Paisius of Jerusalem, he had come
to the conviction that the criterion of the rightness of the correction
of Russian books and rites consisted in their correspondence with that
which from ages past had been accepted by the Eastern Greek Church and
handed down by it to Rus’ and, consequently, must be preserved also in the ancient
Russian customs and books, and that therefore for the correction of the Russian
books and rites it was necessary to take the advice of contemporary Eastern
authorities, although their opinion had to be approached with great caution and
in a critical spirit. It was with these convictions that Nicon completed the
work begun before him of the correction of the Church rites and books,
finishing it completely in 1656. At the same time he did not know that the
correctors of the books had placed at the foundation of their work, not the
ancient, but the contemporary Greek books, which had been published in
the West, mainly in Venice (although in the most important cases they had
nevertheless used both ancient Greek and Slavonic texts). The volume of work in
the correction and publishing of books was so great that the patriarch was simply
unable to check its technical side and was convinced that they were correcting
them according to the ancient texts.
“However,
the correction of the rites was carried out completely under his observation
and was accomplished in no other way than in consultation with the conciliar
opinion in the Eastern Churches and with special councils of the Russian
hierarchs and clergy. Instead of using two fingers in the sign of the cross,
the doctrine of which had been introduced into a series of very important books
under Patriarch Joseph under the influence of the party of Neronov and Avvakum,
the three-fingered sign was confirmed, since it corresponded more to ancient
Russian customs[360]
and the age-old practice of the Orthodox East.[361]
A series of other Church customs were changed, and all Divine service books
published earlier with the help of the ‘zealots’ were re-published.
“As was to
be expected, J. Neronov, Avvakum, Longinus, Lazarus, Daniel and some of those
who thought like them rose up against the corrections made by his Holiness.
Thus was laid the doctrinal basis of the Church schism, but the schism itself,
as a broad movement among the people, began much later, without Nicon and
independently of him. Patriarch Nicon took all the necessary measures that this
should not happen. In particular, on condition of their obedience to the
Church, he permitted those who wished it (J. Neronov) to serve
according to the old books and rites, in this way allowing a variety of
opinions and practices in Church matters that did not touch the essence of the
faith. This gave the Church historian Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov) a basis
on which to assert, with justice, that ‘if Nicon had not left his see and
his administration had continued, there would have been no schism in the
Russian Church.’
“However,
it was not only a matter of differences of opinion with regard to the
correction of books and rites. The point was the deep differences in
perception of the ideas forming the basis of the conception of ‘the third
Rome’, and in the contradictions of the Russian Church
self-consciousness of the time.”[362]
These
differences and contradictions were particularly important at this time because
the Russian State, after consolidating itself in the first half of the seventeenth
century, was now ready to go on the offensive against Catholic Poland, and
rescue the Orthodox Christians who were being persecuted by the Polish and
uniate authorities. In 1654 Eastern Ukraine was wrested from Poland and came
within the bounds of Russia again. But the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine had
been under the jurisdiction of Constantinople and employed Greek practices,
which, as we have seen, differed somewhat from those in the Great Russian
Church. If Moscow was to be the Third Rome in the sense of the protector of all
Orthodox Christians, it was necessary that the faith and practice of the Moscow
Patriarchate should be in harmony with the faith and practice of the Orthodox
Church as a whole. That is why Nicon, supported by the Grecophile Tsar Alexis,
encouraged the reform of the service-books to bring them into line with the
practices of the Greek Church.
The Old
Believers (as we shall now call the opponents of Nicon’s programme) represented
a serious threat to the achievement of this ideal. For they believed that the
Russian Church did not need the help of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and did
not need to seek agreement and harmony with them; she was self-sufficient.
Moreover, - and here they were supported, as we shall see, by certain
influential Greek hierarchs, – they resented the lead that the patriarch was
taking in this affair. In their opinion, the initiative in such matters should
come from the tsar insofar as it was the tsar, rather than the hierarchs, who
defended the Church from heresies.
Here they
were thinking of the Russian Church’s struggle against the false council of
Florence and the Judaising heresy, when the tsar did indeed take a leading role
in the defence of Orthodoxy while some of the hierarchs fell away from the
truth. However, they ignored the no less frequent cases – most recently, in the
Time of Troubles – when it had been the Orthodox hierarchs who had defended the
Church against apostate tsars.
Against
this narrow, nationalistic and state-centred conception of “Moscow – the Third
Rome”, Patriarch Nicon erected a more universalistic, Church-centred conception
which stressed the unity of the Russian Church with the Churches of the East.
“In the
idea of ‘the Third Rome’,” writes Lebedev, “his Holiness saw first of all its
ecclesiastical, spiritual content, which was also expressed in the still more
ancient idea of ‘the Russian land – the New Jerusalem’. This idea was to a
large degree synonymous with ‘the Third Rome’. To a large extent, but not
completely! It placed the accent on the Christian striving of Holy Rus’ for the
world on high.
“In calling
Rus’ to this great idea, Patriarch Nicon successively created a series of
architectural complexes in which was laid the idea of the pan-human, universal
significance of Holy Rus’. These were the Valdai Iveron church, and the Kii
Cross monastery, but especially – the Resurrection New-Jerusalem monastery,
which was deliberately populated with an Orthodox, but multi-racial
brotherhood (Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Germans, Jews,
Poles and Greeks).
“This
monastery, together with the complex of ‘Greater Moscovite Palestine’, was in
the process of creation from 1656 to 1666, and was then completed after the
death of the patriarch towards the end of the 17th century. As has
been clarified only comparatively recently, this whole complex, including in
itself Jordan, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Capernaum, Ramah, Bethany, Tabor, Hermon,
the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, etc., was basically a monastery,
and in it the Resurrection cathedral, built in the likeness of the church of
the Sepulchre of the Lord in Jerusalem with Golgotha and the Sepulchre of the
Saviour, was a double image – an icon of the historical ‘promised land’
of Palestine and at the same time an icon of the promised land of the Heavenly
Kingdom, ‘the New Jerusalem’.
“In this
way it turned out that the true union of the representatives of all the peoples
(pan-human unity) in Christ on earth and in heaven can be realised only on the
basis of Orthodoxy, and, moreover, by the will of God, in its Russian
expression. This was a clear, almost demonstrative opposition of the union of
mankind in the Church of Christ to its unity in the anti-church of ‘the great
architect of nature’ with its aim of constructing the tower of Babylon. But it
also turned out that ‘Greater Muscovite Palestine’ with its centre in the New
Jerusalem became the spiritual focus of the whole of World Orthodoxy. At the
same time that the tsar was only just beginning to dream of become the master
of the East, Patriarch Nicon as the archimandrite of New Jerusalem had already
become the central figure of the Universal Church.
“This also
laid a beginning to the disharmony between the tsar and the patriarch, between
the ecclesiastical and state authorities in Russia. Alexis Mikhailovich, at
first inwardly, but then also outwardly, was against Nicon’s plans for the New
Jerusalem. He insisted that only his capital, Moscow, was the image of
the heavenly city, and that the Russian tsar (and not the patriarch) was the
head of the whole Orthodox world. From 1657 there began the quarrels between
the tsar and the patriarch, in which the tsar revealed a clear striving to take
into his hands the administration of Church affairs, for he made himself the
chief person responsible for them.”[363]
Many have
idealised the Old Believers, as if they represented the true old piety of Holy
Russia which the "Niconians" destroyed. But this was not the opinion
of the great Russian fathers, such as Saints Demetrius of Rostov and Seraphim
of Sarov.[364] Others
have considered the violence meted out to the Old Believers a stain on the
conscience of the Russian Church.
Undoubtedly
the personal sins of some on the side of the authorities, both secular and
ecclesiastical, played their part. Unlike during the earlier liturgical reforms
of Peter Moghila, the reforms of the mid-seventeenth century were not
sufficiently explained, and resistance to them was put down too forcibly at
first. For these personal sins the Russian Church Abroad publicly asked
forgiveness on behalf of the whole of the Russian Church in 1974.
However,
these sins, and the unwillingness of the authorities to correct them, have been
exaggerated. As Paul Meyendorff writes, “to its credit, the Russian Church
appears to have realized its tactical error and tried to repair the damage. As
early as 1656, Nikon made peace with Neronov, one of the leading opponents of
the reform, and permitted him to remain in Moscow and even to use the old books
at the Cathedral of the Dormition. After Nikon left the patriarchal throne in
1658, Tsar Alexis made repeated attempts to pacify the future Old-Believers,
insisting only that they cease condemning the new books, but willing to allow
the continued use of the old. This was the only demand made of the
Old-Believers at the 1666 Moscow Council. Only after all these attempts to
restore peace had failed did the 1667 Council, with Greek bishops present,
condemn the old books and revoke the 1551 “Stoglav (Hundred Chapters)”
Council.”[365]
Again
Sergei Firsov writes: “At the end of his patriarchy Nikon said about the old
and new (corrected) church-service books: ‘Both the ones and the others are
good; it doesn’t matter, serve according to whichever books you want’. In
citing these words, V.O. Klyuchevsky noted: ‘This means that the matter was not
one of rites, but of resistance to ecclesiastical authority’. The Old Believers’ refusal to submit was
taken by the church hierarchy and the state authorities as a rebellion, and at
the Council of 1666-1667 the disobedient were excommunicated from the Church
and cursed ‘for their resistance to the canonical authority of the pastors of
the Church’”.[366]
Moreover,
it must be remembered that the Old Believers were themselves very violent, that
they constituted a real threat to the survival of the Russian State, and that
many of their deaths were self-inflicted, consisting of the mass suicide of
tens of thousands of their followers. By 1690, 20,000 Old Believers are
reported to have burned themselves to death. Thus Bishop Gregory Grabbe writes:
“The very act of burning themselves, according to the research of Professor
Barsov, was sometimes not committed out of fear of persecution, but from a
fanatical thought of purifying themselves through fire. The Church Herself
hardly participated in the persecution… The persecutions were from the State
and for political reasons, insofar as (some of) the Old Believers considered
the power of the State to be antichristian and did not want to submit to it.”[367]
From a
purely ecclesiastical point of view, the Old Believers represented a
nationalist schism, which, if allowed to triumph, might well have torn the
Russian Church away from the Ecumenical Church altogether. This is exemplified
particularly by Archpriest Avvakum, perhaps the most articulate and educated of
the schismatics, who wrote from his prison cell to Tsar Alexis: "Say in
good Russian 'Lord have mercy on me'. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the
Greeks: that's their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexei, not
Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or
at home!"[368]
Again, Avvakum announced “that newborn babies knew more about God than all the
scholars of the Greek church”.[369]
Again, in
the trial of 1667, whose leader was the deposed Greek bishop and crypto-papist
Paisios Ligarides and fourteen of whose bishops were foreigners, Avvakum said to the Greek bishops: “You,
ecumenical teachers! Rome has long since fallen, and lies on the ground, and
the Poles have gone under with her, for to the present day they have been
enemies of the Christians. But with you, too, Orthodoxy became a varied mixture
under the violence of the Turkish Muhammed. Nor is that surprising: you have
become powerless. From now on you must come to us to learn: through God’s grace
we have the autocracy. Before the apostate Nikon the whole of Orthodoxy was
pure and spotless in our Russia under the pious rulers and tsars, and the
Church knew no rebellion. But the wolf Nikon along with the devil introduced
the tradition that one had to cross oneself with three fingers…”[370]
Like their
opponents, the Old Believers believed in the ideology of the Third Rome, but
understood it in a different way: whereas for the Grecophiles of the
“Greco-Russian Church” Moscow the Third Rome was the continuation of
Christian Rome, which in no wise implied any break with Greek Orthodoxy, for
the Old Believers the influence of the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy at
the council of Florence in 1438-39, could only be harmful. They could not
believe that the Greeks could still be Orthodox when they were “powerless”,
that is, without an emperor; and when Russia, too, in their view, became
“powerless” through the tsar’s “apostasy” to the views of Nicon, they prepared
for the end of the world. For, as Fr. Gregory Lurye writes, “the Niconite
reforms were perceived by Old Believerism as apostasy from Orthodoxy, and consequently…
as the end of the last (Roman) Empire, which was to come immediately before the
end of the world.”[371]
More
important to the Old Believers even than the supposed apostasy of the official
Church was the tsar’s apostasy; for, as we have seen, for them the Third
Rome depended on the Orthodoxy of the tsar first and foremost. Some of them
thought that the Antichrist had in fact come when their schism with the
patriarchate and the tsar was sealed by the council of 1667. The persecutions
of Tsaritsa Sophia strengthened this belief; and the western innovations of
Peter the Great confirmed it still further, to the extent that Peter was
himself the Antichrist in their eyes…
The Old
Believers’ fanatical attachment to the letter of the law (which they in any
case distorted[372]),
placing ritual differences on a par with dogmatic differences (which Patriarch
Paisius of Constantinople had warned against), led to the loss of the Spirit
that gives life; and, like the Jews, they became the enemies of lawful
political authority and the revolutionary forerunners of the Bolsheviks, whose
1905 revolution they financed generously. Their own communities, like those on
the River Vyg in the north, were almost democratic communes, having no priests
and recognising no political authority – not unlike the contemporary Puritan
communities of North America. And gradually, as in the writings of Semeon
Denisov, one of the leaders of the Vyg community, they evolved a new conception
of Holy Russia, according to which the real Russia resided, not in the Tsar and
the Church, for they had both apostasised, but in the common people. As Sergei
Zenkovsky writes, Denisov “transformed the old doctrine of an autocratic
Christian state into a concept of a democratic Christian nation.”[373]
The combination of democratism and
apocalypticism was a powerful mixture in Russia, as it had been in many
proto-Protestant movements in the West. The apocalyptic element took its
starting-point from the prophecy of Archimandrite Zachariah (Kopystensky) of
the Kiev Caves Lavra, who in 1620 had foretold that the coming of the
Antichrist would take place in 1666. And in a certain sense the Antichrist did
indeed come in 1666. Not only was Patriarch Nicon unlawfully deposed in that
year, which fatally weakened the symphony of powers in Russia and therefore
led, in the long run, to the appearance of the collective Antichrist in 1917.
