CHRISTIAN POWER IN THE AGE OF REASON
From
the Fall of Constantinople to the French Revolution (1453-1789)
Vladimir Moss
© Vladimir Moss, 2004
CONTENTS
Introduction.………………………………………………………………...4
Part I. The Age of Protest (1453-1689)
1. The West: The Assault on Authority…….……………………………7
Liberty: the Root Idea of Post-Schism Europe – Renaissance
Humanism - Jewish Rationalism - Protestant Rationalism – Luther on Church and
State - Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More – Luther on Church and State - The
Counter-Reformation – The Church of England - Holland: the First Capitalist
State - The Anglican Monarchy - The Old Testament in the New World – The Rise
of Parliament – The Divine Right of Kings - English Radicalism – The Killing of
the King - The Scientific Outlook
2. The East: Muscovite Russia…..……………………………....………103
The Struggle for Romania - The Rise of the Muscovite Great
Princes - The Path to the Third Rome – The Heresy of the Judaisers – Possessors
and Non-Possessors – St. Maximus the Greek - Ivan the Terrible: (1) The
Orthodox Tsar – Ivan the Terrible: (2) The Bloodthirsty Tyrant – The Verdict on
Ivan - 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 Ritualists – Patriarch Nicon of
Moscow – Patriarch Nicon on Church-State Relations – The Rebellion of the Streltsy – The Antichrist in Turkey
Part II. The Age of Enlightenment (1689-1789)
3. The West: Despots and
Philosophers………………….……………233
Hobbes’ Leviathan – Locke’s Theory of the Social Contract
- A Critique of Social Contract Theory - French Absolutism – The Idea of
Religious Toleration - Capitalism and the Jews – Sir Isaac Newton - England:
the Conservative Enlightenment – France: the Radical Enlightenment –
Enlightened Despotism – Hume: the Irrationalism of Rationalism – Kant and
Schiller: The Reaffirmation of Will - Hamann and Herder: the Denial of
Universalism - Rousseau and the General Will – Tikhomirov on the General Will -
Two Concepts of Freedom – Freemasonry: (1) The European Element – Freemasonry:
(2) The Jewish Element – Freemasonry: (3) The Satanist Element - The American
Revolution – The American Idea - The American Revolution and Religious
Toleration – The Enlightenment Programme: a Critique
4. The East: The Petersburg
Empire….………………………...….…...390
From Holy Rus’ to Great Russia - Peter and the West –
Peter’s Leviathan – Tsar Peter and the Orthodox East – Was Peter an Orthodox
Tsar? – Orthodoxy and the Austrian Empire
- The German Persecution of Orthodoxy – Catherine II - Pugachev’s
Rebellion - Poland: Nation without a State – Catherine, the Jews and the Masons
– Critics of Absolutism – Russia and the West
INTRODUCTION
As free, and not
using your liberty
As a cloak of
maliciousness,
But as the servants of God.
I
Peter
2.16.
This book is designed as a successor to my
previous book, The Mystery of Christian Power, 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 Enlightenment, to the threshold of the French Revolution.
The Renaissance-Reformation represents the
first major turning point in the history of the West since its falling away
from the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church in the eleventh century. It
purported to free men from the fetters of medieval scholasticism, to bring the
light of reason to bear on every aspect of human life, and even the revelations
of religion, and to raise the common man to that potential that he would
supposedly be capable of achieving if he were not enslaved to the tyranny of
popes and kings. It was not, however, a revolutionary movement in the sense
that it overthrew tradition in toto and in principle.
On the contrary, in order to correct what it saw as the distortions of the
Middle Ages, it appealed to the authority of the still more ancient past, the
past of pagan Greece and Rome and the early Church. And as late as the English
revolution in the mid-seventeenth century both sides passionately and sincerely
appealed to arguments drawn from Holy Scripture. In other words, it was a
believing age, a Christian age, even if a heretical one; and in Muscovite
Russia there still existed one of the great and right-believing Christian
kingdoms.
However, the Enlightenment, the second
major turning-point in post-Orthodox Western history, took a decisive step
further. No authority, whether pagan, patristic, scholastic or scriptural, was
held sacred or immune from the ravages of unfettered reason. And this rampant
rationalism, with “liberty” as its slogan, begat the first truly “great”
revolution, the French, which for the first time, openly and triumphantly,
tried to écraser l’infâme of Christianity and replace it
with a new, revolutionary religion.
As in my 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 Orthodox East and the other - in the
Catholic and Protestant West. The chapters on the East describe the unification
of the Russian lands around Muscovy, the gradual ascendancy of the secular over
the ecclesiastical power, and the abolition of the patriarchate and the
symphony of powers under Peter the Great and his successors. The
chapters on the West describe the impact of the Renaissance, the Reformation
and the Enlightenment on ideas about Church-State relations, and the pulsating
struggle for dominance between absolutist and democratic polities. I describe
developments in the West first, because in this period, by comparison with the
medieval period, the political, military and cultural – but not spiritual -
pre-eminence passes from East to West, with the East striving to guard its
Orthodox heritage from invasion from the West. Sadly, with the passing of time
this heritage becomes more and more polluted with foreign elements, so that the
distinction between the truly Christian civilization of the East and the
pseudo-Christian one of the West becomes less and less clear-cut. But the
essential difference between the two remains, and remains the main theme of my
book.
I have made use of a large number of
sources and authors, from which I should like to mention particularly L.A.
Tikhomirov, M.V. Zyzykin, C.S. Lewis and Sir Isaiah Berlin.
Through the prayers of our holy Fathers,
Lord Jesus Christ our God, have mercy on us! Amen.
The Ascension of our Lord, God and Saviour Jesus Christ,
2004.
East House, Beech Hill, Mayford, Woking. England.
PART I. THE AGE OF
PROTEST (1453-1689)
1. THE WEST: THE ASSAULT ON AUTHORITY
The chief gift of nature… is freedom.
Leonardo da Vinci.
He who becomes
master of a city accustomed to freedom and does
not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it, for in rebellion it
has always the watchword of liberty and its ancient privileges as a
rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to
forget. And whatever you may do or provide against, they never forget
that name or their privileges unless they are disunited or dispersed,
but at every chance they immediately rally to them.
Machiavelli,
The Prince, chapter V.
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.
With the fall of the New Rome of Constantinople in 1453, the last
incarnation of the traditional concept of Romanity (Romanitas in
Latin, Rwmeiosunh in
Greek), that is, of the religio-political unity of the Christian
commonwealth, disappeared from its ancient homeland, the Mediterranean basin
(its revival in the north, in Russia, is the subject of the next chapter). It
was replaced by the absolutist empire of the Ottomans, one of a trio of
absolutist Muslim empires – the others were Safevid Persia and Moghul India –
that reached their peak in the coming century. In the West, meanwhile, the
papist-feudal corruption of the traditional concept of Romanity which had
prevailed in the medieval period was also breaking down. The so-called “symphony
of powers” between the Roman papacy and the Holy Roman Empire of the
Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs had never been a reality; and now both the papacy
was under attack and the empire was a shadow of its former self. Europe (we
shall use this term from now on to designate only Western Europe) seemed on the
verge of disintegration; and the future seemed to belong to the much more
populous, united and by no means unsophisticated absolutist empires to the East
– the three Muslim empires of Western and Southern Asia, and the Confucian
empire of the Ming dynasty in Eastern Asia.
But Europe recovered. Not only did the Europeans hold their own against
the Muslim onslaught: by the eighteenth century they were making great inroads
into the older civilizations of the East – and this in spite of constant
internecine warfare in the European homeland. The causes of the emergence of
this extraordinarily dynamic – and extraordinarily destructive – European
civilization is the subject of this chapter.
Liberty: The Root Idea of Post-Schism Europe
With 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, specifically 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.
Just as peace among men – secular peace, the Pax Romana –
had been the key ideal of the Roman empire, and peace with God – that
is, right faith and the works of faith – the ideal of the Christian Roman
Empire, so liberty has been the goal of European civilisation from the
Renaissance to the present day. “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.”[1]
Of course, freedom was an important concept in antiquity, too: 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 after the
fall of Constantinople in 1453. For it is a sad fact that what the West imbibed
from Byzantium was not so much its eternally valid and valuable concepts of
Orthodoxy and Romanity, as the pagan ideas of the civilization it replaced.
However, there were several other important factors that made the idea
of freedom of such importance at the beginning of the modern era. 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.”[2]
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: that is, the
people have entered into a contract with their rulers whereby they buy security
in exchange for obedience. [3]
It was especially in England, and a little later in France and Spain,
that the idea of political freedom emerged in the context of the king’s
attempts to define his relationship with other centres of power within his
kingdom, notably the Church and the barons. Important instruments of his power
were his courts of justice, to which both churchmen and barons resorted to
settle disputes, and the office of the exchequer, which imposed taxes on all
estates of the land. But these other estates sought to protect themselves from
the ever-increasing demands of the exchequer, whence Magna Carta and the
first rudimentary parliaments.
W.M. Spellman writes: “Ideally, the medieval monarch was expected to
‘live on his own’ or manage the affairs of the kingdom on the basis of revenues
derived from his estates and from his traditional feudal prerogatives. In such
a context, monarchs who attempted to wrest monies from their leading subjects
without their consent, or for purposes at odds with the priorities of the
landed elite, found themselves locked in stalemate and in some cases facing
direct resistance. Developing out of the feudal compact where the vassal’s
performance of specific services was exchanged for royal protection and the use
of land, kings could not arbitrarily usurp the property rights of their leading
subjects without serious consequences. Most often in the feudal setting the
king called together his leading vassals in order to sollicit their advice and
support. These unpretentious meetings,
alternatively called colloquia, concilia, conventus, curiae
or tractatus, featured both fluid membership and varied agendas. And as
financial, military, economic and administrative problems became more complex,
larger and more structured assemblies were called by the monarch.
“Formal representative assemblies emerged in most European countries –
Spain, Sicily, Hungary, England, France, the Scandinavian countried, various
German principalities – during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries for a
number of related reasons, but the key involved the need for monarchs to access
sources of wealth not under their direct control as feudal lords. Increasingly
after 1000 the cost of pursuing wider military objectives grew substantially
across Europe. This was particularly true in the case of the thirteenth- and
fourteenth-century wars between England and France, where monarchs on both
sides were pressed repeatedly to find additional sources of income.
“The word parlamentum was first coined in the thirteenth century,
and by that time it was being applied to meetings of the unelected feudal
council. Both the economic and social structures of European kingdoms were
quite unique in comparison to the other major world civilizations, where
nothing like Western parliaments ever emerged. Comparatively speaking, only in
Europe were power and wealth distributed in a fairly diffuse fashion. The basic
structure of medieval parliaments, including as they did representatives of
clergy, nobles and commoners from towns and cities, was reflective of this
important distribution of income and land. It was in this context that the
English king’s royal council, for example, normally composed of important
churchmen and aristocrats, expanded during the course of the thirteenth century
to include new urban elites for the purpose of gaining consent to special
taxation.”[4]
Of course, the idea that politics was based on a contract between rulers
and ruled did not immediately bring real political freedom in its train.
On the contrary, at the beginning of our period the trend was in the opposite
direction, towards absolutism, the
idea that the ruler is under no
obligations to his people or to any human institution. As the Wars of the Roses came to an end in
England and France, and the marriage of Isabella and Ferdinand united Castile
and Aragon in Spain, these countries developed powerful monarchies that were
little beholden to their fledgling national parliaments. The boundaries between
states, which had been somewhat blurred by the feudal order, became sharper and
more concentrated territorially. This led to the growth of nationalism around
the person of the monarch, although this feeling was still covered with a cloak
of religiosity, as Erasmus complained: “For in France they say God is on the
French side and they can never be overcome that have God for their protector;
in England and Spain the cry is, the war is not the King’s but God’s.”[5]
In the case of the Latin monarchies, this religiosity, and the specific
obligations still felt towards the papacy, kept the growth of absolutism
somewhat in check. But even among the Protestant monarchies absolutism could
never be as absolute as it was in the non-Christian East. For, as we have seen,
the idea of contract, of rights and obligations, and
therefore of being absolved (absolutus) or not absolved from
certain obligations, was implanted in European man from his feudal past. For
centuries European history had been riven by conflicts over rights: the rights
of popes as opposed to the rights of emperors, the rights of lords as opposed
to the rights of vassals, the rights of kings as opposed to the rights of
barons and burghers. And the rapid development of law, both ecclesiastical and
royal, in the medieval period had accentuated the concept of individual or
human rights generally. Moreover, Protestant kings, though absolved,
unlike their Catholic colleagues, from obligation to a trans-national religious
institution, still felt obliged, as believers in a believing society, to defend
the faith of their subjects. But this meant that the idea of religious freedom,
and of the closely related ideas of freedom
of the mind and conscience, was slower in developing than those of
political or economic freedom, with the result that the early modern period was
a period of great religious intolerance.
However, the seeds of the idea of religious freedom, too, 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. It was given a further important impulse in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a result of the spirit of inquiry let
loose by the Renaissance. And when religious passions began to cool in the late
seventeenth century, the idea of religious freedom came into its own, with
rulers changing their role from prosecutors of the national religious idea to
preservers of the religious peace among their multiconfessional subjects. In
fact, we can already see the beginnings of this transition in the reign of
Queen Elizabeth I of England, who chose the via media of Anglicanism in
order to keep the religious peace among her subjects…
The period under discussion (1453-1689) 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 there 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 – the
all-sufficiency of scientific method for the finding of truth.
This extreme cultural richness and diversity explains in part 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.”[6] 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….
Renaissance Humanism
But before the age of the common man, there came the age of man as such,
the age of Renaissance 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[7]; 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…”[8]
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”.[9]
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…”[10]
From an Orthodox point of view, Renaissance humanism represents a
revival of paganism in a Christian guise. This is especially evident in the
arts sponsored by the Renaissance popes, and in the popes’ own style of life.
Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov writes: “In modern times the pagan life appeared
first of all in the bosom of papism; the pagan feelings and taste of the
papists were expressed with particular vividness in the application of the arts
to the subjects of religion, in painted and sculpted representations of the
saints, in their Church singing and music, in their religious poetry. All their
schools bear upon themselves the mark of sinful passions, especially the love
of pleasure; they have neither the feeling of simplicity, nor the feelings of
purity and spirituality. Such are their Church music and singing. Their poet,
in depicting the liberation of Jerusalem and the Lord’s Sepulchre, did not
flinch from evoking the muse; he sang of Sion in one breath with Halicon, from
the muse he passed on to the Archangel Gabriel. The infallible popes, these new
idols of Rome, present in themselves images of debauchery, tyranny, atheism and
blasphemy against all that is holy. The pagan life with its comedy and tragedy,
its dancing, its rejection of shame and decency, its fornication and adultery
and other idol-worshipping practices, was resurrected first of all in Rome
under the shadow of its gods, the popes, and thence poured out over the whole
of Europe.”[11]
Thus Pope Alexander VI, writes Lev Tikhomirov, “had a
string of lovers. In vain did Savanorola thunder against him. Neither the Pope,
nor his ‘beautiful Julia’ paid any attention to him. At every Church feast
Julia appeared as the lawful wife of the Pope, and when a son was born to her,
the Pope immediately recognized him, as he also recognized his other children.
His son, Cesare Borgia, was well-known for fratricide. The daughter of the
Pope, Lucrecia, quarreled with her husband because of her amorous relationships
with her own brothers. Of course, Alexander Borgias are not common in the human
race, but unbelief, debauchery and the exploitation of religion for filling
one’s pockets shamed the Roman Catholic hierarchy too often. Protestantism
itself arose because of the most shameless use of indulgences, which upset
whole masses of people who had any religious education.
“Of course, sincere Christians were
offended by such phenomena and protested. An example is Savanorola, whom
Alexander Borgia finally killed through torture and burning as a supposed
heretic. However, among people protesting and striving for a true Christian
life there often gradually developed heretical thought, which is natural when
one has broken from the Church… Other Christians, without entering upon a
useless open battle, departed into secret societies, hoping to live in a pure
environment and gradually prepare the reform of Christian practice. However,
departure from the Church, albeit not open, did not fail to affect them, too.
These societies could easily be joined both by heretics and by enemies of
Christianity who hid this enmity on the grounds of a criticism of truly
shocking behaviour. All these protesting elements were willingly joined by the
Jews, who found it easy gradually to pervert the originally Christian feelings
of the participants…”[12]
Archbishop Averky of Syracuse has emphasized the dual character of the
modern quest for freedom – both Christian protest and antichristian rebellion.
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."[13]
Jewish Rationalism
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 do not need to be checked against
any higher authority, which belief is known as Rationalism. Rationalism came in at least three forms: Jewish,
Catholic and Protestant. If the Middle Ages saw the flowering of Catholic
rationalism, the early Modern Age saw the flowering of Jewish and Protestant
rationalism and their gradual merging into one by the time of the French
Revolution.
The origins of Jewish rationalism may be traced to the expulsion of the
Jews from Spain in 1492. Only three months before, King Ferdinand and Queen
Isabella, having united Aragon and Castile by their marriage, had conquered
Granada in the south to complete the reconquest of Spain for the Cross. “With
deep emotion,” writes Karen Armstrong, “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
[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.” [14]
However, the reconquest of Muslim Spain brought in its train a large number of Jews, who had occupied important posts under the Moors. At first the Spaniards tried to convert the Jews to Christianity by force. However, many of these conversos – or, as they were less politely known, marranos (“pigs”), were suspected of continuing to practise the Jewish faith in secret, which led to riots by the “old” Christians against the “new”. So in 1480 the Inquisition was called in to determine the truth by means of torture. However, this solution was also abandoned in favour of the Edict of Expulsion in 1492. “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.”[15] Of those who left, most went to Portugal, and from there to Amsterdam; while a substantial minority migrated to the Ottoman Empire (see next chapter).
The Jews who were expelled – called the Sephardic Jews after their word
for Spain, “Sepharad” – 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. 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 in the form,
especially, of the Kabbala, has been less recognized, largely because it came
from below, from the underground, and entered in spite of the resistance of the
powers that be. Thus 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 [the Kabbala] contained doctrines
which support the Christian faith. In this milieu Judah Abravanel composed a
Neoplatonic work which had an important impact on Italian humanism.”[16]
Many of the conversos who remained
in Spain were able to identify wholly with Catholicism – Teresa of Avila is the
best-known example. Indeed, “it is not an exaggeration,” writes Norman Cantor, “to
see the role of scions of converted Jewish families as central to the Spanish
Renaissance of the early sixteenth century, as were Jews in the modernist
cultural revolution of the early twentieth century. In both cases complete
access to general culture induced an explosion of intellectual creativity.”[17] However, there were many conversos who
both lost touch with Judaism (for it was proscribed) and could not adapt to
Catholicism. “In consequence, “ writes Armstrong, “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”.[18]
As Cantor writes, “a rationalist, scientific,
antitraditional frame of mind, sceptical about the core of religious culture,
arose among some Marrano families in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The emergence of a post-Christian commonwealth secular mentality can be traced
to a handful of Marrano families who found themselves caught between Judaism
and Christianity, bouncing back and forth between the two faiths and cultures,
until they became disoriented and disenchanted equally with priests and rabbis.
“We can see this secularisation with the
Spanish New Christian Fernando de Rojas, the creator of the subversive
picaresque novel (La Celestina) in the early sixteenth century, and the
forerunner of Cervantes’s critique of decaying medieval culture. We can see it
in the sceptical human of the French humanist Montaigne, who was also of
Marrano lineage. We can see it in the writings of two Dutch Jews of Portuguese
extraction in the third quarter of the seventeenth century – Uriel de Costa,
who condemned rabbinical Judaism and was excommunicated by the Jewish community
of Amsterdam, and Baruch (Benedict) Spinoza, who turned away from the whole
theistic tradition toward a new kind of scientific naturalism and universalism
and was also excommunicated from the Jewish community.
“The Marrano descendants who were buffeted
about in the sixteenth century from one religion to another became alienated
from both, and turned first to money-making in international mercantilist
capitalism and then secular, scientific rationalism. They were immensely
successful in these endeavours.”[19]
Spinoza was born of traditionalist Judaist
parents, but in 1655 left the synagogue. Anticipating the so-called “higher
criticism”, he pointed to seeming contradictions in the text and began
expressing doubts about the Divine origins of the Bible. Then he went on to
deny the very possibility of revelation. For “God is in the world and the world
is in God.” Nature “is a particular way in which God himself exists.’ Human
consciousness “is a particular way in which God himself thinks.” As for
freewill, Spinoza denied it, redefining it as the knowledge of the fact that
one is determined.
“In his
concentration on this world,” writes Armstrong, “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.”[20]
Spinoza’s rationalist creed was summed up as follows: “Let everyone
believe what seems to him to be consonant with reason”[21] – by
which he meant a reason not in any way informed or guided by Divine revelation.
This was revolutionary teaching by any standards, and it is not surprising that
on July 27, 1656, the rabbis excommunicated him. Spinoza was lucky: a sentence
of excommunication destroyed the lives of many who rebelled against the Jewish
rabbinate. But Spinoza lived in liberal Holland. The liberalism of Holland and
England was to protect many Jews who worked to destroy the foundations of
Christian civilization…
Protestant
Rationalism
The Protestant Reformation grew out of reasoned protest against
undoubted abuses by the Catholic Church. One of these was papal indulgences,
which particularly angered Luther as it had Hus before him:
As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,
The soul from purgatory springs.
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…”[22]
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 Tim. 3.15), but fallen human reason, “liberated”
now from the “fetters” of tradition, having been absolved by the natural law
tradition from all sin.
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. For 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.”[23] Thus
Protestantism, as New Hieromartyr Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) put 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.”[24]
The nineteenth-century Russian Slavophile I.V. Kireevsky compared
Catholic and Protestant rationalism and the Orthodox love of wisdom as follows:
“The main trait distinguishing Orthodox Christianity from the Latin confession
and the Protestant teaching of the faith in their influence on the intellectual
and moral development of man consists in the fact that the Orthodox Church
strictly adheres to the boundary between Divine Revelation and human reason,
that it preserves without any change the dogmas of Revelation as they have
existed from the first days of Christianity and have been confirmed by the
Ecumenical Councils, not allowing the hand of man to touch their holiness or
allowing human reason to modify their meaning and expression in accordance with
its temporary systems. But at the same time the Orthodox Church does not
restrict reason in its natural activity and in its free striving to search out
the truths not communicated to it by Revelation; it does not give to any
rational system or plausible view of science the status of infallible truth,
ascribing to them an idential inviolability and holiness as that possessed by
Divine Revelation.
“The Latin church, on the contrary, does not know any firm boundaries
between human reason and Divine Revelation. It ascribes to its visible head or
to a local council the right to introduce a new dogma into the number of those
revealed and confirmed by the Ecumenical Councils; to some systems of human
reason it ascribes the exceptional right of ascendancy over others, and in this
way if it does not directly destroy the revealed dogmas, it changes their
meaning, while it restricts human reason in the freedom of its natural activity
and limits its sacred right and duty to seek from a rapprochement between human
truths and Divine truths, natural truths and revealed ones.
“The Protestant teachings of the faith are based on the same
annihilation of the boundary between human reason and Divine revelation, with
this difference from the Latin teaching, however, that they do not raise any
human point of view or systematic mental construction to the level of Divine
Revelation, thereby restricting the activity of reason; but, on the contrary,
they give the reason of man ascendancy over the Divine dogmas, changing them or
annihilating them in accordance with the personal reasoning of man.
“From these three main differences between the relationships of Divine
Revelation to human reason proceed the three main forms of activity of the
intellectual powers of man, and at the same time the three main forms of
development of its moral meaning.
“It is natural that the more one who sincerely believes in the teaching
of the Orthodox Church develops his reason, the more he will make his
understanding agree with the truths of Divine Revelation.
“It is also natural that the sincere supporter of the Latin church
should have not only to submit his mind to Divine Revelation, but at the same
time also to some human systems and abstract mental constructions that have
been raised to the level of Divine inviolability. For that reason he will
necessarily be forced to communicate a one-sided development to the movements
of his mind and will be morally obliged to drown out the inner consciousness of
the truth in obedience to blind authority.
“No less natural is it that the follower of the Protestant confession,
recognizing reason to be the chief foundation of truth, should in accordance
with the measure of his education more and more submit his faith itself to his
personal reasoning, until the concepts of natural reason take the place for him
of all the Traditions of Divine Revelation and the Holy Apostolic Church.
“Where only pure Divine Revelation is recognized to be higher than
reason – Revelation which man cannot alter in accordance with his own
reasonings, but with which he can only bring his reasoning into agreement, -
there, naturally, the more educated a man or a people is, the more its concepts
will be penetrated with the teaching of the faith, for the truth is one and the
striving to find this oneness amidst the variety of the cognitive and
productive actions of the mind is the constant law of all development. But in
order to bring the truths of reason into agreement with the truth of Revelation
that is above reason a dual activity of reason is necessary. It is not enough
to arrange one’s rational concepts in accordance with the postulates of faith,
to choose those that agree with them and exclude those that contradict them,
and thereby purify them of all contradiction: it is also necessary to raise the
very mode of rational activity to the level at which reason can sympathise with
faith and where both spheres merge into one seamless contemplation of the
truth. Such is the aim determining the direction of the mental development of
the Orthodox Christian, and the inner consciousness of this sought-after region
of mental activity is constantly present in every movement of his reason, the
breathing of his mental life…”[25]
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 kind of 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![26]
Thus was Western thought directed along a path of ever-increasing
individualism and subjectivism, which led finally to such as irrational
philosophies as that 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. And so philosophical rationalism was born in the soil
of Protestant rationalism, and philosophical individualism – in the soil of
Protestant individualism. 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 wrote: “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.[27] 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.
“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.’”[28]
“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.”[29]
Luther on Church and State
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. “A Christian man is a
perfectly free lord,” said Luther, “subject to none [of the princes of the
Church]”…
The conservative Protestants – the Lutherans and the Anglicans – tried
to hold on to the ideas of priesthood and 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…”[30]
In his treatises, On the Liberty of the Christian (1520) and On
Temporal Authority (1523), Luther makes a very sharp distinction between
the spiritual and the temporal, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. If
the Christian was free from authority in the Kingdom of God, he was by no means
free in the kingdom of man: “A Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of
all, subject to all [of the princes of this world]”. As Dagron interprets
Luther’s 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’.“[31]
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.”[32] But
this did not mean that he sanctioned rebellion against the powers that be.
Luther’s principles were tested in the 1520s, when Thomas Müntzer
led a German Peasants’ War against all authorities. Müntzer, writes
Charles George, “was a learned priest and mystic who had struggled for faith as
Luther had – desperately – but found it not in the historic Jesus, not in the
revelation of words, but in the blinding visions of immediate knowledge, and in
association with an amazing group of militant prophets in the town of Zwickau.
Zwickau is on the border of Bohemia, and there a weaver named Storch had made
Tabor [the centre of early-fifteenth-century chiliastic revolution among the
Czechs of Bohemia] live again. Müntzer began to preach in Zwickau a
prophecy of millenial revolution – in his vision, a terrible final blood-bath
in which the elect of God would rise up to destroy first the Turkish
Antichrist, and then the masses of the unrighteous. Before long he and Storch
led their evangelized weavers in a revolt which failed, and Müntzer fled
to Bohemia where he searched for the embers of Taborite chiliasm, and ended up
being driven from Bohemia.
“For two years he wandered in central Germany, his delusions now settled
into doctrine” {‘The living God is sharpening his scythe in me, so that later I
can cut down the red poppies and the blue cornflowers’). In 1523 he was invited
to preach in Allstedt, and from there he created a revolutionary organization,
the League of the Elect, made up of peasants and miners. His church became the
most radical center of Christianity in Europe – fo it he created the first
liturgy in German, and to it came hundreds of miners from Mansfeld and peasants
from the countryside as well as artisans from Allstedt.
“Müntzer’s revolution was not, like Luther’s, a proposed
reformation of men and institutions. To him Luther was a Pharisee bound to
books and Wittenberg was the centere of ‘the unspiritual soft-living flesh’. He
attacked the emasculated social imagination of the reformers, branded them
tools of the rich and powerful, and when Luther wrote his Letter to the
Princes of Saxony warning of the danger of this radical agitation,
Müntzer reacted by openly declaring social revolution to be indispensably
a part of faith in Christ: ‘The wretched flatterer is silent… about the origin
of all theft… Look, the seed-grounds of ususry and theft and robbery are our
lords and princes, they take all creatures as their property… These robbers use
the Law to forbid others to rob… They oppress all people, and shear and shave
the poor plowman and everything that lives – yet if (the plowman) commits the
slightest offense, he must hang.’ Like the magnificent Hebrew prophets from
whom he took his texts, Müntzer denounced the princes to their faces (Duke
John, the Elector’s brother, came to Allstedt to hear him, and he was summoned
to Weimar to explain himself as a result of Luther’s complaint) and left them
shaken. Müntzer, with red crucifix and sword, led another frustrated
revolt in Mühlhausen, wandered to Nuremberg and the Swiss border,
preaching revolution and distributing his pamphlets, and finally was called
back to Mühlhausen as Saxony caught the fever that was agitating the rest
of Germany….
“… Frederick the Wise wrote to his brother the following: ‘Perhaps the
peasants have been given just occasion for their uprising through the impeding
the Word of God. In many ways the poor folk have been wronged by the rulers,
and now God is visiting his wrath upon us. If it be his will, the common man
will come to rule; and if it be not his will, the end will soon be otherwise.’
Duke John wrote: ‘As princes we are ruined.’ Luther was less passive before the
will of God; although hooted out of countenance by the groups of peasants whom
he tried to command into submission to their prince, he continued to fight the
rude social rooting of the heresy he had spawned. Müntzer presented a
graphic portrait of Luther’s confrontation with the peasants: ‘He claims the
Word of God is sufficient. Doesn’t he realize that men whose every moment is
consumed in the making of a living have no time to learn to read the Word of
God? The princes bleed the people with usury and count as their own the fish in
the stream, the bird of the air, and the grass of the field, and Dr. Liar says
“Amen!” What courage has he, Dr. Pussyfoot, the new pope of Wittenberg, Dr.
Easychair, the basking sycophant? He says there should be no rebellion because
the sword has been committed by God to the ruler, but the power of the sword
belongs to the whole community. In the good old days the people stood by when
judgement was rendered lest the ruler
pervert justice, and the rulers have perverted justice.’”[33]
The only authority for Müntzer 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.”[34]
Luther called on the lords to destroy the peasants: “Wherefore, my
lords, free, save, help and pity the poor people. Stab, smite and slay, all ye
that can. If you die in battle you could never have a more blessed end, for you
die obedient to God’s Word in Romans 13, and in the service of love to
free your neighbour from the bands of hell and the devil. I implore every one
who can to avoid the peasants as he would the devil himself. I pray God will
enlighten them and turn their hearts. But if they do not turn, I wish them no
happiness for evermore… Let none think this is too hard who consider how
intolerable is rebellion.”[35]
This
led to the massacre or exile of some 30,000 families. Such was the price Luther
had to pay for keeping the support of the princes for his Reformation.[36] 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” 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’.”[37]
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 – and the
manner in which his generals waged that war did his cause no good. For 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.”[38] 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”.[39]
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.[40] 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 it 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…”[41]
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…”[42]
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.” Having removed Wolsey, the king
quickly moved to subdue parliament and the Church to his will. The Church under
Archbishop Warham duly surrendered[43] – 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. 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”[44]. 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”.[45]
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.”[46] 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 believed 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 – and he was not far from the
truth…
Calvin’s approach to Church-State relations was more consistently
democratic than Luther’s; the people, according to Calvin, are the supreme
power in both Church and State. 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.”[47]
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.”[48]
These radically new 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?”[49]
“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.”[50]
“In the Netherlands,” writes Bamber Gascoigne, “Calvinism became the
rallying point for opposition to the oppressive rule of Catholic Spain.
Calvinist ministers had been among the earliest leaders of a small group which
we would describe today as guerillas or freedom fighters, from whom there
developed a national party of the northern provinces. The princely leader of
the fight for independence, William the Silent, joined the reformed church in
1573 and during the next decade a Dutch republic gradually emerged…
“In Scotland the Calvinists went one stage further, in a political
programme which was even more radical in its implications. At precisely the
same period as the Lutherans in Germany were establishing the principle of cuius
region eius religio, the Scots were asserting the very opposite – that the
people had the right to choose their own religion, regardless of the will of
the monarch. In 1560 the Scottish parliament abolished papal authority and
decreed a form of Calvinism as the religion of the country. Scotland became
something unique in the Europe of the day: a land of one religion with a monarch
of another. Admittedly there were, as always, political as well as religious
causes for this state of affairs. The monarch, Mary Queen of Scots, was an
eighteen-year-old girl living abroad, and English troops were underwriting
Scottish independence for fear that Mary might deliver Scotland into the hands
of her husband, the king of France. But the notion that the people could assert
themselves against their ruler was a triumph for the ideas of one man, John
Knox. ‘God help us’, wrote the archbishop of Canterbury, ‘from such visitation
as Knox has attempted in Scotland, the people to be the orderers of things.’”[51]
Spellman writes: “Placing obedience to God’s law before conformity to
the will of the prince, political theorists writing within a Calvinist
theological perspective insisted that the king who violated divine ordinances
was not to be obeyed. Anti-absolutist sentiment was decisively advanced by the
emergence of these religiously motivated resistance theories. Works such as the
anonymous Vindiciae contra tyrannos and George Buchanan’s De jure
regni apud Scotos, both appearing in print in 1579, argued on behalf of
religious minorities who found themselves persecuted by their monarchs. In the
midst of the French wars of religion, the Protestant Philippe Duplessis Mornay
insisted that ‘God’s jurisdiction is immeasurable, whilst that of kings is
measured; that God’s sway is infinite, whilst that of kings is limited.’
Mornay’s Defense of Liberty against Tyrants was first published in Latin
in 1579 but quickly translated into French and finally into English just one
year before the execution of King Charles I in 1649 by his Calvinist opponents.
“Mornay employed metaphors drawn from the medieval feudal tradition in
describing the proper relationship between subjects and their rulers. Since God
created heaven and earth out of nothing, he alone ‘is truly the lord [dominus]
and proprietor [proprietarius] of heaven and earth’. Earthly monarchs,
on the other hand, are ‘beneficiaries and vassals [beneficiarii &
clientes] and are bound to receive and acknowledge investiture from Him’.
Facing religious persecution at the hands of a Catholic monarch, this spokesman
for the French Protestant minority took the bold step of denying kings any
sacred or special distinction. Men do not attain royal status ‘because they
differ from others in species, and because they ought to be in charge of these
by a certain natural superiority, like shepherds with sheep’. Instead of
lording over subjects, legitimate monarchs are those who protect the subjects
in their care, both from the aggressions of individuals within the kingdom and
from hostile neighbours. In language striking in its modernity, Mornay claimed
that ‘royal dignity is not really an honour, but a burden; not an immunity, but
a function; not a dispensation, but a vocation; not license, but public
service’.”[52]
State power protected the Calvinists from the ferocity of the Papists in
both 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 writes: “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…”[53]
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, a fact which
shows that there is a blood-red thread linking the revolutionary movements of
late medieval Catholicism, early Protestantism and twentieth-century militant
atheism.