But in the same year, as we have seen, a Sephardic Jew called Shabbatai Zevi
proclaimed himself to be the Messiah in Smyrna.
An apocalyptic sign was a certain
slackening of public piety from the very high levels that foreign visitors had
marvelled at. Westernism began to undermine the foundations of Russian Church
life just as the Muscovite State reached the height of its power. Thus
Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes that “the condemnation of Patriarch Nicon was a
kind of end of the world in the sense that there ended the world of Russian
life, in which the most important and central in everything was that which can
conditionally be signified by the general concept of ‘Holy Russia’” [374].
From that
time an apocalyptic rejection of the State became the keynote of Old
Believerism. As Fr. George Florovsky writes, “the keynote and secret of
Russia’s Schism was not ‘ritual’ but the Antichrist, and thus it may be termed
a socio-apocalyptical utopia. The entire meaning and pathos of the first
schismatic opposition lies in its underlying apocalyptical intuition (‘the time
draws near’), rather than in any ‘blind’ attachment to specific rites or petty
details of custom. The entire first generation of raskolouchitelei
[‘schismatic teachers’] lived in this atmosphere of visions, signs, and
premonitions, of miracles, prophecies, and illusions. These men were filled
with ecstasy or possessed, rather than pedants… One has only to read the words
of Avvakum, breathless with excitement: ‘What Christ is this? He is not near;
only hosts of demons.’ Not only Avvakum felt that the ‘Nikon’ Church had become
a den of thieves. Such a mood became universal in the Schism: ‘the censer is useless;
the offering abominable’.
“The
Schism, an outburst of a socio-political hostility and opposition, was a social
movement, but one derived from religious self-consciousness. It is precisely
this apocalyptical perception of what has taken place which explains the
decisive or rapid estrangement among the Schismatics. ‘Fanaticism in panic’ is
Kliuchevskii’s definition, but it was also panic in the face of ‘the last
apostasy’…
“The Schism
dreamed of an actual, earthly City: a theocratic utopia and chiliasm. It was
hoped that the dream had already been fulfilled and that the ‘Kingdom of God’
had been realised as the Muscovite State. There may be four patriarchs in the
East, but the one and only Orthodox tsar is in Moscow. But now even this expectation
had been deceived and shattered. Nikon’s ‘apostasy’ did not disturb the Old
Believers nearly as much as did the tsar’s apostasy, which in their opinion
imparted a final apocalyptical hopelessness to the entire conflict.
“’At this
time there is no tsar. One Orthodox tsar had remained on earth, and whilst he
was unaware, the western heretics, like dark clouds, extinguished this
Christian sun. Does this not, beloved, clearly prove that the Antichrist’s
deceit is showing its mask?’
“History
was at an end. More precisely, sacred history had come to an end; it had ceased
to be sacred and had become without Grace. Henceforth the world would seem
empty, abandoned, forsaken by God, and it would remain so. One would be forced
to withdraw from history into the wilderness. Evil had triumphed in history.
Truth had retreated into the bright heavens, while the Holy Kingdom had become
the tsardom of the Antichrist…”[375]
What the
Old Believers did not realise that their rejection of the Muscovite State because
of its supposed surrender to the western heretics betrayed a very western – and
heretical – view of world history. The Old Believers believed that Tsar Alexis
had apostasised by accepting Patriarch Nicon’s reforms. In the same way the
western Protestants believed that true Christianity ended when State and Church
(originally the Emperor Constantine and the Pope of Rome) jointly reverted to
idolatrous practices. The Old Believers fled into the woods to escape the
Antichrist and wait for the Second Coming of Christ in their democratic
communes, accepting the authority of neither king nor priest. Similarly, the
Czech Taborites and German Anabaptists and English Puritans fled from existing
states to build their millenial communities in which the only king and priest
was God.
In both
East and West the failure of the Second Coming to come as predicted by these
revolutionaries led them to compromise with their original beliefs. But the
spirit of the revolution continued to burn under the embers of their shattered
belief-systems. And it burns to this day…
Patriarch
Nicon of Moscow
Still more
serious in its long-term consequences than the Old Believer schism was the
unlawful deposition of Patriarch Nicon in the Moscow council of 1666-67. In the
opinion of many, this assault on the patriarchate paved the way for its
abolition by Peter the Great, which in turn led to Peter’s establishment of an
absolutist state in Russia on the model of Hobbes’ Leviathan. In the
longer term this led, by an opposite swing of the pendulum, to the democratic
revolution of February, 1917.
On becoming
patriarch in 1652, as we have seen, Nicon secured from the Tsar, his boyars and
the bishops a solemn oath to the effect that they would keep the sacred laws of
the Church and State “and promise… to obey us as your chief pastor and supreme
father in all things which I shall announce to you out of the divine
commandments and laws.”[376]
There then followed a short, but most remarkable period, in which, in Lebedev’s
words, “the undivided, although unconfused, union of state and ecclesiastical
powers constituted the natural basis of the public life of Russia. The
spiritual leadership in this belonged, of course, to the Church, but this
leadership was precisely spiritual and was never turned into political
leadership. In his turn the tsar… never used his political autocracy for
arbitrariness in relation to the Church, since the final meaning of life for
the whole of Russian society consisted in acquiring temporal and eternal union
with God in and through the Church…”[377]
Thus the relationship between the two was characterised in the preface to a
service book published in Moscow in 1653, as “the diarchy, complementary,
God-chosen”.[378]
Although
the patriarch had complete control of Church administration and services, and
the appointment and judgement of clerics in ecclesiastical matters, “Church
possessions and financial resources were considered a pan-national inheritance.
In cases of special need (for example, war) the tsar could take as much of the
resources of the Church as he needed without paying them back. The diocesan and
monastic authorities could spend only strictly determined sums on their
everyday needs. All unforeseen and major expenses were made only with the
permission of the tsar. In all monastic and diocesan administrations state
officials were constantly present; ecclesiastical properties and resources were
under their watchful control. And they judged ecclesiastical peasants and other
people in civil and criminal matters. A special Monastirsky Prikaz
established in Moscow in accordance with the Ulozhenie of 1649 was in
charge of the whole clergy, except the patriarch, in civil and criminal
matters. Although in 1649 Nicon together with all the others had put his
signature to the Ulozhenie, inwardly he was not in agreement with it,
and on becoming patriarch declared this opinion openly. He was most of all
disturbed by the fact that secular people – the boyars of the Monastirsky
Prikaz – had the right to judge clergy in civil suits. He considered this
situation radically unecclesiastical and unchristian. When Nicon had still been
Metropolitan of Novgorod, the tsar, knowing his views, had given him a
‘document of exemption’ for the whole metropolia, in accordance with which all
the affairs of people subject to the Church, except for affairs of ‘murder,
robbery and theft’, were transferred from the administration of the Monastirsky
Prikaz to the metropolitan’s court. On becoming patriarch, Nicon obtained a
similar exemption from the Monastirsky Prikaz for his patriarchal
diocese (at that time the patriarch, like all the ruling bishops, had his own
special diocese consisting of Moscow and spacious lands adjacent to it). As if
to counteract the Ulozhenie of 1649, Nicon published ‘The Rudder’, which
contains the holy canons of the Church and various enactments concerning the
Church of the ancient pious Greek emperors. As we shall see, until the end of
his patriarchy Nicon did not cease to fight against the Monastirsky Prikaz.
It should be pointed out that this was not a struggle for the complete
‘freedom’ of the Church from the State (which was impossible in Russia at that
time), but only for the re-establishment of the canonical authority of the
patriarch and the whole clergy in strictly spiritual matters, and also for such
a broadening of the right of the ecclesiastical authorities over people subject
to them in civil matters as was permitted by conditions in Russia.”[379]
From May,
1654 to January, 1657, while the tsar was away from the capital fighting the
Poles, the patriarch acted as regent, a duty he carried out with great
distinction. Some later saw in this evidence of the political ambitions of the
patriarch. However, the patriarch undertook this duty only at the request of the
tsar, and was very glad to return the reins of political administration when
the tsar returned. Nevertheless, from 1656, the boyars succeeded in undermining
the tsar’s confidence in the patriarch, falsely insinuating that the tsar’s
authority was being undermined by Nicon’s ambition. And they began to apply the
Ulozhenie in Church affairs, even increasing the rights given by the Ulozhenie
to the Monastirsky Prikaz. The Ulozhenie also decreed that the
birthdays of the Tsar and Tsarina and their children should be celebrated
alongside the Church feasts, which drew from the Patriarch the criticism that
men were being likened to God, “and even preferred to God”.[380]
Another bone of contention was the tsar’s desire to appoint Silvester Kossov as
Metropolitan of Kiev, which Nicon considered uncanonical in that the Kievan
Metropolitan was in the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople at that
time.[381]
Since the
tsar was clearly determined to have his way even in these strictly
ecclesiastical matters, and since he was manifesting his anger in other ways
(not inviting him to state banquets, not going to church), on July 10, 1658
Nicon protested by withdrawing to his monastery of New Jerusalem, near Moscow.
He compared this move to the flight of the Woman clothed with the sun into the
wilderness in Revelation 12, and quoted the 17th Canon of the
Council of Sardica[382]
and the words of the Gospel: “If they persecute you in one city, depart to
another, shaking off the dust from your feet”.[383].
“The whole state knows,” he said, “that in view of his anger against me the
tsar does not go to the Holy Catholic Church, and I am leaving Moscow. I hope
that the tsar will have more freedom without me.”[384]
Some have
regarded Nicon’s action as an elaborate bluff that failed. Whatever the truth
about his personal motivation, which is known to God alone, there can be no
doubt that the patriarch, unlike his opponents, correctly gauged the
seriousness of the issue involved. For the quarrel between the tsar and the
patriarch signified, in effect, the beginning of the schism of Church and State
in Russia. In withdrawing from Moscow to New Jerusalem, the patriarch
demonstrated that “in truth ‘the New Jerusalem’, ‘the Kingdom of God’, the
beginning of the Heavenly Kingdom in Russia was the Church, its Orthodox
spiritual piety, and not the material earthly capital, although it represented…
‘the Third Rome’.”[385]
And to further underline the significance of these events, the Old Believer
schism began to develop precisely in this period…
However,
Nicon had appointed a vicar-metropolitan in Moscow, and had said: “I am not
leaving completely; if the tsar’s majesty bends, becomes more merciful and puts
away his wrath, I will return”. In other words, while resigning the active
administration of the patriarchy in view of the disobedience of his spiritual
children, he had not resigned his rank – a situation to which there were many
precedents in Church history. And to show that he had not finally resigned from
Church affairs, he protested against moves made by his deputy on the
patriarchal throne, and continued to criticise the Tsar for interfering in the
Church's affairs, especially in the reactivation of the Monastirsky Prikaz.
Not content
with having forced his withdrawal from Moscow, his enemies – in particular, the
boyars - resolved to have him defrocked, portraying him as a dangerous rebel
against both Church and State - although, as Zyzykin points out, Patriarch
Nicon interfered less in the affairs of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich than St.
Philip of Moscow had done in the affairs of Ivan the Terrible.[386]
And so, in 1660, they convened a council which appointed a patriarchal locum
tenens, Metropolitan Pitirim, to administer the Church independently
without seeking the advice of the patriarch and without commemorating his name.
Nicon rejected this council, and cursed Pitirim. Then the Tsar, in his efforts
to gain greater support for his policies, made a fatal mistake. He invited
three Greek hierarchs who were in Moscow on alms-raising missions - two
patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch who had been suspended by the Patriarch of
Constantinople, and the defrocked former metropolitan of Gaza Paisius
Ligarides, - to participate in the councils of the Russian Church. Ligarides
was in the pay of the Vatican[387],
but paradoxically preached a form of caesaropapism in order to ingratiate
himself with the tsar and undermine the patriarch.