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…”[54]
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.”[55]
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."
The Calvinists 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. Thus Calvinism was already democratism in action; and
it is not surprising that the leading democratic countries – Holland, England,
Scotland, America – would be those in which Calvinism let down the deepest
roots…
The
Counter-Reformation
Powerful though the new ideas of the Reformation were, the papacy was
not finished yet; and from the mid-sixteenth century, 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”[56], 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"[57].
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”.[58] 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 most 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. “In Mexico…, a
population estimated at 25 million in 1492 had been reduced to a mere one
million by 1600.”[59] 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.
16th-century Spain recalled the ancient despotisms not only in her
cruelty and the absolutism of her institutions, but also in her enormous wealth
and self-confidence. “We are His chosen people in the New Dispensation,” wrote
Fray Juan de Salazar, “just as the Hebrews were in the time of the written
law.”[60] “The
serenity and splendour of the Spanish throne,” wrote 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.”[61]
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.[62] The
theory was elaborated by the New World missionary (and Jewish converso)
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[63],
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…”[64]
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.”[65]
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…”[66]
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.”[67]
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”.
However, 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.
Mariana’s thoughts were indeed dangerous for absolute monarchs. Thus he
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…”[68]
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…”[69]
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”. It was the
English equivalent of the Jewish cry: “We have no king but Caesar…”
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 political,
this-worldly stamp ever since.
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.” [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 people with the
habit of compromise, of perpetually
seeking some middle way between
opposing opinions. This habit is extremely harmful 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 reign of Edward VI, religious passions came to the fore, polarising
the people between sharply opposed alternatives. During the reign of Edward,
when Calvinists took over the reins of government, the dissolution of the
monasteries assumed such large proportions and brutal destructiveness as
finally to arouse the indignation of large parts of the population, who
remained essentially Catholic in their sympathies. Then, during the reign of
Mary, a Catholic 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 were 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. But it was the failure
of the Spanish Armada in 1588 that removed their last chance of political
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]
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[83], and
perhaps the first successful nationalist revolution. “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…”[84]
The Netherlands immediately proclaimed the principle of religious
liberty – the first State to do so. Not only all Protestant sects, but also, as
we have seen, Jews, and even – most surprisingly, given the current war against
Catholic Spain - Roman Catholics were given freedom to practise their beliefs.
All strictly religious faiths were given liberty alongside the newest and most
important faith, Capitalism.
As the English Catholic poet Andrew Marvell put it in his poem, “The
Character of Holland” (1653):
Hence Amsterdam, Turk-Christian-Pagan-Jew,
Staple of Sects and Mint of Schism grew;
That Bank of Conscience, where not one so
strange
Opinion but finds Credit, and Exchange.
In vain for Catholicks our selves we bear;
The universal church is onely there.
Holland has maintained its reputation of
being in the vanguard of liberty, toleration and permissiveness to the present
day. It was not by chance that when the foremost expression of the modern
ecumenical movement, the “universal church” of the World Council of Churches,
was founded in 1948, its centre was designated in Amsterdam…
“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…”[85]
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.”[86]
“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.”[87]
The Dutch Republic was the first political creation of Calvinist
Protestantism, and 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”. “Holland is a country,” wrote Claude de Saumaise, “where the demon
gold is seated on a throne or cheese, and crowned with tobacco”.[88]
This secular, commercial character of the new Dutch state was caused,
according to Pieter Geyl, by the fact that it was “the urban lower middle
classes” who were mainly inspired to act against the Spaniards, while the town
oligarchies “felt themselves… the guardians of the privileges and welfare of
town and country, rather than the champions of a particularly new religious
faith. In other words, they regarded matters from a secular standpoint, and,
while the new Church had in their scheme of things its indispensable place,
they felt it incumbent on them carefully to circumscribe this place. From one
point of view… the great European movement of the Reformation was a revolt of
the lay community under under the leadership of their rulers – a revolt, that
is to say, of the State against priestly influence.”[89]
And so, while, as we have said, the Dutch Republic was the first
political creation of Calvinism, its purpose was not so much to protect or
spread Calvinism as to protect and increase the material prosperity of its
citizens. Their attitude to the state, therefore, was that it “had better stop
trying to interfere with the serious business of making money.”[90]
Although the Calvinist-Puritans did not make money their goal, and
profit-making was encouraged only in order to be more effective in doing good,
the decay of Puritanism tended to leave mammon in its place. As Cotton Mather said: “Religion begat
prosperity and the daughter devoured the mother.” [91]
We find such a link posited, not surprisingly, by polemical Catholic
writers, such as Hilaire Belloc: “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.”[92]
But it was the German social scientist Max Weber who developed the idea
of a direct link between Protestantism, especially Calvinism, and those
attitudes and kinds of working habit that are conducive to capitalism. His
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.”[93]
We should note not only the link between capitalism and Protestantism,
but also that of both with Judaism. As we have seen, the Marrano Jews had found
a safe refuge in Calvinist Amsterdam, where they prospered exceedingly. And
this was no accident. As Cantor notes, “the Calvinists were close readers of
the Old Testament and taught a bleak image of a wrathful, judging, and
omniscient and omnipotent God that accorded well with Jewish tradition.
Calvinist societies were sympathetic to market capitalism as a sign of God’s
grace working in the world.
“There was a millenial fervor among the latter-day Calvinists, a sense
of the coming end of time. These qualities did not necessarily lead to a more
favorable attitude toward the Jews; theoretically it could have gone the other
way. But shaped by a Calvinist elite that favored an ethic of hard work,
rational application of communal standards to individual behavior, and
postponed gratification, a comity of attitude emerged in the early seventeenth
century between the ruling capitalist oligarchy in Amsterdam and the
rabbinical-capitalist oligarchy that controlled power in the Jewish community.
Not only did the Jews of Amsterdam prosper, but Calvinist England readmitted
them in 1653, for the first time officially since the 1290s…
Everywhere the Calvinism that spread after 1600 – Holland, England,
Scotland, and overseas to the United States, English-speaking parts of the
Canada, and South Africa (a Dutch colony until 1815, and British thereafter) –
the Jews prospered in business and were given the opportunity in the nineteenth
century to enter the learned professions. The Calvinists were too Christian to
regard the Jews as fully their equals. But they showed the Jews more than
tolerance; they accorded them dignified respect. This was because of Calvinist
inclination to the Old Testament literary text in its covenant theology;
because the Calvinists and the Jews agreed that business success was a blessing
from God and a sign of the worth of the entrepreneur in God’s eyes; and because
both religious groups admired the patriarchal family, hard work, social intelligence,
rational calculations, and puritanical postponed gratification.”[94]
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
19th-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.”[95]
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.[96]
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.’”[97]
This act of 1620 was the nearest practical incarnation, before or since,
of the idea of the social contract that later became such a dominant political
idea in the English-speaking countries. As President Ronald Reagan said in
1980: “Three hundred and sixty years ago, in 1620, a group of families dared to
cross a mighty ocean to build a future for themselves in a new world. When they
arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts, they formed what they called a ‘compact’:
an agreement among themselves to build a community and abide by its laws. The
single act – the voluntary binding together of free people to live under the
law – set the pattern for what was to come.”[98]
It did indeed; and to this day, in spite of a waning of zeal and a
mixing with many other elements, America still represents that religious
idealism and messianism, that can-do mentality and belief in the possibility of
solving all problems by rational debate and democratic decision-making, which
the Puritans brought with them to the new world.
The Puritan experiment 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.”[99] 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. “Although Winthrop called the
social structure of New England a ‘mixed Aristocracy’, the ‘democratic’
tendencies hostile to any form of hereditary power were nevertheless quite
pronounced from the beginning.”[100]
But this is not to say 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).”[101]
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.
Indeed, as A.P. Lopukhin writes: "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."[102]
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. 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 not 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."[103]
The Puritan colonies of New England represent a striking attempt to
reproduce the theocratic structure of Israelite society in the time of the
Judges, its laws being derived 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 writes: “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…”[104]
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.”[105]
And yet uniformity was not a practical possibility in a nation that
combined the Puritanism of New England with the Anglicanism of Virginia, the
Roman Catholicism of Maryland with the Quakerism of Pennsylvania. So tolerance,
and a strict separation of Church and State, became a necessity if the country
was not to fall apart along confessional lines (the Quakers, it should be
remembered, rejected all political authority on principle).
The first State to be founded on the principle of religious tolerance
was Maryland, designed as a refuge for Roman Catholics persecuted elsewhere.
And then there was Rhode Island, founded by refugees fleeing from intolerant
Massachusetts. Its early code of laws defined it as a place “where all men may
walk as their consciences persuade them, every man in the name of his God”. As
a consequence, the State was described by its opponents as “the sink into which
all the rest of the colonies empty their heretics”, “the receptacle of all
sorts of riff-raff people, and nothing else than the sewer or latrina of New
England”.[106]
And then there was Pennsylvania, conceived by William Penn as a refuge first of
all for Quakers, but then for all persecuted people, the only condition for
residence in Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, being belief in one God,
the Creator of the Universe.[107]
This tendency towards tolerance was reinforced by the influence of the
European Enlightenment, with the result that America was to move away from its
“democratic totalitarian” beginnings to complete separation of Church and State
and liberty of conscience.
The Anglican Monarchy
England under the Tudors achieved a degree of stability amidst the
extreme religious instability of the time. The “Virgin Queen”, Elizabeth I,
believed in the Divine right of kings and in the supremacy of the sovereign
over all other estates of the realm, including the Church (of which she was the
head). 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.” Susan 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.”[108]
Elizabeth’s position as head of both Church and State was necessitated
by the constant threat of civil war between Catholics and Calvinists. In this
respect her dilemma was similar to that of the contemporary Henry IV of France,
who, though a Calvinist by upbringing, converted to Catholicism in order to
bring the his country’s religious wars to an end. For “Paris is worth a mass”,
he said: the important thing was that “we are all French and fellow-citizens of
the same country”.[109] The
Anglican monarchy similarly aimed to make everyone consciously English and
citizens of the same country, whatever their religion. The result was a nation
united around “a Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy.”[110]
It is instructive to compare the position of these European monarchs
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.”[111]
Elizabeth’s task was hardly less difficult than Akbar’s, 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 expressed 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…
The monarch was the capstone of the whole
social order, founded on hierarchy (or “degree”), as expressed 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.
It is worth pondering why the monarchy continued 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 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".[112] 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[113]
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.”[114]
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.”[115]
From about the beginning of the seventeenth century we see the
beginnings of what we might call the first politically organized and
intellectually justified assault on the Monarchy in European history. It
came from the English parliament, an ancient institution which in earlier
centuries had been used to help the king in his administration, but which was
now to be used against him. The assault of the English parliament on the English
king would be the event, more than any other, that gave birth to the politics
of modernity…
The leaders of parliament, writes George, “set about defending the
‘ancient constitution of the realm’, righting the abuses of Magna Carta, and
similar ‘conservative’ enterprises, while in fact building procedures and
precedents and organizational devices intended to alter radically the relation
of Parliamnet to the King and his non-Parliamentary councils. All the
initiative came from the Commons, but the House of Lords was skillfully used by
the Commoners so that the potentially radical nature of the change from power
organized by hierarchy to power based on property was not perceived until too
late by the peers.
“Once the organizational mechanisms (committee systems, House control of
the Speaker, and, above all, the informal caucuses about which we know least
but which were crucially the genius of the new English politicians) were fixed,
and the interior lines of communication among the interested oligarchies
established, the Commons elite increasingly ventured public argument for their
revolutionary precepts. In 1604 the new King, James I, was greeted with a
document drafted in the House of Commons that would have been inconceivable in
the generation which hailed the accession of Elizabeth – a long, rambling,
theoretical, and blatantly propagandistic statement of the constitutional
position of Parliament. More significant that the actual words of the document
is the fact that the Commoners could feel themselves ready for such a
redefinition of their power in terms completely alien to the form and spirit of
that ‘ancient’ constitution they purported to defend. The Apology argued
at length and with heat that the Commons (which they already are beginning to
make synonymous with Parliament) alone represented ‘the voice of the people’
and the generality of the commonwealth (and there is an interesting assumption
that the vaguer terms ‘generality’, ‘people’, ‘subjects’ – the nationalistic
concepts – stand for a higher, more authoritative political reality than
‘estates’ and ‘orders’). Based upon this claim to speak for the whole of the
commonwealth, Commons asserted a very broad right to consultation and decision
in matters of religion, foreign policy, and other matters of state which in the
medieval constitution had been no concern of the knights and burgesses summoned
to ‘hear and do’. In the Petition of Right of 1610 they repeated their
attack on the prerogative of the Crown (this time in financial matters) and
reasserted that they ‘held it on ancient, general, and undoubted right of
Parliament to debate freely all matters which do properly concern the subject
and his right or state.’
“The institutional struggle – or, more properly, to correct the Whiggish
cast the history of this period is usually given, the revolutionary usurpation
of the Commons – continued as a public debate for forty years before the
decision was left to the armies. James wrote a letter to the Commons warning of
his displeasure with those ‘fiery and popular spirits’ who were meddling in
‘matters far above their reach and capacity’ and commanding the Speaker ‘to
make known, in our name, unto the House that none therein shall presume
henceforth to meddle with anything concerning our government or deep matters of
State.’ Under the leadership of the great jurist Sir Edward Coke, the House
stood up intractably for its revolutionary dogma: ‘That the liberties,
franchises, privileges, and jurisdictions of Parliament are the ancient and
undoubted birthright and inheritance of the subjects of England; and that the
arduous and urgent affairs concerning the King, State, and defense of the Realm
and of the Church of England, and the maintenance and making of laws, and
redress of mischiefs and grievances which daily happen within this Realm, are
proper subjects and matter of counsel and debate in Parliament; and that in the
handling and proceeding of those businesses every member of the House of
Parliaments hath, and of right ought to have, freedom of speech… and that every
member of the said House hath like freedom from all impeachment, imprisonment,
and molestation.’
“The strategy which put teeth into the rhetoric of the Commons was the
withholding of the revenue upon which the operation of the state depended. The
battle joined on the issue of revenues forced the monarchy to exploit every
possible legal ruse to raise monies for the increasing expenses of the state.
This desperation in the Privy Council of the King thoroughly alarmed the community
of the prosperous – the exigencies of the government, a government which the
propertied classes felt irresponsible, began to threaten the security of
property even in the courts of common law. Coke once more led the attack; he
proposed a bill in 1628 ‘for the better securing of every freeman touching the
propriety of his goods and liberty of his person’, and helped send to King
Charles in the same year a meticulously drawn document which summed the
revolutionary argument as a Petition of Right…
“The Petition of Right was followed in a few weeks by a general
‘Remonstrance’ directed against the chief figure at Court – the Duke of
Buckingham – and complaining of unconscionable government. The debates in
Commons pushed the new theories of Parliamentary power to extreme limits; it
was even demanded that the King renounce his ancient right to the desperately
important revenues from Tonnage and Poundage. ‘…forced by that duty which they
owe to your Majesty, and to those whom they represent, to declare, that there
ought not any imposition to be laid upon the goods of merchants, exported or
imported, without common consent by Act of Parliament, which is the right and
inheritance of your subjects, founded not only upon the most ancient and
original constitution of this kingdom, but often confirmed and declared in
divers statute laws.’ Charles could retreat no farther without defaulting the
throne he was born to;… he prorogued the Parliament he could not control…”[116]
What made the situation more difficult for Charles than for his father
was that, under the influence of his Catholic wife, while not formally
abandoning the via media, he had leaned further to the right in
ecclesiastical matters. Meanwhile the left, in the form of 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…
And so the scene was set for the English revolution - “that grand crisis
of morals, religion and government”, as Coleridge called it[117], or
“the first major breech in Absolute Monarchy and the spawning of the first
major, secular, egalitarian and liberal culture in the modern world”, as George
calls it[118]
- 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 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, often by men such as John Milton who were of undoubted,
if not well-balanced, genius.
“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.”[119] What
Guizot meant is illustrated by the words of John Lilburne, who clothed his
communist political programme in religious quotations: “Christ doth not choose
many rich, nor many wise, but the fools, idiots, base and contemptible poor men
and women in the esteem of the world.”[120] John
Milton used similarly religious language to clothe his revolutionary message:
“Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her as out of
Zion should be sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of reformation to
all Europe? Now once again, by all concurrence of signs and the general
instinct of holy and devout men, God is decreeing to begin some new and great
reformation in his Church, even to the reforming of the Reformation itself.
What does He, then, but reveal Himself to His servants, and (as His manner is)
first to His Englishmen?”[121]
The English revolution was “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.
And yet it was also a revolution in the more radical sense in that
nothing was ever really the same again in England, and by extension, the West…
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.
The Divine Right of Kings
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.
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[122], in
England because the king himself had initiated the break with Rome for his own
personal and political ends.[123] 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 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.
James I, like his predecessor Elizabeth I, 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”.[124] At the
same time he acknowledged that there is an important distinction between an
autocrat, who “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.[125] But
while not free in relation to God, the king was free in relation to his
subjects. Hence the title of James’ book, The True Law of Free Monarchies.
“Kings are justly called gods,” said James to parliament in 1610, “for
that they exercise a manner or resemblance of divine power upon earth. For if
you will consider the attributes of God, you shall see how they agree in the
person of the king. God hath power to create or destroy; make or unmake at His
pleasure; to give life or send death; to judge all and to be judged nor
accountable to none; to raise low things and to make high things low at His
pleasure. And the like power have kings.”[126]
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?
This 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.”[127]
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…”[128]
An important aspect of royalist thinking was what may be called the
patriarchal theory of royal authority. James I argued that just as God is the
Father of mankind, “so the style of Pater patriae was ever, and is
commonly applied to Kings.”[129] As
such, the King does not merely represent his people: he embodies them – which
is why in his edicts he says We, not I.[130] 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.’”[131]
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.”[132]
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.”[133]
However, shorn of its dependence on the idea of Adam as the first king,
Filmer’s teaching that kingship, like fatherhood, is natural and therefore
Divine in origin, is not so easily refuted. The people “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 [Filmer]
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.’”[134]
The English revolution threw up a wide range of anti-monarchical sects.
The most important of them was the Levellers, who 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[135] 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’.”[136]
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.[137]
“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 resolved 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…”[138]
The climax of the English revolution was 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. 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”.[139] The
king himself articulated the paradoxicality of the revolution during his trial,
declaring: “A King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth.”
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?[140]
At his trial Charles had said that the king was the guarantor of his
people’s liberties: “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.”[141] 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.’”[142]
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.”[143]
Almost too late did the 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[144], 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 the gentry leader 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.
Thenceforth, however, the social spirit of Europe has been infected with the
bacterium of revolution.”[145]
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”.[146]
Milton began, in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, with a firm
rejection of the Divine Right of Kings. 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”.[147]
“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.”[148] 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.[149]
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.”[150]
Milton,
too, came out against 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. For, as 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.”[151] Thus
did the anti-papist, anti-monastic and anti-images iconoclasm of the English
Reformation reap its fruits in the anti-monarchist iconoclasm of the English
Revolution.
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.”[152]
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. And absolutist monarchies still ruled in
Persia, India and China.
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 a serious rebellion on the part of the Old Ritualists 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 political 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…
The
Scientific Outlook
Out of Protestant rationalism there grew the most revolutionary of all
the achievements of the age, 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.
The scientific 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.[153] 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, solely and exclusively,
that which can be investigated by empirical means, and that
non-empirical reality does not exist.
By contrast, religion 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 [science]
calls all in doubt”.[154]
Religion and science (in their most characteristic forms) are also
motivated by different spirits. The spirit of true religion is the spirit of
the humble receiving of the truth by revelation from God; it does not preclude
active seeking for truth, but recognizes that it will never succeed in this search
if God on His part does not reveal it. For Wisdom “goes about seeking those
worthy of her, and She graciously appears to them in their paths, and meets
them in every thought” (Wisdom 6.16).
Science, on the other hand, is exclusively active. Moreover, there is a
Faustian spirit in science, a striving for power over nature, rather
than simply knowledge of it, which is incompatible with the true religious
spirit (as opposed to the spirit of magic). Thus 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”.[155] This
is even more true of modern scientists, who place no limits to the powers of
science, than of their predecessors in the seventeenth century.
Bacon compared science 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”.[156] “This
light should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions
that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge; and so, spreading
further and further should presently disclose and bring into sight all that is
most hidden and secret in the world.”[157] “God
forbid,” he wrote, “that we should give out a dream of our own imagination for
a pattern of the world: rather may He graciously grant to us to write an apocalypse
or true vision of the footsteps of the Creator imprinted on His creatures.”[158]
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.”[159]
This striving for power by wresting the secrets of nature indicates a
kinship between science and magic, if not in their methods, at any rate in
their aims. And while Erasmus’ humorous critique of scientists in the
early fifteenth century could not be applied to their early twenty-first
century successors without qualification, he unerringly pointed to a common spirit
between science of all ages and magic: “Near these march the scientists,
reverenced for their beards and the fur on their gowns, who teach that they
alone are wise while the rest of mortal men flit about as shadows. How
pleasantly they dote, indeed, while they construct their numberless worlds, and
measure the sun, moon, stars, and spheres as with thumb and line. They assign
causes for lightning, winds, eclipses, and other inexplicable things, never
hesitating a whit, as if they were privy to the secrets of nature, artificer of
things, or as if they visited us fresh from the council of the gods. Yet all
the while nature is laughing grandly at them and their conjectures. For to
prove that they have good intelligence of nothing, this is a sufficient
argument: thye can never explain why they disagree with each other on every
subject. Thus knowing nothing in general, they profess to know all things in
particular; though they are ignorant even of themselves, and on occasion do not
see the ditch or the stone lying across their path, because many of them are
blear-eyed or absent-minded; yet they proclaim that they perceive ideas,
universals, forms without matter, primary substances, quiddities, and ecceities
– things so tenuous, I fear, that Lynceus himself could not see them. When they
especially disdain the vulgar crowd is when they bring out their triangles,
quadrangles, circles, and mathematical pictures of the sort, lay one upon the
other, intertwine them into a maze, then deploy – and all to involve the
unitiated in darkness. Their fraternity does not lack those who predict future
events by consulting the stars, and promise wonders even more magical; and
these lucky scientists find people to believe them.”[160]
For, as Fr. Seraphim Rose points out: “Modern science was born [in the
Renaissance] out of the experiments of the Platonic alchemists, the astrologers
and magicians. The underlying spirit of the new scientific world view was the
spirit of Faustianism, the spirit of magic, which is retained as a definite
undertone of contemporary science. The discovery, in fact, of atomic energy
would have delighted the Renaissance alchemists very much: they were looking
for just such power. The aim of modern science is power over nature. Descartes,
who formulated the mechanistic scientific world view, said that man was to
become the master and possessor of nature. It should be noted that this is a
religious faith that takes the place of Christian faith.”[161]
True Religion, on the other hand, does not seek power over nature, but
obedience to God. It relies on no other ultimate authority than the Word of God
Himself as communicated either directly to an individual 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.
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.[162]
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.”[163]
However, it is misleading to make too great a contrast between
science-loving, democratic religion and science-hating authoritarian religion.
Much confusion has been generated in this respect by Galileo’s trial, in which,
so it is said, 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. Other
scientists persecuted by the Catholics were Copernicus and Giordano Bruno.
However, the truth, as Jay Wesley Richards explains is different. “First
of all, some claim Copernicus was persecuted, but history shows he wasn’t; in
fact, he died of natural causes the same year his ideas were published. As for
Galileo, his case can’t be reduced to a simple conflict between scientific
truth and religious superstition. He insisted the church immediately endorse
his views rather than allow them to gradually gain acceptance, he mocked the
Pope, and so forth. Yes, he was censured, but the church kept giving him his
pension for the rest of his life.”[164]
“Indeed,” writes Lee Strobel, “historian William R. Shea said,
‘Galileo’s condemnation was the result of the complex interplay of untoward
political circumstances, political ambitions, and wounded prides.’ Historical
researcher Philip J. Sampson noted that Galileo himself was convinced that the
‘major cause’ of his troubles was that he had made ‘fun of his Holiness’ – that
is, Pope Urban VIII – in a 1632 treatise. As for his punishment, Alfred North
Whitehead put it this way: ‘Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild
reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.’”[165]
“Bruno’s case was very sad,” Richards continued. “He was executed in
Rome in 1600. Certainly this is a stain on [Roman Catholic] church history. But
again, this was a complicated case. His Copernican views were incidental. He
defended pantheism and was actually executed for his heretical views on the
Trinity, the Incarnation, and other doctrines that had nothing to do with
Copernicanism.”[166]
In fact, neither Holy Scripture[167] nor
the Holy Fathers[168]even
the Roman church supported the idea of a spherical earth. “The truth is,”
writes David Lindberg, “that it’s almost impossible to find an educated person
after Aristotle who doubts that the Earth is a sphere. In the Middle Ages, you
couldn’t emerge from any kind of education, cathedral school or university,
without being perfectly clear about the Earth’s sphericity and even its
approximate circumference.”[169]
The truth is that both science and religion depend on authority – that
is, the reports of reliable men about what they have seen, touched and heard
(the Resurrection of Christ was verified by Thomas’ touch). 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, both rely on authority. The difference
lies, first, in the kinds of truth they seek, and secondly, in the nature and
structure of the authority they rely on.
One of the most important offshoots of the scientific method was the
rise of pseudo-scientific utopias, visions of how society could and should be
constructed on scientific lines. Among the earliest of these chiliastic utopias
(if we exclude Plato’s Republic and Laws) were Thomas More’s Utopia,
Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, and Francis Bacon’s The New
Atlantis. Later ones were to include Marxism and the Soviet five-year
plans. The Renaissance utopias contain astonishingly modern visions of society
– thoroughly secular, this-worldly visions. Thus Jacques 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.”[170]
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, which alone
can tame and transform the fallen passions. 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…”[171]
2.
THE EAST: MUSCOVITE RUSSIA
Romania has passed away, Romania is taken.
Even if Romania has passed away, it will
flower and bear fruit again.
Pontic folk-song, on the Fall of
Constantinople.
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.
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.
The Struggle for Romania
The fall of the
New Rome of Constantinople in 1453 was a great shock for the whole of the
Orthodox world. It was not only the political outlook that was threatening: if
the empire was no more, what would become of the Church? Did not the prophecies
link the fall of Rome with the coming of the Antichrist?
To avert that
threat, it was essential to fight back, to recover Rome if that were possible.
And yet for some time, as if paralysed, the Orthodox offered little resistance
to the seemingly irresistible momentum of the Turkish armies. The last
Byzantine outpost of Morea in the Peloponnese fell in 1461. In the same year
the Comnenian “empire” of Trebizond on the south coast of the Black Sea also
fell, after a siege of forty-two days.[172] Only
further north and east was there significant resistance: for some years George
Branković and his son Vuk held Belgrade, and Prince Vlad “the Impaler” of
Wallachia (of Dracula fame) conducted a courageous rearguard action north of
the Danube.[173]
However, the
Turkish advance only came to a stop in the other Romanian principality further
to the north, that of Moldavia, under its great Prince Stephen (1457-1504). On
coming to the throne, Stephen took St. Daniel the Hesychast to be his
counsellor, much as Prince Demetrius Donskoj had relied on the counsel of St.
Sergius of Radonezh. He “often visited his cell, confessed his sins, asked him
for a profitable word, and did nothing without his prayer and blessing. The
Saint encouraged him and exhorted him to defend the country and Christianity
against the pagans. Saint Daniel assured him that if he would build a church to
the glory of Christ after each battle, he would be victorious in all his wars.
“Stephen the
Great obeyed him and defended the Church of Christ and the Moldavian land with
great courage for nearly half a century after the fall of Byzantium. He won
forty-seven battles and build forty-eight churches. Thus Saint Daniel the
Hesychast was shown to be a great defender of Romanian Orthodoxy and the
spiritual founder of those monasteries that were built at his exhortation…
“After Stephen
the Great lost the battle of Razboieni in the summer of 1476, he went to the
cell of his good spiritual father, Saint Daniel the Hesychast, at Voroneţ.
Then, when ‘Stephen Voda knocked on the hesychast’s door for him to open it,
the hesychast replied that Stephen Voda should wait outside until he had
finished praying. And after the hesychast had finished praying, he called
Stephen Voda into his cell. And Stephen Voda confessed to him. And Stephen Voda
asked the hesychast what he should do now, since he was no longer able to fight
the Turks. Should the country surrender to the Turks or not? And the hesychast
told him not to surrender it, for he would win the war; but that after saving
the country he should build a monastery there in the name of Saint George.’
“Believing Saint
Daniel’s prophecy that he would defeat the Turks, the Prince of Moldavia took
his prayer and blessing and immediately assembled the army and drove the Turks
from the country. Thus the Saint helped deliver Moldavia and the Christian
countries from enslavement to the infidels by his ardent prayers to God.”[174]
But it was not Romania that was destined
to be the Third Rome, the protector and restorer of the fortunes of the
Orthodox Christians. That honour and cross was destined for a nation far to the
north – Russia.
The
Rise of the Muscovite Great Princes
However threatening the prospect from an eschatological point
of view, life continued in the Russian land virtually unaltered, except that
the Emperor and Patriarch of Constantinople were no longer commemorated, the
former because he no longer existed, the latter because he had fallen into
communion with the Latin heretics at the council of Florence in 1439.
One would have expected that this would lead to little change in the
position of the Great Prince of Moscow, who was in no position to take the
place of the Byzantine emperor, and was still only one among several Russian
princes. One might also have expected that the position of the Metropolitan of
Moscow, who had already been the focus of unity for the whole of the Russian
land for a long time, and who now had no ecclesiastical superior, would become
more important. In fact, however, the opposite happened: over the next hundred
years and more the position of the Great Prince became much more powerful,
while the influence of the metropolitan diminished.
This change can be studied from two points of view: from the point of
view of the gradual change in Church-State relations from the pre- to post-1453
periods, and from the point of view of the new ideology of State power that
became established towards the beginning of the 16th century, the
ideology of the Third Rome.
Turning first to the aspect of Church-State relations, A.P. Dobroklonsky
writes: “The previously established link between the Church and the State
became still stronger from the 13th to the 16th
centuries. You constantly encounter facts that indicate the influence of the
former on the latter and vice-versa. But in the history of their mutual
relations the increasing dominance of the State over the Church is noticeable.
Before the State was only organized and brought together under the tutelage of
the Church. But now it passes from the anarchic life of the principalities to
the concentration of power around the Muscovite throne in the north and around
the Polish throne in the south-west of Russia. And at the same time it not only
removes from itself the tutelage of the Church, but places her in subjection to
itself. This goes in tandem with the exaltation of the secular power. Therefore
between the beginning of the given period, when there still existed independent
principalities, and the metropolitan acted as the centre unifying Russis amidst
their scatteredness, and the end [of the period], when the principalities
ceased to exist and the Muscovite sovereign and the Polish king wer exalted to
autocratic status, a large difference in the relationship of the secular power
to the ecclesiastical power and ecclesiastical life is noticeable.
“The
influence of the secular power on ecclesiastical life is expressed in the
given period in the most varied activities in all branches of ecclesiastical
life. The princes in the north of Russia cared for the instalment of
Christianity in the newly-acquired regions and for the Christian enlightenment
of the newly converted. But in the south the Polish king, under the influence
of the Catholic party, tried to weaken the power of Orthodox Christianity and
help Catholic propaganda. The Russian princes themselves built churches and
monasteries, opened dioceses, defined their boundaries, gave money for the
upkeep of sees and churches, themselves influenced the election of clergy, and
in the course of time even chose the highest representatives of ecclesiastical
power on their own. In the south of Russia this became one of the rights of the
king, but in the north at the end of the 15th century and during the
16th it was practised so frequently that it became a normal
phenomenon. The secular authorities deposed hierarchs in the same arbitrary
manner in which they had elevated them: the Polish king even ascribed judgement
over them to himself, as his right. In the inner life of the Church the
influence of the secular authorities was no less. It issued decrees defining
the rights of the clergy, the character of ecclesiastical administration and
courts;… it interfered in the administration of monasteries…; it ascribed to
itself the right of court of highest appeal in doubtful cases of local
arbitration; it checked the monasteries’ accounts; it sometimes confiscated
monastic property; it often convened councils, where it pointed out
ecclesiastical deficiences and suggested that the hierarchs remove them; it
confirmed with its own seals important decisions of the metropolitan; it
accepted reports from the bishops on ecclesiastical issues; it investigated
heresies, and itself sometimes fought with heretics (for example, at the
Council of 1503); it itself sometimes entered into negotiations with the
Patriarch of Constantinople on the needs of the Church (for example, the
letters of Basil Vasilievich in the case of the election of Jonah); it even
sometimes of itself abolished ecclesiastical deficiencies (for example, Ioann
IV wrote decrees to the CyrilloBeloozersk monastery against the disorders that
were taking place there); finally it itself imposed various restrictions on the
hierarchs of the Church, even in their private way of life, for example,
interfering in their selection of assistants in the administration of houses
and dioceses. It is difficult to say where the pressure of the central secular
authorities on Church life was stronger – in the south, or in the north of
Russia; but there is no doubt that the local officials restricted it more, and
the abuses were greater as a result of the interference of the secular
authorities in Church life, in the south of Russia. The decrees often issued by
the princes and kings concerning the inviolability of Church administration and
courts were for the most part voices crying in the wilderness: in the south of
Russia the regional officials did not obey them, and the kings themselves did
not observe them strictly; while in the north, if the former feared to violate
them, the Great Princes themselves often got round them.
The Path to the
Third Rome
Another reason for the rise of the Great
Princes of Moscow was that after the Fall of Constantinople and the submission
of Novgorod to themselves in 1487 they were (if we exclude Moldavia and
Georgia) the last independent Orthodox sovereigns on earth. As such, and by
virtue of Ivan III’s marriage to Sophia, the niece of the last Byzantine
emperor, they soon began to see themselves, not simply as Great Princes, but as
“tsars” and the heirs of the Emperors of New Rome, being in fact the Emperors
of the Third Rome. For Rome, according to this theory, had not in fact
fallen, but had been revived – or rather, translated: just as St. Constantine
had translated the Empire from Old Rome to the New Rome of Constantinople in
the fourth century, so in the fifteenth century God had translated the Empire
from New Rome to the Third Rome, Russia. As Elder Philotheus of Pskov said to
Grand Prince Basil III: “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.”
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 [Romejskoe] kingdom is
indestructible, for the Lord was enrolled into the Roman [Rimskuiu]
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 [Romejskoe] kingdom’, whose successor was now
Rus’, and Roman [Rimskoj] power, which had gone into the past.”[176]
Nevertheless, even if the idea that Roman [Romejskoe] 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."[177]
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, and to the degree that, 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”[178],
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.