But the
State that encroaches on the Church is itself subject to destruction. Thus in
1661 Patriarch Nicon had a vision in which he saw the Moscow Dormition
cathedral full of fire. “The hierarchs who had previously died were standing
there. Peter the metropolitan rose from his tomb, went up to the altar and laid
his hand on the Gospel. All the hierarchs did the same, and so did I. And Peter
began to speak: ‘Brother Nicon! Speak to the Tsar: why has he offended the Holy
Church, and fearlessly taken possession of the immovable things collected by
us. This will not be to his benefit. Tell him to return what he has taken, for
the great wrath of God has fallen upon him because of this: twice there have
been pestilences, and so many people have died, and now he has nobody with whom
to stand against his enemies.’ I replied: ‘He will not listen to me; it would
be good if one of you appeared to him.’ Peter continued: ‘The judgements of God
have not decreed this. You tell him; if he does not listen to you, then if one
of us appeared to him, he would not listen to him. And look! Here is a sign for
him.’ Following the movement of his hand I turned towards the west towards the
royal palace and I saw: there was no church wall, the palace was completely
visible, and the fire which was in the church came together and went towards
the royal court and burned it up. ‘If he will not come to his senses,
punishments greater than the first will be added,’ said Peter. Then another
grey-haired man said: ‘Now the Tsar wants to take the court you bought for the
churchmen and turn it into a bazaar for mammon’s sake. But he will not rejoice
over his acquisition.’”[388]
On December
12, 1666 Patriarch Nicon was reduced to the rank of a simple monk on the basis
of patently unfounded charges, of which the most important was that “he annoyed
his great majesty [the tsar], interfering in matters which did not belong to
the patriarchal rank and authority”.[389]
The truth was in fact the exact opposite: that the tsar and his boyars had
interfered in matters which did not belong to their rank and authority,
breaking the oath they had made to the patriarch upon his assuming the
patriarchy.[390] The
council also sinned in that the Tomos sent by the Eastern Patriarchs to
Moscow in 1663 to justify the supposed lawfulness of Nicon’s deposition and
attached to the acts of the council under the name of Patriarchal Replies
expressed a definitely caesaropapist doctrine, according to which, for example,
the Patriarch was exhorted to obey the tsar and the tsar was permitted to
remove the patriarch in case of conflict with him.
As
Patriarch Dionysius of Constantinople put it in a letter to the tsar: “I inform
your Majesty that in accordance with these chapters you have the power to have
a patriarch and all your councillors established by you, for in one autocratic
state there must not be two principles, but one must be the senior.” To which
Fr. Lev Lebedev justly rejoins: “It is only to be wondered at how the Greeks by
the highest authority established and confirmed in the Russian kingdom that
[caesaropapism] as a result of which they themselves had lost their monarchy! It
was not Paisius Ligarides who undermined Alexis Mikhailovich: it was the
ecumenical patriarchs who deliberately decided the matter in favour of the
tsar.”[391]
However,
opposition was voiced by Metropolitans Paul of Krutitsa and Hilarion of Ryazan,
who feared “that the Patriarchal Replies would put the hierarchs into
the complete control of the royal power, and thereby of a Tsar who would not be
as pious as Alexis Mikhailovich and could turn out to be dangerous for the
Church”. So after several further sessions, as Zyzykin writes, “the Patriarchs
were forced to write an explanatory note, in which they gave another
interpretation to the second chapter of the patriarchal replies… The Council
came to a unanimous conclusion: ‘Let it be recognized that the Tsar has the
pre-eminence in civil affairs, and the Patriarch in ecclesiastical affairs, so
that in this way the harmony of the ecclesiastical institution may be preserved
whole and unshaken.’ This was the principled triumph of the Niconian idea,
as was the resolution of the Council to close the Monastirsky Prikaz and
the return to the Church of judgement over clergy in civil matters (the later
remained in force until 1700).”[392]
And yet it
had been a close-run thing. During the 1666 Council Paisius Ligarides had given
voice to an essentially pagan view of tsarist power that had not been heard
since Leo the iconoclast in the eighth century: “[The tsar] will be called the
new Constantine. He will be both tsar and hierarch, just as the great
Constantine, who was so devoted to the faith of Christ, is praised among us at
Great Vespers as priest and tsar. Yes, and both among the Romans and the
Egyptians the tsar united in himself the power of the priesthood and of the
kingship.”[393]
If this
doctrine had triumphed at the Council, then Russia would indeed have entered
the era of the Antichrist, as the Old Believers believed. And if the good sense
of the Russian hierarchs finally averted a catastrophe, the condemnation of
Patriarch Nicon, the chief supporter of the Orthodox doctrine, cast a long
shadow of evil over the proceedings, and meant that within a generation the
attempt to impose absolutism on Russia would begin again…[394]
According
to M.V. Zyzykin, “in Church-State questions Nicon fought with the same corruption
that had crept into Muscovite political ideas after the middle of the 15th
century and emerged as political Old Believerism, which defended the tendency
that had established itself in life towards caesaropapism. The fact that the
guardian of Orthodoxy, at the time of the falling away of the
Constantinopolitan Emperor and Patriarch and Russian Metropolitan into the
unia, had turned out to be the Muscovite Great Prince had too great an
influence on the exaltation of his significance in the Church. And if we
remember that at that time, shortly after the unia, the Muscovite Great Prince
took the place of the Byzantine Emperor, and that with the establishment of the
de facto independence of the Russian Church from the Constantinopolitan
Patriarch the Muscovite first-hierarchs lost a support for their ecclesiastical
independence from the Great Princes, then it will become clear to us that the
Muscovite Great Prince became de facto one of the chief factors in
ecclesiastical affairs, having the opportunity to impose his authority on the
hierarchy.”[395]
Patriarch
Nicon corrected the caesaropapist bias of the Russian Church, which was
expressed in his time especially by the friend of the tsar, Paisius Ligarides.
He set down his thoughts in detail in his famous work Razzorenie
(“Destruction”) – which, however, has yet to be published in its original
Russian, having been published only in 1871 in an English translation by
William Palmer. In it he defined the rights and duties of the tsar as follows:
“The tsar undoubtedly has power to give rights and honours, but within the
limits set by God; he cannot give spiritual power to Bishops and archimandrites
and other spiritual persons: spiritual things belong to the decision of God,
and earthly things to the king” (I, 555).[396]
“The main duty of the tsar is to care for the Church, for the dominion of the
tsar can never be firmly established and prosperous when his mother, the Church
of God, is not strongly established, for the Church of God, most glorious tsar,
is thy mother, and if thou art obliged to honour thy natural mother, who gave
thee birth, then all the more art thou obliged to love thy spiritual mother,
who gave birth to thee in Holy Baptism and anointed thee to the kingdom with
the oil and chrism of gladness.”[397]
Indeed,
“none of the kings won victory without the prayers of the priests” (I, 187).[398]
For “Bishops are the successors of the Apostles and the servants of God, so
that the honour accorded to them is given to God Himself.”[399]
“It was when the evangelical faith began to shine that the Episcopate was
venerated; but when the spite of pride spread, the honour of the Episcopate was
betrayed.” “A true hierarch of Christ is everything. For when kingdom falls on
kingdom, that kingdom, and house, that is divided in itself will not stand.”[400]
“The tsar is entrusted with the bodies, but the priests with the souls of men.
The tsar remits money debts, but the priests – sins. The one compels, the other
comforts. The one wars with enemies, the other with the princes and rulers of
the darkness of this world. Therefore the priesthood is much higher than the
kingdom.”[401]
The
superiority of the priesthood is proved by the fact that the tsar is anointed
by the patriarch and not vice-versa: “The highest authority of the priesthood
was not received from the tsars, but on the contrary the tsars are anointed to
the kingdom through the priesthood… We know no other lawgiver than Christ, Who
gave [me] the power to bind and to loose. What power did the tsar give me? This
one? No, but he himself seized it for himself…. Know that even he who is
distinguished by the diadem is subject to the power of the priest, and he who
is bound by him will be bound also in the heavens.”[402]
Nicon
explains why, on the one hand, the priesthood is higher than the kingdom, and
on the other, the kingdom cannot be abolished by the priesthood: “The kingdom
is given by God to the world, but in wrath, and it is given through anointing
from the priests with a material oil, but the priesthood is a direct anointing
from the Holy Spirit, as also our Lord Jesus Christ was raised to the
high-priesthood directly by the Holy Spirit, as were the Apostles. Therefore,
at the consecration to the episcopate, the consecrator holds an open Gospel
over the head of him who is being consecrated” (I, 234, 235)… There is no human
judgement over the tsar, but there is a warning from the pastors of the Church
and the judgement of God.”[403]
However,
the fact that the tsar cannot be judged by man shows that the kingdom is given
him directly by God, and not by man. “For even if he was not crowned, he would
still remain king.” But he can only be called an Orthodox, anointed king
if he is crowned by the Bishop. Thus “he receives and retains his royal power
by the sword de facto. But the name of king (that is, the name of a
consecrated and Christian or Orthodox king) he receives from the episcopal
consecration, for which the Bishop is the accomplisher and source.” (I, 254).[404]
The
“two swords” of royal and ecclesiastical power, of which Pope Gregory VII and
his successors made such perverted use, are explained by Nicon as follows: “The
old Greek laws declare what are the swords of power: the spiritual and the
secular, which the Lord Jesus Christ established for the defence of His people
in the Church, in which the Bishop is the spiritual sword, and the tsar the
secular… If anyone does not obey the Bishop, the tsar forces him to obedience,
just as those who refused to obey the tsar are forced to obedience to the
Bishop, when a need for this arises. But these swords are of two different
kinds of power and jurisdiction… In spiritual affairs belonging to the Glory of
God, the Bishop is higher than the tsar, for there only he can realise
spiritual jurisdiction, but in the affairs of this world the tsar is higher.
Thus the two sides do not contradict each other. However, the Bishop has a
certain relationship to secular affairs.. If the tsar does not do what he
should do in obeying the laws of God, then it is in the power of the Bishop to punish
or excommunicate him, not as king, but as an apostate from the law of God.”[405]
We see here how far Nicon is from the
papocaesarism of a Pope Gregory VII, who claimed to be able to depose kings
precisely “as kings”. And yet he received a reputation for papocaesarism (which
prevented his recognition at least until the Russian Council of 1917-18)
because of his fearless exposure of the caesaropapism of the Russian tsar:
“Everyone should know his measure. Saul offered the sacrifice, but lost his kingdom;
Uzziah, who burned incense in the temple, became a leper. Although thou art
tsar, remain within thy limits. Wilt thou say that the heart of the king is in
the hand of God? Yes, but the heart of the king is in the hand of God [only]
when the king remains within the boundaries set for him by God.”[406]
In another passage Nicon combines the
metaphor of the two swords with that of the sun and moon. The analogy with the
sun and the moon had been used by Pope Innocent III; but Patriarch Nicon’s
development of it is Orthodox and does not exalt the power of the priesthood
any more than did the Fathers of the fourth century: “The all-powerful God, in
creating the heaven and the earth, order the two great luminaries – the sun and
the moon – to shine upon the earth in their course; by one of them – the sun -
He prefigured the episcopal power, while by the other – the moon – He
prefigured the tsarist power. For the sun is the greater luminary, it shines by
day, like the Bishop who enlightens the soul. But the lesser luminary shines by
night, by which we must understand the body. As the moon borrows its light from
the sun, and in proportion to its distance from it receives a fuller radiance,
so the tsar derives his consecration, anointing and coronation (but not power)
from the Bishop, and, having received it, has his own light, that it, his
consecrated power and authority. The similarity between these two persons in
every Christian society is exactly the same as that between the sun and the
moon in the material world. For the episcopal power shines by day, that is,
over souls; while the tsarist power shines in the things of this world. And
this power, which is the tsarist sword, must be ready to act against the
enemies of the Orthodox faith. The episcopate and all the clergy need this
defence from all unrighteousness and violence. This is what the secular power
is obliged to do. For secular people are in need of freedom for their souls,
while spiritual people are in need of secular people for the defence of their
bodies. And so in this neither of them is higher than the other, but each has
power from God.”[407]
But Nicon insists that when the tsar
encroaches on the Church he loses his power. For “there is in fact no man more
powerless than he who attacks the Divine laws, and there is nothing more
powerful than a man who fights for them. For he who commits sin is the slave of
sin, even if he bears a thousand crowns on his head, but he who does righteous
deeds is greater than the tsar himself, even if he is the last of all.”[408]
So a tsar who himself chooses patriarchs and metropolitans, breaking his oath
to the patriarch “is unworthy even to enter the church, but he must spend his
whole life in repentance, and only at the hour of death can he be admitted to
communion… Chrysostom forbade every one who breaks his oath … from crossing the
threshold of the church, even in he were the tsar himself.” (I, 581).[409]
Nicon comes very close to identifying the
caesaropapist tsar with the Antichrist. For, as Zyzykin points out, “Nicon
looked on the apostasy of the State law from Church norms (i.e. their
destruction) as the worship by the State of the Antichrist, ‘This antichrist is
not satan, but a man, who will receive from satan the whole power of his
energy. A man will be revealed who will be raised above God, and he will be the
opponent of God and will destroy all gods and will order that people worship
him instead of God, and he will sit, not in the temple of Jerusalem, but in the
Churches, giving himself out as God. As the Median empire was destroyed by
Babylon, and the Babylonian by the Persian, and the Persian by the Macedonian,
and the Macedonian by the Roman, thus must the Roman empire be destroyed by the
antichrist, and he – by Christ. This is revealed to us by the Prophet Daniel.
The divine Apostle warned us about things to come, and they have come for us
through you and your evil deeds (he is speaking to the author of the Ulozhenie, Prince Odoyevsky) Has not the apostasy from the Holy Gospel and the
traditions of the Holy Apostles and holy fathers appeared? (Nicon has in mind
the invasion by the secular authorities into the administration of the Church
through the Ulozheniye). Has not the man of sin been discovered - the son of
destruction, who will exalt himself about everything that is called God, or
that is worshipped? And what can be more destructive than abandoning God and
His commandments, as they have preferred the traditions of men, that is, their
codex full of spite and cunning? But who is this? Satan? No. This is a man, who
has received the work of Satan, who has united to himself many others like you,
composer of lies, and your comrades. Sitting in the temple of God does not mean
in the temple of Jerusalem, but everywhere in the Churches. And sitting not
literally in all the Churches, but as exerting power over all the Churches. The
Church is not stone walls, but the ecclesiastical laws and the pastors, against
whom thou, apostate, hast arisen, in accordance with the work of satan, and in
the Ulozhenie thou hast presented secular people with jurisdiction
over the Patriarch, the Metropolitans, the Archbishops, the Bishops, and over
all the clergy, without thinking about the work of God. As the Lord said on one
occasion: ‘Depart from Me, satan, for thou thinkest not about what is pleasing
to God, but about what is pleasing to men.’ ‘Ye are of your father the devil
and you carry out his lusts.’ Concerning such Churches Christ said: ‘My house
will be called a house of prayer, but you will make it a den of thieves’; as Jeremiah
says (7.4): ‘Do not rely on deceiving words of those who say to you: here is
the temple of the Lord.’ How can it be the temple of God if it is under the
power of the tsar and his subjects, and they order whatever they want in it?
Such a Church is no longer the temple of God, but the house of those who have
power over it, for, if it were the temple of God, nobody, out of fear of God,
would be capable of usurping power over it or taking anything away from it. But
as far as the persecution of the Church is concerned, God has revealed about
this to His beloved disciple and best theologian John (I, 403-408),… [who]
witnesses, saying that the Antichrist is already in the world. But nobody has
seen or heard him perceptibly, that is, the secular authorities will begin to
rule over the Churches of God in transgression of the commandments of God.’ For
the word ‘throne’ signifies having ecclesiastical authority, and not simply
sitting… And he will command people to bow down to him not externally or
perceptibly, but in the same way as now the Bishops, abandoning their priestly
dignity and honour, bow down to the tsars as to their masters. And they ask
them for everything and seek honours from them” (I, 193).”[410]
For “there is apostasy also in the fact that the Bishops, abandoning their
dignity, bow down before the tsar as their master in spiritual matters, and
seek honours from him.”[411]
The power
of the Roman emperors, of which the Russian tsardom is the lawful successor, is
“that which restraineth” the coming of the Antichrist. And yet “the mystery of
iniquity is already being accomplished” in the shape of those kings, such as
Nero, who ascribed to themselves divine worship.[412]
The warning was clear: that which restrains the antichrist can be swiftly
transformed into the antichrist himself. Even the present tsar could suffer
such a transformation; for “what is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge
bishops, taking to himself a power which has not been given him by God?… This
is apostasy from God.”[413]
In this apocalyptic
outlook on events, if in nothing else, Patriarch Nicon and the Old Believers
were united…
It was not only the Russian State that had
sinned in Nicon’s deposition: both the Russian hierarchs and the Eastern
Patriarchs had displayed pusillanimity in submitting to the pressure of tsar
and boyars. But judgement was deferred for a generation or two, while the
Russian autocracy restored the Ukraine, “Little Russia”, to the Great Russian
kingdom, thereby taking a big step in the task of “the gathering of the Russian
lands”. Indeed, in the period between the council of 1667 and the death of
Patriarch Adrian in 1700, the Moscow Patriarchate seemed to be at the height of
its power. With the weakening of Poland and the increase in strength of the
generally pro-Muscovite Cossacks under Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, large areas
of Belorussia and the Ukraine, including Kiev, were freed from Latin control,
which could only be joyful news for the native Orthodox population who had
suffered so much from the Polish-Jesuit yoke. Moreover, the liberated areas,
albeit with some initial opposition from unia-inclined hierarchs and the
Patriarch of Constantinople (which had had nominal jurisdiction over these
areas for many years), were returned to the jurisdiction of the Russian Church
in 1686. This meant that most of the Russian lands were now, for the first time
for centuries, united under a single, independent Russian State and Church. The
Russian national Church had been restored to almost its original dimensions.
As if in
acknowledgement of its achievement, at the coronation of Tsar Theodore
Alexeyevich certain additions were made to the rite that showed that the
Russian Church now looked on the tsardom as a quasi-priestly rank. “These
additions were: 1) the proclamation of the symbol of faith by the tsar before
his crowning, as was always the case with ordinations, 2) the vesting of the
tsar in royal garments signifying his putting on his rank, and 3) communion in
the altar of the Body and Blood separately in accordance with the priestly
order, which was permitted only for persons of the three hierarchical sacred
ranks. These additions greatly exalted the royal rank, and Professor Pokrovsky
explained their introduction by the fact that at the correction of the
liturgical books in Moscow in the second half of the 17th century,
the attention of people was drawn to the difference in the rites of the
Byzantine and Muscovite coronation and the additions were introduced under the
influence of the Council of 1667, which wanted to exalt the royal rank.”[414]
Although
exalted in this way, the pious tsar did not use his position to humiliate the
Church. On the contrary, he acted to correct, as far as it was in his power,
the great wrong that had been done to the Church in his father’s reign. Thus
when Nicon died it was the tsar who had to overcome the resistance of Patriarch
Joachim before the reposed patriarch’s body could be buried as a hierarch in
the place that he had desired. And it was the tsar who ordered “that the body
should be conveyed to New Jerusalem. The patriarch did not want to give the
reposed hierarchical honours. [So] his Majesty persuaded Metropolitan Cornelius
of Novgorod to carry out the burial. He himself carried the coffin with the
remains.”[415] Moreover,
it was the tsar rather than the patriarch who obtained a gramota from
the Eastern Patriarchs in 1682 restoring Nicon to patriarchal status and
“declaring that he could be forgiven in view of his redemption of his guilt by
his humble patience in prison”[416].
This was hardly an adequate summary of the situation, but it did go some of the
way to helping the Greeks at least in part to redeem their guilt in the
deposition of the most Grecophile of Russian patriarchs.
However, Patriarch Nicon was never
completely rehabilitated. Indeed, in 1676 Patriarch Joachim had convened a
council which hurled yet more accusations against him.[417]
It was not until after the fall of the Russian empire, at the Moscow Council of
1917-18, that the first steps towards his complete rehabilitation were
undertaken, under the leadership of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of
Kiev. Moreover, in spite of the formal abolition of the Monastirsky Prikaz
in 1675, as Nikolin writes, “the interference of the State in the life of the
Church was becoming constantly stronger. The property privileges of
ecclesiastical institutions and the clergy were gradually restricted or
completely removed. Gradually also State obligations were extended to the Church’s
properties.”[418]
The last
Patriarch of Muscovite Russia, Adrian, was enthroned in 1690, and expressed a
traditional, very Niconian concept of the relationship between the Church and
the State: “The kingdom has dominion only on earth, … whereas the priesthood
has power on earth as in heaven… I am established as archpastor and father and
head of all, for the patriarch is the image of Christ. He who hears me hears
Christ. For all Orthodox are the spiritual sons [of the patriarch] – tsars,
princes, lords, honourable warriors, and ordinary people… right-believers of
every age and station. They are my sheep, they know me and they heed my
archpastoral voice…”[419]
However,
this boldness evaporated when the domineering personality of Peter the Great
came to full power in the kingdom. Thus “when Tsaritsa Natalia, who had
supported Patriarch Adrian, a supporter of the old order of life, died [in
1694], there began a reform of customs which showed itself already in the
outward appearance of the Tsar [Peter]. The Tsar’s way of life did not accord
with the sacred dignity of the Tsar and descended from this height to drinking
bouts in the German suburb and the life of a simple workman. The Church with
its striving for salvation.. retreated into the background, and, as a
consequence of this, a whole series of changes in customs appeared. Earlier the
First-hierarchs and other hierarchs had been drawn into the Tsar’s council even
in civil matters; they had been drawn to participate in the zemskie sobory
and the Boyar’s Duma; now Peter distanced the Church’s representatives from
participation in state matters; he spoke about this even during the lifetime of
his mother to the Patriarch and did not summon him to the council. The ceremony
on Palm Sunday in which the Tsar had previously taken part only as the first
son of the Church, and not as her chief master, was scrapped. This ceremony on
the one hand exalted the rank of the Patriarch before the people, and on the
other hand also aimed at strengthening the authority of his Majesty’s state
power through his participation in front of the whole people in a religious
ceremony in the capacity of the first son of the Church. Until the death of his
mother Peter also took part in this ceremony, holding the reins of the ass on which
Patriarch Adrian [representing Christ Himself] sat, but between 1694 and 1696
this rite was put aside as if it were humiliating for the tsar’s power. The
people were not indifferent to this and in the persons of the riflemen who
rebelled in 1698 they expressed their protest. After all, the motive for this
rebellion was the putting aside of the procession on Palm Sunday, and also the
cessation of the cross processions at Theophany and during Bright Week, and the
riflemen wanted to destroy the German suburb and beat up the Germans because
‘piety had stagnated among them’. In essence this protest was a protest against
the proclamation of the primacy of the State and earthly culture in place of
the Church and religion. So as to introduce this view into the mass of the
people, it had been necessary to downgrade the significance of the First
Hierarch of the Church, the Patriarch. After all, he incarnated in himself the
earthly image of Christ, and in his position in the State the idea of the
churchification of the State, that lay at the foundation of the symphony of
powers, was vividly expressed. Of course, Peter had to remove all the rights of
the Patriarch that expressed this. We have seen that the Patriarch ceased to be
the official advisor of the Tsar and was excluded from the Boyars’ Duma. But
this was not enough: the Patriarch still had one right, which served as a
channel for the idea of righteousness in the structure of the State. This was
the right to make petitions before the Tsar, and its fall symbolised the fall
in the authority of the Patriarch. Soloviev has described this scene of the
last petitioning in connection with the riflemen’s rebellion. ‘The terrible
preparations for the executions went ahead, the gallows were placed on Belij
and Zemlyanoj gorod, at the gates of the Novodevichi monastery and at the four
assembly houses of the insurgent regiments. The Patriarch remembered that his
predecessors had stood between the Tsar and the victims of his wrath, and had
petitioned for the disgraced ones, lessening the bloodshed. Adrian raised the
icon of the Mother of God and set off for Peter at Preobrazhenskoye. But the
Tsar, on seeing the Patriarch, shouted at him: ‘What is this icon for? Is
coming here really your business? Get away from here and put the icon in its
place. Perhaps I venerate God and His All-holy Mother more than you. I am
carrying out my duties and doing a God-pleasing work when I defend the people
and execute evil-doers who plot against it.’ Historians rebuke Patriarch Adrian
for not saying what the First Priest was bound to say, but humbly yielded to
the Tsar, leaving the place of execution in shame without venturing on an act
of heroic self-sacrifice. He did not oppose moral force to physical force and
did not defend the right of the Church to be the guardian of the supreme
righteousness. The petitioning itself turned out to be, not the heroism of the
Patriarch on his way to martyrdom, but an empty rite. The Patriarch’s
humiliation was put in the shade by Peter in that he heeded the intercession of
a foreigner, the adventurer Lefort. ‘Lefort, as Golikov informs us, firmly
represented to Peter that his Majesty should punish for evil-doing, but not
lead the evil-doers into despair: the former is the consequence of justice,
while the latter is an act of cruelty.’ At that very moment his Majesty ordered
the stopping of the execution...”[420]
In
February, 1696 Patriarch Adrian was paralyzed, and in October, 1700, he died.
Peter did not permit the election of a new patriarch, but only a locum tenens.
Later in his reign he abolished the patriarchate itself and introduced what was
in effect a Protestant form of Church-State relations… Thus the seventeenth century ended with the
effective fall of the symphony of powers in Russia in the form of the shackling
of one of its two pillars – the patriarchate.
That this
would eventually lead to the fall of the other pillar, the tsardom, had been
demonstrated by events in contemporary England. For there were uncanny
parallels in the histories of the two countries at this time. Thus 1649 saw
both the enactment of the Ulozhenie, the first official and legal
expression of caesaropapism in Russia, and the execution of the king in England
- the first legalised regicide in European history. And if by the 1690s both
the patriarchate in Russia and the monarchy in England appeared to have been
restored to their former status, this was only an illusion. Soon the doctrine
of the social contract, which removed from the monarchy its Divine right and
gave supreme power to the people, would triumph in both countries: in England
in its liberal, Lockean form, and in Russia in its absolutist, Hobbesean form…
From
Holy Rus’ to Great Russia
“The most
important task of the Orthodox Tsar,” wrote Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich to the
Patriarch of Jerusalem, “is care for the faith, the Church, and all the affairs
of the Church.” “There is no question”, writes Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “that
the Orthodox Sovereign does indeed care for the Orthodox Church, defends her,
protects her, takes part in all her most important affairs. But not he in the
first place; and not he mainly. The Church has her own head on earth – the
Patriarch. Relations between the head of the state and the head of the Church
in Russia, beginning from the holy equal-to-the-apostles Great Prince Vladimir
and continuing with Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nicon, were always
formed in a spirit of symphony.