Moreover, Russia remained a nation-state with a predominantly Russian or
Russian-Ukrainian-Belorussian population throughout its extraordinary expansion
from the core principality of Muscovy, whose territory in 1462 was 24,000
square kilometres, to the multi-national empire of Petersburg Russia, whose
territory in 1914 was 13.5 million square kilometres.[179]
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”)[180].
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.[181] 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 Byzantine Church and Empire
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 this betrayal, 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. He stressed 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”.[182]
Since the Russian Great Prince was now the only independent Orthodox
ruler[183], 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). [184] 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”.[185] And
St. Jonah wrote to Prince Alexander of Kiev that Basil was imitating his
“ancestors” – the holy Emperor Constantine and the Great-Prince Vladimir.[186] 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.[187]
Ivan himself indicated that in marrying Sophia he had united Muscovite
Russia with Byzantium by uniting two coats of arms – the two-headed eagle of
Byzantium with the image of St. George piercing the dragon with his spear. From
now on the two-headed eagle became the Russian coat of arms with the image of
St. George in the centre of it, as it were in its breast.[188]
However, there were many weighty reasons militating against the Great
Prince assuming the title of Tsar 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.[189] 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 that 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 and 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, ruled 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…”[190]
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.”[191]
At about the same time the same theme was eagerly taken up by
Metropolitan Zosima, who was later condemned as Judaiser. Ya.S. Lourié
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…”[192]
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.”[193]
However, thus far Moscow was only an embryonic Third Rome: several tasks
needed to be carried out before the embryo could become a fully adult 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 in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries until the
“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.[194] 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 the heresy of the
Judaisers. 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 propelled the Khazars westwards towards
what is now Belorussia and Poland, where they were joined, at the beginning of
the sixteenth century, by large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution
in Italy, Provence and Germany.[195] From
this time the Jewish community in Poland and the Russian territories under
Polish dominion in Ukraine and Belorussia began to multiply rapidly…
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."[196]
The Russian princes placed restrictions on the Jews and their
money-lending practices. Vladimir Monomakh even expelled them. 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.” [197]
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."[198]
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.[199]
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[200] 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."[201]
A.P. Dobroklonsky continues the story: “Under his [Zosima’s] protection
the heretics in Moscow began to act more boldly. Priest Dionysius supposedly
even allowed himself to dance behind the altar and mock the cross; a circle of
the more active heretics gathered at the house of Theodore Kurytsyn. Many
heretics, on hearing that their comrades were living peacefully in Moscow, fled
there from Novgorod; Gennadius was suspected of heterodoxy: the metropolitan
demanded a confession of faith from him; the monk Zakhar spread leaflets
against him everywhere. In Novgorod itself the heretics, hoping for impunity,
again began to blaspheme openly. Gennadius considered it necessary to write
epistles to Metropolitan Zosimas, to Archbishop Tikhon of Rostov, and to the
bishops: Bassian of Tver, Niphon of Suzdal, Prochorus of Sarsk and Philotheus
of Perm. He tried to persuade them to review the question of the heretics in
council and take decisive measures against them: to execute, burn, hang and
curse them. In 1490 a council did indeed take place, but without the
participation of Gennadius. At it several heretics were accused of spreading
Judaism and of trying to destroy Orthodox Christianity, of celebrating Pascha
in the Jewish style, of breaking the weekly fasts, of celebrating the Liturgy
after receiving food and drink, etc. They were cursed, defrocked and
imprisoned. Some of them, on the orders of the Great Prince, were sent to
Gennadius in Novgorod. He ordered them to be met 40 versts from the city, to be
clothed in garments turned inside-out and to be seated on pack-horses with
their faces turned to the tail. Pointed birch-bark helmets were put on their
heads with bast brushes and straw crowns with the inscription: ‘this is the
army of Satan’. In such a form they were led into the city; those who met them,
on the orders of the bishop, spat on them and said: ‘these are the enemies of
God and Christian blasphemers’. Then the helmets on their heads were burned.
All this was done with the aim of frightening the heretics and cautioning the
Orthodox.
“But the triumph of Orthodoxy was short-lived and not complete. The
cruder and more ignorant of the heretics were punished, those who allowed
themselves openly to mock the Orthodox holy things; but the intelligentsia,
which had power in the heretical party, was not touched: Zosima remained on the
metropolitan see, Theodore Kuritsyn and Helena reigned in society and at the
court, the brother of Kuritsyn Ivan the wolf, Klenov and others acted as before
in Moscow. Therefore the heretical movement was bound to appear again even
after the Council of 1490. One chance circumstance strengthened this movement.
In the 15th century there was a widespread opinion in Russia and
Greece that with the end of the seventh thousand of years (from the creation of
the world) there would come the end of the world and the Coming of Jesus
Christ. The Paschalia we had at the time ended at the year 7000, after which
there was the addition: ‘Here is fear, here is sorrow; this year has at last
appeared and in it we expect Thy universal Coming’. This year fell in 1492
(from the Birth of Christ). But then, contrary to the universal expectation,
1492 passed without incident, and the end of the world did not follow. The
heretics began to laugh at them and say: ‘7000 years have passed, and your
Paschalia has passed; why has Christ not appeared? That means the writings both
of your Apostles and of your Fathers, which (supposedly) announced the glorious
Coming of Christ after 7000 years are false’. A great ‘disturbance among the
Christians’ appeared, as well as a critical attitude towards the patristic and
sacred literature and ‘many departed from Orthodoxy’. Thus the heresy was again
strengthened; the blasphemous scenes were repeated. Metropolitan Zosima himself
supposedly mocked the crosses and icons, blasphemed Jesus Christ, led a
debauched life and even openly denied life after death. Those Orthodox who
reproached him he excommunicated from Holy Communion, defrocked, and even, by
means of slander, obtained their detention in monasteries and prisons.
Archbishop Gennadius, seeing that his practical activity in the former spirit
was bearing little fruit, started writing. He composed the paschalia for 70
years into the eighth thousand, showing in a foreword that the former opinions
concerning the end of the world and the method of calculating the paschalia
were baseless. Then he devoted his efforts to collecting the sacred books into
one Bible, so as to give the Orthodox the necessary means of struggling with
heresy and protecting the Orthodox faith that had been lacking for many. Into
the arena of active struggle with the Judaizers there stepped St. Joseph of
Volokolamsk. In his epistle to Niphon of Suzdal, a very influential bishop of
the time (1493), he told him about the licentious behaviour and apostasy from
the faith of Metropolitan Zosima, about the bad religio-moral condition of
Orthodox society, and asked him to overthrow Zosima and save the Russian
Church.[202]
At about this time he gave his final edition to his fist sermons against the
Judaizers and, prefacing them with a history of the heresy to 1490, he
published them in a special book for general use; in it he also did not spare
Metropolitan Zosima, calling him a Judas-traitor, a forerunner of the
Antichrist, a first-born son of Satan, etc. Zosima was forced to abandon his
see and depart into retirement (1494). His place was taken (1495) by Simon,
abbot of the Trinity-St. Sergius monastery, an indecisive and compromising man,
albeit disposed against the heretics. Under the protection of Theodore Kuritsyn
and Helena the heretics were able to act boldly. They wanted to organize a
heretical community in Novgorod as well as in Moscow; on their insistence the
tsar appointed Cassian, a supporter of the Judaizers, as archimandrite of the
Novgorod Yuriev monastery. With his arrival the heretical movement was
strengthened in Novgorod, and the Yuriev monastery became the centre and den of
the heretics: here they held meetings, here they acted in an extremely
blasphemous manner. Gennadius could do nothing with the heretics, who were
supported in Moscow. Their triumph was aided by the fact that after the open
plot against the tsar’s grandsom, Demetrius Ivanovich, the son of Helena, he
was declared the heir to the throne and married to a Great Princess. In this
way Helena’s party, which protected the heretics, became still stronger.
However, from 1499 a turn-around began to take place. Several supporters of
Helena were executed; instead of Demetrius, the grandson, Basil, the son, was
declared heir to the throne (1502); Helena and Demetrius were imprisoned. The
blow delivered to them was at the same time a heavy blow to the heretics. Now
it was easier to persuade Ivan III to take decisive measures against them.
Joseph of Volokolamsk tried to do this. After the Council of 1503 he several
times talked with the tsar and directly said: ‘Your majesty, move against the
heretics’; but he did not succeed in persuading him. The tsar was fearful of
committing a sin in executing the heretics, although he did promise to conduct
a search through all the cities. In 1504 Joseph wrote a letter to the tsar’s
spiritual father, Metrophanes, archimandrite of the Andronikov monastery,
asking him to exert influence on the tsar… In December, 1504 a Council did
convene in Moscow. Present were Ivan III, Basil Ivanovich, Metropolitan Simon,
the bishops and many clergy. Joseph spoke out against the heretics. The guilty
ones were sentenced to various punishments. Some were burned in cages in Moscow
(Ivan the wolf and others); others had their tongues cut out and were exiled to
Novgorod where they were burned (together with Archimandrite Cassian); others,
finally, were dispersed to various monastery prisons. The executions frightened
the heretics. Many of them began to repent in order to receive clemency.
Prince-Monk Bassian Patrikeev and the White Lake elders interceded for them,
saying that it was necessary to receive repentant heretics into communion with
the Church. But their repentance seemed insincere to Joseph; he thought it was
necessary to keep the repentant heretics in prison and not allow them to
receive Communion and communion with the Church; he expressed this view in his
epistles and the last sermons of The Enlightener. In his private letters
to Basil Ivanovich, who had taken the place of his father (1505), he demanded
that searches for the heretics should contine and that they should be severely
punished. An impassioned literary struggle began between the Josephites and the
White Lake elders, which was expressed in works composed on both sides,
especially by Joseph and Bassian Patrikeev. Bassian was so embittered that he
called Joseph a misanthrope, a teacher of lawlessness and a breaker of the law
of God, and those of the Judaizers who had been subjected to execution in spite
of their late repentance, he glorified as martyrs. However, Joseph’s views
prevailed. Basil Ivanovich ‘ordered that all the heretics should be cast into
prison and kept there without coming out until the end of their lives’. On the
death of Joseph (1515), the Judaizers for a time revived. Isaac the Jew seduced
and drew away the Orthodox, so that in about 1520 a special Council was
convened, Maximus the Greek wrote his ‘advice’ to the Fathers of this Council
that they should move with zeal for Orthodox and give Isaac over to be
executed. Joseph’s disciple Daniel [the future metropolitan] and Maximus the Greek
considered it necessary to write works against the remnants of the heresy…”[203]
This episode represents perhaps the only clear-cut case in Orthodox
history when heretics have been executed precisely for their heresy. There is
no doubt that the predominant tradition in the Orthodox Church with regard to
the treatment of heretics was represented here by the White Lake Elders,
especially St. Nilus of Sora, and not by St. Joseph of Volokolamsk. Some have
speculated that such harshness betrayed the influence of the contemporary
Spanish Inquisition, which was also directed primarily at Judaizing heretics.
Be that as it may, it should be remembered that: (i) the death penalty for
heresy was on the statute books of both the Byzantine and Russian empires[204], (ii)
the Judaizing heresy represented a most serious threat to both the Church and
the State of Moscow.
Possessors and
Non-Possessors
The immediate result of the Judaising heresy was a major increase in the
Great Prince’s power and in the Church’s reliance on the State. 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.[205]
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 must preserve everything
that is subject to his power from all harm, both spiritual and bodily”.[206]
According to St. Joseph, as M.V. 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.[207] 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.”[208]
St. Joseph was far from ascribing absolute power to the tsar, as 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.”[209]
However, his theory of Church-State relations lays great responsibility on the
tsar as the representative of God on earth, and less emphasis on the bishop’s
duty to reprove an erring tsar.
An attempt to restore the balance was made at the Council of 1503, in
which the debate on the Judaizers led
naturally to the problem of the monasteries’ landed estates; for one of the
reasons for the popularity of the heretics was the perceived justice of their
criticisms of monasticism, and in particular of the wealth of the monasteries.
St. Joseph defended this wealth, claiming that it was necessary in order to
support the poor and the Great Prince and the education of the clergy. However,
Monk-Prince Bassian Patrikiev and the hermit St. Nilus of Sora, preached the
monastic ideal of non-possessiveness. Moreover, 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.”[210] The
debate between the so-called “possessors” and “non-possessors” was therefore
also a debate about the relationship between the Church and the State. And
insofar as the non-possessors favoured greater independence for the Church,
they also argued that the Church, and not the State, should punish the Judaizer
heretics – which would mean less severe sentences for them in accordance with
the Orthodox tradition of non-violence in the treatment of heretics.
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.”[211]
In spite of the differences between Saints Joseph and Nilus, it must be
remembered that they were both canonised by the Church, and were therefore, in
Lebedev’s phrase, “brothers in spirit”.[212]
St. Maximus the Greek
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…”[213]
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).
St. Maximus immediately rebuked the Great Prince. He 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.”[214]
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.”[215]
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…
Hieromonk
Gregory (Lourié) 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…”[216] 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 have seen and will see in more detail later, caesaropapism was
by no means the rule in the Russian Church even in the reign of Ivan the
Terrible. 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 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. It was only in September, 1562 that Ivan received a gramota
from the Patriarch calling 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. 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 (‘Hundred Chapters’)
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…”[217]
All this went
with a 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. Lourié 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’.[218]
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.”[219]
“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).”[220]
Ivan the Terrible: (2) The Bloodthirsty
Tyrant
The
tsar started putting this programme into effect in the decade 1547-1556, when
he convened his Zemskie Sobory. This 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. This marked the beginning of one of the sharpest
changes in Russian history…
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 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”.[221]
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. 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’.”[222]
Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that sixteenth-century Russia was in
many ways a less free State than in the 11th or 14th
centuries. The reason lay in the task imposed by Divine Providence on Russia of
defending the last independent outpost of Orthodoxy in the world, which
required, in the context of the threat posed by Counter-Reformation
Catholicism, an ever-increasing centralisation and militarisation of society,
and therefore great sacrifices from all classes of the population. “The
particularity of Ivan the Terrible’s ideological position,” writes Ya. S.
Lourié, “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…”[223]
Although at least some of the boyars certainly did not fit into Ivan’s
conception of his State, it is not true that the boyar class wanted to abolish
the autocracy. For, as Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes, “Russia without the Tsar
was inconceivable to it; the Tsar was even necessary to it (otherwise
the princes would simple have fought against each other, as in the time of the
appanage wars). The boyar opposition attained a relative independence, as it
were autonomy, and, of course, it was not against ruling the Tsars, but this
could never be fully realised because of the inevitable and constant quarrels
within the princely boyar or court opposition itself, which consisted of
various grouping around the most powerful families, which were doomed to an
absence of unity because of the love of power and avarice of each of them.
One can say that the princely-courtly opposition from time immemorial tried to
weaken (and did weaken, did shake!) the Autocracy, while at the same time
unfailingly wanting to preserve it! A shaky and inconsistent position…”[224]
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!”[225]
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.[226]
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. The prince’s power was
greatly increased by his conquest of Novgorod in 1478 and his appropriation of
all the land of the local aristocratic and merchant elites. But the really
staggering increase in his power came in the 1550s-1560s, when the vast lands
of the former Kazan and Astrakhan khanates 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!”[227] 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 are 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 land is Manichaeism, according to Ivan; for the Manichaeans taught
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!”[228] 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”.[229]
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.[230]
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.”[231]
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.”[232]
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…”[233]
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 in the end to the Russian revolution… 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…”[234]
Moreover, while we have asserted that Ivan
was true ruler, it must be admitted that his theory (and still more his
practice) of government contained absolutist elements which were closer to the
theories of Protestant Reformers such as Luther and contemporary Protestant
monarchs such as Elizabeth I of England than to Orthodoxy. In fact, the
nineteenth-century Slavophile Ivan Kireevsky went so far as to call him a
heretic, and attributed to his heretical view of Church-State relations all the
woes of the later part of his reign: “The terrible one acted in a restrictive
manner because he was a heretic; this is proved… by his striving to
place Byzantinism [i.e. the absolutist ideas of some Byzantine emperors and
canonists] in a position of equal dignity with Orthodoxy. From this there came
the oprichnina as a striving towards state heresy and ecclesiastical
power. And that this concept of the limits or, more correctly, the lack of
limits of his power and of its lack of connection with the people was not
Christian, but heretical is witnessed publicly to this day by the holy relics
of Metropolitan Philip.”[235]
St. Philip was the one man who, together with the fools-for-Christ Basil
the Blessed and Nicholas Salos, did oppose the unrighteousness of the
tsar. His ideas about the nature of tsarist power did not differ substantially
from those of his predecessors, and especially St. Joseph of Volotsk. 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
Saints 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.[236]
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.”[237] 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.” [238]
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.” And 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?…”[239]
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 than 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 having 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 after his
refusal to bless his expedition against Novgorod. 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…
Was
Ivan Orthodox?
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.”[240]
If there was indeed something of eastern absolutism as well as purely
Orthodox autocracy in Ivan’s rule, then this would explain, not only the cruelties
of his own reign, but also 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…
Ivan rejected this service 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.[241]
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. Indeed, Lebedev calls the latter part of his reign
“not a struggle with rebellion, but the affirmation of his permission
to do everything. So we are concerned here not with the affirmation of the
Orthodox Autocracy of the Russian Tsars, but with a prefiguring of the
authority of the Antichrist.”[242]
In view of contemporary efforts from the right wing of the Moscow
Patriarchate to canonize Tsar Ivan, let us dwell a little longer on this aspect
of his reign, borrowing at length from the work in this area of Bishop
Dionysius (Alferov): “The reign of Ivan the Terrible is divided by historians,
following his contemporaries, into two period. The first period (1547-1560) is
evaluated positively by everyone. After his coronation and acceptance of the
title of Tsar, and after his repentance for his aimless youth in subjecting his
life to the rules of Orthodoxy piety, Ioann IV appears as an exemplary Christian
Sovereign. He convened the first Zemskie Sobory in the 1550s, kept
counsel with the best me of the Russian Land, united the nation’s forces,
improved the interior administration, economy, justice system and army.
Together with Metropolitan Macarius he also presided at Church Councils, which
introduced order into Church life. Under the influence of his spiritual father,
Protopriest Sylvester, he repented deeply for the sins of his youth, and lived
in the fear of God and in the Church, building a pious family together with his
wife Anastasia Romanova. The enlivening of piety and the consolidation of the
people also brought external successes to the Russian state in this period. By
the good will of God the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan were crushed, and the
Crimean khanate was pacified for the time being. The whole of the Volga region
from Kazan to the Caspian and a part of the Northern Caucasus went to Moscow.
Under the blows of the Russian armies the Livonian Order in the Baltic was
crushed. A positive estaimate of this period does not elicit disagreement among
historians.
“The second period begins after the expulsion of his spiritual father,
Protopriest Sylvester and close friends of the Tsar, who were united into the
‘Chosen Assembly’ (the Adashevs, Prince Kurbsky and others). This period
finally becomes well established by 1564, with the proclamation of the oprichnina.
After the oprichnina’s great terror (1564-1572), the system of
government created in this period, albeit in a ‘weakly flowing regime’,
continued right to the death of the Terrible one in March, 1584. The negative
consequences of this period completely blot out the attainments of the first
period. All historians also agree on this. Let us note the main results of this
period:
“1. The liquidation of elementary justice and legality, mass repressions
without trial or investigation of the suspects, and also of their relatives and
house servants, of whole cities. The encouragement of denunciations created a
whole system of mass terror and intimidation of people.
“2. The destruction of national unity through an artificial division of
the country into two parts (the zemschina and the oprichnina,
then the system of ‘the Sovereign’s Court’) and the stirring up of enmity
between them.
“3. The destruction of the popular economy by means of the oprichnina’s
depradations and the instilling of terror, the mass flight of people from
Russia to Lithuania and to the borderlands. A great devastation of the central
provinces of Russia, a sharp decline in the population (according to
Skrynnikov’s date, from 8 to 5 million).
“4. Massive repressions against the servants of the Church who spoke out
against the oprichnina or those suspected of it, beginning with the
killing of Metropolitan Philip and individual bishops (of Novgorod and Tver),
and continuing with the executions of prominent church-servers (St. Cornelius
of Pechersk), and ending with the massive slaughter of the clergy in certain
cities (Novgorod, Tver, Torzhok, Volochek) and the expoliation of the churches.
“5. As a consequence of the internal ravaging of the state – external
defeats, both military and diplomatic: the complete loss of the conquests in
Lithuania and the outlet to the Baltic se, the loss of possessions in the
Caucasus, international isolation, incapacity to defend even Moscow from the
incursions of the Crimean Tatars.
“All historians agree that the Terrible one left Russia after his death
in an extremely sorry state: an economically ruined and devastated country,
with its population reduced by one-and-a-half times, frightened and
demoralised. But this does not exhaust the woes caused to Russia by the
Terrible one. Perhaps the most tragic consequences of his reign consisted in
the fact that he to a great extent prepared the ground for the Time of
Troubles, which exploded 17 years after his death and placed the Russian state
on the edge of complete annihilation. This was expressed concretely in the
following.
“1. A dynastic crisis – the destruction by the Terrible one of
his closest relatives, the representatives of the Moscow house of the Riuriks.
First of all this concerned the assassination of his cousin, Prince Vladimir
Andreevich Staritsky with his mother, wife and children, and also with almost
all his servants and many people close to him (in 1569). This was not execution
following an investigation and trial, but precisely the repression of innocent
people (some were poisoned, others were suffocated with smoke), carried out
only out of suspicion and arbitrariness. Then it is necessary to note the
killing of his son Ivan, the heir to the throne….
“Thus Ivan the Terrible undoubtedly hewed down the dynasty with his own
hands, destroying his son, grandson and cousin with all his house, and thereby
prepared a dynastic crisis, which made itself sharply felt during the Time of
Troubles.
“2. The oprichnina and the consequent politics of ‘the
Sovereign’s Court’ greatly reduced the aristocracy and the service class.
Under the axe of repressions there fell the best people morally speaking, the
honourable, principled and independent in their judgements and behaviour, who
were distinguished by their capabilities, and for that reason were seen as
being potentially dangerous. Instead of them intriguers, careerists and
informants were promoted, unprincipled and dishonourable time-servers. It was
the Terrible one who nourished such people in his nearest entourage, people
like Boris Godunov, Basil Shuisky, Bogdan Belsky, Ivan Mstislavsky and other
leaders in the Time of Troubles, who were sufficiently clever to indulge in
behind-the-scenes intrigues and ‘under the carpet struggle”, but who absolutely
did not want to serve God and the fatherland, and for that reason were
incapable of uniting the national forces and earning the trust of the people.
“The moral rottenness of the boyars, their class and personal desires
and their unscrupulousness are counted by historians as among the main causes
of the Troubles. But the Moscow boyars had not always been like that. On the
contrary, the Moscow boyars nourished by Kalita worked together with him to
gather the Russian lands, perished in the ranks of the army of Demetrius
Donskoj on Kulikovo polje, saved Basil the Dark in the troubles caused by
Shemyaka, went on the expeditions of Ivan III and Basil III. It was the
Terrible one who carried out a general purge in the ranks of the aristocracy,
and the results of this purge could not fail to be felt in the Troubles.
“3. The Terrible one’s repressions against honourable servers of the
Church, especially against Metropolitan Philip, weakened the Russian
Church, drowned in its representatives the voice of truth and a moral
evaluation of what was happening. After the holy hierarch Philip, none of the
Moscow metropolitans dared to intercede for the persecuted. ‘Sucking up’ to
unrighteousness on the part of the hierarchs of course lowered their authority
in the eyes of the people, this gave the pretenders the opportunity to
introduce their undermining propaganda more successfully in the people.
“We should note here that the defenders of the Terrible one deny his
involvement in the killing of Metropolitan Philip in a rather naïve way:
no written order, they say, has been discovered. Of course, the first hierarch
of the Russian Church, who was beloved by the people for his righteous life,
was not the kind of person whom even the Terrible tsar would dare to execute
just like that on the square. But many of the Terrible one’s victims were
destroyed by him by means of secret assassinations (as, for example, the family
of the same Vladimir Andreyevich). It is reliably known that the holy hierarch
Philip reproved the Terrible one for his cruelties not only in private, but
also, finally, in public, and that the latter began to look for false witnesses
against him. By means of bribes, threats and deceit he succeeded in involving
Abbot Paisius of Solovki (a disciple of St. Philip) and some of the hierarchs
in this. Materials have been preserved relating to this ‘Council of 1568, the
most shameful in the history of the Russian Church’ (in the expression of
Professor Kartashev), which condemned its own chief hierarch. The majority of
the bishops did not decide to support the slanderers, but they also feared to
defend the holy hierarch – and simply kept silent. During the Liturgy the
oprichniki on the tsar’s orders seized the holy confessor, tore off his
vestments, beat him up and took him away to prison. At the same time almost all
the numerous relatives of St. Philip, the Kolychev boyars, were killed. They
cast the amputated head of the hierarch’s favourite nephew into his cell. A
year later, the legendary Maliuta came to the imprisoned Philip in the Otroch
monastery, and the holy hierarch just died suddenly in his arm – the contemporary
lovers of the oprichnina force us to believe in this fairy-tale!
“Detailed material on this subject were collected in the book of
Professor Fedotov, The Holy Hierarch Philip, Metropolitan of Moscow.
Those descendants who lived nearest to those times also well remembered who was
the main perpetrator of the death of St. Philip. For that reason Tsar Alexis
Mikhailovich transferred the relics of the hieromartyr to Moscow, and wrote a
penitent letter to him as if he were alive, asking forgiveness for the sin of
his predecessor Ivan the Terrible (in imitation of the Emperor Theodosius the
Younger, who repented for the sin of his mother, the Empress Eudoxia, against
St. John Chrysostom). Therefore the apologists of the Terrible one, in denying
his guilt against St. Philip, simply reject the tradition of the
whole Russian Church as
established in documents.
“Besides St. Philip, on the orders of the Terrible during the
devastation of Novgorod, one of those who envied and slandered St. Philip, Archbishop
Pimen was killed. And if contemporary ‘oprichniki’ consider it to the
credit of the Terrible one that he dealt with the false witnesses in the affair
of the holy hierarch, then let them remember that a timely ‘clean-up’ of
witnesses and agents who have done their work is a common phenomenon in the
course of large-scale repressions. Only it not a work of God. The unknown
author of the Tale of the Devastation of Novgorod tells us that on the
orders of the Terrible one up to three hundred abbots, hieromonks, priests and
deacons in Novgorod itself and its environs, monasteries and villages were
killed. Several tens of Church servers were killed in each of the cities of
Tver, Torzhok, Volokolamsk and other places. One can argue about the accuracy
of the numbers of victims cited, but one cannot doubt that the clergy
slaughtered during the reign of the Terrible one numbered at least in the tens,
but more likely in the hundreds. There is every reason to speak about a
persecution of the clergy and the Church on the part of the Terrible one.
The holy hierarch Philip and St. Cornelisu of Pskov-Pechersk are only the
leaders of a whole host of hieromartyrs, passion-bearers and confessors of that
time. It is those whose glorification it is worth thinking about!
“4. Finally, the Terrible one’s epoch shook the moral supports of the
simple people, and undermined its healthy consciousness of right. Open
theft and reprisals without trial or investigation, carried out in the name of
the Sovereign on any one who was suspect, gave a very bad example, unleashing
the base passions of envy, revenge and baseness. Participation in denunciations
and cooperation in false witnesses involved very many in the sins of the oprichnina.
Constant refined tortures and public executions taught people cruelty and
inured them to compassion and mercy. Everyday animal fear for one’s life, a
striving to survive at any cost, albeit at the cost of righteousness and
conscience, at the cost of the good of one’s neighbours, turned those who survived
into pitiful slaves, ready for any baseness. The enmity stirred up between the zemschina
and the oprichnina, between ‘the Sovereign’s people’ and ‘the rebels’,
undermined the feeling of popular unity among Russian people, sowing resentment
and mistrust. The incitement of hatred for the boyars, who were identified with
traitors, kindled class war. Let us add to this that the reign of the Terrible
one, having laid waste to the country, tore many people away from their roots,
deprived them of their house and land and turned them into thieves, into what
Marxist language would call ‘declassified elements’. Robbed and embittered
against the whole world, they were turned aside into robber bands and filled up
the Cossack gangs on the border-lands of Russia. These were ready-made reserves
for the armies of any pretenders and rebels.
“And so, if we compare all this with the Leninist teaching on the
preparation of revolution, we see a striking resemblance. The Terrible one did
truly do everything so that ‘the uppers could not, and lowers would not’ live
in a human way. The ground for civil war and the great Trouble had therefore
been completely prepared…”[243]
The Moscow Patriarchate
“After the horrors of the reign of Ivan IV,” writes Protopriest Lev
Lebedev, “a complete contrast is represented by the soft, kind rule of his son,
Theodore Ivanovich. In Russia there suddenly came as it were complete silence…
However, the silence of the reign of Theodore Ivanovich was external and
deceptive; it could more accurately be called merely a lull before a new
storm. For that which had taken place during the Oprichnina could not simply
disappear: it was bound to have the most terrible consequences.”[244]
But this lull contained some very important events. One was the crowning
of Theodore according to the full Byzantine rite, followed by his communion in
both kinds in the altar. This established the Russian Tsars as the Emperors of
the Third Rome, which status, as we shall see, was confirmed publicly by the
Ecumenical Patriarch himself.
No less important was the raising of the metropolitanate of Moscow
raised to patriarchal status with the blessing of the Eastern.
There was good reason for such a step. As A.P. Dobroklonsky writes, “the
Moscow metropolitan see stood very tall. Its riches and the riches of the
Moscow State stimulated the Eastern Patriarchs – not excluding the Patriarch of
Constantinople himself – to appeal to it for alms. The boundaries of the Moscow
metropolitanate were broader than the restricted boundaries of any of the
Eastern Patriarchates (if we exclude from the Constantinopolitan the Russian
metropolitan see, which was part of it); the court of the Moscow metropolitan
was just as great as that of the sovereign. The Moscow metropolitan was freer
in the manifestation of his ecclesiastical rights than the Patriarchs of the
East, who were restricted at every step. Under the protection of the Orthodox
sovereigns the metropolitan see in Moscow stood more firmly and securely than
the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, which had become a plaything in the hands
of the sultan or vizier. The power of the Moscow metropolitan was in reality
not a whit less than that of the
patriarchate: he ruled the bishops, called himself their ‘father, pastor,
comforter and head, under the power and in the will of whom they are the
Vladykas of the whole Russian land’. Already in the 15th century,
with the agreement of the Constantinopolitan Patriarch, he had been elected in
Rus’ without the knowledge or blessing of the Patriarch; the Russian metropolia
had already ceased hierarchical relations with the patriarchal see. If there
remained any dependence of the Moscow metropolitan on the patriarch, it was
only nominal, since the Russian metropolia was still counted as belonging to
the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate…”[245]
Not only was the Moscow metropolia a de facto patriarchate
already: its exaltation would simultaneously raise the status of the Russian
Autocracy, whose prosperity was vital for the survival, not only of Russian
Orthodoxy, but of Greek, Balkan and Georgian Orthodoxy, too. 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.”[246]
Because of her internal and external troubles, Russia was not able to
offer significant military aid to Georgia for some time. And so “in 1617,”
writes Dobroklonsky, “Georgia was again subjected to destruction from the
Persians: the churches were devastated, the land was ravaged. Therefore in 1619
Teimuraz, king of Kakhetia, Imeretia and Kartalinia, accepted Russian citizenship,
and Persia was restrained from war by peaceful negotiations. But the peace was
not stable. In 1634 the Persian Shah placed the Crown Prince Rostom on the
throne of Kartalinia. He accepted Islam, and began to drive the Orthodox out of
Kartalinia. The renewal of raids on Georgia had a disturbing effect on
ecclesiastical affairs there, so that in 1637 an archimandrite, two priests and
two icon-painters with a craftsman and materials for the construction of
churches were sent from Moscow ‘to review and correct the peasants’ faith’. And
in 1650 Prince Alexander of Imeretia and in 1658 Teimuraz of Kakhetia renewed
their oath of allegiance to the Russian Tsar. Nevertheless, even after this the
woes continued. Many Georgians, restricted by the Muslims in their homeland,
fled to Russia and there found refuge. But Georgia did not receive any real
help from Russia throughout this period.
“As regard the Orthodox Greeks who were suffering under the
Turkish yoke, Russia gave them generous material assistance, and sometimes
tried to ease the yoke of the Turkish government that was weighing on them…”[247]
All this demonstrated that the Russian tsar and patriarch were now in
essentially the same relationship with the Eastern Orthodox Christians as the
Constantinopolitan emperors and patriarchs had been centuries before, and that
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.
In 1586 talks began with Patriarch Joachim of Antioch, who had arrived
in Moscow. He promised to discuss the question of the status of the Russian
Church with his fellow patriarchs. Then, in 1588, the Ecumenical Patriarch
Jeremiah II (Trallas) came to Moscow on an alms-raising trip.[248]
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.[249]
Later, he politely but firmly rejected the confession of the Lutheran Church in
a dialogue with Augsburg.[250]
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.
It was the desperate situation of the Orthodox in Western Russia that
made the exaltation of the Muscovite see still more timely. In 1596 the
Orthodox hierarchs in the region had signed the unia of Brest-Litovsk with the
Roman Catholics (see below). It was now obvious that Divine Providence had
singled out the Church and State 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 in the eyes of all the Orthodox.
Patriarch Jeremiah understood this. And in agreeing to the tsar’s
request for a patriarchate of Moscow, he showed that he understood that in
having a Patriarch at his side, the status of the Tsar, too, would be exalted:
“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.”[251]
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."[252]
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.
And so on January 26, 1589 Patriarch Jeremiah raised Metropolitan Job to
the rank of Patriarch of Moscow in the Dormition cathedral in the Kremlin. 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
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 abolished by Peter the Great and replaced – with the blessing
of the Eastern Patriarchs – by a “Holy Governing Synod”.
Nevertheless, the elevation of the head of the Russian Church to the
rank of patriarch was to prove beneficial now, in the early seventeenth
century, when the Autocracy in Russia had been shaken to its foundations and
the patriarchs had taken 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, waiting
for the time when it could restore political power into the hands of the
anointed tsars.
Poles, Ñossacks and Jews
However, at this point, just as the Russian State was beginning to
recover its former strength, it came into contact again with the Jews…
Persecutions in Western Europe had gradually pushed the Ashkenazi Jews
further and further east, until they arrived in Poland. Norman Cantor writes:
“The Polish king and nobility held vast lands and ruled millions of newly
enserfed [Russian] peasants and could make varied use of the Jews. Hence the
Jews were welcomed into Poland in the sixteenth century from Germany and
Western Europe. Even Jews exiled from Spain in 1492 and those tired of the
ghettos of northern Italy under the oppressive eye of the papacy found their
way to Poland. Its green, fruitful, and underpopulated land seemed wonderful to
the Jews.
“By the end of the sixteenth century Poland was being hailed as the new
golden land of the Jews…”[253]
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[254]; 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.”[255]
Cantor, though a Jew himself, writes that “the Ukrainians had a right to
resent the Jews, if not to kill them. The Jews were the immediate instrument of
the Ukrainians’ subjection and degradation. The Halakic rabbis never considered
the Jewish role in oppression of the Ukrainian peasants in relation to the
Hebrew prophets’ ideas of social justice. Isaiah and Amos were dead texts from
the past in rabbinical mentality.
“Or perhaps the Jews were so moved by racist contempt for the Ukrainian
and Polish peasantry as to regard them as subhuman and unworthy of
consideration under biblical categories of justice and humanity…”[256]
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.”[257]
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.[258]
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.[259] 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.[260]
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[261],
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.[262] 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.[263]
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
until a part of the Ukraine came under the dominion of Moscow in 1654 as a
result of the victories of Bogdan Chmielnicki and his Cossack armies.
“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 Orthodox, 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.”[264]
Platonov writes: “All the persecutions against the Orthodox in the West
Russian lands were carried out by the Jews and the Catholics together. Having
given the Russian churches into the hands of the Jews who were close to them in
spirit, the Polish aristocracy laughingly watched as the defilement of
Christian holy things was carried out by the Jews. The Catholic priests and
uniates even incited the Jews to do this, calculating in this way to turn the
Russians away from Orthodoxy.
“As Archbishop Philaret recounts: ‘Those churches whose parishioners
could by converted to the unia by no kind of violence were leased to the Jews:
the keys of the churches and bell-towers passed into their hands. If it was
necessary to carry out a Church need, then one had to go and trade with the
Jew, for whom gold was an idol and the faith of Christ the object of spiteful
mockery and profanation. One had to pay up to five talers for each liturgy, and
the same for baptism and burial. The uniate received paschal bread wherever and
however he wanted it, while the Orthodox could not bake it himself or buy it in
any other way than from a Jew at Jewish rates. The Jews would make a mark with
coal on the prosphoras bought for commemorating the living or the dead. Only
then could it be accepted for the altar.’”[265]
Especially notorious as a persecutor of the Orthodox was the uniate
Bishop Joasaph Kuntsevich of Polotsk.
Lev Sapega, the head of the Great Principality of Lithuania, wrote to
Kuntsevich on the Polish king’s behalf: “I admit, that I, too, was concerned
about the cause of the Unia and that it would be imprudent to abandon it. But
it had never occurred to me that your Eminence would implement it using such
violent measures… You say that you are ‘free to drown the infidels [i.e. the
Orthodox who rejected the Unia], to chop their heads off’, etc. Not so! The
Lord’s commandment expresses a strict prohibition to all, which concerns you
also. When you violated human consciences, closed churches so that people should
perish like infidels without divine services, without Christian rites and
sacraments; when you abused the King’s favours and privileges – you managed
without us. But when there is a need to suppress seditions caused by your
excesses you want us to cover up for you… As to the dangers that threaten your
life, one may say that everyone is the cause of his own misfortune. Stop making
trouble, do not subject us to the general hatred of the people and you yourself
to obvious danger and general criticism… Everywhere one hears people grumbling
that you do not have any worthy priests, but only blind ones… Your ignorant
priests are the bane of the people… But tell me, your Eminence, whom did you
win over, whom did you attract through your severity?… It will turn out that in
Polotsk itself you have lost even those who until now were obedient to you. You
have turned sheep into goats, you have plunged the state into danger, and maybe
all of us Catholics – into ruin… It has been rumoured that they (the Orthodox)
would rather be under the infidel Turk than endure such violence… You yourself
are the cause of their rebellion. Instead of joy, your notorious Unia has
brought us only troubles and discords and has become so loathsome that we would
rather be without it!”[266]
On May 22, 1620, local people gathered at the Trinity monastery near
Polotsk to express their indignation at Kuntsevich’s cruelty. “These people
suffered a terrible fate: an armed crowed of uniates surrounded the monastery
and set it on fire. As the fire was raging and destroying the monastery and
burning alive everyone within its walls, Joasaphat Kuntsevich was performing on
a nearby hill a thanksgiving service accompanied by the cries of the victims of
the fire…”[267]
In 1623 Kuntsevich was killed by the people of Vitebsk. In 1867 Pope
Pius IX “glorified” him as a saint. In 1963 Pope Paul VI translated his relics
to the Vatican, and even the present Pope, John-Paul II, has lauded him as a
“hieromartyr”…
The Time of Troubles
The Brest unia made the necessity of a strong autocracy in Moscow more
essential than ever. Under Patriarch Job (1589-1605), the patriarchate had
become an important player in State affairs. The bishops “together with the
tsar and the boyars came together in a zemsky
sobor in the dining
room of the State palace and there reviewed the matters reported to them by the
secretary. The patriarch began to play an especially important role after the
death of Theodore Ivanovich (1598). The tsar died without children, and the
throne was vacant. Naturally, the patriarch became head of the fatherland for a
time and had to care for State affairs. In the election of the future tsar his
choice rested on Boris Godunov, who had protected him, and he did much to aid
his ascension on the throne…”[268]
However, Boris Godunov had been a member of the dreaded Oprichnina from
his youth, and had married the daughter of the murderer of St. Philip of
Moscow, Maliuta Skouratov.[269] He
therefore represented that part of Russian society that had profited from the
cruelty and lawlessness of Ivan the Terrible. Moreover, though he was the first
Russian tsar to be crowned and anointed by a full patriarch (on September 1,
1598), and there was no serious resistance to his ascending the throne, 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, Boris decided upon an unprecedented act. He interrupted the
liturgy of the coronation, as Stephen Graham writes, “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.”[270]
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.”
And again: “The Russian autocrats have from the beginning had possession of all
the kingdoms, and not the boyars and grandees…”[271] 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…”[272]
In fact, Ivan the Terrible’s attitude to his own power, at any rate in
the first part of his reign, 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.”[273]
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. 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 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.”[274]
This is an exaggeration: there were many things wrong with the reign of
Boris Godunov, especially his encouragement of westerners[275], and
his introduction of mutual spying and denunciation. However, there is no doubt
that it was Boris’s murder of the Tsarevich Demetrius, the lawful heir to the
throne, that especially excited the people to rebel. For “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.”[276]
Although this exaggerates the contrast between Byzantium and Rus’, 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.”[277]
The people were never sure of the legitimacy of Boris Godunov, so they
rebelled against him. Unfortunately, however, in rejecting Boris, they accepted
a real imposter, the false Demetrius – in reality a defrocked monk called
Grishka Otrepev. Moreover, when in May, 1606, Prince Basil Shuisky led a
successful rebellion against Demetrius, executed him and expelled the false
patriarch Ignatius before being lawfully crowned, they proceeded to murder him,
a killing which the Zemskij Sobor of 1613 called “a common sin of the
land, committed out of the envy of the devil”.[278] Tsar
Basil called on Patriarch Job to come out of his enforced retirement, but he
refused by reason of his blindness and old age.[279]
Another Patriarch was required; the choice fell of Metropolitan Hermogen of
Kazan.
“Wonderful is the Providence of God,” writes Protopriest Lev Lebedev,
“in bringing him to the summit of ecclesiastical power at this terrible Time of
Troubles… In 1579 he had been ordained to the priesthood in the St. Nicholas
Gostinodvordsky church in Kazan. And in the same year a great miracle had taken
place, the discovery of the Kazan icon of the Most Holy Theotokos. This was
linked with a great fall in the faith of Christ in the new land, the mocking of
the Orthodox by the Muslims for failures in harvest, fires and other woes. A
certain girl, the daughter of a rifleman, through a vision in sleep discovered
on the place of their burned-down house an icon of the Mother of God. Nobody
knew when or by whom it had been placed in the ground. The icon began to work
wonders and manifest many signs of special grace. The whole of Kazan ran to it
as to a source of salvation and intercession from woes. The priest Hermogen was
a witness of all this. He immediately wrote down everything that had taken
place in connection with the wonderworking icon and with great fervour composed
a narrative about it. The glory of the Kazan icon quickly spread through
Russia, many copies were made from it, and some of these also became
wonderworking. The Theotokos was called “the fervent defender of the Christian
race” in this icon of Kazan. It was precisely this icon and Hermogen who had
come to love it that the Lord decreed should deliver Moscow and Russia from the
chaos of the Time of Troubles and the hands of the enemies. By the Providence
of the Theotokos Hermogen was in 1589 appointed Metropolitan of Kazan for his
righteous life, and in 1606 he became Patriarch of all Rus’.
“As his first work it was necessary for him to correct the wavering of
the people in relation to the false Demetrius and free them from the oath
(curse) they had given. A special strict fast was declared, after which,
on February 20, 1607, public repentance began in the Dormition cathedral of the
Kremlin. Patriarch Job repented of having hidden from the people the fact that
the Tsarevich Demetrius had been killed ‘by the plotting of Boris’ and called
everyone to repentance. Nun Martha [the mother of the Tsarevich Demetrius]
repented that out of fear she had recognized the Imposter to be her son. The
Muscovites wept and repented of having sworn to Boris Godunov and Grisha
Otrepev. Two Patriarchs – Job and Hermogen – absolved everyone with a special
prayer-declaration, which was read aloud by the archdeacon.
“However, by this time it was already the question of another Imposter –
false Demetrius the second. He was an obvious adventurer. And knowing about
this, Rome and certain people in Poland again supported him! The legend was as
follows: ‘Tsar’ Demetrius had not been killed in Moscow, but had managed to
flee (‘he was miraculously saved’ for the second time!). And again Cossack
detachments from Little Russia, the Don and Ukraine attached themselves to him.
Again quite a few Russian people believed the lie, for they very much wanted to
have a ‘real’, ‘born’ Tsar, as they put it at that time, who in the eyes of
many could only be a direct descendant of Ivan IV. Marina Mnishek [the wife of
the first false Demetrius] ‘recognized’ her lawful husband in the second false
Demetrius. However, her spiritual father, a Jesuit, considered it necessary to
marry her to the new Imposter; the Jesuit knew that he was not the same who had
been killed in Moscow, but another false Demetrius… Certain secret instructions
from Rome to those close to the new Imposter have been preserved. Essentially
they come down to ordering them gradually but steadily to bring about the unia
of the Russian Church with the Roman Church, and her submission to the Pope. In
1608 the second false Demetrius entered Russia and soon came near to Moscow,
encamping at Tushino. For that reason he was then called ‘the Tushino thief’.
‘Thief’ in those days mean a state criminal (those who steal things were then
called robbers). Marinka gave birth to a son from the second false Demetrius.
The people immediately called the little child ‘the thieflet’. Moscow closed
its gates. Only very few troops still remained for the defence of the city. A
great wavering of hearts and minds arose. Some princes and boyars ran from
Moscow to the ‘thief’ in Tushino and back again. Not having the strength to
wage a major war, Tsar Basil Shuisky asked the Swedish King Carl IX to help
him. In this he made a great mistake… Carl of Sweden and Sigismund of Poland
were at that time warring for the throne of Sweden. By calling on the Swedes
for help, Shuisky was placing Russia in the position of a military opponent of
Poland, which she used, seeing the Troubles in the Russian Land, to declare war
on Russia. Now the Polish king’s army under a ‘lawful’ pretext entered the
Muscovite Kingdom. The Imposter was not needed by the Poles and was discarded
by them. Sigismund besieged Smolensk, while a powerful army under Zholevsky
went up to Moscow. The boyars who were not contented with Shuisky removed him
from the throne (forced him to abdicate) in July, 1610. But whom would they now
place as Tsar? This depended to a large extent on the boyars.
“O Great Russian princes and boyars! How much you tried from early times
to seize power in the State! Now there is no lawful Tsar, now, it would seem,
you have received the fullness of power. Now would be the time for you to show
yourselves, to show what you are capable of! And you showed it…
“A terrible difference of opinions began amidst the government, which
consisted of seven boyars and was called the ‘semiboyarschina’. Patriarch
Hermogen immediately suggested calling to the kingdom the 14-year-old ‘Misha Romanov’,
as he called him. But they didn’t listen to the Patriarch. They discussed
Poland’s suggestion of placing the son of King Sigismund, Vladislav, on the
Muscovite Throne. The majority of boyars agreed. The gates of Moscow were
opened to the Poles and they occupied Chinatown and the Kremlin with their
garrison. But at the same time a huge Polish army besieged the monastery of St.
Sergius, ‘the Abbot of the Russian Land’, the Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, but
after a 16-month siege they were not able to take it! Patriarch Germogen was
ready to agree to having the crown-prince Vladislav, but under certain
conditions. Vladislav would be immediately, near Smolensk, baptised into the
Orthodox Faith. He would take for a wife only a virgin of the Orthodox Confession.
The Poles would leave Russia, and all the Russia apostates who had become
Catholic or uniates would be executed. There would never be any negotiations
between Moscow and Rome about the faith. An embassy was sent from near Smolensk
to Sigismund for negotiations about the succession to the Throne. The spiritual
head of the embassy was Metropolitan Philaret Nikitich Romanov of Rostov, who
had been taken out of exile and then consecrated to the episcopate under Tsar
Basil Shuisky. But at the same time Patriarch Germogen did not cease to exhort
the Tushintsy who were still with the thief near Moscow, calling on them to be
converted, repent and cease destroying the Fatherland.
“However, it turned out that Sigismund himself wanted to be on the
Throne of Moscow… But this was a secret. The majority of the boyars agreed to
accept even that, referring to the fact that the Poles were already in
Moscow, while the Russians had no army with which to defend the country from
Poland. A declaration was composed in which it was said that the Muscovite
government ‘would be given to the will of the king’. The members of the
government signed it. It was necessary that Patriarch Germogen should also give
his signature. At this point Prince Michael Saltykov came to him. The head of
the Russian Church replied: ‘No! I will put my signature to a declaration that
the king should give his son to the Muscovite state, and withdraw all the
king’s men from Moscow, that Vladislav should abandon the Latin heresy, and
accept the Greek faith… But neither I nor the other (ecclesiastical)
authorities will write that we should all rely on the king’s will and that our
ambassadors should be placed in the will of the king, and I order you not to do
it. It is clear that with such a declaration we would have to kiss the cross to
the king himself.’ Saltykov took hold of a knife and moved towards the
Patriarch. He made the sign of the cross over Saltykov and said: ‘I do not fear
your knife, I protect myself from it by the power of the Cross of Christ. But
may you be cursed from our humility both in this age and in the age to come!’.
Nevertheless, in December, 1611 the boyars brought the declaration to near
Smolensk, to the Russian ambassadors who were there.”[280]
The boyars nearly produced a Russian Magna Carta, as Geoffrey
Hosking explains: “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.”[281]
The Patriarch’s authority was enough to scupper the plans of the Poles
and the Russian boyars. For when the latter brought the document to the Poles
at Smolensk, where a Russian embassy led by Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov had
been for some time, then, “on not seeing the signature of the Patriarch on the
document, the ambassadors replied to our boyars that the declaration was
unlawful. They objected: ‘The Patriarch must not interfere in affairs of the
land’. The ambassadors said: ‘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 Tsar). It is now
unfitting to confer upon such a great matter without the patriarch… It is now
impossible for us to act without patriarchal declarations, and only with those
of the boyars…’
“The agreement with Sigismund and the transfer of the Muscovite Kingdom
into his power did not take place… That is what such a mere ‘detail’ as
a signature sometimes means – or rather, in the given case, the absence
of a signature!
“This gave a spiritual and lawful basis (in prevision of fresh boyar
betrayals) for the Russian cities to begin corresponding with each other with
the aim of deciding how to save Moscow and the Fatherland. In this
correspondence the name of Patriarch Hermogen was often mentioned, for he was
‘straight as a real pastor, who lays down his life for the Christian Faith’.
The inhabitants of Yaroslavl wrote to the citizens of Kazan: ‘Hermogen has
stood up for the Faith and Orthodoxy, and has ordered all of us to stand to the
end. If he had not done this wondrous deed, everything would have perished.’
And truly Russia, which so recently had been on the point of taking Poland at
the desire of the Poles, was now a hair’s-breadth away from becoming the dominion
of Poland (and who knows for how long a time!). Meanwhile Patriarch Hermogen
began himself to write to all the
cities, calling on Russia to rise up to free herself. The letter-declarations
stirred up the people, they had great power. The Poles demanded that he write
to the cities and call on them not to go to Moscow to liberate it from those
who had seized it. At this point Michael Saltykov again came to Hermogen. ‘I
will write,’ replied the Patriarch, ‘… but only on condition that you and the
traitors with you and the people of the king leave Moscow… I see the mocking of
the true faith by heretics and by you traitors, and the destruction of the holy
Churches of God and I cannot bear to hear the Latin chanting in Moscow’.
Hermogen was imprisoned in the Chudov monastery and they began to starve him to
death. But the voice of the Church did not fall silent. The brothers of the
Trinity-St. Sergius monastery headed by Archimandrite Dionysius also began to
send their appeals to the cities to unite in defence of the Fatherland. The
people’s levies moved towards Moscow. The first meeting turned out to be
unstable. Quite a few predatory Cossacks took part in it, for example the
cossacks of Ataman Zarutsky. Quarrels and disputes, sometimes bloody ones, took
place between the levies. Lyapunov, the leader of the Ryazan forces, was
killed. This levy looted the population more than it warred with the Poles.
Everything changed when the second levy, created through the efforts of
Nizhni-Novgorod merchant Cosmas Minin Sukhorukov and Prince Demetrius
Pozharsky, moved towards the capital. As we know, Minin, when stirring up the
people to make sacrifices for the levy, called on them, if necessary, to sell
their wives and children and mortgage their properties, but to liberate the
Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the Dormition of the All-Holy Theotokos,
where there was the Vladimir icon and the relics of the great Russian Holy
Hierarchs (that is, he was talking about the Dormition cathedral of the
Kremlin!) That, it seems, was the precious thing that was dear to
the inhabitants of Nizhni, Ryazan, Yaroslavl, Kazan and the other cities of
Russia and for the sake of which they were ready to sell their wives and lay
down their lives! That means that the Dormition cathedral was at that time that
which we could call as it were the geographical centre of patriotism of
Russia!
“On the advice of Patriarch Hermogen, the holy Kazan icon of the Mother
of God was taken into the levy of Minin and Pozharsky.
“In the autumn of 1612 the second levy was already near Moscow. But it
did not succeed in striking through to the capital. Their strength was ebbing
away. Then the levies laid upon themselves a strict three-day fast and
began earnestly to pray to the Heavenly Queen before her Kazan icon. At this
time Bishop Arsenius, a Greek by birth, who was living in a monastery in the
Kremlin, and who had come to us in 1588 with Patriarch Jeremiah, after fervent
prayer saw in a subtle sleep St. Sergius. The abbot of the Russian Land told Arsenius
that ‘by the prayers of the Theotokos judgement on our Fatherland has been
turned to mercy, and that tomorrow Moscow will be in the hands of the levy and
Russia will be saved!’ News of this vision of Arsenius was immediately passed
to the army of Pozharsky, which enormously encouraged them. They advanced to a
decisive attack and on October 22, 1612 took control of a part of Moscow and
Chinatown. Street-fighting in which the inhabitants took part began. In the
fire and smoke it was difficult to distinguish friend from foe. On October 27
the smoke began to disperse. The Poles surrendered….
“Patriarch Hermogen did not live to this radiant day. On February 17,
1612 he had died from hunger in the Chudov monastery. In 1912 he was numbered
with the saints, and his relics reside to this day in the Dormition cathedral
of the Kremlin.
“Thus at the end of 1612 the Time of Troubles came to an end.
Although detachments of Poles, Swedes, robbers and Cossacks continued to wander
around Russia. After the death of the second false Demetrius Marina Mnishek got
together with Zarutsky, who still tried to fight, but was defeated. Marinka
died in prison… But the decisive victory was won then, in 1612!”[282]
In 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
Protopriest 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…’” [283]
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
hermit, St. Irinarchus of Rostov. Thus 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…”[284]
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 had ceased to exist as an independent State…
At the beginning of February, 1613, a Zemskij
Sobor was assembled in
Moscow in order to elect a Tsar for the widowed Russian land. In accordance
with pious tradition, it began with a three-day fast and prayer to invoke God’s
blessing on the assembly.
“At the first conciliar session,” writes Hieromartyr Nicon, Archbishop
of Vologda, “it was unanimously decided: ’not to elect anyone of other foreign
faiths, but to elect our own native Russian’. They began to elect their own;
some pointed to one boyar, others to another… A certain nobleman from Galich
presented a written opinion that the closest of all to the previous tsars by
blood was Mikhail Fyodorovich Romanov: he should be elected Tsar. They
remembered that the reposed Patriarch had mentioned this name. An ataman from
the Don gave the same opinion. And Mikhail Fyodorovich was proclaimed Tsar. But
not all the elected delegates had yet arrived in Moscow, nor any of the most
eminent boyars, and the matter was put off for another two weeks. Finally, they
all assembled on February 21, on the Sunday of Orthodoxy, and by a common vote
confirmed this choice. Then Archbishop Theodoritus of Ryazan, the cellarer
Abraham Palitsyn of the Holy Trinity Monastery and the boyar Morozov came out
onto the place of the skull and asked the people who were filling Red Square:
‘Who do you want for Tsar?’ And the people unanimously exclaimed: ‘Mikhail
Fyodorovich Romanov!’ And the Council appointed Archbishop Theodoritus, Abraham
Palitsyn, three archimandrites and several notable boyars to go to the newly
elected Tsar to ask him to please come to the capital city of Moscow to his
Tsarist throne.”[285]
It was with great difficulty that the delegation persuaded the
adolescent boy and his mother, the nun Martha, to accept the responsibility.
Then, 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.
In February, 1917 the people of Russia broke their oath to the House of
Romanov by their betrayal of Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II. Thes curse duly fell upon
them in the form of the horrors of Soviet power…
“The outcome,” writes Lebedev, “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…”[286]
“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…”[287]
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)[288];
but in Russia, as in some Western Orthodox autocracies (for example, the
Anglo-Saxon), it had always been 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 four Russian writers: Protopriest Lev Lebedev, I. L. Solonevich,
St. John Maximovich and Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow.
First, after electing the first Romanov tsar, 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.
Secondly, while the Zemskij Sobor of 1613 was, of course, 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.”[289]
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.”[290]
Again, Fr. Lev Lebedev puts it as follows: “Tsars are not elected! And a
Council, even a Zemskij Sobor, cannot be the source of power. The
kingdom is a calling of God, the Council can determine the lawful Tsar
and summon him.”[291]
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.”[292]
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.”[293]
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?”[294]
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.”[295]
But if the tsar is above the law, how can he not be a tyrant, insofar
as, in the 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’.”[296]
“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.”[297]
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, republic, dictatorship. 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!”[298]
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.”[299]
Moreover, as Bishop Ignatius also 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.”[300] 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.”[301]
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.”[302]
“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.”[303]
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!”.[304] And it
was highly significant in that it showed what the relationship between the
heads of the Church and the State should be – a filial one of mutual trust and
love.
The sixteenth century had seen
the power of the tsar, in the person of Ivan the Terrible, 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.”[305]
Patriarch Philaret’s firm hand
was essential in holding the still deeply shaken State together. As
Dobroklonsky writes: “The Time of Troubles had shaken the structure of the
State in Russia, weakening discipline and unleashing arbitrariness; the
material situation of the country demanded improvements that could not be put
off. On ascending the throne, Michael Fyodorovich was still too young,
inexperienced and indecisive to correct the shattered State order. Having
become accustomed to self-will, the boyars were not able to renounce it even
now: ‘They took no account of the tsar, they did not fear him,’ says the
chronicler, ‘as long as he was a child… They divided up the whole land in
accordance with their will.’ In the census that took place after the devastation
of Moscow many injustices had been permitted in taxing the people, so that it
was difficult for some and easy for others. The boyars became ‘violators’,
oppressing the weak; the Boyar Duma contained unworthy me, inclined to
intrigues against each other rather than State matters and interests. In the
opinion of some historians, the boyars even restricted the autocracy of the
tsar, and the whole administration of the State depended on them. A powerful
will and an experienced man was necessary to annihilate the evil. Such could be
for the young sovereign his father, Patriarch Philaret, in whom circumstances
had created a strong character, and to whom age and former participation in
State affairs had given knowledge of the boyar set and the whole of Russian
life and experience in administration. Finally, the woes of the fatherland had
generated a burning patriotism in him. In reality, Philaret became the adviser
and right hand of the Tsar. The Tsar himself, in his decree to voyevodas of
July 3, 1619 informing them of the return of his father from Poland, put it as
follows: ‘We, the great sovereign, having taken counsel with our father and
intercessor with God, will learn how to care for the Muscovite State so as to
correct everything in it in the best manner.’ The chroniclers call Philaret
‘the most statesmanlike patriarch’, noting that ‘he was in control of all the
governmental and military affairs’ and that ‘the tsar and patriarch
administered everything together’. Philaret was in fact as much a statesman as
a churchman. This is indicated by the title hew used: ‘the great sovereign and
most holy Patriarch Philaret Nikitich’. All important State decrees and
provisions were made with his blessing and counsel. When the tsar and patriarch
were separated they corresponded with each other, taking counsel with each
other in State affairs. Their names figured next to each other on decrees… Some
decrees on State affairs were published by the patriarch alone; and he
rescinded some of the resolutions made by his son. Subjects wrote their
petitions not only to the tsar, but at the same time to the patriarch; the
boyars often assembled in the corridors before his cross palace to discuss
State affairs; they presented various reports to him as well as to the tsar.
The patriarch usually took part in receptions of foreign ambassadors sitting on
the right hand of the tsar; both were given gifts and special documents; if for
some reason the patriarch was not present at this reception, the ambassadors
would officially present themselves in the patriarchal palace and with the same
ceremonies as to the tsar. The influence of the patriarch on the tsar was so
complete and powerful that there was no place for any influence of the boyars
who surrounded the throne.”[306]
The Church’s recovery 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, and that in general all
Catholics and uniates joining the Orthodox Church, and all Orthodox who had
been baptised incorrectly, without full immersion, should be baptised.[307]
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 Zemskie
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 Zemskie
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 (Zemskie Sobory) 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.”[308]
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.”[309]
The Schism of the Old Ritualists
Unfortunately, this almost ideal relationship between Tsar and people
did not survive for long into the second half of the seventeenth century. Under
Tsar Michael’s son, Alexis Mikhailovich, writes Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “the
principle of the ‘ministry’ (prikaz) did not cease to take precedence
over the principle of the ‘land’ (zemskij): instead of the healthy forces of
local government, there was a badly organized bureaucracy – and that for three
hundred years to come. The reign of Alexis Mikhailovich is full of rebellions: protests
of the people against the voevodas and the central ministries…”[310]
The most serious, large-scale and long-term rebellion was that of the
so-called Old Ritualists against both the State and the Orthodox Church, and
more particularly against the Orthodox idea of the Universal Empire…
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.[311] 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.”[312]
As Hieromonk Gregory Lourié 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.”[313]
Tragically, however, it was at precisely this time, when Russia seemed
ready to take the place of the Christian Roman Empire in the eyes of all the
Orthodox, that the Russian autocracy and Church suffered a simultaneous attack
from two sides from which it never fully recovered. From the right came the
attack of the “Old Ritualists” or “Old Believers”, as they came to be called,
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 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 (and Greek hierarchs
visiting Moscow) 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, which had anathematized the
three-fingered sign of the cross, 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.
However, the Stoglav council, while important, was never as
authoritative as the Ecumenical Councils, and certain of its provisions have
never been accepted in their full force by the Russian Church - for example,
its 40th chapter, which decreed that anyone who shaved his beard,
and died in such a state (i.e. without repenting), should be denied a Christian
burial and numbered among the unbelievers.
Moreover, in elevating ritual differences between the Greek and Russian
Churches into an issue of dogmatic faith, the “zealots for piety” were
undoubtedly displaying a Judaizing attachment to the letter of the law that
quenches the Spirit. In the long run it led to their rejection of Greek
Orthodoxy, and therefore of the need of any agreement with the Greeks whether
on rites or anything else, a rejection that threatened the foundations of the Ecumenical
Church.[314]
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 that 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[315] and
the age-old practice of the Orthodox East.[316] 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.[317]
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.[318]
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.’”[319]
This important point is confirmed by other authors. Thus 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.”[320]
Again Sergei Firsov writes: “At the end of his patriarchy Nicon 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’.”[321]
All this is true, but fails to take into
account the long-term effect produced by the actions of the Greek hierarchs,
and in particular Patriarch Macarius of Antioch, in anathematizing the old
books and practices. Early in 1656 this patriarch, together with Metropolitans
Gabriel of Serbia and Gregory of Nicaea, was asked by Patriarch Nicon to give
his opinion on the question of the sign of the cross. On the Sunday of
Orthodoxy, “during the anathemas, Makarios stood before the crowd, put the
three large fingers of his hand together ‘in the image of the most holy and
undivided Trinity, and said: ‘Every Orthodox Christian must make the sign of
the Cross on his face with these three first fingers: and if anyone does it
based on the writing of Theodoret and on false tradition, let him be anathema!’
The anathemas were then repeated by Gabriel and Gregory. Nikon further obtained
written condemnations of the two-fingered sign of the Cross from all these
foreign bishops.
“On April 23, a new council was called in
Moscow. Its purpose was twofold: first, Nikon wanted to affirm the
three-fingered sign of the Cross by conciliar decree; second, he wanted
sanction for the publication of the Skrizhal’. Once again, the presence
of foreign bishops in Moscow served his purpose. In his speech to the assembled
council, Nikon explains the reasons for his request. The two-fingered sign of
the Cross, he states, does not adequately express the mysteries of the Trinity
and the Incarnation…
“The significance of this council lies
chiefly in its formal condemnation of those who rejected the three-fingered
sign of the Cross – and, by extension, those who rejected the Greek model – as
heretics. For those who make the sign of the Cross by folding their thumb
together with their two small fingers ‘are demonstrating the inequality of the
Holy Trinity, which is Arianism’, or ‘Nestorianism’. By branding his opponents
as heretics, Nikon was making schism inevitable.”[322]
Whether it made schism inevitable or not,
it was certainly a serious mistake. And paradoxically, it was the same
mistake as that made by the Old Ritualists. That is, like the Old Ritualists,
Nicon was asserting that differences in rite, and in particular in the making
of the sign of the cross, reflected differences in faith, dogmatical
differences. But this was not the case, as had been pointed out to Nicon by
Patriarch Paisius of Constantinople and his Synod the previous year. And while,
as noted above, Nicon himself backed away from a practical implementation of
the decisions of the 1656 council, and after retiring from the patriarchate
seemed to lose all interest in the question, the fact is that the decisions of
the 1656 council remained on the statute books. Moreover, they were confirmed –
again with the active connivance of Greek hierarchs – at the council of 1667.
Only later, with the edinoverie of 1801, was it permitted to be a member
of the Russian Church and serve on the old books.
“However,” writes Lebedev, the differences between the Orthodox and the
Old Ritualists did not only come down to “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’s
self-consciousness at the time.”[323] 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. So 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 Ritualists represented a serious threat to the achievement of
this ideal. Like their opponents, they believed in the ideology of the Third Rome, but understood it
differently. First, 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 great prince 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.
Secondly, 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 Ritualists the
influence of the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy at the council of Florence,
could only be harmful. 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, The Greeks could not be
Orthodox, according to the Old Ritualists, not only because they had
apostasised at the council of Florence, but also because they were “powerless”,
that is, without an emperor. And when Russia, too, in their view, became
“powerless” through the tsar’s “apostasy”, they prepared for the end of the
world. For, as Fr. Gregory Lourié writes, “the Niconite reforms were
perceived by Old Ritualism 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.”[324]
This anti-Greek attitude was exemplified particularly by Archpriest
Avvakum, 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!"[325] Again,
Avvakum announced “that newborn babies knew more about God than all the
scholars of the Greek church”.[326] And in
the trial of 1667, he told 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 Nicon 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 Nicon along with the devil introduced the tradition that one had to
cross oneself with three fingers…”[327]
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 Muscovite
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.”[328]
Patriarch Nicon of Moscow
This intrusion of the tsar into the ecclesiastical administration,
leading to the deposition of Patriarch Nicon, was the decisive factor allowing
the Old Ritualist movement to gain credibility and momentum.
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.”[329] There
followed a short, but remarkable period in which “the undivided, although
unconfused, union of state and ecclesiastical powers constituted the natural
basis of 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…”[330]
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 Monastirskij 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 Monastirskij 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 Monastirskij Prikaz to the metropolitan’s court.
On becoming patriarch, Nicon obtained a similar exemption from the Monastirskij
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 Monastirskij 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.”[331]
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, he 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 Monastirskij 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”.[332]
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.[333]
Since the tsar was clearly determined to have his way, 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 withdrew 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 of Sardica[334] and
the words of the Gospel: “If they persecute you in one city, depart to another,
shaking off the dust from your feet”.[335]. “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.”[336]
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’.”[337]
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 Monastirskij 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.[338]
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[339], 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.’”[340]
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”.[341]
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.[342]
Another charge made against the patriarch in the 1666 council was that
in 1654 he had defrocked and exiled the most senior of the opponents to his reforms,
Bishop Paul of Kolomna, on his own authority, without convening a council of
bishops. But, as Lebedev writes, “Nicon refuted this accusation, referring to
the conciliar decree on this bishop, which at that time was still in the
patriarchal court. Entering now [in 1654] on the path of an authoritative
review of everything connected with the correction of the rites, Nicon of
course could not on his own condemn a bishop, when earlier even complaints
agains prominent protopriests were reviewed by him at a Council of the clergy.”[343]
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 caesaropapist doctrine, according to which the
Patriarch was exhorted to obey the tsar and the tsar was permitted to remove
the patriarch in case of conflict with him. Patriarch Dionysius of
Constantinople expressed this doctrine as follows 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.”[344]
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”. They particularly objected to the following sentence
in the report on the affair of the patriarch: “It is recognized that his
Majesty the Tsar alone should be in charge of spiritual matters, and that the
Patriarch should be obedient to him”, which they considered to be humiliating
for ecclesiastical power and to offer a broad scope for the interference of the
secular power in Church affairs.[345]
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 Monastirskij Prikaz and the
return to the Church of judgement over clergy in civil matters (the later
remained in force until 1700).”[346]
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.”[347]
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
unjust condemnation of Patriarch Nicon, the chief supporter of the Orthodox
doctrine, cast a long shadow over the proceedings, and meant that within a
generation the attempt to impose absolutism on Russia would begin again…[348]
Patriarch Nicon on Church-State Relations
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.”[349]
Patriarch Nicon corrected the caesaropapist bias of the Russian Church
as expressed especially by the friend of the tsar, the defrocked metropolitan
and crypto-papist Paisius Ligarides. He set down his thoughts in detail in his
famous work Razzorenie (“Destruction”), in which 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).[350] “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.”[351]
Indeed, “none of the kings won victory without the prayers of the
priests” (I, 187).[352] 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.”[353] “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.”[354] “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.”[355]
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 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.”[356]
The patriarch explains why, on the one hand, the priesthood is higher
than the kingdom, and on the other, why 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.”[357]
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 be king.” But he can only 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).[358]
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.”[359]
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.”[360]
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.”[361] 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).[362]
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 Ulozhenie). 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).”[363] 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.”[364]
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.[365] 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.”[366]
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”. 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 (who had had
nominal jurisdiction over these areas for many years), were returned to the
jurisdiction of the Russian Church, with Constantinople’s agreement, 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.”[367]
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 Patriarch Nicon died 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.”[368]
Again, 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”[369]. 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.[370]
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...