“Not
without exceptions, but, as a rule, this symphony was not broken and
constituted the basis of the inner spiritual strength of the whole of Rus’, the
whole of the Russian state and society. The complexity of the symphony
consisted in the fact that the Tsar and Patriarch were identically responsible
for everything that took place in the people, in society, in the state. But at
the same time the Tsar especially answered for worldly matters, matters of
state, while the Patriarch especially answered for Church and spiritual
affairs. In council they both decided literally everything. But in worldly affairs
the last word lay with the Tsar; and in Church and spiritual affairs – with the
Patriarch. The Patriarch unfailingly took part in the sessions of the State
Duma, that is, of the government. The Tsar unfailingly took part in the Church
Councils. In the State Duma the last word was with the Sovereign, and in the
Church Councils – with the Patriarch. This common responsibility for everything
and special responsibility for the state and the Church with the Tsar and the
Patriarch was the principle of symphony or agreement.”[421]
Although it
is customary to date the breakdown of Church-State symphony or agreement in
Russia to the time of Peter the Great, western influence in Russia had
increased, and the foundations of Holy Russia had been undermined, already in
the time of his father, Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich. For, as Archbishop Nathaniel
of Vienna writes, “by the time of Peter Holy Rus’ was not an integral,
full-blooded vital phenomenon, since it had been broken… The Moscow Rus’ of
Tsars Alexis Mikhailovich and Theodore Alekseyevich and Tsarevna Sophia, with
whom Peter had to deal, was already only externally Holy Rus’.
“There is
evidence that Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich had an illegitimate son (who later
became the boyar Ivan Musin-Pushkin). Concerning Tsaritsa Natalia Kirillovna
Tikhon Streshnev said that he was not her only lover, and Tsarevna Sophia had a
“dear friend” in Prince Basil Golitsyn. Such sinful disruptions had been seen
earlier, being characteristic of the generally sensual Russian nature. But
earlier these sins had always been clearly recognised as sins. People did not
justify them, but repented of them, as Great Prince Ivan III repented to St.
Joseph of Volotsk for his sin of sorcery and fortune-telling, as the fearsome
Ivan the Terrible repented of his sins. But if the tsars did not repent of
their sins, as, for example, Basil III did not repent of his divorce from St.
Solomonia, these sins were rebuked by the representatives of the Church and
burned out and rooted out by long and painful processes. In the second half of
the 17th century in Moscow we see neither repentance for sins
committed, not a pained attitude to them on the part of the sinners themselves
and the society surrounding them. There was only a striving to hide sins, to make
them unnoticed, unknown, for “what is done in secret is judged in secret”. A
very characteristic trait distinguishing the Muscovite society of the second
half of the 17th century from the preceding epochs, a trait fraught
with many consequences, was the unrestrained gravitation of the upper echelons
of Muscovite society towards the West, to the sinful West, to the sinful free
life there, which, as always with sin viewed from afar, seemed especially
alluring and attractive against the background of the wearisome holy Russian
way of life.
“Tsar
Alexis Mikhailovich, and all the higher Moscow boyars after him, introduced
theatres. Originally the theatrical troupes most frequently played ‘spiritual’
pieces. But that this was only an offering to hypocrisy is best demonstrated by
the fact that the actors playing ‘sacred scenes” gratifying unspoiled
sensuality about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, David and Bathsheba and Herod and
Salome, were profoundly despised by the tsar and other spectators, who
considered them to be sinful, ‘scandal-mongering’ people. Neither holy days nor
festal days, and still more not the eves of feasts, were chosen for the
presentation of these scenes. (It is known that Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich
changed the date of a presentation fixed for December 18, for ‘tomorrow is the
eve of the Forefeast of the Nativity of Christ’.) The real exponents of the
really sacred scenes: The Action in the Cave and the Procession on the Donkey
were considered by nobody to be sinful people, and their scenes were put on
precisely on holy days. The tsar was followed by the boyars, and the boyars by
the noblemen; everything that was active and leading in the people was drawn at
this time to a timid, but lustful peeping at the West, at its free life, in
which everything was allowed that was strictly forbidden in Holy Rus’, but
which was so longed for by sin-loving human nature, against which by this time
the leading echelons of Muscovite life no longer struggled, but indecisively
pandered to. In this sinful gravitation towards the West there were gradations
and peculiarities: some were drawn to Polish life, others to Latin, a third
group to German life. Some to a greater degree and some to a lesser degree, but
they all turned away from the Orthodox Old Russian way of life. Peter only
decisively opened up this tendency, broke down the undermined partition between
Rus’ and the West, beyond which the Muscovites timidly desired to look, and
unrestrainedly threw himself into the desired sinful life, leading behind him his
people and his state.
“Holy Rus’
was easily broken by Peter because much earlier it had already been betrayed by
the leading echelons of Muscovite society.
“We can see
the degree of the betrayal of the Holy Rus’ to a still greater degree than in
the pandering to the desires of the flesh and the gravitation towards the free
and sinful life, in the state acts of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, and principally
in the creation of the so-called ‘Monastirsky Prikaz’, through which, in spite
of the protests of Patriarch Nicon, the tsar crudely took into his own hands
the property of the Church ‘for its better utilisation’, and in the
persecutions to which ‘the father and intercessor for the tsar’, his Holiness
Patriarch Nicon, was subjected. Nicon understood more clearly than anyone where
the above-listed inner processes in the Muscovite state were inclining, and
unsuccessfully tried to fight with it. For a genuinely Old Russian
consciousness, it was horrific to think that the state could ‘better utilise’ the
property of the Church than the Church. The state had been able earlier - and
the more ancient the epoch, and the more complete its Old Russianness, the
easier and the more often – to resort to Church property and spend it on its
own urgent military and economic needs. After all, the Church took a natural
interest in this. A son or daughter can freely take a mother’s money in a
moment of necessity, and in the given case it is of secondary importance
whether he returns it or not: it is a question of what is more convenient to
the loving mother and her loving son. They do not offend each other. But in the
removal of the monastery lands by Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich (although this
measure was elicited by the needs of the war in the Ukraine, which the Church very
much sympathised with), another spirit was clearly evident: the spirit of
secularisation. This was no longer a more or less superficial sliding towards
the longed-for sinful forms of western entertainment, it was not a temporary
surrender to sin: it was already a far-reaching transfer into the inner sphere
of the relations between Church and State – and what a state: Holy Rus’ (!), -
of the secular ownership relations with a view to ‘better utilisation’ instead
of the loving relations between mother and children characteristic of Orthodox
morality. Better utilisation for what ends? For Church ends? But it would be
strange to suppose that the state can use Church means for Church ends better
than the Church. For state ends? But then the degree of the secularisation of
consciousness is clear, since state ends are placed so much higher than Church
ends, so that for their attainment Church property is removed. State ends are
recognised as ‘better’ in relation to Church ends.
“Finally,
the drying up of holiness in Rus’ in the second half of the 17th
century is put in clearer relief by the fact that, after the period of the 14th-16th
centuries, which gave a great host of saints of the Russian people, the 17th
century turned out to be astonishingly poor in saints. There were far more of
them later. In the century of the blasphemous Peter there were far more saints
in Russia than in the century of the pious tsars Alexis Mikhailovich and
Theodore Alexeyevich. In the second half of the 17th century there
were almost no saints in Rus’. And the presence or absence of saints is the
most reliable sign of the flourishing or, on the contrary, the fall of the
spiritual level of society, the people or the state.
“And so it
was not Peter who destroyed Holy Rus’. Before him it had been betrayed by the
people and state that had been nurtured by it. But Peter created Great Russia…”[422]
[1] Armstrong, The Battle for God: a
History of Fundamentalism, New York: Ballantine Books, 2001, pp. 3-4.
[2] David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 32.
[3] Platonov, op. cit., p. 137.
[4] Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, The Christian Book Club of America, 1924, pp. 12-13. Further evidence for paganism in modern Judaism is the adoption of the Babylonian Fast of Tammuz as one of the two main fasts of the synagogue year, though condemned by the Prophet Ezekiel (Elizabeth Dilling, The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today, The Noontide Press, 1963).
[5] Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 196.
[6] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 198-199.
[7] Cohn-Sherbok, Atlas of Jewish History, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 112.
[8] Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 13-14.
[9] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 260-261. Luria also believed in reincarnation, writing: “If the soul was not purified entirely the first time, and it left this world, that soul must come back in a reincarnation, even a few times, until it is entirely purified.” Recently Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the ultra-orthodox leader known as the “Moses of the Sephardic world” has applied this theory to the Holocaust, declaring that the Jewish victims of Nazism were “the reincarnation of earlier souls who sinned [and who] returned… to atone for their sins” (Lisa Beyer, Eric Silver, “Heresy and Holocaust”, Time, August 21, 2000, p. 74).
[10] Armstrong, op. cit., p. 11.
[11] Cohn-Sherbok, op.
cit., pp. 117-119. However, as Johnson writes, “the Shabbatean movement,
sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, not only survived the
débâcle of the apostasy but continued in existence for over a
century… The movement survived splits, nonconformist deviations of its own and
eventually produced a breakaway religion founded by a reincarnation of Zevi
called Jacob Frank (1726-91)… While embracing Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism
and Orthodoxy, Frank continued to follow Nathan’s expanded religious theories.
He created a new Trinity, of the ‘Good God’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘She’, the last
an amalgam of the Shekinah and the Virgin Mary, and eventually
propounded the notion that the messianic idea could be pursued equally well in
all the main religions or, for that matter, in the secular enlightenment or
freemasonry. Thus the kabbalah, which began in unspecific, formless gnosticism
in late antiquity, returned to unspecific, formless gnosticism in the late
eighteenth century.” (op. cit., pp. 273, 274)
[12] Armstrong, op. cit., p. 7.
[13] Armstrong, op. cit., p. 15.
[14] Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 22, 23-24.
[15] Braudel, A History of Civilizations, London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 315-316.
[16] Braudel, op. cit., p. 322.
[17] J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 172, 173.
[18] Leontiev, “Vizantizm i Slavyanstvo”, in Vostok, Rossia i Slavyanstvo, Moscow, 1996, p. 142 (in Russian).
[19] Pico’s man-centred world-view is evident in the following: “O sublime generosity of God the Father! O highest and most wonderful felicity of Man! To him it was granted to be what he wills. The Father endowed him with all kinds of seeds and with the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow and bear fruit in him” (On the Dignity of Man). (V.M.)
[20] Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 471, 479.
[21] Braudel, op. cit., pp. 348-349.
[22] Braudel, op. cit., p. 326.
[23] As an example of this paradox, we may consider the example of Marx, who was, of course, the spiritual father of the despotic, materialist and anti-Christian regimes of the twentieth century. And yet, according to Sir Karl Popper, “although he recognised that the material world and its necessities are fundamental, he did not feel any love for the ‘kingdom of necessity’, as he called a society which is in bondage to its material needs. He cherished the spiritual world, the ‘kingdom of freedom’, and the spiritual side of ‘human nature’, as much as any Christian dualist” (The Open Society and its Enemies, p. 103). It must be borne in mind, of course, that Marx’s understanding of “the spiritual world” was not Christian.
[24] Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 11.
[25] Averky (Taushev), "On the Situation of the Orthodox Christian in the Contemporary World", Istinnoe Pravoslavie i Sovremennij Mir, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, pp. 19-21 (in Russian).
[26] Quoted in V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do Nashikh Dnej, Harbin, 1934, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 75 (in Russian).
[27] Martin Luthers Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Weimar, 1885, 405, 35. Quoted by Deacon John Whiteford in ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU (Orthodox Christianity), September 6, 1999.
[28] Archbishop Hilarion, Christianity or the Church?, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, p. 28.
[29] We are here anticipating future developments in Protestantism, which Luther and Calvin did not espouse in the simplistic form here described. Nevertheless, their root was already there, in the sixteenth-century Reformers.
[30] Descartes wrote in The Principles of Philosophy: “Above all else we must impress on our memory the overriding rule that whatever God has revealed to us must be accepted as more certain than anything else. And although the light of reason may, with the utmost clarity and evidence, appear to suggest something different, we must still put our entire faith in Divine authority rather than in our own judgement.”
[31] Tikhomirov, Religiozniye-Filosofskiye Osnovy Istorii, Moscow, 1997, pp. 472-474 (in Russian).
[32] Zhukovsky, “O stikhotvorenii ‘Svyataya Rus’”, in V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra i do nashikh dnej, Harbin, 1934, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 74 (in Russian).
[33] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 119-120.
[34] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 125, 127.
[35] Luther, “On the Appointment of Ministers”, 1523; translated in Englander, D. et al. (eds.) Culture and Belief in Europe 1450-1600, Oxford: Blackwells, 1990, p. 186.
[36] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre, Gallimard, 1996, pp 292-293 (in French).
[37] Peter Matheson, “Thomas Müntzer’s idea of an audience”, History, vol. 76, no. 247, June, 1991, pp. 192, 193.
[38] There was some justification for this charge. For Luther’s need of the Prince’s support compelled him to condone “the bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse by advising the new faith’s leading patron ‘to tell a good strong lie’” (Davis, op. cit., p. 492).
[39] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-filosofskiye osnovy, op. cit., p. 271.
[40] Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More, London: Vintage, 1999, p. 261.
[41] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 223.
[42] See John Guy, “More to Thomas than a man for all seasons”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 2, no. 2, February, 2001, p. 53.
[43] Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 224-225, 221.
[44] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 279.
[45] It was Warham who in 1508 uncovered the fragrant relics of perhaps the greatest of the Orthodox archbishops of Canterbury, St. Dunstan. Dunstan had been distinguished by his fearless defence of the Church against secular encroachment, and had even imposed a penance upon King Edgar of not wearing his crown from his sixteenth to his thirtieth year (see V. Moss, The Saints of Anglo-Saxon England, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1993, p. 28). The uncovering of his relics was a hint to Warham that the time for confession against secular encroachment had come again; but sadly he paid no heed.
[46] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 354.
[47] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 388.
[48] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 394.
[49] Davies, op. cit., p. 453. United, also, with the people; for “throughout the history of the Inquisition, commentators agreed on the impressive support given to it by the people” (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, London: The Folio Society, 1998, p. 69).
[50] Davies, op. cit., p. 453.
[51] Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: the Making of a World Power, 1492-1763, Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 2002.
[52] Belloc, Richelieu, London: Ernest Benn, 1930, pp. 67-68.
[53] We may note that the Pope is supposedly king even of heaven! In view of these and similar statements, it is hard to deny that the Counter-Reformation papacy, no less than its medieval predecessor, usurped the power of God and became, in the strict definition of the word, idolatrous. (V.M.)
[54] Las Casas, Aqui se contienen treinta proposiciones muy juridicas, Propositions XVI, XVII, in Englander, op. cit., p. 327.
[55] Gilbert Dagron, Vostochnij tsezaropapizm (istoria i kritika odnoj kontseptsii), http://portal-credo.ru/site/?act=lib&id=177 (in Russian).
[56] Las Casas, op. cit., Proposition XI, in Englander, op. cit., p. 325.
[57] John Warrington, introduction to More’s Utopia, London: Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1974, p. xi.
[58] De Mariana, The King and the Education of the King, in Englander, op. cit., p. 265.
[59] Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, p. 233, footnote.
[60] McClelland, op. cit., p. 175.
[61] McClelland, op. cit., p. 174.
[62] Luther, “Secular Authority: To What Extent it Should be Obeyed”, in Englander, op. cit., p. 190.
[63] Calvin, Institutes IV.xi.3; quoted in Jay, op. cit., p. 175).
[64] Jay, The Church, London: SPCK, 1977, p. 176.
[65] Chadwick, The Reformation, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 83, 86-87.
[66] Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 190-191.
[67] Frazier, A Second Look at the Second Coming, Ben Lomond: Conciliar Press, 1999, pp. 61-62.
[68] Quoted in Jay, op. cit., p. 178.
[69] Quoted in Jay, op. cit., p. 179.
[70] Quoted in Jeremy Paxman, The English, London: Penguin Books, 1998, 1999. p. 98.
[71] Later, Anglicanism was to acquire a deeply individualist character, too. This was akin to the doctrine of another German Reformer, Kaspar Schwenkfeld, who asserted, in Barzun’s words, that “if each soul has a unique destiny, then each man and woman may frame his or her creed within the common Christian religion. They deserve to have faith custom-tailored to their needs” (op. cit., p. 33).
[72] G.W. Bernard, “The Church of England c.1529-c.1642”, History, vol. 75, no. 244, June, 1990, p. 185.
[73] Bernard, op. cit., p. 187.
[74] Bernard, op. cit., p. 188.
[75] Bernard, op. cit., pp. 205-206.
[76] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-filosofskiye osnovy, op. cit., p. 269.
[77] Hill, “Social and Economic Consequences of the Henrician Revolution”, in Puritanism and Revolution, op. cit., p. 47.
[78] Hill, op. cit., pp. 56-57.
[79] Paxman, op. cit., p. 89.
[80] Owen Chadwick, op. cit., p. 128; quoted in Paxman, op. cit., p. 91.
[81] Henry Bettenson & Chris Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, third edition, 1999, pp. 267-268.
[82] Hilaire Belloc writes: “The mass of England was Catholic in tradition and feeling during all the last half of the sixteenth century. Even into the beginning of the seventeenth the tradition survived. A good half of the people still had Catholic sympathies in the earlier years of James I. A quarter of them had, in varying degrees, Catholic sympathies (and half that quarter was willing to sacrifice heavily for the sake of openly confessing Catholicism) as late as the fall of the Stuarts in 1685-88.” (How the Reformation Happened, London: Jonathan Cape, 1933, p. 176)
[83] Quoted in Archbishop Seraphim, “Sud’by Rossii”, Pravoslavnij Vestnik, N 87, January-February, 1996, pp. 6-7 (in Russian).
[84] Nazarov, Taina Rossii, Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1999, p. 538 (in Russian).
[85] Òrapezuntios, quoted in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, C. 215.
[86] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaya Gosudarstvennost’, St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 164 (in Russian).
[87] Fr. John Meyendorff, “From Byzantium to Russia: Religious and Cultural Legacy”, in Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, p. 115.
[88] The Russians were not even exposed to the classical pagan authors; for, as Meyendorff (ibid., pp. 119-120) writes, because of “the availability of Scriptures and other literature in translation”, “there was no compelling need to study a ‘classical’ language, classical civilisation was not assimilated in Russia together with Christianity, as was the case in the West. Indeed a Latin medieval scholar who knew Latin would not read only Christian scriptures, but also Cicero, Augustine, and eventually Aristotle. Instead, a Russian knizhnik would only have at his disposal works translated from the Greek and channeled through the Church, i.e., liturgical, hagiographic, canonical, and some historical materials.”
[89] Boyeikov, Tserkov',
Rus' i Rim, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983 (in Russian).
[90] With the exception of Georgia, which later entered the Russian empire. The metropolitan of Georgia had been among the very few, with St. Mark of Ephesus, who refused to sign the unia in Florence. Romania under Stephen the Great was also independent for a time, but soon came under the suzerainty of the Ottomans.
[91] “The primary sense of imperium is ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’, with no connotation of overseas territories, or oppressed indigenous peoples. Though ambitious monarchs, of course, aspired to as extensive an imperium as possible, the main point about being an emperor was that you did not have to take orders from anybody.” (Alan MacColl, “King Arthur and the Making of an English Britain”, History Today, volume 49 (3), March, 1999, p. 11).
[92] Simeon of Suzdal, in Fomin, S. & Fomina, T., Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem, Moscow, 1994, p. 242 (in Russian).
[93] Meyendorff, “Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, op. cit., p. 108.
[94] Meyendorff, “Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, op. cit., pp. 109-110.
[95] Meyendorff, “Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, op. cit., p. 109.
[96] Meyendorff, “Was There Ever a ‘Third Rome’? Remarks on the Byzantine Legacy in Russia”, in Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, op. cit., p. 135.
[97] Quoted in Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 114.
[98] Ya.S. Lurye, «Perepiska Groznogo s Kurbskim v obschestvennoj Mysli Drevnej Rusi», in Ya.S. Lurye and Yu.D. Rykov, Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim, Ìîscow: «Nauka», 1993, p. 230 (in Russian).
[99] Philotheus, Letter against the Astronomers and the Latins.
In van den Bercken, op. cit.
[100] See N. Ulyanov,
"Kompleks Filofeya", Voprosy Filosofii, 1994, no. 4, pp.
152-162 (in Russian).
[101] Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, pp. 231,
[102] Koestler, A. The Thirteenth Tribe. London: Pan Books, 1980, pp. 125-26. Koestler claims that about 82% of the present-day Jews are in fact of Turkic Khazar, that is, non-semitic, descent. This conclusion is supported by B. Freedman (The Truth about the Khazars, Los Angeles, 1954)
[103] O.A. Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii, Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, pp. 74-76, 87 (in Russian).
[104] Nechvolodov, A. L'Empereur Nicolas II et les Juifs. Paris, 1924, p. 183 (in French).
[105] Another cause was the introduction into Russian service-books of several materials that were read in the cycle of synagogue feasts and readings. Also in the 15th century the five books of Moses and the Book of Daniel were translated from Jewish (non-Greek) texts. See Platonov, op. cit., p. 91.
[106] According to St. Joseph of Volotsk, “they said: we are mocking these icons just as the Jews mocked Christ” (Platonov, op. cit., opposite page 320).
[107] Russkaia
Pravoslavnaia Tserkov', Publication of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1988, pp.
25-26 (in Russian).
[108] In the speech of Patriarch Alexis II (Ridiger) to the Rabbis of New York in November, 1991. See Shmakov, Rech’ Patriarkha Alekseya II k rabbinam g. Nyu Yorka (S.Sh.A.) i Eres’ Zhidovstvuyushchikh, U.S.A., 1993 (MS, in Russian).
[109] St. Joseph,
The Enlightener, Word 16.
[110] At the very moment that Joseph passed into eternal life, Serapion stood up and said to those around him: “Our brother Joseph has died. May God forgive him: such things happen even with righteous people” (Ìîskovskij Paterik, Moscow: “Stolitsa”, 1991, p. 46 (in Russian)).
[111] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 153-154.
[112] Kologrivov, Îcherki po Istorii Russkoj Svyatosti, Brussels, 1961, p. 204 (in Russian).
[113] St. Joseph,
The Enlightener, Word 16.
[114] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 151.
[115] However, here is another opinion: “There were state laws in both Byzantium and Russia that envisaged the death penalty for heretics (not for all, but for separate groups), and which the Church called on the emperor to observe. Everyone – this has always been the teaching of the Orthodox Church – must pass his life in accordance with his station: the monk and the hermit must love everybody, the hierarch is obliged to speak out against heresy, and the emperor is obliged, in accordance with the laws, to execute heretics. If they will not do this, the monk will destroy his silence, the hierarch his flock and the emperor the state given to him by God. And all will give an answer for this at the Terrible Judgement.
“The laws concerning heretics in Russia and Byzantium were as follows.
In Byzantium the state laws envisage the death penalty for apostates and
Manichaeans, that is how they related to a series of public and more dangerous
crimes (it was not the beliefs themselves that were punished, but the spreading
of them), but other heresies were sometimes subsumed under these two large
categories. Russia fully accepted the Byzantine laws (changing several of them
in form), and already from the Ustav of St. Vladimir until the Ulozhenie
of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, native laws envisaged such penalties as death for
‘blasphemy’ (burning, ch. 1, article 2 of the Ulozhenie), ‘for seducing
from the Orthodox Faith into Islam [Judaism]’ (burning, ch. 22, article 24),
‘wizardry’ (burning), sacrilege (death penalty), etc.” (“Iosif Volotsky”, http://webforum.land.ru/mes.php?id=4176471&fs=0&ord=0&board=287&1st=&arhv=
(09/08/02).
[116] Kologrivov, op. cit., p. 177.
[117] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 146.
[118] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 158.
[119] Quoted in G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, volume II, 1966, pp. 168, 255.
[120] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 152.
[121] “Our Father among the Saints Maxim the Greek”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XIII, no. 1, January-February, 1991, p. 11.
[122] Francis Carr, Ivan the Terrible, London: David & Charles, 1981, pp. 61-62.
[123] Lurye, “Sergianstvo:
parasinagoga, pereshedshaia v raskol”, http://web.referent.ru/nvc/forum/0/co/BC415C9E/179
[124] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 230, 270.
[125] M. Macarius, Istoria Russkoj Tserkv, ,Moscow, 1996, vol. 4,
part 2, pp. 91, 93 (in Russian).
[126] Ya.S. Lurye, op. cit., pp. 230-231.
[127] Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, London: Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 48-49.
[128] Ya.S. Lurye, op. cit., p. 232.
[129] Pokrovsky, quoted in Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia, Minsk, 1998, p. 331 (in Russian).
[130] Thus Solonevich points out that according to Ivan’s Sudebnik of 1550, “the administration did not have the right to arrest a man without presenting him to the representatives of the local self-government…, otherwise the latter on the demand of the relatives could free the arrested man and exact from the representative of the administration a corresponding fine ‘for dishonour’. But guarantees of security for person and possessions were not restricted to the habeas corpus act. Klyuchevsky writes about ‘the old right of the ruled to complain to the highest authority against the lawless acts of the subject rulers’” (op. cit., p. 340).
[131] Ivan IV, Sochineniya, St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000, p. 49 (in Russian).
[132] Ivan IV, Sochinenia, op. cit., p. 40.
[133] Ivan IV, Sochineniya, op. cit., p. 37.
[134] Peter Budzilovich, “O vozmozhnosti vosstanovlenia monarkhii v
Rossii”, Russkoe Vozrozhdenie, 1986, ¹ 34, http://www.russia.talk.com/monarchy.htm.
[135] In this way the victims of Ivan’s rule
prefigure the Christian victims of Lenin and Stalin, while the oprichnina
looks forward to Stalin’s Russia, the NKVD-KGB, dekulakisation and the great
terror of the 1930s. There has been no shortage of historians who have seen in
Stalin’s terror simply the application of Ivan the Terrible’s methods on a grander
scale. This theory is supported by the fact that Stalin called Ivan “my
teacher”, and commissioned Eisenstein’s film, Ivan the Terrible,
instructing him to emphasise the moral that cruelty is sometimes necessary to
protect the State from its internal enemies.
[136] Carr, op. cit., pp. 199-200.
[137] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, v, 24, 3; translated in Maurice Wiles & Mark Santer, Documents in Early Christian Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 226.
[138] St. Isidore, Letter 6, quoted in Selected Letters of Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, Liberty, TN: St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1989, p. 36.
[139] Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “ O Petre Velikom”, Epokha, N 10, 2000, no. 1, p. 38 (in Russian).
[140] Kurbsky, letter to Monk Vassian of the Pskov Caves monastery;
translated in van den Bercken, op. cit., pp. 157-158.
[141] “Svyatoj Filipp Mitropolit”, Nadezhda, 14, in Troitsky Paterik, Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, 1896; reprinted in Nadezhda, 14, Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1988, p. 66 (in Russian).
[142] Van den Bercken, op. cit., p. 153.
[143] Zhitia Svyatykh, Òàtaev, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 695, 696 (in Russian).
[144] Sochineniya, op. cit., p. 37.