The Rebellion of the Streltsy
We have noted the opinion that if Patriarch Nicon had not been forced to
leave his see, there would have been no Old Ritualist schism. Nor would there
have been that weakening of the authority of the Church vis-à-vis the
State that was to have such catastrophic consequences in the next century. And
yet in the reign of the pious Tsar Theodore Alexeyevich, Patriarch Nicon was
posthumously restored to his see, the Old Ritualist schism was still of small
proportions, and Church-State relations were still essentially “symphonic”.
Even the Monastirskij Prikaz, which Nicon had fought so hard and
unsuccessfully to remove, was in fact removed in 1675. But all that changed with
the death of Tsar Theodore in 1682…
Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes: “He did not have a son and heir.
Therefore power had to pass to the brother of the deceased, Ivan, the son of
Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich from his first marriage with Maria Ilyinichna
Miloslavskaia. Behind him, behind Ivan Alexeyevich, there also stood his very
active sister the Tsarevna Sophia. But we know that from the second marriage of
Alexeis Mikhailovich with Natalia Kirillovna Naryshkina there was another son,
Peter Alexeyevich, who was born in 1672. In 1682 he was ten years old, while
his half-brother Ivan was fifteen. The Naryshkins did not want to let their
interests be overlooked, and wanted Peter to be made Tsar. A battle began
between them and their supporters and the supporters of the Miloslavsky
princes. The result was yet another schism, this time in the Royal
Family itself… This of course elicited a time of troubles. Behind Sophia and
the Miloslavskys there stood a part of the boyars, including Prince Basil
Vasilyevich Golitsyn. Against them was Patriarch Joachim (at first not openly)
and other supporters of the Naryshkins. A rumour was spread about them that
they wanted to ‘remove’ (kill) Ivan Alexeyevich. The army of riflemen [streltsy]
in Moscow rebelled. The riflemen more than once burst into the royal palace
looking for plotters and evil-doers, and once right there, in the palace,
before the eyes of the Royal Family, including Peter, they killed the boyars A.
Matveev and I. Naryshkin. The country was on the edge of a new time of troubles
and civil war. The wise Sophia was able to come to an agreement with the
Naryshkins and in the same year both Tsareviches, Ivan and Peter, were
proclaimed Tsars, while their ‘governess’, until they came of age, became the
Tsarevna Sophia. The leader of the riflemen’s army, the very aged Prince
Dolgorukov, was removed in time and Prince Ivan Andreevich Khovansky was
appointed. He was able quickly to take the riflemen in hand and submit them to
his will.
“The Old Ritualists decided to make use of these disturbances.
Protopriest Nikita Dobrynin, aptly nicknamed ‘Emptyholy’, together with
similarly fanatical Old Ritualists, unleashed a powerful campaign amidst the
riflemen and attained the agreement of the Royal Family and the Patriarch to
the holding of a public debate on the faith with the ‘Niconians’, that is,
first of all with the Patriarch himself. This debate took place on July 5, 1682
in the Granovita palace in the Kremlin in the presence of the Royal Family, the
clergy and the Synclete. Nikita read aloud a petition from the Old Ritualists
that the new books and rites should be removed, declaring that they constituted
‘the introduction of a new faith’. Against this spoke Patriarch Joachim,
holding in his hands an icon of Metropolitan Alexis of Moscow. He was very
emotional and wept. The Old Ritualists did not want even to listen to him! They
began to interrupt the Patriarch and simply shout: ‘Make the sign of the cross
in this way!’, raising their hands with the two-fingered sign of the cross.
Then Archbishop Athanasius of Kholmogor (later Archangelsk), who had himself
once been an Old Believer, with knowledge of the subject refuted ‘Emptyholy’s’
propositions, proving that the new rites were by no means ‘a new faith’, but
only the correction of mistakes that had crept into the services. Protopriest
Nikita was not able to object and in powerless fury hurled himself at
Athanasius, striking him on the face. There was an uproar. The behaviour of the
Old Ritualists was judged to be an insult not only to the Church, but also to
the Royal Family, and they were expelled. Finding themselves on the street, the
Old Ritualists shouted: ‘We beat them! We won!’ – and set off for the riflemen
in the area on the other side of the Moscow river. As we see, in fact there was
no ‘beating’, that is, they gained no victory in the debate. On the same night
the riflemen captured the Old Ritualists and handed them over to the
authorities. On July 11 on Red Square Nikita Dobrynin ‘Emptyholy’ was beheaded
in front of all the people.
“Then, at a Church Council in 1682, it was decided to ask their
Majesties to take the most severe measures against the Old Ritualists, to the
extent of executing the most stubborn of them through burning. And so
Protopriest Avvakum was burned in Pustozersk. This is perhaps the critical
point beyond which the church schism began in full measure, no longer as
the disagreement of a series of supporters of the old rites, but as a movement
of a significant mass of people. Now the Old Ritualists began to abuse not only
the ‘Niconian’ Church, but also the royal power, inciting people to
rebel against it. Their movement acquired not only an ecclesiastical, but also
a political direction. It was now that it was necessary to take very severe
measures against them, and they were taken, which probably saved the State from
civil war.[371]
Many Old Ritualists, having fled beyond the boundaries of Great Russia, then
began to undertake armed raids on the Russian cities and villages. It is now
considered fashionable in our ‘educated’ society to relate to the schismatical
Old Ritualists with tender feeling, almost as if they were martyrs or innocent
sufferers. To a significant degree all this is because they turned out to be on
the losing, beaten side. And what if they had won? Protopriest Avvakum used to
say that if he were given power he would hang ‘the accursed Niconians’
on trees (which there is no reason to doubt, judging from his biography). He
said this when he had only been exiled by the ‘Niconians’, and not even
defrocked. So if the Old Ritualists had won, the Fatherland would simply have
been drowned in blood. Protopriest Avvakum is also particularly venerated as
the author of his noted ‘Life’. It in fact displays the very vivid Russian language
of the 17th century and in this sense, of course, it is valuable for
all investigators of antiquity. But that is all! As regards the spirit and the
sense of it, this is the work of a boundlessly self-deceived man. It is
sufficient to remember that none of the Russian saints wrote a ‘Life’ praising
himself…”[372]
We must also characterise as “self-deception” the Old Ritualist practice
of self-immolation. This began in 1672 with the self-immolation of 2000 people,
and by 1690 20,000 had burned themselves to death - often, as Professor Barsov
has demonstrated, not out of fear of persecution, but from a fanatical thought
of purifying themselves through the fire.[373] In
spite of its romanticisation by Mussorgsky in his opera Khovanschina,
this represents, not Christianity, but a
particularly fanatical type of apocalyptic sectarianism. 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. For as a result of the unlawful deposition
of Patriarch Nicon, the symphony of powers between Church and State in Russia
was fatally weakened, leading, in the long run, to the appearance of the
collective Antichrist, Soviet power, in 1917…
The Old Ritualists also saw apocalyptic signs in the increase of western
influence in the Muscovite State. They believed that the Tsar had apostasised
by accepting the Patriarch’s reforms. And yet the parallel here, paradoxically,
is with the western heretics. For in a very similar way the Protestants
believed that true Christianity ended when State and Church reverted to
idolatrous practices in the time of the Emperor Constantine. The Old Ritualists
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.
This was particularly the case with the priestless Old Ritualists,
called the Bespopovtsi (as opposed to the Popovtsi, who still had
priests, and the Beglopopovtsi who used priests fleeing from the
official Church).[374] The
communities of the priestless, 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 Sergius Zenkovsky writes, Denisov
“transformed the old doctrine of an autocratic Christian state into a concept
of a democratic Christian nation.”[375]
From that time an apocalyptic rejection of the State became the keynote
of Old Ritualism. 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 Ritualists 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…”[376]
In spite of this apocalypticism, some at any rate of the Old Ritualists
came to accept the Russian State as the legitimate Orthodox empire. Thus an
investigator of the Old Rite in the 1860s, V.I. Kel’siev asserted that “the
people continue to believe today that Moscow is the Third Rome and that there
will be no fourth. So Russia is the new Israel, a chosen people, a prophetic land,
in which shall be fulfilled all the prophecies of the Old and New Testaments,
and in which even the Antichrist will appear, as Christ appeared in the
previous Holy Land. The representative of Orthodoxy, the Russian Tsar, is the
most legitimate emperor on earth, for he occupies the throne of
Constantinople…”[377]
The Antichrist in Turkey
The apocalypticism of the Old Ritualists found another, contemporary
parallel amidst the Jews of the Ottoman empire. After the Edict of Expulsion in
1492, the Jews of Spain were invited to the Muslim lands by the promise of
economic concessions and political protection. They settled throughout the
Eastern Mediterranean. Thus the Jews had 44 synagogues and 30,000 people in
Constantinople, which may have been the seat of their secret government, or
exilarchate, which had been abolished by the Arabs of Baghdad in the tenth
century. Again, in Thessalonica, which was called the New Jerusalem, there were
36,000 Jews. Their grip on trade was so powerful that in 1568 they appealed to
the Sublime Porte to have their tax bill reduced.[378]
Powerful though they were these Sephardic
Jews still pined for their former life in Andalusia, and it was through them
that the Kabbala received an important theoretical and practical development
that reflected their longings. [379]
“The most important person,” writes
Tikhomirov, “who gave an impulse to the Kabbalistic movement here was Issak Lourié Levi [or Louria], a
native of Jerusalem, who had a mystical, passionate nature that devoted itself
entirely to the idea. He lived for a very short time on the earth (from 1534 to
1572) and died at the age of 38 from the plague. But in the short period of his
activity he exerted a powerful influence on the development of Kabbalism. In
Jerusalem he founded a kabbalistic circle in which they discussed the Kabbala
and practised incantations and the calling up of spirits. He had an enormous
influence on those around him, and the movement of Kabbalism continued also
after his death.”[380]
“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.”[381]
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.”[382] This
motif of reincarnation was to receive a fateful development in the thought of
one of his disciples, Shabbatai Zevi, who “was educated on the Kabbala and
declared himself to be the Messiah. Shabbatai Zevi was born in 1626 and died in
1676, and stirred up the whole Jewish world from the east to the extreme west.
His father was from the Morea, and he himself began his activity in Smyrna.
Possessing a huge ability to exert influence on those around him, he, while
basing himself on Kabbalistic works (especially the Zohar), gave his own
teaching, whose outlines, however, are not at all clearly known. In this
period, both among Christians and among Jews there was an expectation of
extraordinary events in 1666: among Christians – the Second Coming, among Jews
– the coming of their Messiah. In Shabbatai Zevi those round him had already
for a long time supposed to see something great, and in 1648 he finally
declared that he was the Messiah. For this he was excommunicated from the
synagogue and exiled from Smyrna. Then he began to preach in various other
cities, including Constantinople. His fellow-labourer Nathan [Benjamin Levi],
who played the role of the resurrected Prophet Elijah, announced that in 1666
the Messiah would appear, would liberate the Jews from the Turks and would take
the Sultan into captivity. In 1665 Shabbatai Zevi did indeed triumphantly
enter into Jerusalem, where the majority of the Jewish population believed in
him. Then with the same pomp he appeared in Smyrna. A psychopathological
inspiration that had not been seen for a long
time took hold of the Jews. Everywhere the Jews gave themselves over to
unrestrained joy, while others – to exploits of fasting and repentance with
self-flagellation, giving alms and organizing feasts in honour of the Messiah,
who was triumphantly announced in the synagogue. News of this reached Europe,
where the same scenes began en masse, while the rabbis declared
Shabbatai to be a liar and in every way opposed the movement. Meanwhile, the
worried Turks arrested Shabbatai in 1666 and imprisoned him in Abydos, where crowds
of worshippers continued to surround the Messiah in expectation that he would
finally be released and liberate the Jews. The Turkish government decided to
put an end this and declared Shabbatai Zevi an ultimatum: either accept Islam
or be annihilated. Shabbatai Zevi accepted Islam, but still continued his role,
until finally they exiled him to Dulcinea, where he died. [383]
“However, Shabbataism did not disappear even after that. Up to now [the
early twentieth century] there exists in Thessalonic a small sect of his
followers, about 4000 souls, who call themselves the maiminim (that is,
believers). Although their teaching is preserved in the strictest secrecy,
nevertheless its Catechism is known. Both from this Catechism and from a work
attributed to Shabbatai Zevi,it is evident that Shabbatai Zevi and the Messiah
in general is periodically incarnated. Adam, Abraham, Moses, etc. are only
parts of the soul of Shabbatai Zevi. The maiminim affirm that Shabbatai
Zevi has been incarnate 18 times.
“After the death of Shabbatai Zevi there were several continuers of his
work, who were generally looked upon as incarnations of the original soul of
the Messiah, that is, as the Divinity having taken on human form. This
incarnation of the Divinity constitutes one of the main points of the teaching
of Shabbatai Zevi, and although his followers present several different
schools, in this respect they all agree. It is noteworthy that Shabbatai Levi
rebuked the Jews for their murder of Jesus Christ and intended to declare Him a
prophet. In the work attributed to Shabbatai and which at the same time a
certain Nehemiah Hia Hojon (in Graetz’ opinion, a simple rogue) called his own,
the religious history of the world is expounded. This world-view should be
compared, for clarity’s sake, with the teaching of Hojon on the trihypostacity
of the Divinity. It is very possible that this was also Shabbatai’s idea.
According to the teaching of Hojon, the Divinity is trinitarian, but not in the
same sense as is taught by Christians. In the Divinity there are three
Partsefim (persons): 1) the Holy Pre-Eternal Elder, who is the soul of
all souls, 2) the Holy King, who is the incarnation of God, and 3) a
female essence, the Shehinah. In the above-indicated work of Shabbatai
it is explained that the creation of the world by Ayn-Sof (from the Kabbala)
turned out to be unsuccessful. Neither the world, nor God himself were able to
realize its ideal character. Only with the incarnation of Shabbatai Zevi – the
Messiah, Christ, the Holy King – was the world renewed and attained perfection.
Then also ‘the unknown hidden Holy Elder’ became knowable, and attained his
development and realization. The Messiah, the highest man, constitutes one
whole with God. He is the true creator and founder, for he brings order into
the shaken-up structure of the world. Thus Shabbatai Zevi was the incarnation
of the Divinity and one of the Partsefim. But we must note that in this theory
the highest man, or Holy King, unites in himself the masculine and feminine principles.
Consequently, in him is also included the Shehinah, although, perhaps, the
trihypostacity is not thereby destroyed.
“In all this we clearly see a variation on what is undoubtedly the
Kabbala. But apparently Shabbatai said about the Jews contemporary to him that
they worshipped, not God, but the Metatron. In the teaching of the maiminim
the Jews, although predestined for salvation, must now be numbered among the
unbelievers, and for their salvation they must admit that Shabbatai Zevi is the
Messiah.
“The sects of the Hassidim and Frankists in Poland, Russia and Austria
are considered offshoots of Shabbataism. But the founder of Hassidism in Poland
at that time, Israel Besht (1698-1760), had no relations of any kind with the
Shabbataists, and was extremely negatively disposed to Shabbatai Zevi. One
presents in his teaching several other Kabbalistic variations. As regards
Yankel Leibovich, who accepted the name of Jacob Frankel, he truly recognized
the Messianic status of Shabbatai. According to his teaching, there were many
Messiahs and there are all incarnations of one and the same Messianic soul,
among whom are King David, Elijah the Prophet, Jesus Christ, Mahomet and
Shabbatai Zevi. Jacob Frank composed his teaching in Thessalonica after
entering into close relations with the Shabbataists… ”[384]
PART II. THE AGE OF ABSOLUTISM (1689-1789)
3.
THE WEST: DESPOTS AND PHILOSOPHERS
Temporal and spiritual are two words brought
into the world to 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 good of the people must be the great
purpose of government. By the laws of nature and of reason, the governors are
invested with power to that end. And the greatest good of the people is
liberty. It is to the state what health is to the individual..
Diderot, Encyclopedia.
‘Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the
destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger.
David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature,
book II, section 3.
The early modern period (to 1689) was distinguished by two contrary
tendencies in politics: on the one hand, the tendency towards the absolutist
state, freed now from the shackles of ecclesiastical and feudal obligation, and
on the other hand, the rise of representative institutions and the gradual
re-imposition of shackles on the state by the will of the people – or those
classes of society (usually the aristocrats and landowners) who considered that
they stood for the people. By the beginning of the eighteenth century the first
tendency had reached its climax in the France of Louis XIV and the Russia of
Peter the Great, while the second tendency was beginning to gather strength in
the most ideologically “advanced” states of the day, England and Holland. The
history of the eighteenth century up to 1789 is to a large extent that of the
penetration of French absolutism by the ideas of English scientific rationalism
and democratism, and their synthesis by the French philosophes into the
universalist system of thought known as the Enlightenment.
The English revolution gradually ran out of steam. “As the millenium
failed to arrive,” writes Christopher Hill, “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’…”[385]
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 was not suitable because he might
choose to touch their financial interests, as Charles I had done. A
constitutional ruler was the answer – that is, a ruler who would rule within
limitations imposed by the men of property and drawn up in a constitution.
Thus, 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.”[386]
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 from above than on the
satisfaction of human needs 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.”[387] “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.[388]
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.”[389]
But it was Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) which 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.” Some kinds of animals, such as bees and ants, live
sociably with each other, but this is not the case of men, because of their
various destructive passions. And so “the agreement of these creatures is
natural; that of men, is by covenant only, which is articial: and therefore it
is no wonder if there be somewhat else required, besides covenant, to make
their agreement constant and lastingl which is a common power, to keep them in
awe, and to direct their actions to the common benefit.
“The only way to erect such a common power, as may be able to defend
them from the invasion of foreigners, and the injuries of one another, and
thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their own industry, and by the
fruits of the earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to
confer all their power and strength upon one man, or upon one assembly of men,
that may reduce all their wills, by plurality of voices, unto one will: which
is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or assembly of men, to bear their
person; … and therein to submit their wills, every one to his will, and their
judgements, to his judgement. This is more than consent, or concord; it is the
real unity of them all, in one and the same person, made by covenant of every
man with every man, in such manner, as if every man should say to every man, I
authorize and give up my right of governing myself, to this man, or to this
assembly of men, on this condtion, that thou give up thy right to him, and
authorize all his actions in like manner. This done, the multitude so
united in one person, is called a COMMONWEALTH, in Latin CIVITAS. This is the
generation of that LEVIATHAN, or rather, to speak more reverently, of that mortal
god, to which we owe under the immortal God, our peace and defence.”[390]
The State was therefore a Leviathan, “a monster composed of men” headed
by a sovereign, personal or collective, whose power was created by a social
contract, but who, after the “signing” of the contract, was 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” [391] 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 J.S. 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.”[392] 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 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.”[393]
So Hobbes had learned from both sides in the Civil War!
Hobbes defined liberty negatively, as the absence of impediments to
motion. Subjects are free when the laws do not interfere with them, allowing
them some liberty of action. However, liberty is not a right, and subjects have
no right to rebel 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.[394]
“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.”[395]
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.”[396]
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.”[397]
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). 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, is 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 in his sound mind 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”.[398] “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.”[399]
Hobbes’ theory was admired on the continent, but rejected with horror in
England (Leviathan was burned at Oxford in 1683). One reason was its
implicit amoralism, 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.”[400]
Another problem with Leviathan was its perceived support for
absolutism. In fact, Hobbes 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[401], 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.
The “Glorious Revolution” of 1688 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 social contract theory, 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.”[402]
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.”[403] 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”.[404]
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 is the preservation of their property.”[405]
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.”[406]
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.”[407]
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.”[408]
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.”[409]
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.”[410] 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.[411]
The monarchy is necessary 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.”[412]
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.”[413]
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? When
is the use of force against the government just and lawful?
This vital question has never received a satisfactory answer in western
political theory. Locke’s answer was: when “estates, liberties, lives are in
danger, and perhaps religion too”. Only “perhaps religion”? In the East,
danger to religion was the only possible justification for rebellion against
the powers that be. But for Locke the justification was, in the end, secular:
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.”[414]
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”.[415]
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.”[416]
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”.[417]
“’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.’”[418]
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.”[419]
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.”[420]
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.”[421]
“Every people,” writes L.A. 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.”[422]
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow wrote: “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).”[423]
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…’”[424]
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, interests
and beliefs. Thus not only is the original social contract a historical myth in
the strictest sense of the word: the “conception of the good” of those who
enter into it must not be allowed to intrude into political life in any shape
or form.
As Scruton notes, Rawls’s social contract aims to remove “from the legal
order all reference to the sources of division and conflict between human
groups, so as to create a society in which no question can arise that does not
have a solution acceptable to everyone. If religion, culture, sex, race, and
even ‘conceptions of the good’ have all been relegated to the private sphere,
and set outside the scope of jurisdiction, then the resulting public law will
be an effective instrument for the government of a multicultural society,
forbidding citizens to make exceptions in favor of their preferred group, sex,
culture, faith, or lifestyle…. This simply reinforces the status of the theory as
the theology of a post-religious society.”[425]
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. And such a society has the whole of the West, following
England, become in the decades and centuries that have passed since “the
Glorious 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 steadily 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 took place: a weak monarchy
besieged by a semi-independent nobility within and the united Hapsburg domains
of Germany, Italy and Spain from without, gradually recovered 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.”[426]
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.”[427]
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.”[428]
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.
“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.”[429]
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.”[430]
The other major estate of the land that needed to be controlled was the
Church. A parish priest of St. Sulpice said, “he was so absolute that he passed
above all the laws to do his will. The priests and nobility were oppressed; the
parlements had no more power. The clergy were shamefully servile in
doing the king’s will.”[431]
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.
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…”[432]
Absolutism reached its height under Louis XIV, who famously stated: “I am
the State”. His most determined opponent, the Dutch King William, said that
Louis’ aim in Europe was to establish “a universal monarch and a universal
religion”.[433]
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.”[434]
The difference between Orthodox autocracy and Catholic absolutism is
that while the former welcomes 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 François Guizot wrote: “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 [i.e. absolutism] 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.”[435]
The Idea of Religious
Toleration
The idea of religious toleration 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.[436] 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.”[437]
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.”[438] 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.”[439]
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.”[440]
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).[441] 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”.[442] 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.”[443]
Cromwell’s supporter, Milton, produced a whole tract, Areopagitica (1646)
in favour of freedom of speech and the abolition of censorship. “Let her
[Truth] and Falsehood grapple; who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free
and open encounter?” Besides, “how”, he asked ironically, “shall the licensers
themselves be confided in, unless we can confer upon them, or they assume to
themselves above all others in the Land, the grace of infallibility and
uncorruptedness?”[444]
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.”[445]
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”.[446] And
indeed, the English revolutionaries were not the most tolerant of men…
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.”[447] 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.”[448]
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.[449]
“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.”[450]
“Since you are pleased to enquire,” wrote Locke, “what are my thoughts
about the mutual toleration of Christians in their different professions of
religion, I must needs answer you freely, that I esteem that toleration to be
the chief characteristical mark of the true church.”[451]
As
Smith interprets his thought: “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…”[452]
Such lukewarmness would hardly have satisfied a truly religious nation;
but from 1688 England’s religious zeal rapidly cooled, and to this day
“toleration” represents for English Christianity the cardinal virtue, perhaps
the only essential virtue, and certainly more important than true faith...
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…”[453]
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[454], 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].”[455]
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?’”[456]
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. The story was as follows. In 1655 the Venetian ambassador to England,
Giovanni Sagredo wrote: “The events of this week are all concerned with the
affair of the Jews and their earnest request to be admitted to domicile in
these realms. A Jew came from Antwerp and… when introduced to his highness
[Oliver Cromwell] he began not only to kiss but to press his hands and touch…
his whole body with the most exact care. When asked why he behaved so, he
replied that he had come from Antwerp solely to see if his highness was of
flesh and blood, since his superhuman deeds indicated that he was more than a
man… The Protector ordered [i.e. set up] a congregation of divines, who
discussed in the presence of himself and his council whether a Christian
country could receive the Jews. Opinions were very divided. Some thought they
might be received under various restrictions and very strict obligations.
Others, including some of the leading ministers of the laws, maintained that
under no circumstances and in no manner could they receive the Jewish sect in a
Christian kingdom without very grave sin. After long disputes and late at night
the meeting dissolved without any conclusion…”[457]
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…”[458]
“Indeed,” points out Johnson, “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”.[459]
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.’[460]
“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.’”[461]
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.
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..."[462]
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 – the fact was that 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[463],
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[464], 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’…”[465]
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
textiles and precious stones to the court… Such court Jews stood at the
pinnacle of the social scale, forming an elite class.”[466]
The migration of the Sephardic Jews from Catholic Spain and Portugal to
Protestant Holland and England marked the beginning both of the ascent of these
latter powers to the status of world powers, and of the fall of Spain and
Portugal from their position of power…. For, as R.H. Tawney writes: “Portugal
and Spain held the keys of the treasure house of the east and the west. But it
was neither Portugal with her tiny population, and her empire that was little
more than a line of forts and factories 10,000 miles long, nor Spain, for
centuries an army on the march and now staggering beneath the responsibilities
of her vast and scattered empire, devout to fanaticism, and with an incapacity
for economic affairs which seemed almost inspired, which reaped the material
harvest of the empires into which they had stepped, the one by patient toil,
the other by luck. Gathering spoils which they could not retain, and amassing wealth
which slipped through their fingers, they were little more than the political
agents of minds more astute and characters better versed in the arts of peace…
The economic capital of the new civilization was Antwerp… its typical figure,
the paymaster of princes, was the international financier”[467] – that
is, the Jew.
And when the Jews began to move from Antwerp to London, the economic
leadership of the world moved to England…
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…”[468]
But the main reason was undoubtedly: money...
“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. 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.[469] 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.’”[470]
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.[471]
“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.”[472]
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”.[473]
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.”[474]
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.”[475]
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…”[476]
The second half of the seventeenth century was the period in which the
scientific, proclaimed at the beginning of the century, was bringing forth its
first solid fruits in the discoveries of such men as Harvey, Gilbert, Boyle,
Hooke and Sir Isaac Newton.
It is worthy of note that Newton, though perhaps the greatest scientist
of all time, 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.”[477]
Of course, there was a large element of hubris in this programme,
a hubris that Newton shared, vaingloriously giving himself the pseudonym
“’Jeova Sanctus Unus’ – One Holy God – based upon an anagram of the Latinised
verson of his name, Isaacus Neuutonus”.[478]
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.”[479]
“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 was not a Deist. He believed that God periodically intervened in
the workings of nature. For, as his disciple Samuel Clarke wrote to Leibniz,
“the notion of the world’s being a great machine, going on without the
interposition of God, as a clock continues to go without the assistance of a
clock-maker, is the notion of materialism and fate, and tends… to exclude
providence and God’s government in reality out of the world.”[480]
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”.[481] 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.”[482] And
hence his quoting of 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.”[483]
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 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.”[484]
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[485] and
that the plan of the Temple of Solomon (Ezekiel 40-48) was a paradigm
for the entire future of the world.[486]
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, a fact which he carefully concealed until he
was dying). 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."[487]
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."[488]
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…
England: the
Conservative Enlightenment
The first war of the century, that of the Spanish succession (1701-1713),
was also the last of what we might call the wars of religion. Henceforth wars
would be fought, in the West at any rate, for the sake of territorial or
commercial aggrandizement, but not for faith – if we exclude, that is, the
atheist faith of the revolution. The turning away of the European peoples from
all such wars, was the single most important cause of that new tone of elegant
scepticism and tolerance that defined the Enlightenment more than anything
else.[489]
This war was also important because it changed the balance of power in
Europe from the “old regime” states, especially Spain, to the victors,
especially Britain, which now, as Davies writes, “emerged as the foremost
maritime power, as the leading diplomatic broker, and as the principal opponent
of French supremacy.”[490] From
now on, therefore, there were three kinds of state in Western Europe: old-style
absolutism, represented by Spain, in which Church and feudalism still exerted
their old power; new-style absolutism, represented by France, in which Church
and feudalism, while still strong, were becoming increasingly subject to the
law of the king; and constitutional monarchy, as represented by Britain and
Holland, in which the king, while still strong, was increasingly subject to the
law of parliament and, behind parliament, of mammon.
The rise of mammon, in the form of laissez-faire capitalism, was
especially important. The reinvention of paper money (it had previously been
invented in China) and the stock market produced the first massive financial
speculations, such as the South Sea Bubble in England and the Mississippi
Company in France. The most important men now, as Jonathan Swift noted in 1710,
were “quite different from any that were ever known before the Revolution [of
1688]; consisting of those… whose whole fortunes lie in funds and stocks; so
that power, which… used to follow land, is now gone over into money…”[491]
Since, as the Lord said, one cannot serve God and mammon, this trend
inevitably meant that the worship of God and zeal for the truth waned. Already
in 1668 in Samuel Butler’s Hudibras we can see the revulsion from the
methods of the wars of religion:
The holy text of pike and gun
Decide all controversies by
Infallible artillery…
As if religion were intended
For nothing else but to be mended.
And the
rise of another, no less pernicious tendency:
What makes all doctrines plain and clear?
About two hundred poundes a year.
And that which was true before
Proved false again? Two hundred more.
By the beginning of the next century, the trend was firmly entrenched.
Thus H.M.V. Temperley writes: “The earlier half of the eighteenth century in
England is an age of materialism, a period of dim ideals, of expiring hopes… We
can recognise in English institutions, in English ideals, in the English
philosophy of this age, the same practical materialism, the same hard
rationalism, the same unreasonable self-complacency. Reason dominated alike the
intellect, the will, and the passions; politics were self-interested, poetry
didactic, philosophy critical and objective… Even the most abstract of thinkers
and the most unworldly of clerics have a mundane and secular stamp upon them.”[492]
The “enthusiasm” of the lower classes was definitely rejected by the
self-satisfied upper classes. As the Duchess of Buckingham said of the
Methodist George Whitefield: “His doctrines are most repulsive and strongly
tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards his superiors. It is
monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches
that crawl on the earth…”[493]
A
depressing picture; and yet it was precisely in this dull, self-satisfied
England of the early 18th century that the foundations of the
contemporary world were laid. Moreover, the leading intellects of the time
looked on it as by no means dull. Anthony Ashley Cooper, the 3rd
Earl of Shaftesburgy, wrote to a comrade in the Netherlands: “There is a mighty
Light which spreads its self over the world especially in those two free Nations
of England and Holland; on whom the Affairs of Europe now turn; and if Heaven
sends us soon a peace suitable to the great Socrates we have had, it is
impossible but Letters and Knowledge must advance in greater Proportion than
ever… I am far from thinking that the cause of Theisme will lost anything by
fair Dispute. I can never… wish better for it when I wish the Establishment of
an intire Philosophical Liberty”.[494]
This quotation combines many of the characteristic themes of the
Enlightenment: first, the image of light itself; then the optimism, the belief
that knowledge and education will sweep all before it; the belief in free
speech, which, it was felt then, would not damage faith; above all, the belief
in liberty. And indeed, with the English Enlightenment there came a tolerance
that went far beyond the bounds of what had been considered tolerable in the
past. Thus Catholicism was still banned, because that was considered a political
threat; but the Earl of Shaftesbury was allowed “to print his scandalous
view that religion should be optional and atheism considered a possible form of
belief”...[495]
The Enlightenment world-view can be summarised as follows: “All men are
by nature equal; all have the same natural rights to strive after happiness, to
self-preservation, to the free control of their persons and property, to resist
oppression, to hold and express whatever opinions they please. The people is
sovereign; it cannot alienate its sovereignty; and every government not
established by the free consent of the community is a usurpation. The
title-deeds of man’s rights, as Sieyès said, are not lost. They are
preserved in his reason. Reason is infallible and omnipotent. It can discover
truth and compel conviction. Rightly consulted, it will reveal to us that code
of nature which should be recognised and enforced by the civil law. No evil
enactment which violates natural law is valid. Nature meant man to be virtuous
and happy. He is vicious and miserable, because he transgresses her laws and
despises her teaching.
“The essence of these doctrines is that man should reject every
institution and creed which cannot approve itself to pure reason, the reason of
the individual. It is true that if reason is to be thus trusted it must be
unclouded by prejudice and superstition. These are at once the cause and effect
of the defective and mischievous social, political and religious institutions,
which have perverted man’s nature, inflamed his passions, and distorted his
judgement. Therefore to overthrow prejudice and superstition should be the
first effort of those who would restore to man his natural rights.”[496]
The English Enlightenment rested on the achievements of two intellectual
giants: John Locke and Sir Isaac Newton. Newton’s work astonished the world.
His Principia was the single most important work of science before
Einstein. His Opticks, by explicating the nature of light, provided the
Enlightenment thinkers with the perfect image of that programme of intellectual
enlightenment that they were trying to carry out.
As Alexander Pope put it,
Nature, and
Nature’s Laws lay Hid from Sight;
Voltaire was so enamoured of Newtonian
principles that he called his mistress “Venus-Newton”. Newtonian physics
appeared to promise the unlocking of all Nature’s secrets by the use of reason
alone – although it must be remembered that Newton believed in revelation as
well as reason and wrote many commentaries on the Scriptures.
Roy Porter writes: “Newton was the god who put English science on the
map, an intellectual colossus, flanked by Bacon and Locke.
To mortals lent to trace His boundless works
From laws sublimely simple, speak thy fame
In all philosophy.
Sang James Thomson in his ‘Ode on the Death
of Sir Isaac Newton’ (1727). Wordsworth was later more Romantic:
Newton with his prism and silent face,
… a mind for ever,
Voyaging through strange seas of thought
alone.
‘Newton’ the icon proved crucial to the British
Enlightenment, universally praised except by a few obdurate outsiders, notably
William Blake, who detested him and all his works.
“What was crucial about Newton – apart from the fact that, so far as his
supporters were concerned, he was a Briton blessed with omniscience – was that
he put forward a vision of Nature which, whilst revolutionary, reinforced
latitudinarian Christianity. For all but a few diehards, Newtonianism was an
invincible weapon against atheism, upholding no mere First Cause but an
actively intervening personal Creator who continually sustained Nature and,
once in a while, applied a rectifying touch. Like Locke, furthermore, the
public Newton radiated intellectual humility. Repudiating the a priori
speculations of Descartes and later rationalists, he preferred empiricism: he
would ‘frame no hypotheses’ (hypotheses non fingo), and neither would he
pry into God’s secrets. Thus, while he had elucidated the law of gravity, he
did not pretend to divine its causes. Not least, in best enlightened fashion,
Newtonian science set plain facts above mystifying metaphysics. In
Newtonianism, British scientific culture found its enduring rhetoric: humble,
empirical, co-operative, pious, useful. ‘I don’t know what I may seem to the
world, but, as to myself,’ he recalled, in his supreme soundbite, ‘I seem to
have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now
and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst
the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’….