[145] Cherniavsky, “Khan or basileus: an aspect of Russian medieval political theory”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 10, No. 4, October-December, 1950, p. 476; quoted in Hosking, op. cit., p. 7.
[146] Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 265.
[147] Thus Hilaire Belloc writes of “that cancer point of Holland, whereby the huge organism [of Spain] was slowly poisoned and at last broke down” (Richelieu, London: Ernest Benn, 1930, p. 69).
[148] Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 534, 536, 538.
[149] Mark Almond, Revolution, London: De Agostini Editions, 1996, p. 44.
[150] Davies, op. cit., pp. 538-539.
[151] Davies, op. cit., pp. 538, 539.
[152] J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London and New York, 1996, p. 287.
[153] Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, pp. 126, 127.
[154] Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 174-176, 177-178.
[155] Buruma, “China and Liberty”, Prospect, May, 2000, p. 37.
[156] Doran, “Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 51, no. 4.
[157] Lyall, “India. (1) The Mogul Empire”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, pp. 514-515.
[158] Lewis, "Myth became Fact", God in the Dock: Essays on Theology, Fount Paperbacks, 1979, p. 64.
[159] A better word here would be “providential”. It is God, not chance, that places monarchs on their thrones (Wisdom 6.3).
[160] Scruton, England: An Elegy, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, p. 188.
[161] Chadwick, op. cit., p. 222.
[162] Quoted in Barzun, op. cit., p. 33. The Arminians were Calvinists who ascribed a greater role to free will than was acceptable to the Calvinist orthodoxy.
[163] Quoted in Harold Nicolson, Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 201.
[164] Nicolson, op. cit., p. 200.
[165] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York: Fontana, 1968, pp. 37, 40.
[166] J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 149.
[167] Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 43-44.
[168] Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 45.
[169] Quoted in Jay, The Church, London: SPCK, 1977, p. 214.
[170] Lopukhin, A.P. Zakonodatel'stvo Moiseya. Saint Petersburg, 1888, p. 233; quoted in Alexeyev, N.N. "Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhia", Put', no. 6, January, 1927, p. 557 (in Russian).
[171] Berdyaev, N. "Tsarstvo Bozhiye i Tsarstvo Kesarya", Put', September, N 1, September, 1925, p. 44 (in Russian).
[172] Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 47-49,
51.
[173] Quoted in Barzun, op. cit., p. 278.
[174] Coleridge, Table Talk, 9 November, 1833.
[175] Guizot, op. cit., p. 217.
[176] Quoted by Barzun, op. cit., p. 270.
[177] Thus in France in 1614 the bourgeois order in the Estates General made the Divine Right of Kings Article I of their petition. Barzun, op. cit., p. 248.
[178] As A.L. Smith puts it: “The theory [of the Divine Right of Kings] was due to many converging influences. First: at the Reformation, the civil power became rival claimant with the Pope to represent God upon earth; and it had to counter the papal axioms of sovereignty of the people, right o resistance, accountability of Kings, by propositions the direct contrary. Secondly: in England, Wars of the Roses, risings of the Commons, French and Spanish threats, papal interferences, had led to a Tudor monarchy which Bodin could quote as a type of absolutism” (“English Political Philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, 1909, pp. 802-803).
[179] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 250-251.
[180] Quoted by Ashton, The English Civil War, p. 7.
[181] Barzun, op. cit., p. 249.
[182] Ashton, op. cit., pp. 7, 8.
[183] J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution, London: Blandford Press, 1972, p. 8.
[184] McClelland, op. cit., p. 232. Rousseau also pointed out, in The Social Contract, that since every man is equally a descendant of Adam, it was not clear which descendants of Adam were to exercise lordship over others.
[185] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 9-10.
[186] Nicolson, op. cit., p. 194.
[187] Cf. Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789, Penguin books, 1970, p. 79.
[188] As is always the case with religious radicals. Pope Gregory VII was a religious radical for his time, and his revolution led to a secularisation of the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformers were religious radicals, leading to a further secularisation. (V.M.)
[189] Taylor Downing and Maggie Millman, Civil War, London: Parkgate books, 1991, pp. 109, 112-116.
[190] Downing and Millman, op. cit., pp. 119-121, 125.
[191] Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, London: Faber & Faber, 1997, p. 172.
[192] Quoted in John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1967, p. 92.
[193] Downing and Millman, op. cit., pp. 134-135.
[194] Kelsey, “The Trial of Charles I: A New Perspective”, History Today, vol. 49 (1), January, 1999, p. 37.
[195] Quoted in Almond, op. cit., p. 51.
[196] As Guizot wrote, Cromwell “was successively a Danton and a Buonaparte” (op. cit., p. 221).
[197] This has been a characteristic of the English throughout their history. Thus Jeremy Paxman writes: “England has had her share of class revolts, from Wat Tyler’s peasants’ revolt in the fourteenth century to the Chartists in the nineteenth. But they were very civilized affairs by comparison with the bloodletting which accompanied similar events on the European continent” (The English, op. cit., p. 136)
[198] Metropolitan Anastasius, “The Dark Visage of Revolution”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVII, no. 5, September-October, 1996, p. 10.
[199] Sir Edmund Leach, “Melchisedech and the Emperor: Icons of Subversion and Orthodoxy”, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Society, 1972, p. 6.
[200] Quoted in Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, op. cit., p. 167.
[201] Quoted in Hill, Milton
and the English Revolution, op. cit., pp. 100, 101, 169.
[202] Quoted in Hill, op. cit., p. 169.
[203] Brown, Love’s Body, New York, 1966, p. 114; quoted in Hill, op.
cit., p. 171.
[204] Quoted in Hill, op. cit., pp. 173-174.
[205] Hill, op. cit., p. 181.
[206] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen
& Unwin, 1946, p. 520.
[207] Russell, op. cit., p. 529.
[208] Russell, op. cit., p. 529.
[209] Hobbes, Leviathan; quoted in Davies, op. cit., p. 521.
[210] Scruton, Modern Philosophy, London: Arrow Books, 1997, p. 415.
[211] McClelland, op. cit., p. 199.
[212] McClelland, op. cit., p. 207.
[213] Russell, op. cit., p. 575.
[214] McClelland, op. cit., p. 203.
[215] Russell, op. cit., p. 579.
[216] McClelland, op. cit., p. 201.
[217] Shaftesbury, quoted in Roy Porter, Enlightenment, London: Penguin Books, p. 160.
[218] Smith, op. cit., pp. 786-787.
[219] Smith, op. cit., p. 789.
[220] Smith, op. cit., p. 791.
[221] Russell, op. cit., p. 643.
[222] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government.
[223] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 2,
section 6.
[224] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 13, section 149.
[225] Quoted in Russell, op. cit., p. 651.
[226] McClelland, op. cit., p. 234.
[227] McClelland, op. cit., p. 236.
[228] McClelland, op. cit., p. 237.
[229] Locke, Two Treatises on Government; quoted by David Held, Models of Democracy, Oxford: Polity Press, 1987, p. 51.
[230] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; quoted by Held, op. cit., p. 57.
[231] Smith, op. cit., p. 809.
[232] Weston, op. cit., p. 24.
[233] Locke, An Essay concerning the true, original, extent, and end of Civil Government (1690).
[234] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 13, section 149.
[235] Russell, op. cit., pp. 662-663.
[236] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, treatise 2, chapter 14, section 168.
[237] Weston, op. cit., p. 25.
[238] Smith, op. cit., p. 813.
[239] Scruton, op. cit., p. 416.
[240] Andrezev Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 39.
[241] Scruton, op. cit., p. 417.
[242] Tikhomirov, “Demokratiya liberal’naia i sotsial’naia”, in Kritika Demokratia, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 122 (in Russian).
[243] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, Moscow, 1877, vol. 3, pp. 448, 449; reprinted in Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, 49, N 9 (573), September, 1997, pp. 3-4 (in Russian).
[244] Ben Rogers, “Portrait: John Rawls”, Prospect, June, 1999, p. 51.
[245] Rogers, op. cit., p. 51.
[246] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 281-282, 283, 284.
[247] Belloc, Richelieu, op. cit., pp. 83-84.
[248] Belloc, Richelieu, op. cit., p. 304.
[249] Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 62.
[250] Roger Price, A Concise History of France, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 59.
[251] Davies, op. cit., pp. 620, 621.
[252] Quoted in Robert Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 193.
[253] Quoted in William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 38.
[254] François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1847, 1997, pp. 140-141.
[255] On Mariana, see above, chapter I, “Catholic Rationalism”.
[256] Willert, “Philosophy and the Revolution”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VIII: The French Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1934, pp. 3-5.
[257] Norman Davies, op. cit., p. 568.
[258] Quoted in Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, London: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 637.
[259] Quoted by Fr. Antonious Henein, <orthodox-tradition@egroups.com> , 8 August, 2000.
[260] Patapios, “On Caution regarding Anathematization”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVII, no. 1, January, 2000, p. 22.
[261] More, Utopia, book II, pp. 119-120.
[262] Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., p. 241.
[263] Edwards, in Porter, op. cit., p. 105.
[264] Winstanley, quoted in Downing and Millman, op. cit., p. 136.
[265] Milton, Areopagitica, in C.A Patrides (ed.), John Milton: Selected Prose, London: Penguin, p. 216.
[266] Barzun, op. cit., p. 276.
[267] Porter, op. cit., p. 50.
[268] Hobbes, Leviathan; in Christopher Hill, “Thomas Hobbes and the Revolution in Political Thought”, Puritanism and Revolution, London: Penguin books, 1958, p. 277.
[269] Hobbes, Leviathan; in Hill, Puritanism and Revolution,
op. cit., p. 283.
[270] According to the principles of this father of liberalism, therefore, communist parties should be banned, as well as the expression of communist opinions, first, because communists are atheists, and therefore cannot be trusted to keep their oaths, and secondly because they work towards the destruction of all non-communist governments. (V.M.)
[271] Porter, op. cit., pp. 106-197.
[272] Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., p. 342.
[273] This put an end to pre-publication censorship. From now on, as Porter remarks, “though laws against blasphemy, obscenity and seditious libel remained on the statute book, and offensive publications could still be presented before the courts, the situation was light years away from that obtaining in France, Spain or almost anywhere else in ancien régime Europe.” (Enlightenment, London: Penguins books, 2000, p. 31).
[274] Porter, op. cit., p. 108.
[275] Porter, op. cit., pp. 21-22.
[276] Israel Shahak writes that many Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have failed because “displaying the flag of a ‘non-Jewish state’ within the Land of Israel contradicts the sacred principle which states that all this land ‘belongs’ to the Jews” (“Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Political Consequences”, http://www.ptimes.com/current/articles.html).
[277] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 144-145, 147.
[278] Johnson, op. cit., p. 174.
[279] Hence the English word “slave”, and the French “esclave”.
[280] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 148-149.
[281] Cohn-Sherbok, op. cit., p. 115.
[282] York, Letters, History Today, vol. 50 (12), December, 2000, p. 61.
[283] David Vital writes: “When Cromwell resolved to rescind King Edward I’s edict of expulsion of 1290 in the interests of allowing London’s very small colony of crypto-Jews to surface and permit other Jews, mostly from Holland, to join them, he did so primarily because he had his eye on the advantages Spanish and Portuguese Jews, with their worldwide connections might bring to English commerce, the information on foreign affairs with which they could supply him, and the political services they could perform for him on the continent. What is of greatest interest, because, unwittingly, it set a pattern of sorts, was that Cromwell had begun by considering a more open and comprehensive policy that the one that his administration was eventually to implement. When it became apparent, however, that by formally revoking the thirteenth-century edict of expulsion a noisy and troublesome opposition would be aroused, the plan was abandoned. The resettlement of Jews in England was allowed to take place, but on a de facto basis and Edward I’s edict left to pass into history…
“By the early years of the eighteenth century, political interest in the Jews of the kind that had initially drawn the Cromwellian government to favour them had largely faded. But English conventional wisdom was firm in holding them to be of worldwide commercial significance…
“By the end of the eighteenth century the Jews of England had little to complain of…” (op. cit., pp. 38, 39).
“Indeed, in 1732 a judgement gave Jews, in effect, legal protection against generic libels which might endanger life. Hence… England became the first place in which it was possible for a modern Jewish community to emerge” (Johnson, op. cit., p. 278).
[284] Thus “by 1694 the Austrian state debt to Oppenheimer alone amounted to no less than 3 million florins. At his death, by his Emmanuel’s estimate, it had reached double that figure.” (Vital, op. cit., p. 14).
[285] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 154-155. Thus in the 18th century the Jewish banker Jean Lo (Levi) founded a huge “Mississipi company” in Paris, which gave him monopoly rights to trade with China, India, the islands of the southern seas, Canada and all the colonies of France in America, and which “guaranteed” dividends of 120% a year to investors. However, the paper he issued was founded on nothing, the company collapsed, “millions of Frenchmen were ruined and for many years the finances of the country were hopelessly disordered. At the same time many representatives of the Jewish community of Paris amassed huge fortunes on this misery” (Platonov, op. cit., p. 153).
[286] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 256-258.
[287] Johnson, op. cit., p. 281.
[288] Arendt, “On Totalitarianism”, in Mikhail Nazarov, “Triumf mirovoj kulisy”, Tajna Rossii, Moscow: “Russkaya ideya”, 1999, p. 394 (in Russian).
[289] Quoted in Philip Mansel, Constantinople, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 124.
[290] Mansel, op. cit., p. 126.
[291] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 245-246, 247, 283, 285, 286.