“The affinities between the Newtonian cosmos and the post-1688 polity
were played up. In the year after the master’s death, his disciple J.T.
Desaguliers produced an explicit application of physics to politics in The
Newtonian System of the World: The Best Model of Government, an Allegorical
Poem (1728), where the British monarchy was celebrated as the guarantor of
liberty and rights: ‘attractin is now as universal in the political, as the
philosophical world’.
What made the Planets in such Order move,
He said, was Harmony and mutual Love.
God
himself was commended as a kind of constitutional monarch:
His Pow’r, coerc’ed by Laws, still leaves
them free,
Directs but not Destroys their Liberty.
The Principia
thus provided an atomic exploratory model not just for Nature but for
society too (freely moving individuals governed by law)…
“This enthronement of the mechanical philosophy, the key paradigm switch
of the ‘scientific revolution’, in turn sanctioned the new assertions of man’s
rights over Nature so salient to enlightened thought… No longer alive or occult
but rather composed of largely inert matter, Nature could be weighted, measured
– and mastered. The mechanical philosophy fostered belief that man was
permitted, indeed dutybound, to apply himself to Nature for (in Bacon’s words)
the ‘glory of God and the relief of man’s estate’. Since Nature was not, after
all, sacred or ‘ensouled’, there could be nothing impious about utilizing and
dominating it. The progressiveness of science thus became pivotal to
enlightened propaganda. The was now well-lit, as bright as light itself.”[498]
But, as we shall see in more detail later, it was a light that cast much
of reality into the shadows; for “with the Newtonian mechanistic synthesis,”
writes Philip Sherrard, “… the world-picture, with man in it, is flattened and
neutralized, stripped of all sacred or spiritual qualities, of all hierarchical
differentiation, and spread out before the human observor like a blank chart on
which nothing can be registered except what is capable of being measured.”[499]
Locke’s philosophy also began with a tabula rasa, the mind of man
before empirical sensations have been imprinted upon it. The development of the
mind then depends on the movement and association and ordering of sensations
and the concepts that arise from them, rather like the atoms of Newton’s
universe. And the laws of physical motion and attraction correspond to the laws
of mental inference and deduction, the product of the true deus ex machina
of the Newtonian-Lockean universe – Reason.
Locke’s political and psychological treatises promised that all the
problems of human existence could be amicably settled by reason and rather than
revelation, and reasonableness rather than passion. Traditional religion was
not to be discarded, but purified of irrational elements, placed on a firmer,
that is, more rational and reasonable foundation; for, as Benjamin Whichcote
had said, with Locke’s agreement, “there is nothing so intrinsically rational
as religion”.[500]
Hence the title of another of Locke’s works: The Reasonableness of
Christianity (1695), in which only one key dogma was proclaimed as
necessary: that Jesus was the Messiah, proclaiming the coming of the Kingdom.
Reason, for Locke, was “the candle of the Lord”, “a natural revelation, whereby
the eternal Father of light, and Fountain of all knowledge, communicates to
mankind that portion of truth which he has laid within the reach of their
natural faculties”.[501] Armed
with reason, and even without Christ, one can know what is the just life lived
in accordance with natural law.
This reason, however, was not the deductive reason championed by the
contemporary German Gottfried Leibniz. The ideas of Leibniz, writes Sir Isaiah
Berlin, “were developed by his followers and interpreters into a coherent and
dogmatic metaphysical system which, so their popularisers claimed, was
logically demonstrated by deductive steps from simple premises, in their turn
self-evident to those who could use that infallible intellectual intuition with
which all thinking beings were endowed at birth. This rigid intellectualism was
attacked in England, where no form of pure rationalism has ever found a
congenial soil, by the most influential philosophical writers of the age,
Locke, Hume, and, towards the end of the century, Bentham and the philosophical
radicals, who agreed in denying the existence of any such faculty as an
intellectual intuition into the real nature of things. No faculty other than
the familiar physical senses could provide that initial empirical information
on which all other knowledge of the world in ultimately founded. Since all
information was conveyed by the senses, reason could not be an independent
source of knowledge, and was responsible only for arranging, classifying and
fitting together such information, and drawing deductions from it, operating on
material obtained without its aid.”[502]
“Locke,” writes Roy Porter, “had no truck with the fideist line that
reason and faith were at odds; for the latter was properly ‘nothing but a firm
assent of the mind: which… cannot be accorded to anything but upon good
reason’. Gullibility was not piety. To accept a book, for instance, as
revelation without chekcing out the author was gross superstition – how could
it honour God to suppose that faith overrode reason, for was not reason no less
God-given?
“In a typically enlightened move, Locke restricted the kinds of truths
which God might reveal: revelation could not be admitted contrary to reason,
and ‘faith can never convince us of anything that contradicts our knowledge’.
Yet there remained matters on which hard facts were unobtainable, as, for
instance, Heaven or the resurrection of the dead: ‘being beyond the discovery
or reason’, such issues were ‘purely matters for faith’.
“In short, Locke raised no objections to revealed truth as such, but
whether something ‘be a divine revelation or no, reason must judge – it was the
constant court of appeal. The credo, quia impossibile est of the early
Church fathers might seem the acme of devotion, but it ‘would prove a very ill
rule for men to choose their opinions or religion by’. Unless false prophets
were strenuously avoided, the mind would fall prey to ‘enthusiasm’, that
eruption of the ‘ungrounded fancies of a man’s own brain’. Doubtless, God might
speak directly to holy men, but Locke feared the exploitation of popular
credulity, and urged extreme caution.”[503]
Lockean rationalism led to the theology of Deism, which sought to
confine God’s activity in the world to the original act of creation. Thus the
Deists’ understanding of God was closely modelled on the English monarchy:
“’God is a monarch’, opined Viscount Bolingbroke, ‘yet not an arbitrary but a
limited monarch’: His power was limited by His reason”.[504] All
history since the creation could be understood by reason alone without recourse
to Divine Revelation or Divine intervention. Thus in 1730 Matthew Tyndal,
fellow of All Souls, Oxford, published his Christianity as Old as the
Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature. In it he
declared: “If nothing but Reasoning can improve Reason, and no Book can improve
my Reason in any Point, but as it gives me convincing Proofs of its
Reasonableness; a Revelation, that will not suffer us to judge of its Dictates
by our Reason, is so far from improving Reason, that it forbids the Use of it…
Understanding… can only be improv’d by studying the Nature and Reason of
things: ‘I applied my Heart’ (says the wisest of Men) ‘to know, and to search,
and to seek out Wisdom and the Reason of Things’ (Ecclesiastes 7.25)…”[505]
Of course, the word “Reason” has a long and honourable history in
Christian theology; Christ Himself is called the Wisdom and the Word of God,
and the word “Logos” can be translated by “Reason”. But what the Deists were
proposing was no Christian use of human reason enlightened by Divine Reason.
Reason for them was something divorced from Revelation and therefore from
Christ; it was something purely ratiocinative, rationalist; it was what we
would now call ratiocination or intellection rather than the
grace-filled, revelation-oriented reason of the Christian theologians. “Reason
is for the philosopher what Grace is for the Christian”, wrote Diderot.[506]
It followed from this Deistic concept of God and Divine Providence that
all the complicated theological speculation and argument of earlier centuries
was as superfluous as revelation itself. The calm, lucid religion of nature
practised by philosopher-scientists would replace the arid, tortured religion
of the theologians. And such a religion, as well as being simpler, would be
much more joyful that the old. No more need to worry about sin, or the wrath of
God, or hell. No more odium theologicum, just gaudium naturale.
As Porter writes, “rejecting the bogeyman of a vengeful Jehovah blasting wicked
sinners, enlightened divines instated a more optimistic (pelagian) theology,
proclaiming the benevolence of the Supreme Being and man’s capacity to fulfil
his duties through his God-given faculties, the chief of these being reason,
that candle of the Lord.”[507]
This Deist, man-centred view of the universe was sometimes seen as being
summed up in Pope’s verse:
Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,
The proper study of mankind is man.[508]
However, Pope, a Roman Catholic and therefore a member of a
persecuted minority, actually went on to express a scepticism about the powers
of human knowledge and the human mind which provided a necessary
counter-balance to the prevailing optimism:
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise, and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic
side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s
pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act, or rest;
In doubt to deem himself a God, or Beast;
In doubt his Mind or Body to prefer,
Born but to die, and reas’ning but to err.[509]
But for the Protestant majority the centre of attention was no longer
the life of the age to come, but this world with its delightfully harmonious
laws, reflecting a wise, beneficent Creator and His happy, reasonable
creatures. It followed that religion had to be happy and reasonable. “’Religion
is a cheerful thing,’ Lord Halifax explained to his daughter. And Lord
Shaftesbury enlarged: ‘Good Humour is not only the best Security against
Enthusiasm: Good Humour is also the best Foundation of Piety and True
Religion.’ For the proof of that religion, you had only to look about you. It
was perfectly evident to anyone standing in the grounds of any English stately home
that a discriminating gentleman had created them: how much more overwhelming
evidence of that even greater Gentleman above, who had so recently revealed to
Sir Isaac Newtom that his Estate too was run along rational lines…”[510]
Thus the cult of happiness was another important aspect of the English
Enlightenment. Porter writes: “The Ancients taught: ‘be virtuous’, and
Christianity: ‘have faith’; but the Moderns proclaimed: ‘be happy’. Replacing
the holiness preached by the Church, the great ideal of the modern world has
been happiness, and it was the thinkers of the 18th century who
first insisted upon that value shift.
Good, Pleasure, Ease, Content! Whate’er thy
name…
sang poet Alexander Pope. ‘Happiness is the
only thing of real value in existence’, proclaimed the essayist Soame Jenyns.
‘Pleasure is now the principal remaining part of your education,’ Lord
Chesterfield instructed his son.
“And if phrases like ‘pleasure-loving’ always hinted at the unacceptable
face of hedonism, it would be hard to deny that the quest for happiness –
indeed the right to happiness – became a commonplace of Enlightenment thinking,
even before it was codified into Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian ‘greatest
happiness of the greatest number’ definition. That formula was itself a variant
upon phrases earlier developed by the moral philosopher Francis Hutcheson, and
by the Unitarian polymath, Joseph Priestley, who deemed that ‘the good and
happiness of the members, that is, the majority of the members of any state, is
the great standard by which everything related to that state must finally be
determined.’
“The quest for happiness became central to enlightened thinking
throughout Europe, and it would be foolish to imply that British thinkers had
any monopoly of the idea. Nevertheless, it was a notion which found many of its
earliest champions in this country. ‘I will faithfully pursue that happiness I
propose to myself,’… had insisted at the end of the 17th century.
And English thinkers were to the fore in justifying happiness as a goal….
“What changes of mind made hedonism acceptable to the Enlightenment? In
part, a new turn in theology itself. By 1700 rational Anglicanism was picturing
God as the benign Architect of a well-designed universe. The Earth was a
law-governed habitat meant for mankind’s use; man could garner the fruits of
the soil, tame the animals and quarry the crust. Paralleling this new Christian
optimism ran lines of moral philosophy and aesthetics espoused by the Third
Earl of Shaftesbury and his admirer, Francis Hutcheson. Scorning gravity and
the grave, Shaftesbury’s rhapsodies to the pleasures of virtue pointed the way
for those who would champion the virtues of pleasure.
“Early Enlightenment philosophers like Locke gave ethics a new basis in
psychology. It was emphasized that, contrary to Augustinian rigour, human
nature was not hopelessly depraved; rather the passions were naturally benign –
and in any case pleasure was to be derived from ‘sympathy’ with them. Virtue
was, in short, part and parcel of a true psychology of pleasure and was its own
reward. Good taste and good morals fused in an aesthetic of virtue.
“Like Nature at large, man became viewed as a machine made up of parts,
open to scientific study through the techniques of a ‘moral anatomy’ which
would unveil psychological no less than physical laws of motion. Building on
such natural scientific postulates, thinkers championed individualism and the
right to self-improvement. It became common, as in Bernard Mandeville’s Fable
of the Bees, to represent society as a hive made up of individuals, each
pulsating with needs, desires and drives which hopefully would work for the
best: private vices, public benefits. ‘The wants of the mind are infinite,’
asserted the property developer and physician Nicholas Barbon, expressing views
which pointed towards Adam Smith’s celebration of ‘the uniform, constant and
uninterrupted effort of every man to better his condition’. ‘Self love’,
asserted Joseph Tucker, Dean of Gloucester Cathedral, ‘is the great Mover in
human Nature’.”[511]
Self love was also the prime mover in capitalist economics. According to
Adam Smith, one of the bright lights of the Scottish Enlightenment, “it is not
from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker, that we expect
our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves,
not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own
necessities but of their advantages.”[512]
So the common interest is best served by everyone being made free to pursue his
own self-interest with as little interference from the State or other bodies as
possible. Here we see the doctrine of laissez-faire economics which has
become one of the corner-stones of the modern world-view.
Garnished with a touch of German moral earnestness, this English concept
of Enlightenment was well summed up by the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the
words: “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.
Immaturity is the inability to use one’s own understanding without the
guidance of another. This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is
not lack of understanding, but lack of resolution and courage to use it without
the guidance of another. The motto of enlightenment is therefore: Sapere
aude! Have courage to use your own understanding!”[513]
France: The Radical Enlightenment
The English Enlightenment, while theologically and philosophically
radical, was politically conservative. For the English revolution had already
happened, and by 1700 the essential freedoms, especially the freedom of the
press, which the Enlightenment thinkers valued, had already been won. “In these
circumstances,” writes Porter, “enlightened ideologies were to assume a unique
inflection in England: one less concerned to lambast the status quo than
to vindicate it against adversaries left and right, high and low. Poachers were
turning gamekeepers; implacable critics of princes now became something more
like apologists for them; those who had held that power corrupted now found
themselves, with the advent of political stabilisation, praising the Whig
regime as the bulwark of Protestant liberties….
“The English, in [Pocock’s] view, were uniquely able to enjoy an enlightenment
without philosophes precisely because, at least after 1714, there was no
longer any infâme to be crushed…
“There was no further need to contemplate regicide because Great Britain
was already a mixed monarchy, with inbuilt constitutional checks on the royal
will; nor would radicals howl to string up the nobility, since they had
abandoned feudalism for finance. What Pocock tentatively calls the
‘conservative enlightenment’ was thus a holding operation, rationalizing the
post-1688 settlement, pathologizing its enemies and dangling seductive
prospects of future security and prosperity. The Enlightenment became
established and the established became enlightened.”[514]
It was very different in France. The French had not yet beheaded their
king; their Protestants had no liberties, and their intellectuals no freedom of
the press. Therefore the ideas of the English Enlightenment, popularised for a
French audience by Voltaire in his Letters on the English and Elements
of Newton’s Physics, and by Montesquieu in his The Spirit of the Laws, acquired
an altogether sharper, more revolutionary edge. The tolerant English empiricism
became the French cult of reason, a fiercely intolerant revolt against
all revealed religion. For, as Berlin writes, the French philosophes
were perceived to be “the first organised adversaries of dogmatism,
traditionalism, religion, superstition, ignorance, oppression.”[515]
Reason for the philosophes, as for the English thinkers, was
something down-to-earth and utilitarian – “not man’s mind as such,” writes
Cragg, “but the way in which his rational faculties could be used to achieve
certain specific ends. Descartes had relied on deduction; Newton had used
inductive analysis in penetrating to the great secret of nature’s marvellous
laws, and the spirit and method of Newtonian physics ruled the eighteenth
century. Nature was invested with unparalleled authority, and it was assumed
that natural law ruled every area into which the mind of man could penetrate.
Nature was the test of truth. Man’s ideas and his institutions were judged by
their conformity with those laws which, said Voltaire, ‘nature reveals at all
times, to all men’. The principles which Newton had found in the physical
universe could surely be applied in every field of inquiry. The age was
enchanted with the orderly and rational structure of nature; by an easy
transition that the reasonable and the natural must be synonymous. Nature was
everywhere supreme, and virtue, truth, and reason were her ‘adorable
daughters’. The effect of this approach was apparent in every sphere. In France
history, politics, and economics became a kind of ‘social physics’. The new
outlook can be seen in Montesquieu’s The Spirit of the Laws; thenceforth
the study of man’s institutions became a prolongation of natural science. The
emphasis fell increasingly on the practical consequences of knowledge: man is
endowed with reason, said Voltaire, ‘not that he may penetrate the divine
essence but that he may live well in this world’.”[516]
Voltaire said, “I am not an atheist, nor a superstitious person; I stand
for common sense and the golden mean”.[517] “I
believe in God, not the God of the mystics and the theologians, but the God of
nature, the great geometrician, the architect of the universe, the prime mover,
unalterable, transcendental, everlasting.”[518] So
far, so English. But the anti-religious zeal of many of the philosophes,
including Voltaire himself, was decidedly unEnglish. Moreover, an English
thinker would not have declared, with Diderot, that the aim of philosophy was
“to enlarge and liberate God”[519] (not
only man, but even God was supposedly in chains!!).
The philosophers set about undermining the foundations of Christian
civilization. Theye denied original sin and attacked the Church. Thus Voltaire
wrote to Frederick the Great: “Your majesty will do the human race an eternal
service in extirpating this infamous superstition [Christianity], I do not say
among the rabble, who are not worthy of being enlightened and who are apt for
every yoke; I say among the well-bred, among those who wish to think.”[520] Montesquieu, Diderot and others
followed him in mocking the faith of believers.
The reaction of the Catholic Church in France was firmer than that of
the Anglican Church in England. Thus Archbishop Beaumont of Paris wrote in
1762: “In order to appeal to all classes and characters, Disbelief has in our
time adopted a light, pleasant, frivolous style, with the aim of diverting the
imagination, seducing the mind, and corrupting the heart. It puts on an air of
profundity and sublimity and professes to rise to the first principles of
knowledge so as to throw off a yoke it considers shameful to mankind and to the
Deity itself. Now it declaims with fury against religious zeal yet preaches
toleration for all; now it offers a brew of serious ideas with badinage, of
pure moral advice with obscenities, of great truths with great errors, of faith
with blasphemy. In a word, it undertakes to reconcile Jesus Christ with
Belial.”[521]
The next target was the State. The Enlightenment’s political creed was
summed up by Barzun as follows: “Divine right is a dogma without basis;
government grew out of nature itself, from reasonable motives and for the good
of the people; certain fundamental rights cannot be abolished, including
property and the right of revolution”.[522]
However, the philosophers did not at first attack the State so fiercely, hoping
that their own programme would be implemented by the “enlightened despots” of
the time. Moreover, until Rousseau’s theory of the General Will appeared, the
philosophers were wary of the destructive impact a direct attack on the State
could have.
What, then, was the constructive programme of the philosophers?
With what did they plan to replace the Church and State? Surprisingly, perhaps,
there were very few planned utopias in this period. It was simply assumed that
with the passing of prejudice, a golden age would ensue automatically. So there
was great emphasis on the future, but not in the form of blueprints of a future
society, but rather in the form of rhapsodies on the theme of how posterity,
seeing the world changed through education and reason and law (“Legislation
will accomplish everything”, said Hélvetius), would praise the
enlightened men of the present generation.
“God had been dethroned as judge, and posterity was exalted in its
stead. It would be more than a time of fulfilment; it would provide the true
vindication of the aspirations and endeavours of all enlightened men.
‘Posterity,’ wrote Diderot, ‘is for the philosopher what the other world is for
the religious man.’”[523]
Thus the Age of Reason created its own mythology of the Golden Age. Only
it was to be in the future, not in the past. And in this world, not the next.
“The Golden Age, so fam’d by Men of Yore, shall soon be counted fabulous no
more”, said Paine. And “the Golden Age of Humanity is not behind us”, said
Saint Simon; “it lies ahead, in the perfection of the social order”.
Thus “if the Enlightenment repudiated ‘supernatural, other-worldly,
organized Christianity’,” writes Fr. Michael Azkoul, “it believed in its own
brave new world. The ‘great book of Nature’ had recorded the means by which it
was to be achieved. Professor Carl Becker shows in his Heavenly City of the
Eighteenth Century Philosophers that nature was in fact not ‘the great
book’ for them, but Augustine’s City of God torn down and rebuilt with
‘up-to-date’ materials.’ For example, Eden was replaced with ‘the golden age of
Greek mythology,’ the love of God with the love of humanity, the saving work of
Christ with the creative genius of great men, grace with the goodness of man,
immortality by posterity or the veneration of future generations… The vision of
the Enlightenment, as Becker affirms, was a secular copy, a distorted copy, of
Christianity…”[524]
Enlightened Despotism
But let us turn now to the period of “enlightened despotism”, when the
ideals of the Enlightenment appeared to work together with traditional forms of
government.
The combination of the two words “enlightened” and “despotism” is
paradoxical, for the whole thrust of the Enlightenment, as we have seen, was
anti-despotic and anti-authoritarian. And yet at precisely this time there came
to power in continental Europe of a series of rulers who were infected with the
cult of reason and democratism, on the one hand, but who ruled as despots, on
the other.
Enlightened despotism was made possible because the official Churches –
still, until the French Revolution, the main “check” on government - had grown
weak. Even the most despotic of earlier rulers, such as Louis XIV, had made
concessions to the power of the Church. For example, Louis XIV’s rejection of
Gallicanism and revocation of the Edict of Nantes giving protection to the
Huguenots was elicited by his need to retain the support of the still-powerful
Papacy. In France, the Catholic Church, if not the Papacy as such, continued to
be strong, which is one reason why the struggle between the old and the new
ideas and régimes was so intense there, spilling over into the
revolution of 1789. In other continental countries, however, despotic rulers
did not have to take such account of ecclesiastical opposition to their ideas.
Their success was aided by the demise of their main rivals, the Jesuits.
Like the Jews, the Jesuits were a kind of state within the states. In Paraguay
they had even created a hierocratic society under their control among the
Indians.[525]
Rich, powerful and well-educated, they were a threat to despotic rulers even
when their nominal master, the Pope, had ceased to be.
And so, under pressure from rulers, writes Davies, “Benedict XIV
(1740-58), whose moderation won him the unusual accolade of praise from
Voltaire, initiated an inquiry into their affairs. They were accused of running
large-scale money-making operations, also of adopting native cults to win
converts at any price.[526] In
1759 they were banished from Portugal, in 1764 from France, and in 1767 from
Spain and Naples. Clement XIII (1758-69) stood by the Society with the words Sint
ut sunt, aut non sint (may they be as they are, or cease to be). But Clement XIV (1769-74),
who was elected under the shadow of a formal demand by the Catholic powers for
abolition, finally acquiesced. The brief Dominus ac Redemptor noster of 16
August 1773 abolished the Society of Jesus, on the grounds that it was no
longer pursuing its founder’s objectives. It took effect in all European
countries except for Russia.”[527]
Having removed the priests who would be kings, the kings could now rule
without any priestly limitations on their power. Perhaps the first to begin
this trend was the adolescent Charles XII of Sweden, who, while not dispensing
with the Church altogether, nevertheless demonstrated that he was king whatever
the Church might do or not do about it. Thus at his coronation in 1697, writes
Massie, Charles “refused to be crowned as previous kings had been: by having
someone else place the crown on his head. Instead, he declared that, as he had
been born to the crown and not elected to it, the actual act of coronation was
irrelevant. The statesmen of Sweden, both liberal and conservative, and even
his own grandmother were aghast. Charles was put under intense pressure, but he
did not give way on the essential point. He agreed only to allow himself to be
consecrated by an archbishop, in order to accede to the Biblical injunction
that a monarch be the Lord’s Anointed, but he insisted that the entire ceremony
be called a consecration, not a coronation. Fifteen-year-old Charles rode to
the church with his crown already on his head.
“Those who looked for omens found many in the ceremony… The King slipped
while mounting his horse with his crown on his head; the crown fell off and was
caught by a chamberlain before it hit the ground. During the service, the
archbishop dropped the horn of anointing oil. Charles refused to give the
traditional royal oath and then, in the moment of climax, he placed the crown
on his own head…”[528]
Charles could hardly be called an enlightened despot. But his
successor, Gustavus Adolphus III, was. And so, in 1792, he was killed by nobles
“outraged at a programme of democratic despotism… [which] made the popular
gestures constantly being pressed upon Louis XVI by his secret advisers seem
tame.”[529]
In
neighbouring Germany the princes, who were in effect also first minister of
their Churches[530], were
more influenced by the French Enlightenment. Thus Frederick of Prussia
dispensed with any religious sanction for his rule and took the Enlightenment
philosophers for his guides. “I was born too soon,” he said, “but I have seen
Voltaire.”[531]
How could despotism co-exist with the caustic anti-authoritarianism of
Voltaire and the other philosophes? It was a question of means and
ends. If the aims of the philosophes were “democratic” in the sense that
they wished the abolition of “superstition” and increased happiness for
everybody through education, the best – indeed the only – means to that end at
that time was the enlightened despot.
But there is no question that they preferred republicanism to despotism,
enlightened or otherwise. Thus Voltaire said: “The most tolerable government of
all is no doubt a republic, because it brings men closest to natural equality.”
And yet “there has never been a perfect government because men have passions”.
It was not only the philosophes who looked to the enlightened
despots: as Hobsbawn writes, “the middle and educated classes and those
committed to progress often looked to the powerful central apparatus of an
‘enlightened’ monarchy to realize their hopes. A prince needed a middle class
and its ideas to modernize his state; a weak middle class needed a prince to
batter down the resistance of entrenched aristocratic and clerical interests to
progress.”[532]
For “what possible grounds
could the philosophes have had for vesting political trust in the wisdom of the people at
large? Almost everywhere in Europe, the bulk of the population consisted of
illiterate peasants, labourers, and even serfs – all, to elitist eyes,
hopelessly ignorant, backward and superstitious, browbeaten by custom into an
unthinking deferential loyalty to throne and altar. The likes of Voltaire
habitually depicted the peasantry as hardly distinguishable from the beasts of
the field. Their point in making such unflattering comparisons was to criticise
a system that reduced humans to the level of brutes; but such comments betray a
mind for which the true question was not popular participation in government –
that did not seem a real priority – but whether the people were to be ruled
wisely or incompetently.”[533]
So the philosophes went to the kings – Voltaire to Frederick of Prussia, Diderot to
Catherine of Russia – and tried to make them into philosopher-kings, as Plato
had once tried with Dionysius of Syracuse. And the kings were flattered to
think of themselves in this light. But neither the kings nor their philosopher
advisers ever aimed to create democratic republics, as opposed to more
efficient monarchies.
“The Continental philosophes of the High Enlightenment never made their
prime demand the maximisation of personal freedom and the reciprocal
attenuation of the state, in the manner of later English laissez-faire
liberalism. For one thing, a strong executive would be needed to maintain the
freedom of subjects against the encroachments of the Church and the privileges
of the nobles. Physiocrats such as Quesnay championed an economic policy of
free trade, but recognised that only a determined, dirigiste administration
would prove capable of upholding market freedoms against encroached vested
interests. No continental thinkers were attracted to the ideal of the
‘nightwatchman’ state so beloved of the English radicals…
“It was the thinkers of Germanic and Central Europe above all who looked
to powerful, ‘enlightened’ rulers to preside over a ‘well-policed’ state. By
this was meant a regime in which an efficient, professional career bureaucracy
comprehensively regulated civic life, trade, occupations, morals and health,
often down to quite minute details.”[534]
Cragg writes: “Certain characteristics were common to all the
enlightened despotisms, but each of the continental countries had its own
particular pattern of development. By the middle of the century, Frederick the
Great had achieved a pre-eminent position, and his brilliance as a military
leader had fixed the eyes of Europe on his kingdom. Prussia appeared to be the
supreme example of the benefits of absolute rule. But appearances were
deceptive. Frederick had indeed brought the civil service to a high degree of
efficiency and had organized the life of the country in a way congenial to a
military martinet. Though he was anxious to improve the peasants’ lot, he could
not translate his theories into facts. His reign resulted in an actual increase
of serfdom. His rule rested on assumptions that were already obsolete long
before the advent of the French Revolution. It is true that by illiberal means
he achieved certain liberal ends. He abolished torture; he promoted education;
in the fields of politics and economics he applied the principles of the
Enlightenment. He had no sympathy with Christianity and little patience with
its devotees. He regarded the service of the state as an adequate substitute
for Christian faith and life. He advocated toleration on the ground that all
religious beliefs were equally absurd…”[535]
Thus toleration
for all faiths, so long as they accepted “the service of the state” as the
supreme cult. Such a religion perfectly suited Frederick, who could only
understand religion in utilitarian terms, in terms of its usefulness to the
State. But was this really an adequate substitute for Christianity? Why should
the people serve the state? For material gain? But Frederick gave them only war
and serfdom. In any case, man cannot live by bread alone, and states cannot
survive through the provision of material benefits alone. The people need a
faith that justifies the state and the dominion of some men over others.
Christianity provided such a justification as long as the people believed in
it, and as long as the ruler could make himself out to be “the defender of the
faith”. But if neither the people nor the ruler believe in Christianity, what
can take its place? One alternative is the deification of the nation or state
itself, and this was the path Frederick’s successors took. But between
Frederick’s enlightened despotism and the Prussian nationalism of the
nineteenth century there was a logical and chronological gap. That gap was
filled by the teaching of Kant and Herder and Rousseau, the French revolution
and Napoleon…
We have said
that the philosophes like Voltaire and Diderot were happy to work with
the enlightened despots. However, this was a purely transitional phase, a
tactical ploy which could not last long. For the principles of the philosophes,
carried to their logical conclusion, led to the destruction of all monarchies.
This was
clearest in the case of Rousseau, as we shall see; but even in Diderot, the
friend of Catherine the Great, we find the following: “The arbitrary government
of a just and enlightened prince is always bad. His virtues are the most
dangerous and the most surely seductive: they insensibly accustom a people to
love, respect and serve his successor, however wicked or stupid he might be. He
takes away from the people the right of deliberating, of willing or not
willing, of opposing even its own will when it ordains the good. However, this
right of opposition, mad though it is, is sacred… What is it that characterises
the despot? Is it kindness or ill-will? Not at all: these two notions enter not
at all into the definition. It is the extent of the authority he arrogates to
himself, not its application. One of the greatest evils that could befall a
nation would be two or three reigns by a just, gentle, enlightened, but
arbitrary power: the peoples would be led by happiness to complete
forgetfulness of their privileges, to the most perfect slavery…”[536]
“The right of
opposition, mad though it is, is sacred”… Here we find the true voice of the
revolution, which welcomes madness, horror, misery, bloodshed on an
unprecedented scale, so long as it is the expression of the right of opposition, that is, of
satanic rebelliousness. And that madness, that irrationality, that satanism, it
must not be forgotten, was begotten in the heart of the Age of Reason…
The Scot David Hume was unique among the rationalist philosophers of the
eighteenth-century in claiming to prove, by the method of “experimental
philosophy”, or reductionism, the irrationality of reason itself – that
is, considered on its own and without any other support. His conclusion was
that reason is in fact supplemented by faith. But then he went on to
show that faith – not only in God, but in any enduring, objective reality – is
itself a species of irrationalism.
Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature, was written in 1739-40,
shortly after he had had a nervous breakdown. It was subtitled ‘An Attempt to
Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects’. This
indicated the final end of the Enlightenment Programme: to subdue absolutely
everything, even religion and morality, to the “experimental method”.
Hume first disposes of the idea of substance. Since our idea of the
external world is derived entirely from impressions of sensation, and since we
can never derive from sensation alone the idea of an object existing independently
of our sensations, such an idea does not really exist at all. Instead, “the
idea of a substance… is nothing but a collection of simple ideas that are
united by the imagination and have a particular name assigned to them, by which
we are able to recall, either to ourselves or others, that collection.”[537]
Following the same reasoning, Hume also disposes of the idea of the soul
or self. There is no sense-impression which corresponds to the idea of a
permanently existing self. For “self or person is not any one impression, but
that to which our several impressions and ides are supposed to have a
reference. If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression
must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since
self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression
constant and invariable… and consequently there is no such idea.”[538]
The most famous example of Hume’s reductionism ad absurdum is his
analysis of causation. When we say that A causes B, the word “causes” does not
correspond to any impression of sensation. All that we actually see is
that events of the class A are constantly followed by events of the class B.
This constant conjunction of A and B predisposes the mind, on seeing A, to
think of B. Thus a cause in nature “is an object precedent and contiguous to
another, and so united with it that the idea of the one determines the mind to
form the idea of the other, and the impression of the one to form a more lively
idea of the other.”[539]
Russell has analysed Hume’s teaching into two parts: “(1) When we say ‘A
caused B’, all that we have a right to say is that, in part experience,
A and B have frequently appeared together or in rapid succession, and no
instance has been observed of A not followed or accompanied by B. (2) However
many instances we may have observed of the conjunction of A and B, that give no
reason for expecting them to be conjoined on a future occasion, though
it is a cause of this expectation, i.e. it has been frequently observed
to be conjoined with such an expectation. These two parts of the doctrine may
be stated as follows: (1) in causation there is no indefinable relation except
conjunction or succession; (2) induction by simple enumeration is not a valid
argument…
“If the first half of Hume’s doctrine is admitted, the rejection of
induction makes all expectation as to the future irrational, even the
expectation that we shall continue to feel expectations. I do not mean merely
that our expectations may be mistaken; that, in any case, must be
admitted. I mean that, taking even our firmest expectations, such as that the
sun will rise to-morrow, there is not a shadow of a reason for supposing them
more likely to be verified than not…”[540]
Thus empiricism is shown to be irrational. As Copleston writes, “the
uniformity of nature is not demonstrable by reason. It is the object of belief
rather than of intuition or demonstration.”[541] We
cannot help having such beliefs; for “whatever may be the reader’s opinion at
this present moment,.. an hour hence he will be persuaded there is both an
external and internal world.”[542].
However, such belief cannot be justified by reason; for it “is more properly an
act of the sensitive, than of the cogitative part of our natures.”[543]
Hume’s attitude to belief in God is predictably agnostic, if not
strictly atheistic. We cannot say that God is the cause of nature because we
have never seen a constant conjunction of God, on the one hand, and nature, on
the other. Also, “I much doubt,” he says, “that a cause can be known only by
its effect.”[544]
At most, Hume concedes, “the cause or causes of order in the universe probably
bear some remote analogy to human intelligence.”[545]
In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion Hume wrote: “For aught
we know a priori, matter may contain the source, or spring, of order
originally, within itself, as well as the mind does.” As Edward Skidelsky
points out, “This is the seed from which the various 19th-century
theories of evolution – of which Darwin’s is only the most famous – spring…
After Hume, it is only a matter of time before agnosticism reigns supreme. The
perseverance of belief is attributed to mere ignorance or else to a wilful
‘sacrifice of the intellect’. Unbelievers, on the other hand, are congratulated
for their disinterested pursuit of truth ‘wherever it may lead’.”[546]
Morality is disposed of as thoroughly as the idea of God. The essential
point is that “reason alone can never be a motive to any action of the will”,
and reason “can never oppose passion in the direction of the will”. For “‘Tis
not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the
scratching of my finger.”[547] And
“the life of a man is of no greater important to the universe than that of an
oyster.”[548]
Reason can oppose a passion only by directing the mind to other passions
tending in the opposite direction. For “it is from the prospect of pain or
pleasure that the aversion or propensity arises towards any object.”[549] Hume’s
conclusion is that “reason is, and ought to be the slave of the passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”[550]
Nor is this necessarily a bad
thing. For “analysis of such desires as pride and humility, love and hate,
uncovered an internal feeling or sentiment called the ‘moral sense’.
In delineating the workings of propensities integral to human existence,
Hume noted that Christian theologians and Platonists alike had condemned the
appetites, the former deploring them as sinful, the latter demanding their
mastery by reason. For Hume, by contrast, feelings were the true springs of
such vital social traits as the love of family, attachment to property and the
desire for reputation. Pilloried passions like pride were the very cement of
society. Dubbing its denigrators ‘monkish’, Hume defended pride when well
regulated; indeed, magnanimity, that quality attributed to all the greatest
heroes, was ‘either nothing but a steady and well-establish’d pride and
self-esteem, or partakes largely of that passion’. Besides, ‘hearty pride’ was
essential to society, whose hierarchy of ranks, fixed by ‘our birth, fortume,
employments, talents or reputation’, had to be maintained if it were to
function smoothly. A person needed pride to acquit himself well in his station
– indiscriminate humility would reduce social life to chaos. Much that had traditionally
been reproved as egoistically immoral he reinstated as beneficial.”[551]
Hume’s essential idea was that, in Edwin Burt’s words, “Reason is a
subjective faculty which has no necessary relation with the ‘facts’ we seek to
know. It is limited to tracing the relations of our ideas, which themselves are
already twice removed from ‘reality’. And our senses are equally subjective,
for they can never know the ‘thing in itself’, but only an image of it which
has in it no element of necessity and certainty – ‘the contrary of every matter
of fact is still possible’.[552]
Hume’s significance lies in his rational demonstration of the impotence
of reason, of the fact that it can prove the existence of nothing – not
only of God, Providence and the immortal soul, but even of material objects and
causality, the bedrock of empirical explanation. As Bertrand Russell writes:
“Hume… developed to its logical conclusion the empirical philosophy of Locke
and Berkeley, and by making it self-consistent made it incredible. He
represents, in a certain sense, a dead end: in his direction, it is impossible
to go further.”[553]
But a dead-end for rationalism can only mean an opening for
irrationalism. If reason can only serve passion rather than rule it, as Hume
claimed, then the last moral barrier to the overturning of all traditional
values is removed. And indeed, in Paris, where Hume was fêted much more
than his native Scotland, the revolution against eighteenth-century rationalism
was only a few years away.
Hume’s hard-headed empiricism extended also to his political philosophy,
where it at least had the virtue of exposing the weak foundations on which the
theory of the social contract was based. Thus for Hume there never was any such
thing as a “state of nature” – “men are necessarily born in a family-society at
least.”[554]
The initial bonds between men are not contractual, but sexual and parental:
“Natural appetite draws members of the two sexes together and preserves their
union until a new bond arises, their common concern for their offspring. 'In a
little time, custom and habit operating on the tender minds of the children
makes them sensible of the advantages which they reap from society, as well as
fashions them by degrees for it, by rubbing off those rough corners and
untoward affections which prevent their coalition.’ The family, therefore (or,
more accurately, the natural appetite between the sexes), is ‘the first and
original principle of human society’. The transition to a wider society is
effected principally by the felt need for stabilizing the possession of
external goods.”[555]
Men could continue living in primitive societies like those of the
American Indians without the formal structure of government if it were not that
quarrels over property led to the need for the administration of justice. “The
state of society without government is one of the most natural states of men,
and must subsist with the conjunction of many families, and long after the
first generation. Nothing but an increase of riches and possessions could
oblige men to quit it.”[556]
Later, quarrels between tribes lead to the emergence of war leaders.
Then, during the peace, the war leader continues to lead. And so an ad hoc
arrangement dictated by necessity and the need to survive would generate a
permanent government. This is a gradual, organic process propelled by
“necessity, inclination and habit” rather than an explicit, rational agreement.
Indeed, not only are governments not formed on the basis of consent:
“’almost all the governments which exist at present, or of which there remains
any record in story, have been founded originally, either on usurpation or
conquest or both, without any pretence of a fair consent or voluntary
subjection of the people… The face of the earth is continually changing, by the
increase of small kingdoms into great empires, by the dissolution of great
empires into smaller kingdoms, by the planting of colonies, by the migration of
tribes. Is there anything discernible in all these events but force and violence?
Where is the mutual agreement or voluntary association so much talked of?’ Even
when elections take the place of force, what does it amount to? It may be
election by a few powerful and influential men. Or it may take the form of
popular sedition, the people following a ringleader who owes his advancement to
his own impudence or to the momentary caprice of the crowd, most of whom have
little of no knowledge of him and his capacities. In neither case is there a
real rational agreement by the people.”[557]
English political liberalism, we may recall, arose from the need to
justify the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Protestant William of Orange
usurped the throne of the Catholic James II. William’s rule was tacitly
consented to as being more in accord with natural law and reason than the
despotism of James II, who was deemed to have broken some kind of contract with
his citizens. But Hume undermines both the contractual and the rational
elements in this justification, reducing the whole duty of allegiance to naked
self-interest. In this way he is closer to Hobbes than to Locke – and to Marx
than to J.S. Mills….
“Granted that there is a duty of political allegiance, it is obviously
idle to look for its foundation in popular consent and in promises if there is
little or no evidence that popular consent was ever asked or given. As for
Locke’s idea of tacit consent, ‘it may be answered that such an implied consent
can only have place where a man imagines that the matter depends on his choice’.
But anyone who is born under an established government thinks that he owes
allegiance to the sovereign by the very fact that he is by birth a citizen of
the political society in question. And to suggest with Locke that every man is
free to leave the society to which he belongs by birth is unreal. ‘Can we
seriously say that a poor peasant or artisan has a free choice to leave his
country, when he knows no foreign language or manners and lives from day to day
by the small wages which he acquires?’
“The obligation of allegiance to civil government, therefore, ‘is not
derived from any promise of the subjects’. Even if promises were made at some
time in the remote past, the present duty of allegiance cannot rest on them.
‘It being certain that there is a moral obligation to submit to government,
because everyone thinks so, it must be as certain that this obligation arises
not from a promise, since no one whose judgement has not been led astray by too
strict adherence to a system of philosophy has ever yet dreamt of ascribing it
to that origin.’ The real foundation of the duty of allegiance is utility or
interest.
‘This interest I find to consist in the security and protection which we
can enjoy in political society, and which we can never attain when perfectly
free and independent.’ This holds good both of natural and of moral obligation.
‘It is evident that, if government were totally useless, it never could have a
place, and that the sole foundation of the duty of allegiance is the advantage
which it procures to society by preserving peace and order among mankind.’
Similarly, in the essay Of the Original Contract Hume observes: ‘If the
reason be asked of that obedience which we are bound to pay to government, I
readily answer, Because society could not otherwise subsist; and this
answer is clear and intelligible to all mankind.’
“The obvious conclusion to be drawn from this view is that when the
advantage ceases, the obligation to allegiance ceases. ‘As interest, therefore,
is the immediate sanction of government, the one can have no longer being than
the other; and whenever the civil magistrate carries his oppression so far as
to render his authority perfectly intolerable, we are no longer bound to submit
to it. The cause ceases; the effect must also cease.’ It is obvious, however,
that the evils and dangers attending rebellion are such that it can be
legitimately attempted only in cases of real tyranny and oppression and when
the advantages of acting in this way are judged to outweigh the disadvantages.
“But to whom is allegiance due? In other words, whom are we to regard as
legitimate rulers? Originally, Hume thought or inclined to think, government
was established by voluntary convention. ‘The same promise, then, which binds
them (the subjects) to obedience, ties them down to a particular person and
makes him the object of their allegiance.’ But once government has been
established and allegiance no longer rests upon a promise but upon advantage or
utility, we cannot have recourse to the original promise to determine who is
the legitimate ruler. The fact that some tribe in remote times voluntarily
subjected itself to a leader is no guide to determining whether William of
Orange or James II is the legitimate monarch.
“One foundation of legitimate authority is long possession of the
sovereign power: ‘I mean, long possession in any form of government, or
succession of princes’. Generally speaking, there are no governments or royal
houses which do not owe the origin of their power to usurpation or rebellion
and whose original title to authority was not ‘worse than doubtful and
uncertain’. In this case ‘time alone gives solidity to their right and,
operating gradually on the minds of men, reconciles them to any authority and
makes it seem just and reasonable’. The second source of public authority is
present possession, which can legitimize the possession of power even when
there is no question of its having been acquired a long time ago. ‘Right to
authority is nothing but the constant possession of authority, maintained by
the laws of society and the interests of mankind.’ A third source of legitimate
political authority is the right of conquest. As fourth and fifth sources can
be added the right of succession and positive laws, when the legislature
establishes a certain form of government. When all these titles to authority
are found together, we have the surest sign of legitimate sovereignty, unless
the public good clearly demands a change. But if, says Hume, we consider the
actual course of history, we shall soon learn to treat lightly all disputes
about the rights of princes. We cannot decide all disputes in accordance with
fixed, general rules. Speaking of this matter in the essay Of the Original
Contract, Hume remarks that ‘though an appeal to general opinion may
justly, in the speculative sciences of metaphysics, natural philosophy or
astronomy, be deemed unfair and inconclusive, yet in all questions with regard
to morals, as well as criticism, there is really no other standard by which any
controversy can ever be decided. To say, for example, with Locke that absolute
government is not really civil government at all is pointless if absolute
government is in fact accepted as a recognized political institution. Again, it
is useless to dispute whether the succession of the Prince of Orange to the
throne was legitimate or not. It may not have been legitimate at the time. And
Locke, who wished to justify the revolution of 1688, could not possibly do so
on his theory of legitimate government being founded on the consent of the
subjects. For the people of England were not asked for their opinion. But in
point of fact William of Orange was accepted, and the doubts about the
legitimacy of his accession are nullified by the fact that his successors have
been accepted. It may perhaps seem to be an unreasonable way of thinking, but
‘princes often seem to acquire a right from their successors as well as
from their ancestors.’”[558]
Thus just as Hume had argued that there was no rational reason
for believing in the existence of objects, or causative forces, or the soul, or
God, or morality, so he argued that there was no rational reason for believing
that a given government was legitimate. Or rather, governments are legitimate
for no other reason than that they survive, whether by force or the
acquiescence of public opinion. Their legitimacy is de facto, as it
were, rather than de jure – although, of course, legitimacy is a
juridical rather than a factual category. It is a matter of what the people,
whether individually or collectively, consider to be in their self-interest;
but since there is no objective way of measuring self-interest, it comes down
in the end to a matter of taste, of feeling. And since there is no arguing
about tastes, there is also by implication no arguing with a revolutionary who
wishes to destroy society to its foundations…
Hume’s demonstration of the irrationalism of rationalism had one very
important result: it aroused the greatest philosopher of the eighteenth
century, Immanuel Kant, from what he called his “dogmatic slumbers”. Kant
sought to re-establish some of the beliefs or prejudices which Hume’s
thorough-going scepticism had undermined.
To that end, he determined to subject “pure reason itself to critical
investigation”, answering the question: “what and how much can understanding
and reason know, apart from all experience?”[559] He
established that empirical reason can indeed know certain things, but that the
use of reason itself presupposes the existence of other things which transcend
reason. Thus “I think” must accompany all our experiences if they are to be
qualified as ours, so that there must be what Kant calls a “transcendental
unity of apperception” which unifies experience while being at the same time
beyond it. “There is thus a being above the world, namely the spirit of
man”[560], which
is not a substance in the empirical sense, nor subject to the empirical causal
nexus – although it is the seat of that which is greatest and truly rational in
man, including the sense of duty or “categorical imperative”.
And so, apart from the “phenomenal” realm of nature, which the mind can
understand only by imposing upon it the categories of substance, causality and
mutual interaction, there is also the “noumenal” realm of spirit and freedom,
which transcends nature and causality. Man himself is noumenally free while
being at the same time empirically (phenomenally) determined.
It is significant that Kant is concerned above all to provide grounds
for believing in man’s freedom. We have seen how the whole development
of western thought from the Renaissance onwards centres on the idea of freedom,
of human autonomy and especially the autonomy of human reason. However, this development
has led, by the second half of the eighteenth century, to a most paradoxical
dead-end: to the conclusion that man, being a part of nature, is not free, but
determined, and that the exercise of human reason is based on the most
irrational leap of blind faith in substance and causality, without which we
could not be assured of the existence of anything external to our own mind –
which is in any case just a bundle of sensations.
Kant, by a supreme exercise of that same free reasoning faculty, stanches
the flow of irrationalism. But at a price: the price of making man a schizoid
creature living on a razor blade between the noumenal and phenomenal realms.
Yes, he says, man is a part of nature and determined, otherwise the science of
man and the whole Enlightenment project would be impossible (and Kant remains
an Enlightenment figure to the end). And yes, he says, man is free and
uncaused, otherwise Christianity and morality would be impossible (and Kant
remains a devout Lutheran to the end). But the balance and synthesis he
achieves between the two is hard to express and difficult to maintain; and
succeeding generations preferred to go in one direction or the other: some down
the Enlightenment path of seeking a Utopia on earth through science and rational
social organisation, and others down the Romantic path of irrational,
unfettered self-expression in both the private and the public spheres.
Thus “in his moral philosophy,” writes Berlin, Kant lifted “the lid of a
Pandora’s box, which released tendencies which he was among the first, with
perfect honesty and consistency, to disown and condemn. He maintained, as every
German schoolboy used to know, that the moral worth of an act depended on its
being freely chosen by the agent; that if a man acted under the influence of
causes which he could not and did not control, whether external, such as
physical compulsion, or internal, such as instincts or desires or passions,
then the act, whatever its consequences, whether they were good or bad, advantageous
or harmful to men, had no moral value, for the act had not been freely chosen,
but was simply the effect of mechanical causes, an event in nature, no more
capable of being judged in ethical terms than the behaviour of a an animal or
plant. If the determinism that reigns in nature – on which, indeed, the whole
of natural science is based – determines the acts of a human agent, he is not
truly an agent, for to act is to be capable of free choice between
alternatives; and free will must in that case be an illusion. Kant is certain
that freedom of the will is not illusory but real. Hence the immense emphasis
that he places on human autonomy – on the capacity for free commitment to
rationally chosen ends. The self, Kant tells us, must be ‘raised above natural
necessity’, for if men are ruled by the same laws as those which govern the
material world ‘freedom cannot be saved’, and without freedom there is no
morality.
“Kant insists over and over again that what distinguishes man is his
moral autonomy as against his physical heteronomy – for his body is governed by
natural laws, not issuing from his own inner self. No doubt this doctrine owes
a great deal to Rousseau, for whom all dignity, all pride rest upon
independence. To be manipulated is to be enslaved. A world in which one man
depends upon the favour of another is a world of masters and slaves, of
bullying and condescension and patronage at one end, and obsequiousness,
servility, duplicity and patronage at the other. But whereas Rousseau supposes
that only dependence on other men is degrading, for no one resents the laws of
nature, only ill will, the Germans went further. For Kant, total dependence on
non-human nature – heteronomy – was incompatible with choice, freedom,
morality. This exhibits a new attitude to nature, or at least the revival of an
ancient [supposedly] Christian antagonism to it. The thinkers of the
Enlightenment and their predecessors in the Renaissance (save for isolated
antinomian mystics) tended to look upon nature as divine harmony, or as a great
organic or artistic unity, or as an exquisite mechanism created by the divine
watchmaker, or else as uncreated and eternal, but always as a model from which
men depart at their cost. The principal need of man is to understand the
external world and himself and the place that he occupies in the scheme of
things: if he grasps this, he will not seek after goals incompatible with the
needs of his nature, goals which he can follow only through some mistaken
conception of what he is in himself, or of his relations to other men or the
external world…. Man is subject to the same kind of causal laws as animals and
plants and the inanimate world, physical and biological laws, and in the case
of men psychological and economic too, established by observation and
experiment, measurement and verification. Such notions as the immortal soul, a
personal God, freedom of the will, are for them metaphysical fictions and
illusions. But they are not so for Kant.
“The German revolt against France and French materialism has social as
well as intellectual roots. Germany in the first half of the eighteenth
century, and for more than a century before, even before the devastation of the
Thirty Years War, had little share in the great renaissance of the West – her cultural
achievement after the Reformation is not comparable to that of the Italians in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Spain and England in the age of
Shakespeare and Cervantes, of the Low Countries in the seventeenth century,
least of all of France, the France of poets, soldiers, statesmen, thinkers,
which in the seventeenth century dominated Europe both culturally and
politically, with only England and Holland as her rivals. What had the
provincial German courts and cities, what had even Imperial Vienna, to offer?
“This sense of relative backwardness, of being an object of patronage or
scorn to the French with their overweening sense of national and cultural
superiority, created a sense of collective humiliation, later to turn into
indignation and hostility, that sprang from wounded pride. The German reaction
at first is to imitate French models, then to turn against them. Let the vain
but godless French cultivate their ephemeral world, their material gains, their
pursuit of glory, luxury, ostentation, the witty trivial chatter of the salons
of Paris and the subservient court of Versailles. What is the worth of the
philosophy of atheists or smooth, worldly abbés who do not begin to
understand the true nature, the real purpose of men, their inner life, man’s
deepest concerns – his relation to the soul within him, to his brothers, above
all to God – the deep, the agonising questions of man’s being and vocation?
Inward-looking German pietists abandoned French and Latin, turned to their
native tongue, and spoke with scorn and horror of the glittering generalities
of French civilisation, the blasphemous epigrams of Voltaire and his imitators.
Still more contemptible were the feeble imitators of French culture, the
caricature of French customs and taste in the little German principalities.
German men of letters rebelled violently against the social oppression and
stifling atmosphere of German society, of the despotic and often stupid and
cruel German princes and princelings and their officials, who crushed or
degraded the humbly born, particularly the most honest and gifted men among
them, in the three hundred courts and governments into which Germany was then
divided.
“This surge of indignation formed the heart of the movement that, after
the name of a play by one of its members, was called Sturm und Drang.
Their plays were filled with cries of despair or savage indignation, titanic
explosions of rage or hatred, vast destructive passions, unimaginable crimes
which dwarf the scenes of violence even in Elizabethan drama; they celebrate
passion, individuality, strength, genius, self-expression at whatever cost,
against whatever odds, and usually end in blood and crime, their only form of
protest against a grotesque and odious social order. Hence all these violent
heroes – the Kraftmenschen, Kraftschreiber, Kraftkersl, Kraftknaben –
who march hysterically through the pages of Klinger, Schubart, Leisewitz, Lenz,
Heinse and even the gentle Carl Philipp Moritz; until life began to imitate
art, and the Swiss adventurer Christoph Kaufmann, a self-proclaimed follower of
Christ and Rousseau, who so impressed Herder, Goethe, Hamann, Wieland, Lavater,
swept through the German lands with a band of unkempt followers, denouncing
polite culture, and celebrating anarchic freedom, transported by wild and
mystical public exaltation of the flesh and the spirit.
“Kant abhorred this kind of disordered imagination, and, still more,
emotional exhibitionism and barbarous conduct. Although he too denounced the
mechanistic psychology of the French Encyclopaedists as destructive of
morality, his notion of the will is that of reason in action. He saves himself
from subjectivism, and indeed irrationalism, by insisting that the will is
truly free only so far as it wills the dictates of reason, which generate
general rules binding on all rational men. It is when the concept of reason
becomes obscure (and Kant never succeeded in formulating convincingly what this
signified in practice), and only the independent will remains man’s unique
possession whereby he is distinguished from nature, that the new doctrine
becomes infected by the ‘stürmerisch’ mood. In Kant’s disciple, the
dramatist and poet Schiller, the notion of freedom begins to move beyond the
bounds of reason. Freedom is the central concept of Schiller’s early works. He
speaks of ‘the legislator himself, the God within us’, of ‘high, demonic
freedom’, ‘the pure demon within the man’. Man is most sublime when he resists
the pressure of nature, when he exhibits ‘moral independence of natural laws in
a condition of emotional stress’. It is will, not reason – certainly not
feeling, which he shares with animals – that raises him above nature, and the
very disharmony which may arise between nature and the tragic hero is not entirely
to be deplored, for it awakens man’s of his independence.”[561]
Thus to the thesis of the godless worship of reason was opposed the
antithesis of the demonic worship of will. Dissatisfied with the dry
soullessness of the Enlightenment, western man would not go back to the sources
of his civilization in Orthodoxy, only forward to – the Revolution, and the
hellish torments of the Romantic hero. For, as Francisco Goya said, “the sleep
of Reason engenders monsters”.
And so if the image of the Enlightenment was Voltaire, that of the
Counter-Enlightenment was Byron, whose unfettered will defied both the
impediment of his deformed foot, which he saw “as the mark of satanic
connection”[562],
and all the laws of morality, of which the end, for a Christian consciousness,
could only be the hell he describes in “The Giaour”:
So do the dark in soul expire,
Or live like Scorpion girt with by fire;
So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,
Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,
Darkness above, despair beneath,
Around it flame, within it death!
“Nowhere was German amour propre more deeply wounded,” continues
Berlin, “than in East Prussia, still semi-feudal and deeply traditionalist;
nowhere was there deeper resentment of the policy of modernisation which
Frederick the Great conducted by importing French officials who treated his
simple and backward subjects with impatience and open disdain. It is not
surprising, therefore, that the most gifted and sensitive sons of this
province, Hamman, Herder, and Kant too, are particularly vehement in opposing
the levelling activities of these morally blind imposers of alien methods on a
pious, inward-looking culture.”[563] Hamann
and Herder were the first thinkers explicitly to attack the whole Enlightenment
enterprise. This attack was perhaps the first sign of that great cleavage
within western culture that was to take the place of the Catholic/Protestant
cleavage: the cleavage between the classical, rationalist and universalist spirit
of the Latin lands, and the romantic, irrational and particularist spirit of
the Germanic lands (England with its dual Roman and Germanic inheritance stood
somewhere in the middle).
“Hamann,” writes Berlin, “was brought up as a pietist, a member of the
most introspective and self-absorbed of all the Lutheran sects, intent upon the
direction communion of the individual soul with God, bitterly anti-rationalist,
liable to emotional excess, preoccupied with the stern demands of moral
obligation and the need for severe self-discipline. The attempt of Frederick
the Great in the middle years of the eighteenth century to introduce French
culture and a degree of rationalisation, economic and social as well as
military, into East Prussia, the most backward of his provinces, provoked a
peculiarly violent reaction in this pious, semi-feudal, traditional Protestant
society (which also gave birth to Herder and Kant). Hamann began as a disciple
of the Enlightenment, but, after a profound spiritual crisis, turned against
it, and published a series of polemical attacks written in a highly
idiosyncratic, perversely allusive, contorted, deliberately obscure style, as
remote as he could make it from the, to him, detestable elegance, clarity and
smooth superficiality of the bland and arrogant French dictators of taste and
thought. Hamann’s theses rested on the conviction that all truth is particular,
never general: that reason is impotent to demonstrate the existence of anything
and is an instrument only for conveniently classifying and arranging data in
patterns to which nothing in reality corresponds; that to understand is to be
communicated with, by men or by God. The universe for him, as for the older
German mystical tradition, is itself a kind of language. Things and plants and
animals are themselves symbols with which God communicates with his creatures.
Everything rests on faith; faith is as basic an organ of acquaintance with
reality as the senses. To read the Bible is to hear the voice of God, who
speaks in a language which he has given man the grace to understand. Some men
are endowed with the gift of understanding his ways, of looking at the
universe, which is his book no less than the revelations of the Bible and the
fathers and saints of the Church. Only love – for a person or an object – can
reveal the true nature of anything. It is not possible to love formulae,
general propositions, laws, the abstractions of science, the vast system of
concepts and categories – symbols too general to be close to reality – with which
the French lumières have blinded themselves to the real
experiences which only direct acquaintance, especially by the senses, provides.
“Hamann glories in the fact that Hume had successfully destroyed the
rationalist claim that there is an a priori route to reality, insisting that
all knowledge and belief ultimately rest on acquaintance with the date of
direct perception. Hume rightly supposes that he could not eat an egg or drink
a glass of water if he did not believe in their existence; the date of belief –
what Hamann prefers to call faith – rest on grounds and require evidence as
little as taste or any other sensation. True knowledge is direct perception of
individual entities, and concepts are never, no matter how specific they may
be, wholly adequate to the fullness of the individual experience. ‘Individuum
est ineffabile’, wrote Goethe to Lavater in the spirit of Hamann, whom Goethe
profoundly admired. The sciences may be of use in practical matters; but no
concatenation of concepts will give an understanding of a man, of a work of
art, of what is conveyed by gestures, symbols, verbal and non-verbal, of the
style, the spiritual essence, of a human being, a movement, a culture; nor for
that matter of the Deity, which speaks to one everywhere if only one has ears
to hear and eyes to see.“[564]
Following up on these insights, Herder “believed that to understand
anything was to understand it in its individuality and development, and that
this required the capacity of Einfühling (‘feeling into’) the
outlook, the individual character of an artistic tradition, a literature, a
social organisation, a people, a culture, a period of history. To understand
the actions of individuals, we must understand the ‘organic’ structure of the
society in terms of which alone the minds and activities and habits of its
members can be understood. Like Vico, he believed that to understand a
religion, or a work of art, or a national character, one must ‘enter into’ the
unique conditions of its life… To grade the merits of cultural wholes, of the
legacy of entire traditions, by applying a collection of dogmatic rules
claiming universal validity, enunciated by the Parisian arbiters of taste, is
vanity and blindness. Every culture has its own unique Schwerpunkt (‘centre
of gravity’), and unless we grasp it we cannot understand its character or
value…”[565]
As he wrote in Auch eine Philosophie: “How unspeakably difficult
it is to convey the particular quality of an individual human being and how
impossible it is to say precisely what distinguishes an individual, his way of
feeling and living; how different and how individual [anders und eigen]
everything becomes once his eyes see it, once his soul grasps it, his heart
feels it. How much depth there is in the character of a single people, which,
no matter how often observed, and gazed at with curiosity and wonder,
nevertheless escapes the word which attempts to capture it, and, even with the
word to catch it, is seldom so recognizable as to be universally understood and
felt. If this is so, what happens when one tries to master an entire ocean of
peoples, times, cultures, countries with one glance, one sentiment, by means of
one single word!”[566]
This admirable sensitivity to the unique and unrepeatable was
undoubtedly a needed corrective to the over-generalising and over-rationalising
approach of the French philosophes. And in general Herder’s emphasis on
warm, subjective feeling and the intuition of quality - “Heart! Warmth! Blood!
Humanity! Life!” “I feel! I am!”[567]
– was a needed corrective to the whole rationalist emphasis on cold clarity,
objectivity and the measurement of quantity that had come to dominate western
thought since Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am”. From now on, thanks in part
to Herder, western thought would become more sensitive to the aesthetically
intuited, as opposed to the scientifically analysed aspects of reality, to
organic, living, historical wholes as well as to inorganic, dead, ahistorical
parts.
Nevertheless, Herder was as unbalanced in his way as the philosophes
were in theirs. This is particularly evident in his relativism, his idea that
every nation and culture was not only unique, but also incommensurable – that
is, it could not be measured by universal standards of truth and falsehood,
right and wrong. As he wrote: “Not one man, country, people, national history,
or State, is like another. Hence the True, the Beautiful, the Good in them are
not similar either.”[568]
If Herder has been unjustly accused of being an ancestor of German fascist
nationalism, he cannot so easily be absolved of being one of the fathers of the
modern denial of universal truths and values that has so eaten into and
corroded modern western civilization.
Another
Enlightenment figure who, like Kant, opened the doors to the
Counter-Enlightenment was Rousseau. On the one hand, he was a social contract
theorist, a man of reason and science. On the other hand, he was a prophet of
the Romantic Will in its collective, national form – what he called the General
Will.
We have seen that while the French Enlightenment philosophers were
admirers of English liberalism, they still believed in relatively unfettered
state power concentrated in the person of the monarch. That way, they believed,
the light of reason and reasonableness would spread most effectively downward
and outward to the rest of the population. Thus their outlook was still
essentially aristocratic; for all their love of freedom, they still believed in
restraint and good manners, hierarchy and privilege. Perhaps their Jesuit
education had something to do with it. Certainly, however much they railed
against the despotism of the Catholic Church, they were still deeply imbued
with the Catholic ideals of order and hierarchy.
However, Rousseau believed in power coming from below rather than above.
Perhaps his Swiss Calvinist upbringing had something to do with that; for, as
he wrote, “I was born a citizen of a free State, and a member of the Sovereign
[i.e. the Conseil Général] of Geneva, which was considered
sovereign by some”[569].
Certainly, the mutual hatred between Voltaire and Rousseau reflected to some
degree the differences between the (lapsed) Catholic and the (lapsed)
Calvinist, between the city fop and the peasant countryman[570],
between the civilized reformer and the uncouth revolutionary.
Rousseau set out to inquire “if, in the civil order, there can be any
sure and legitimate rule of administration”.[571] He
quickly rejected Filmer’s patriarchal justification of monarchy based on the
institution of the family: “The most ancient of all societies, and the only one
that is natural, is the family: and even so the children remain attached to the
father only so long as they need him for their preservation. As soon as this
need ceases, the natural bond is dissolved. The children, released from the
obedience they owed, and the father released from the care he owed his
children, return equally to independence. If they remain united, they continue
so no longer naturally, but voluntarily; and the family itself is then
maintained only by convention… The family then may be called the first model of
political societies: the ruler corresponds to the father, and the people to the
children; and all, being born free and equal, alienate their liberty only to
their own advantage.”[572]
This argument is not convincing. First, a child is neither free at
birth, nor equal to his father. Secondly, the bond between the father and the
son continues to be natural and indissoluble even after the child has grown up.[573]
Next, Rousseau disposes of the argument that might is right. “To yield
to force is an act of necessity, not of will – at the most, an act of prudence.
In what sense can it be a duty?… What kind of right is that which perishes when
force fails? If we must obey perforce, there is no need to obey because we
ought; and if we are not forced to obey, we are under no obligation to do so…
Obey the powers that be. If this means yield to force, it is a good precept,
but superfluous: I can answer for its never being violated. All power comes
from God, I admit; but so does all sickness: does that mean that we are
forbidden to call in the doctor?… Let us then admit that force does not create
right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.
“Since no man has a natural authority over his fellow, and force creates
no right, we must conclude that conventions form the basis of all legitimate
authority among men.”[574]
Here we approach the social contract. But Rousseau quickly disposes of
the form of contract proposed by Hobbes, namely, that men originally contracted
to alienate their liberty to a king. This is an illegitimate argument, says
Rousseau, because: (a) it is madness for a whole people to place itself in
slavery to a king, “and madness creates no right”; (b) the only possible
advantage would be a certain tranquillity, “but tranquillity is found also in
dungeons; but is that enough to make them desirable”[575]; and
(c) “if each man could alienate himself, he could not alienate his children:
they are born men and free.” In any case, “to renounce liberty is to renounce
being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties.. Such a
renunciation is incompatible with man’s nature; to remove all liberty from his
will is to remove all morality from his acts… so, from whatever aspect we
regard the question, the right of slavery is null and void, not only as being
illegitimate, but also because it is absurd and meaningless. The words slave
and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive. It will
always be equally foolish for a man to say to a man or to a people: ‘I make
with you a convention wholly at your expense and wholly to my advantage; I
shall keep it as long as I like, and you will keep it as long as I like.’”[576]
We may interrupt Rousseau at this point to note that his concept of
freedom, being “positive” rather than “negative”, led to very different
consequences from the freedom of the English empiricists or French philosophes.
Freedom was for Rousseau, as for Kant, a – or rather, the - categorical
imperative, and the foundation of all morality. “Both Rousseau and Kant, writes
Norman Hampson, “aspired to regenerate humanity by the free action of the
self-disciplined individual conscience”. Rousseau’s concept of freedom “rested,
not on any logical demonstration, but on each man’s immediate recognition of
the moral imperative of his own conscience. ‘I hear much argument against man’s
freedom and I despise such sophistry. One of these arguers [Helvétius?]
can prove to me as much as he likes that I am not free; inner feeling, more
powerful than all his arguments, refutes them all the time.’”[577]
In true Protestant fashion, Rousseau’s conscience was to him both Pope
and Church: “Whatever I feel to be right is right, what I feel to be wrong is
wrong; the best of all casuists is the conscience… Reason deceives us only too
often and we have earned all too well the right to reject it, but conscience
never deceives… Conscience, conscience, divine instinct, immortal and heavenly
voice, sure guide to men who, ignorant and blinkered, are still intelligent and
free; infallible judge of good and ill who shapes men in the image of God, it
is you who form the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions;
without you, I feel nothing within that raises me above the beasts, nothing but
the melancholy privilege of straying from error to error, relying on an
understanding without rule and a reason without principle.”[578]
Now conscience, according to Rousseau, was likely to be stifled by too
much education and sophistication. So he went back to the idea of the state of
nature as expounded in Hobbes and Locke, but invested it with the optimistic,
revolutionary spirit of the Levellers and Diggers. Whereas Hobbes and Locke
considered the state of nature as an anarchic condition which civilization as
founded on the social contract transcended and immeasurably improved on, for
Rousseau the state of nature was “the noble savage”, who, as the term implied,
had many good qualities. Indeed, man in the original state of nature was in
many ways better and happier than man as civilized through the social contract.
In particular, he was freer and more equal. It was the institutions of
civilization that destroyed man’s original innocence and freedom. As Rousseau
famously thundered: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains!” [579]
This concept did not stand the test of experience. “Among those who
believed in Rousseau’s ideas,” writes Fr. Alexey Young, “was the French painter
Gaughin (1848-1903). So intent was his commitment that he abandoned his family
and went to Tahiti to find Rousseau’s ‘noble savage’. But, to his great dismay,
he discovered that Rousseau’s conception was an illusion. ‘Primitive’ man could
be just as cruel, immoral and heartless as men under the influence of the
civilized world. Seeing this, Gaughin was driven to despair…”[580]
Since man is born free, according to Rousseau, and his conscience is
infallible, the common, unsophisticated man is fully equal as a moral agent to
his educated social superiors and should be entrusted with full political
power. Thus the social contract should be rewritten to keep sovereignty with
the ruled rather than the rulers. For Hobbes, the people had transferred sovereignty
irrevocably to their rulers; for Locke, the transfer was more conditional, but
revocable only in exceptional circumstances. For Rousseau, sovereignty was
never really transferred from the people.