[292] The transition from the early to the later empiricism is marked by David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1747), in which he writes: “While we argue from the course of nature and infer a particular intelligent cause which first bestowed and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle which is still uncertain and useless. It is uncertain because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human experience. It is useless because… we can never on that basis establish any principles of conduct and behaviour” .
[293] Donne, The First Anniversarie (1611), quoted in Porter, op. cit., p. 130.
[294] Trostnikov, “The Role and Place of the Baptism of Rus in the European Spiritual Process of the Second Millenium of Christian History”, Orthodox Life, volume 39, no. 3, May-June, 1989, p. 29.
[295] Landes, op. cit., p. 179.
[296] The proof that the earth is not circular but flat according to the Scriptures is to be found in Isaiah 40.22, which reads: “It is He Who sits above the circle of the earth”. So the Pope need not have worried. On this controversy, see Peter De Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, pp. 221-231.
[297] Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, London: Fourth Estate, 1998, p. 106.
[298] Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book I, 1, 3.
[299] Roberts, The Triumph of the West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 160.
[300] Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, London: Macmillan, 1990, p. 17.
[301] White, op. cit., p. 140.
[302] White, op. cit., p. 121.
[303] White, op. cit., p. 122.
[304] White, op. cit., p. 128.
[305] White, op. cit., p. 129.
[306] White, op. cit., p. 155.
[307] White, op. cit., pp. 157, 158.
[308] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1959, p. 512.
[309] Polanyi, “The Two Cultures", Encounter, 1959, 13, p. 61.
[310] See A.V.
Kartashev, Ocherki po Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi, Paris: YMCA Press, 1959,
pp. 10-46, Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi, 1988, pp.
152-156, and the life of St. Job, first patriarch of Moscow, in Moskovskij
Paterik, Moscow: Stolitsa, 1991, pp. 110-113 (in Russian).
[311] This anathema was confirmed by two further Pan-Orthodox Councils in 1587 and 1593, and by several conciliar statements in later centuries.
[312] P. Ioseliani, A Short History of the Georgian Church, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983, pp. 146-148.
[313] Thus in 1615 6000 monks inhabiting twelve monasteries in the wilderness of David-Garejeli were martyred by Shah Abbas I. Again, several of the Georgian monarchs suffered martyrdom in the struggle at the hands of the Persian Muslims. See, for example, the life of Great-Martyr Queen Ketevan, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVI, no. 5, September-October, 1994, pp. 3-12
[314] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 156. This thought was echoed by the patriarch of Alexandria, who wrote to the “most Orthodox” tsar in 1592: “The four patriarchates of the Orthodox speak of your rule as that of another, new Constantine the Great… and say that if there were no help from your rule, then Orthodoxy would be in extreme danger.” (Quoted in van den Bercken, op. cit., p. 160).
[315] Appendix to Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984, p. 379.
[316] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 250-252, 258-260.
[317] Smirnov, Istoria Khristianskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi, Ìîscow, 2000, pp. 203-204 (in Russian).
[318] Sir Steven
Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge, 1968.
[319] See New
Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1985.
[320] Runciman, op.
cit. On the unia, see Boyeikov, op. cit.. ch. 4; A.V. Kartashev, op.
cit., vol. II, pp. 267-310.
[321] See Timothy
Ware, Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule,
Oxford, 1964.
[322] See Boyeikov, op.
cit.; Kartashev, op. cit.; Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov', op
cit., pp. 45-48.
[323] See Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1985.
[324] Smirnov, op. cit., 205-207, 208.
[325] Graham, Boris Godunof, London: Ernest Benn, 1933, p. 116.
[326] Quoted in Carr, op. cit., p. 130.
[327] Quoted in Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia, St. Petersburg: Suvorina, 1992, p. 64 (in Russian).
[328] Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), op. cit., p. 65.
[329] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie Zakona o Prestolonasledii v Rossii; in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?”, Svecha Pokayania. N 4, February, 2000, p. 12 (in Russian).
[330] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 81, 82.
[331] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 255.
[332] St. John Maximovich, op. cit.; in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?”, Svecha Pokayaniya. N 4, February, 2000, p. 13 (in Russian).
[333] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, Moscow: “Veche”, 1995, p. 14 (in Russian).
[334] The Life of St. Irinarchus, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
[335] Hosking, op. cit., pp. 60-61.
[336] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 15.
[337] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 63, 64.
[338] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 18-19.
[339] In this respect the thinking of St. Basil the Great on the State – anti-democratic but also not in favour of the hereditary principle – was typically Byzantine: "Even the king of the birds is not elected by the majority because the temerity of the people often nominates for leader the worst one; nor does it receive its power by lot, because the unwise chance of the lot frequently hands over power to the last; nor in accordance with hereditary succession, because those living in luxury and flattery are also less competent and untaught in any virtue; but according to nature one holds the first place over all, both in its size and appearance and meek disposition." (Hexaemeron 8).
[340] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 82-83. As St. John Maximovich writes: “It was almost impossible to elect some person as tsar for his qualities; everyone evaluated the candidates from his own point of view” (op. cit., in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?”, Svecha Pokayania, N 4, February, 2000, p. 13).
[341] St. John, op. cit., pp. 43-45.
[342] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochineniya, 1848, vol. 2, p. 134; Pravoslavnya Zhizn’, op. cit., p. 6.
[343] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 84, 85.
[344] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochineniya, 1861, vol. 3, p. 226; Pravoslavnya Zhizn’, 49, N 9 (573), September, 1997, p. 8.
[345] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 85-86.
[346] Solonevich, op. cit., p. 86.
[347] Solonevich, op. cit., p. 87.
[348] Brianchaninov, “On the Judgements of God”.
[349] Brianchaninov, Pis’ma, Moscow, 2000, p. 781 (in Russian).
[350] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 87-88, 89-90, 91-92.
[351] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, 1861, vol. 3, pp. 322-323; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, op. cit., p. 9.
[352] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, 1877, vol. 3, p. 442; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, op. cit., p. 5.
[353] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 20.
[354] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 20.
[355] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’, op. cit., pp. 270-271, 272.
[356] Archbishop Andronicus, O Tserkvi Rossii, Fryazino, 1997, pp. 132-133 (in Russian).
[357] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 259.
[358] Quoted in Sergius Fomin, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem, Sergiev Posad: Holy Trinity – St. Sergius monastery, first edition, 1993, p. 20 (in Russian).
[359] Lurye, “O Vozmozhnosti Kontsa Sveta v Odnoj Otdel’no Vzyatoj Strane”, pp. 1-2 (MS) (in Russian).
[360] But not to Russian practice since the Stoglav council of 1551, which had legislated in favour of the two-fingered sign.
[361] And of the Orthodox West. Thus Hieromonk Aidan of St. Hilarion’s Monastery, Texas (quoted in “Sign of the Cross is first millenium Europe”, ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU (Orthodox Christianity), 11/10/1999) writes: “We know that in England the change from right shoulder first and probably also to indiscriminate use of the fingers was underway sometime in the 14th century, though there were holdouts… Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) has a commentary on the sign of the cross making clear that the three fingers were used and that it was, in his day, right to left still. There is an interesting sermon of Abbot Aelfric of Abingdon which he gave around the year 1000 in which he states, "Though a man wave wonderfully with his hand, yet it is not the sign of the Cross: With three fingers thou shalt sign thyself." (Sermon for Sept. 14).”
[362] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 36-37.
[363] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 40-41.
[364] A passage from
the life of St. Seraphim of Sarov is instructive in this respect: “Another time
an Old Ritualist asked him: ‘Tell me, old man of God, which faith is the best –
the present faith of the Church or the old one?’
“’Stop your nonsense,’ replied Father
Seraphim sharply, contrary to his wont. ‘Our life is a sea, the Holy Orthodox
Church is our ship, and the Helmsman is the Saviour Himself. If with such a
Helmsman, on account of their sinful weakness people cross the sea of life with
difficulty and are not all saved from drowning, where do you expect to get with
your little dinghy? And how can you hope to be saved without the Helmsman?’
“Once they brought him a woman whose limbs
were so distorted that her knees bent up to her breast. She had previously been
Orthodox, but having married an Old Ritualist, she stopped going to Church. St.
Seraphim cured her in front of all the people by anointing her breast and hands
with oil from his Icon-lamp, and then ordered her and her relations to pray in
the Orthodox way.
“’Did some of your now-deceased relatives
pray with the two-finger Sign of the Cross?’
“’To my grief, everyone prayed like that
in our family.’
“Father Seraphim reflected a little, and then remarked: ‘Even though they were virtuous people, they will be bound; the Holy Orthodox Church does not accept this Sign of the Cross…’” (Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, St. Seraphim of Sarov, Blanco, Texas: New Sarov Press, 1994, p. 235).
[365] Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual & Reform, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991, p. 33.
[366] Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov’ nakanune peremen (konets 1890-kh – 1918 gg.), Moscow, 2002, p. 252 ®.
[367] Bishop Gregory, Pis’ma, Moscow, 1998, p. 24 (in Russian).
[368] See Michael
Cherniavsky, "The Old Believers and the New Religion", Slavic Review,
vol. 25, 1966, pp. 27-33.
[369] Robert Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 63.
[370] Avvakum, translated in van den Bercken, op. cit., p. 165.
[371] Lurye, “O Vozmozhnosti”, op. cit., p. 14.
[372] Cf. the comments of Epiphany Slavinetsky, one of the main correctors of the books: “Blind ignoramuses, hardly able to read one syllable at a time, having no understandng of grammar, not to mention rhetoric, philosophy, or theology, people who have not even tasted of study, dare to interpret divine writings, or, rather, to distort them, and slander and judge men well-versed in Slavonic and Greek languages. The ignoramuses cannot see that we did not correct the dogmas of faith, but only some expressions which had been altered through the carelessness and errors of uneducated scribes, or through the ignorance of correctors at the Printing Office”. And he compared the Old Believers to Korah and Abiram, who had rebelled against Moses (Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 113).
[373] Zenkovsky, in Hosking, op. cit., p. 72.
[374] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit., volume I, pp. 280, 283.
[375] Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, part I, 1979, pp. 98, 99.
[376] Quoted by Fr. Sergei Hackel, “Questions of Church and State in ‘Holy Russia’: some attitudes of the Romanov period”, Eastern Churches Review, vol. II, no. 1, Spring, 1970, p. 8
[377] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 87.
[378] Quoted in Hackel, op. cit., p. 8.
[379] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 88-89.
[380] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit., volume I, p. 281.
[381] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 101.
[382] “If any Bishop who has suffered violence has been cast out unjustly, either on account of his science or on account of his confession of the Catholic Church, or on account of his insisting upon the truth, and fleeing from peril, when is innocent and jeoparded, should come to another city, let him not be prevented from living there, until he can return or find relief from the insolent treatment he had received. For it is cruel and most burdensome for one who has had to suffer an unjust expulsion not to be accorded a welcome by us. For such a person ought to be shown great kindness and courtesy.”
[383] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit., volume I, p. 23; Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 105.
[384] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 104.
[385] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 141. Italics mine (V.M.).
[386] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 106-107.
[387] Hackel, op. cit., p. 9.
[388] Fomin, op. cit., volume I, pp. 24-25.
[389] Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi, USA, 1993, p. 191(in Russian).
[390] Ironically, they also transgressed those articles of the Ulozheniye, chapter X, which envisaged various punishments for offending the clergy (Priest Alexis Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo, Izdaniye Sretenskogo monastyrya, 1997, p. 71 (in Russian)).
[391] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 132.
[392] Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, pp. 274, 275.
[393] Quoted by Vyacheslav (now Ali) Polosin, in “Pochemy ya, pravoslavnij svyashchennik, prinyal islam”, http://www/lebed.com/art1181.htm.
[394] The tsar asked forgiveness of the patriarch just before his death. The patriarch replied to the messenger: “Imitating my teacher Christ, who commanded us to remit the sins of our neighbours, I say: may God forgive the deceased, but a written forgiveness I will not give, because during his life he did not free us from imprisonment” (quoted in Rusak, op. cit., p. 193).
[395] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 9.
[396] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 15.
[397] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 16.
[398] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 41.
[399] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 91.
[400] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 86.
[401] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 17.
[402] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 30, 32.
[403] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 41. As Zyzykin says in another place, Nicon “not only does not call for human sanctions against the abuses of tsarist power, but definitely says that there is no human power [that can act] against them, but there is the wrath of God, as in the words of Samuel to Saul: ‘It is not I that turn away from thee, in that thou has rejected the Word of the Lord, but the Lord has rejected thee, that thou shouldest not be king over Israel’ (I Kings 15.26)” (op. cit., part II, p. 17).
[404] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 55.
[405] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 55, 56, 57.
[406] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 19-20.
[407] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 59.
[408] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 62.
[409] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 63-64.
[410] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 24-25, 28.
[411] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 27.
[412] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 48.
[413] Quoted in Hackel, op. cit., p. 9.
[414] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 165.
[415] Rusak, op. cit., p. 194.
[416] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 26.
[417] Rusak, op. cit., pp. 193-194.
[418] Nikolin, op. cit., p. 73.
[419] Quoted by Hackel, op. cit., p. 10.
[420] Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, pp. 218-220.
[421] Lebedev, “Razmyshleniya vozlye styen novogo Ierusalima”, Vozvrashchenie, NN 12-13, 1999, p. 60 (in Russian).
[422] Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “O Petre Velikom”, Epokha, N 10, 2000, no. 1, pp. 39-41 (in Russian).