Rousseau rejected the idea that the people could have “representatives”
who exerted sovereignty in their name. “Sovereignty cannot be represented, for
the same reason that it cannot be alienated… the people’s deputies are not, and
could not be, its representatives; they are merely its agents; and they cannot
decide anything finally. Any law which the people has not ratified in person is
void; it is not law at all. The English people believes itself to be free; it
is gravely mistaken; it is free only during the election of Members of
Parliament; as soon as the Members are elected, the people is enslaved; it is
nothing.”[581]
Thus representative government is “elective autocracy”.
Essentially Rousseau wanted to abolish the distinction between rulers
and ruled, to give everyone power through direct democracy. The citizen can
exercise this power only if he himself makes every decision affecting himself.
But the participation of all the citizens in every decision is possible only in
a small city-state like Classical Athens, not in modern states. Thus Rousseau
represents a modern, more mystical version of the direct democratism of the
Greek philosophers. He echoes Aristotle’ Politics: “If liberty and
equality, as is thought by some, are chiefly to be found in democracy, they
will be best attained when all persons alike share in the government to the
utmost.”
And yet there was a modern state that seemed to promise the kind of
mystical, direct democracy that Rousseau pined for – Corsica, which in 1755
threw off the centuries-old yoke of Genoa and created its own constitution. In
Corsica,” writes Zamoyski, “Rousseau believed he had found a society untainted
by the original sin of civilization. In his Project de constitution pour la
Corse, written in 1765, he suggested ways of keeping it so. ‘I do not want
to give you artificial and systematic laws, invented by man; only to bring you
back under the unique laws of nature and order, which command to the heart and
do not tyrannize the free will,’ he cajoled them. But the enterprise demanded
an act of will, summed up in the oath to be taken simultaneously by the whole
nation: ‘In the name of Almighty God and on the Holy Gospels, by this
irrevocable and sacred oath I unite myself in body, in goods, in will and in my
whole potential to the Corsican Nation, in such a way that I myself and
everything that belongs to me shall belong to it without redemption. I swear to
live and to die for it, to observe all its laws and to obey its legitimate
rulers and magistrates in everything that is in conformity with the law.’”[582]
Now one of the problems of democratic theory lies in the transition from
the multitudinous wills of the individual citizens to the single will of the
state: how was this transition to be effected without violating the will of the
individual? Rousseau recognised this problem: “The problem is to find a form of
association which will defend and protect with the whole common force the
person and goods of each associate, and in which each, while uniting himself
with all, may still obey himself alone, and remain as free as before. This is
the fundamental problem of which the social contract provides the solution.”[583]
This is a major, indeed insuperable problem for most liberal theorists
insofar as they recognise that individuals have different interests and
therefore different wills, so that any single decision expressing what we may
call the collective will of the state will inevitably be in the interests of
some and not in the interests of others. For Rousseau, however, it is less of a
problem insofar as he holds a much more optimistic (and, his critics would say,
wholly unrealistic) view of human nature. For since each individual citizen has
an infallible conscience, if each individual finds and expresses that
infallible conscience, his will will be found to coincide with the will of
every other individual citizen. This general will will then express the
will of every citizen individually while being common to all of them
collectively. “Each of us comes together to place his person and all his power
under the supreme direction of the general will, and we in a body admit each
member as an indivisible part of the whole This act of association produces a
moral and collective entity… As for the associates, they all take on the name
of the people when they participate in the sovereign authority, and call
themselves specifically citizens and subjects when they are
placed under the laws of the State.”[584]
This general will is not the will of the majority; for that will
is by definition not the will of the minority, and the general will must
embrace all. Nor, more surprisingly, is it the will of all when all
agree; for the will of all is sometimes wrong, whereas the general will is
always right. “The general will is always upright and always tends to the
public advantage; but it does not follow that the deliberations of the people
always have the same rectitude. Our will is always for our own good, but we do
not always see what that is; the people is never corrupted, but it is often
deceived, and on such occasions only does it seem to will what is bad. There is
often a great deal of difference between the will of all and the general will;
the latter considers only the common interest, while the former takes private
interest into account, and is no more than a sum of particular wills: but take
away from these same wills the pluses and minuses that cancel one another, and
the general will remains as the sum of the differences.”[585]
The general will is a certain mysterious entity which reveals itself in
certain special conditions: “If, when the people, being furnished with adequate
information, held its deliberations, the citizens had no communication one with
the another, the grand total of the small differences would always give the
general will, and the decision would always be good.”[586] In
other words, when the self-interest of each citizen is allowed to express
itself in an unforced manner, without the interference of external threats and
pressures, a certain highest common denominator of self-interest, what Russell
calls “the largest collective satisfaction of self-interest possible to the
community”[587],
reveals itself. This is the general will, the wholly infallible revealed
truth and morality of the secular religion of the revolution.
What are the conditions for the appearance of the general will? The
fundamental condition is true equality among the citizenry, especially economic
equality. For where there is no equality, the self-interest of some carries
greater weight than the self-interest of others. This is another major
difference between Rousseau and the English and French liberals. They did not
seek to destroy property and privilege, but only to prevent despotism; whereas
he is a much more thorough-going egalitarian.
This first condition is linked to a second condition, which is the
absence of “partial associations” or parties. For the wills of partial
associations, which come together as expressing some common economic or class
interest, conflict with the will of the community as a whole. For “when
intrigues arise, and partial associations are formed at the expense of the
great association, the will of each of these associations becomes general in
relation to its members, while it remains particular in relation to the State:
it may then be said that there are no longer as many votes as there are men,
but only as many as there are associations. The differences become less
numerous and give a less general result. Lastly, when one of these associations
is so great as to prevail over all the rest, the result is no longer a sum of
small differences, but a single difference; in this case there is no longer a
general will, and the opinion which prevails is purely particular. It is
therefore essential, if the general will is to be able to make itself known,
that there should be no partial society in the state and that each citizen
should express only his own opinion.”[588]
A
third condition (here Rousseau harks back again to Athens) is that the citizen
body should consist only of men. For women, according to Rousseau, are swayed
by “immoderate passions” and require men to protect and guide them.[589]
Such a system appears at first sight remarkably libertarian and
egalitarian (except in regard to women). Unfortunately, however, the other side
of its coin is that when the general will has been revealed – and in practice
this means when the will of the majority has been determined, for “the votes of
the greatest number always bind the rest”, – there is no room for dissent. For
in joining the social contract, each associate alienates himself, “together
with all his rights, to the whole community; for, in the first place, as each
gives himself absolutely, the conditions are the same for all; and, this being
so, no one has any interest in making them burdensome to others. Moreover, the
alienation being without reserve, the unions is as perfect as it can be, and no
associate has anything more to demand: for, if the individuals retained certain
rights, as there would be no common superior to decided between them and the
public, each, being on one point his own judge, would ask to be so on all; the
state of nature would thus continue, and the association would necessarily
become inoperative or tyrannical. Finally, each man, in giving himself to all,
gives himself to nobody; and as there is no associate over which he does not
acquire the same right as he yields over himself, he gains an equivalent for
everything he loses, and an increase of force for the preservation of what he
has…”[590]
“In order then that the social compact may not be an empty formula, it
tacitly includes the undertaking, which alone can give force to the rest, that
whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the
whole body. This means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free…”[591]
Forced
to be free – here the totalitarian potentialities of Rousseau’s concept of
positive freedom become painfully clear. Thus of all the eighteenth-century
philosophers, Rousseau is the real prophet of the revolution. The others,
especially Voltaire, paved the way for it, but it was Rousseau who gave it its
justification, its metaphysical, quasi-mystical first principle.
But the most striking characteristic of this principle, considering it
was proclaimed in “the Age of Reason”, was its irrationality. For the
general will was not to be deduced or induced by any logical or empirical
reasoning, nor identified with any specific empirical phenomenon or phenomena.
It was not the concrete will of any particular man, or collection of men, but a
quasi-mystical entity that welled up within a particular society and propelled
it towards truth and righteousness.
This accorded with the anti-rational, passionate nature of the whole of
Rousseau’s life and work. As Hume said of him: “He has only felt during
the whole course of his life.”[592] Thus
while the other philosophers of the Age of Reason believed, or did not believe,
in God or the soul or the Divine Right of kings, because they had reasons
for their belief or unbelief, for Rousseau, on the other hand, religion was
just a feeling; and as befitted the prophet of the coming Age of Unreason, he
believed or disbelieved for no reason whatsoever. So religious belief,
or the lack of it, was not something that could be objectively established or
argued about. True, in his ideal political structure, Rousseau insisted that
his subjects should believe in a “civil religion” that combined belief in “the
existence of an omnipotent, benevolent divinity that foresees and provides; the
life to come; the happiness of the just; the punishment of sinners; the
sanctity of the social contract and the law”.[593] If any
citizen accepted these beliefs, but then “behaved as if he did not believe in
them”, the punishment was death.[594]
However, the only article of this faith he argued for was the social contract…
As Barzun writes: “Rousseau reminds the reader that two-thirds of
mankind are neither Christians nor Jews, nor Mohammedans, from which it follows
that God cannot be the exclusive possession of any sect or people; all their
ideas as to His demands and His judgements are imaginings. He asks only that we
love Him and pursue the good. All else we know nothing about. That there should
be quarrels and bloodshed about what we can never know is the greatest impiety.”[595]
Superficially, this irrationalist attitude seems like that of Pascal,
who said: “The heart has its reasons, of which reason is ignorant”. But Pascal,
while pointing to the limits of reason, had not abandoned reason; he sought the
truth with every fibre of his being. Rousseau, on the other hand, in both his
life and his work, appeared quite deliberately to abandon reason and surrender
himself to irrational forces. In these forces he saw freedom and nobility,
while others saw only slavery to the basest instincts. The revolution would
soon allow the world to judge the truth for itself...
Rousseau’s concept of the general, or people’s will is so important that
it is worth examining it in a little more detail.
The Russian revolutionary-turned-monarchist philosopher, L.A. Tikhomirov[596],
pointed out that eighteenth-century ideas about society, though pagan and
materialist in essence, can nevertheless not be understood except in the
context of the Christian society that Western Europe still was – or, more
precisely, “a Christian society, but one that has renounced Christ”, to use
Aksakov’s phrase.
Thus “in the very concept of the 18th century about society
there is a clearly materialised reminiscence of the Church. From the
Church was copied the idea of society as a certain collectivity defined
exclusively by the spiritual nature of man. The cosmopolitanism of the new
society, its mysterious people’s will, which as it were saturates it
completely, which in some incomprehensible way rules all while remaining
infallible in all its private mistakes, - all these are echoes of the Christian
Church. They are in all points ‘the Kingdom that is not of this world’, which
is squeezed into, without being contained in, the bounds precisely of ‘this
world’…
“Contemporary society, torn apart by this basic contradiction, is not
conscious of it intellectually and even denies it. The materialist
understanding of life is so strongly rooted that people for the most part are
simply incapable of seriously paying attention to the action of the
spiritual element. ‘What contradiction is here?’ they say. ‘In truth, the
valuable element of Christianity is constituted by its moral concepts
and its lofty conception of personality. And it is this that the new era
has held onto. It has cast out only the outdated, mystical element of
Christianity. Isn’t that natural? Isn’t that how all progress comes about in
the world, holding on to everything valuable from the past and throwing out the
unnecessary old rags?’ In this, however, the present age is mistaken. It
doesn’t understand that it is impossible to throw out the mystical principles
from Christianity without thereby destroying the social significance of the
personality created by it. Historically Christian moral concepts have to the
highest degree exerted a positive influence on earthly, social life. However
this takes place only when the Christian remains completely a Christian, that
is, when he lives not for this earthly life, and does not seek the realisation
of his ideals in this life, does not put his soul into it. It turns out
completely differently if the Christian remains without guidance by Divine
authority, without a spiritual life on earth and without this spiritual activity
of his having its final ends beyond the grave. Then he remains with infinite
demands before an extremely finite world, which is unable to satisfy them. He
remains without discipline, because he knows nothing in the world higher than
his own personality, and he bows before nothing if for him there is no God. He
is not capable of venerating society as a material phenomenon, nor bow down
even before a majority of personalities like his, because from their sum there
still emerges no personality more lofty than his own. The lot and social role
of such a person is extremely unhappy and harmful. He is either an eternal
denier of real social life, or he will seek to satisfy his strivings for
infinity in infinite pleasures, infinite love of honour, in a striving for the
grandiose which so characterises the sick 18th and 19th
centuries. The Christian without God is completely reminiscent of Satan. Not in
vain did the image of unrestrained pride so seduce the poets of the 18th
century. We all – believers or non-believers in God – are so created by Him, so
incapable of ripping out of ourselves the Divine fire planted by Him, that we
involuntarily love this spiritual, immeasurably lofty personality. But let us
look with the cold attention of reason. If we need only to construct well our
earthly, social life, if nothing else exists, then why call those qualities and
strivings lofty and elevated which from an earthly point of view are only
fantastic, unhealthy, having nothing in common with earthly reality? These are
the qualities of an abnormal person. He is useful, they will say, for his
eternal disquietude, his striving for something different, something other than
that which is. But this striving would be useful only if his ideals were
basically real. But the disquietude of the Christian deprived of God knocks the
world out of the status quo only in order to drag it every time towards the
materially impossible.
“They err who see in the 18th and 19th centuries
the regeneration of ancient ideas of the State. The pagan was practical. His
ideals were not complicated by Christian strivings for the absolute. His
society could develop calmly. But the lot of a society that is Christian in its
moral type of personality, but has renounced Christ in the application of its
moral forces, according to the just expression of A.S. Aksakov, will be reduced
to eternal revolution.
“This is what the 18th century’s attempt to create a new
society also came to. Philosophy succeeded in postulating an ideal of society
such as a personality forged by eighteen centuries of Christian influence could
agree to bow down to. But what was this society? A pure mirage. It was
constructed not on the real laws and foundations of social life, but on
fictions logically deduced from the spiritual nature of man. Immediately they
tried to construct such a society, it turned out that the undertaking was
senseless. True, they did succeed in destroying the old historical order and
creating a new one. But how? It turned out that this new society lives and is maintained
in existence only because it does not realise its illusory bases, but acts in
spite of them and only reproduces in a new form the bases of the old society.
“It is worth comparing the factual foundations of the liberal-democratic
order with those which are ascribed to it by its political philosophy. The most
complete contradiction!
“Rousseau, of course, was fantasising when he spoke of the people’s will
as supposedly one and always wants only the good and never goes wrong. But one
must not forget that he was not speaking of that people’s will which our
deputies, voters and journalists talk about. Rousseau himself grew up in a
republic and he did not fall into such traps. He carefully qualified himself,
saying that ‘there is often a difference between the will of all (volonté
de tous) and the general will (volonté
générale).
“Rousseau sincerely despised the will of all, on which our liberal
democratism is raised. Order and administration are perfect, he taught, only
when they are defined by the general will, and not by the egoistic,
easily frightened and bribed will of all. For the creation of the new,
perfect society it is necessary to attain the discovery and activity precisely
of the general will.
“But how are we to attain to it? Here Rousseau is again in radical
contradiction with the practice of his disciples. He demands first of all the
annihilation of private circles and parties. ‘For the correct expression of the
general will it is necessary that there should be no private societies in the
State and that every citizen should express only his own personal opinion’ (n’opine
que d’après lui). Only in this case does one receive a certain
sediment of general will from the multitude of individual deviations and
the conversation always turns out well. With the appearance of parties
everything is confused, and the citizen no longer expresses his own will, but
the will of a given circle. When such individual interests begin to be felt and
‘small societies (circles, parties) begin to exert influence on the large (the
State), the general will is no longer expressed by the will of all’. Rousseau
therefore demands the annihilation of parties or at least their numerical
weakening. As the most extreme condition, already unquestionably necessary, it
is necessary that there should exist no party which would be noticeably
stronger than the rest. If even this is not attained, if ‘one of these
associations (parties) is so great as to dominate all the others, then the
general will no longer exists and the only opinion that is realisable is the
individual opinion.’
“In other words, democracy, the
rule of the people’s will, no longer exists.
“Just as decisively and insistently does Rousseau demonstrate that the
people’s will is not expressed by any representation. As a sincere and
logical democrat, he simply hates representation, he cannot denounce it enough.
When the citizens are corrupted, he says, they establish a standing army so as
to enslave society, and they appoint representatives so as to betray it.
“He also reasons about representative rule in the section on the death
of the political organism. Neither the people’s autocracy, he says, nor the
people’s will can be either handed over or represented by the very nature of
things.
“It is not difficult to imagine what Rousseau would have said about our
republics and constitutional monarchies, about the whole order of liberal
democratism, which is maintained in existence exclusively by that which its
prophet cursed. This order is wholly based on representation, it is
unquestionably unthinkable without parties, and, finally, the
administration of the country is based unfailingly on the dominance of
one or another party in parliament. When there is no such dominance, administration
is ready to come to a stop and it is necessary to dissolve parliament in the
hope that the country will give the kind of representation in which, in the
terminology of Rousseau, there exists no people’s will, but only ‘individual
opinion’.
“And this political system, as the height of logicality, is consecrated
by the all-supporting fiction of the people’s will!…”
Thus Rousseau’s political philosophy is not democratic as that term is
usually understood. And yet his concept of the people’s will has had enormous
influence on the history of democracy.
“Properly speaking, the principle of the people’s will requires direct
rule by the people. Even on this condition the principle would not produce
any good results. In Switzerland there is the right of appeal to the people’s
vote (referendum) and the presentation of the basic laws for confirmation to
the direct vote of the people. No useful results proceed from this for
the reasonableness of the law; moreover, the practice of such luxury of democratism
is possible only in very unusual circumstances. In essence this is a system of
‘self-indulgence’, and not a serious resource of legislative construction.
“But the most important question is: what is this ‘people’s will’?
Where, and in what, does it really exist? The people firmly wants one
thing: that things should go well. A people with a history, which
constitutes something united in distinction from its neighbours, which has not
yet been shattered into insuperably hostile groups, has another will; that
affairs in the country should go in a familiar spirit to which it is
historically accustomed and which it trusts.
“And then in the innumerable individual cases from the solution of which
the government is formed, the people has no will except in extreme cases – such
as war or peace or the handing over of its salvation to such-and-such a popular
person…. But in the everyday questions of government there is no people’s
will. How can I have a will in relation to that of which I have no comprehension?
In every question a few think well, a few think something, and 99 out a hundred
– exactly nothing. Ivan has some understanding of one question, but Theodore
not, while on another Theodore has some ideas, but Ivan not. But in each case
there is the huge majority which understands nothing and has no other will
except that everything should go well.
“It is from this majority that they demand that it should express its
own opinion and its own will! But, you know, it’s simply comical, and besides
harmful. Let us suppose that there are a hundred people who understand the
given question, and several million who do not. To demand a decision from the
majority means only to drown the hundred knowing voices in the hundreds of
thousands who have no thoughts on the matter!
“The people, they say, can listen to those who know; after all, it wants
the best for itself. Of course. But the people who are know are, in the first
place, occupied with their work, which is precisely why they are familiar with
the question; secondly, they by no means exercise their capabilities in oratory
or the technique of agitation. In connection with the art of stultifying the
crowd, flattering it, threatening it, attracting – this disastrous, poisonous
art of agitation – people will always be beaten down by those who have
specially devoted themselves to political intrigue. And people are specially
chosen to be intriguers, they are suitable for this trade because of their
innate capabilities; they then exercise their capabilities; and then finally
they are shaped into a party… But how is the man of action to fight
against them? This is quite impossible, and in fact the people that is placed
in this situation always goes, not for those who know, but for those who
are skilled in political intrigue. It plays a most stupid role and cannot get
out of it, even if they are completely aware of their stupid situation. I, for
example, completely understand the role of the political intriguer and despise
it, but if they were to force me to give my vote for measures which I am
personally unable to weigh up myself, then of course I have not the
slightest doubt that I would be fooled, and crafty people would shield
me from the people who know and are honourable.
“Such is the reality of the people’s will. It is a toy of crafty
people even if we have unmediated rule by the people. But unmediated
rule by the people is practically impossible. It is impossible to collect, and
it is impossible to turn the whole people into legislators. Somebody has to sow
the bread and work in the factories. Finally, everyone has his own private
life, which is dearer to him than politics. In generally, one has to resort to representation.
“Theoretically this is senseless. One can hand over one’s right
as a citizen. But one cannot hand over one’s will. After all, I’m handing it over for future
time, for future decisions, on questions which have not yet arisen. Therefore
in choosing a deputy, I give him the right to express that will of mine which I
do not yet myself know. Electing representatives would have a realisable
meaning only if I were to hand over my right as a citizen, that is, if I simply
said that I entrust the given person to carry out my political affairs and that
I will not quarrel with or contradict whatever he does lawfully until the end
of his term of office. But such a handing over of the very right of the
people’s autocracy is the idea of Caesarism, and not parliamentarism.
Parliamentarism requires from the country representatives of its will,
opinion and desire – that is, something impossible, an obvious deception.
In sending its deputies, the country does not renounce its will for the term of
their office. If, for example, our deputy, even if he were Ferri, should out of
deep conviction consider it necessary to send an expedition to the Bay of
Tonkin, and we, the voters, do not want this, then, according to the theory,
Ferri must lay down his deputyship. If the president of the republic supposes
that his chamber does not express the will of the country, he will dissolve it
and demand new representatives from the country. He demands that it should be
precisely the country’s will that is expressed.
“And so the country is offered elections. But whom will it send?
“First of all, there is still the
question: who will want to become a deputy?
“In extreme cases, when the salvation of the fatherland is required (in
1612 in Russia, in 1789 in France, in 1871 in France again), in extreme cases
generally, which demand a temporary and moreover very necessary exploit of
self-sacrifice, of course the better people will want the representatives not
of that will which the democratic theory demands, but of the spirit
and capacities of the country, its genius, to become deputies, - the
flower of the nation will come to the help of the fatherland. It will express
the spirit of the nation, the maximum of its capacities; therefore the
crowd in such decisions will recognise, not its will, but its ideal,
not what it may want by its own poor discrimination, but what it would want if
it was mindful. It highly estimates this mind (for it is in its spirit), it
recognises its decisions and supports them. But this is a triumphant
moment of history.
“During simple administration and ordering of affairs nothing of
the sort takes place or can take place. The flower of the nation – the real
representatives of its genius and its greatness are occupied with their own
affairs: the scientist, the doctor, the technician, the factory-owner, the
worker of the land – all these are occupied with their own affairs and will not
give them up because they love it, they put their whole soul into it. It is
only because they are the best people that they have this feeling. In an
ordinary time the representatives of the genius of the nation do not become
deputies, especially parliamentary deputies. A parliamentary deputy is
obliged to express another person’s will. For a man with his own
ideas this is not at all enticing, quite the opposite. He will enter a Constitutive
Assembly, but not a parliament. He will rather remain at his own work and
with his own ideas… Generally speaking, for a person who is able to make his
own way in something more useful, the significance of being a deputy is
not enticing. Moreover, it requires such external capacities as most of
the best people do not have. Glibness of speech, pushyness, a capacity for
intrigue, superficial convictions. Such are the people elected for the trade of
representation.[597]
“In elections they will most easily be successful, even the first
time, when there are not yet any solidly based parties. But parties have
longer ago been formed – also out of necessity. Since there is no
general people’s will in everyday administrative matters, it has to be created
for the people, the people has to be convinced, and it is easier and more
convenient to do this when the whole of the nation’s complicated life has been
broken down into separate elements and principles, and then out of each a programme
is constructed by logical deduction. It is hard for the elector to grasp
the complex whole; as an average person, he does not posses a very broad mind
or wide knowledge. But when he is presented with a simplified party programme,
it dawns on, he is forced to think that he has understood everything. But the
competition of those seeking deputyship forces the thinking of up of programmes
for which there is not even any foundation in real life. Otherwise why would I
recommend that the people elect me, and not my competitor? It is necessary to
put forward something special which distinguishes me from the others.
“Thus parties and political programmes would without fail arise and be
composed, even if national life were still whole. Political intriguers
will undoubtedly first cut it up in programmes, and them – because of their
activity – the cutting up of national integrity will take root in reality as
far as possible…
“In general, in laying claim to the deputyship, I must join some party.
I will be pushed forward not by the people, but by the party. I will be obliged
to it for everything, I will depend on it, I will have to take it into account.
The people is – for him who is being elected – the last thing to worry about.
It has to be incited to give its vote, but it is not at all necessary to
learn what its vote is. The election campaign is a hunt for votes,
but in no way a poll of the people. Hares are not asked whether they want to
land up on the table, they are caught; their own desires are interesting only
in order to clarify how precisely they can best be caught. That is
exactly how interested they are in the people during elections.
“And so the candidacies are put forward. Noise, fuss, walls plastered
with proclamations and names, journeys, conferences, false rumours, mutual
slanders, loud words, avaricious promises, promises that are consciously false,
bribes, etc. The people goes crazy: before it knew little, now it cannot make
out anything at all. The greatest art of this hunt does not consist in a preliminary
preparation of the people, but in some concluding surprise, which will snatch
away votes at the last minute without giving time to think again. Finally the
triumphant moment has arrived, the votes have been collected and counted, the
‘will of the people’ ‘has said its word’, and the representatives of the
nation gather in the Palais Bourbon.
“What happens then? During the elections they still had to reckon with
the voters. But having received the votes and gathered in the palace, the
representatives of the people can completely forget about it right until the
approach of the following elections. During this period they live exclusively
their own party’s life, developing all the qualities of cliquishness. The
deputy, who in theory represents the will of the voters, has real obligations
only in relation to his party…
“As Benjamin Disraeli said: ‘Damn your principles. Stick to your
party…’”
Two Concepts of
Freedom
The contrast between the “nanny state” of the continental philosophes
and enlightened despots, injected with some mystical energy by Rousseau’s
concept of the general will, and the “nightwatchman state” of the English
liberals, was linked with the difference between two concepts of freedom.
The English liberal tradition, which emerged in part as the continuance
of, and in part as a reaction against, the English revolution, defined freedom
in a negative way, as freedom from certain restraints on, and violence
to, the individual. Thus “liberty,” writes Locke, “is to be free from restraint
and violence from others”.[598]
But this freedom from restraint, paradoxically, was to be attained only
by submitting to restraint in the form of law: “Where there is no law,
there is no freedom.”[599] But
since right laws can be framed only through the use of reason, man’s
freedom “is grounded on his having reason, which is able to instruct him in
that law he is to govern himself by and make him know how far he is left to the
freedom of his own will.”[600] The necessity for reason implies at least a
minimal degree of tolerance, for reason cannot operate in a climate of
compulsion.
This tradition, summed up in the four words: freedom, law, reason
and tolerance, dominated the first half of the eighteenth-century, and
continues to dominate political thinking in the Anglo-Saxon countries to this
day.
However, from the time of Rousseau another, positive definition of
freedom gained currency – the freedom to do what you like and be what you want.
This concept of freedom scorned every notion of restraint as foreign to the
very idea of liberty; it emphasised lawlessness (freedom from law) as
opposed to law, emotion as opposed to reason, the people as a single
mystical organism having one will as opposed to the people as individuals
having many wills. And even when it admitted the need for laws,
it vehemently rejected the idea of the superiority of the lawgiver; for, as
Demoulins put it, “My motto is that of every honourable man – no superior”.
The transition between the two concepts of liberty can be seen in the
following passage from Rousseau, which begins with an “English”, negative,
law-abiding definition of liberty, but goes on to a revolutionary definition
which recognizes laws only insofar as they are an expression of “natural law”,
i.e. the general will of the people: “Liberty consists less in doing one’s will
than in not being submitted to the will of others… There is no liberty without
laws, nor where there is someone above the laws: even in the state of nature
man is free only by virtue of the natural law which commands everyone. A free
people obeys, but does not serve; it has leaders, but not masters; it obeys the
laws, but it obeys only the laws, and it is by dint of the laws that it does
not obey men… A people is free, whatever form its government may have, when in
he who governs there is not a man, but an organ of the law”.[601]
The difference between the concepts of freedom, freedom from and
freedom to, was illuminatingly
explored in a famous essay by Sir Isaiah Berlin entitled Two Concepts of
Freedom.
Concerning negative freedom, freedom from, Berlin writes: “I am
normally said to be free to the degree to which no human being interferes with
my activity. Political liberty in this sense is simply the area within which a
man can do what he wants. If I am prevented by other persons from doing what I
want I am to that degree unfree; and if the area within which I can do what I
want is contracted by other men beyond a certain minimum, I can be described as
being coerced, or, it may be, enslaved. Coercion is not, however, a term that
covers every form of inability. If I say that I am unable to jump more than 10
feet in the air, or cannot read because I am blind, or cannot understand the
darker pages of Hegel, it would be eccentric to say that I am to that degree
enslaved or coerced. Coercion implies the deliberate interference of other
human beings within the area in which I wish to act. You lack political liberty
or freedom only if you are prevented from attaining your goal by human beings.
Mere incapacity to attain your goal is not lack of political freedom… ‘The
nature of things does not madden us, only ill will does’, said Rousseau. The
criterion of oppression is the part that I believe to be played by other human
beings, directly or indirectly, in frustrating my wishes. By being free in this
sense I mean not being interfered with by others. The wider the area of
non-interference the wider my freedom.
“This is certainly what the classical English political philosophers
meant when they used this word.[602] They
disagreed about how wide the area could or should be. They supposed that it
could not, as things were, be unlimited, because if it were, it would entail a
state in which all men could boundlessly interfere with all other men; and this
kind of ‘natural’ freedom would lead to social chaos in which men’s minimum
needs would not be satisfied; or else the liberties of the weak would be
suppressed by the strong. Because they perceived that human purposes and
activities do not automatically harmonize with one another; and, because
(whatever their official doctrines) they put high value on other goals, such as
justice, or happiness, or security, or varying degrees of equality, they were
prepared to curtail freedom in the interests of other values and, indeed, of
freedom itself. For, without this, it was impossible to create the kind of
association that they thought desirable. Consequently, it is assumed by these
thinkers that the area of men’s free action must be limited by law. But equally
it is assumed, especially by such libertarians as Locke and Mill in England,
and Constant and Tocqueville in France, that there ought to exist a certain
minimum area of personal freedom which must on no account be violated, for if
it is overstepped, the individual will find himself in an area too narrow for
even that minimum development of his natural faculties which alone makes it
possible to pursue, and even to conceive, the various ends which men hold good
or right or sacred. It follows that a frontier must be drawn between the area
of private life and that of public authority. Where it is to be drawn is a
matter of argument, indeed of haggling. Men are largely interdependent, and no
man’s activity is so completely private as never to obstruct the lives of others
in any way. ‘Freedom for the pike is death for the minnows’; the liberty of
some must depend on the restraints of others. Still, a practical compromise has
to be found.
“Philosophers with an optimistic view of human nature, and a belief in
the possibility of harmonizing human interests, such as Locke or Adam Smith
and, in some moods, Mill, believed that social harmony and progress were
compatible with reserving a large area for private life over which neither the
state nor any other authority must be allowed to trespass. Hobbes, and those
who agreed with him, especially conservative or reactionary thinkers, argued
that if men were to be prevented from destroying one another, and making social
life a jungle or a wilderness, greater safeguards must be instituted to keep
them in their places, and wished correspondingly to increase the area of
centralized control, and decrease that of the individual. But both sides agreed
that some portion of human existence must remain independent of the sphere of social
control. To invade that preserve, however small, would be despotism. The most
eloquent of all defenders of freedom and privacy, Benjamin Constant, who had
not forgotten the Jacobin dictatorship, declared that at the very least the
liberty of religion, opinion, expression, property, must be guaranteed against
arbitrary invasion. Jefferson, Burke, Paine, Mill, compiled different
catalogues of individual liberties, but the argument for keeping at authority
at bay is always substantially the same. We must preserve a minimum area of
personal freedom if we are not to ‘degrade or deny our nature’. We cannot
remain absolutely free, and must give up some of our liberty to preserve the
rest. But total self-surrender is self-defeating. What then must the minimum
be? That which a man cannot give up without offending against the essence of
his human nature. What is this essence? What are the standards which it
entails? This has been, and perhaps always will be, a matter of infinite
debate. But whatever the principle in terms of which the area of
non-interference is to be drawn, whether it is that of natural law or natural
rights, or of utility or the pronouncements of a categorical imperative, or the
sanctity of the social contract, or any other concept with which men have
sought to clarify and justify their convictions, liberty in this sense means
liberty from; absence of interference beyond the shifting, but always
recognizable, frontier. ‘The only freedom which deserves the name is that of
pursuing our own good in our own way’, said the most celebrated of its
champions. If this is so, is compulsion ever justified? Mill had no doubt that
it was. Since justice demands that all individuals be entitled to a minimum of
freedom, all other individuals were of necessity to be restrained, if need be
by force, from depriving anyone of it. Indeed, the whole function of law was
the prevention of just such collisions: the state was reduced to what Lassalle
contemptuously described as the functions of a nightwatchman or traffic policeman.”[603]
Berlin goes on to make the important observation that “liberty in this
sense is not incompatible with some kinds of autocracy, or at any rate with the
absence of self-government. Liberty in this sense is principally concerned with
the area of control, not with its source. Just as a democracy may, in fact,
deprive the individual citizen of a great many liberties which he might have in
some other form of society, so it is perfectly conceivable that a
liberal-minded despot would allow his subjects a large measure of personal
freedom. The despot who leaves his subjects a wide area of liberty may be
unjust, or encourage the wildest inequalities, care little for order, or
virtue, or knowledge; but provided that he does not curb their liberty, or at
least curbs it less than many other régimes, he meets with Mill’s
specification.[604]
Freedom in this sense is not, at any rate logically, connected with democracy
or self-government. Self-government may, on the whole, provide a better
guarantee of the preservation of civil liberties than other régimes, and
has been defended as such by libertarians. But there is no necessary connexion
between individual liberty and democratic rule. The answer to the question ‘Who
governs me?’ is logically distinct from the question ‘How far does government
interfere with me?’ It is in this difference that the great contrast between
the two concepts of negative and positive liberty, in the end, consists. For
the ‘positive’ sense of liberty comes to light if we try to answer the
question, not ‘What am I free to do or be?’, but ‘By whom am I ruled?’ or ‘Who
is to say what I am, and what I am not, to be or do?’ The connexion between
democracy and individual liberty is a good deal more tenuous than it seemed to
many advocates of both. The desire to be governed by myself, or at any rate to
participate in the process by which my life is to be controlled, may be as deep
as that of a free area for action, and perhaps historically older. But it is
not a desire for the same thing. So different is it, indeed, as to have led in
the end to the great clash of ideologies that dominates our world. For it is
this – the ‘positive’ conception of liberty: not freedom from, but freedom to –
which the adherents of the ‘negative’ notion represent as being, at times, no
better than a specious disguise for brutal tyranny.”[605]
Berlin now passes to the “positive” concept of liberty, freedom to:
“The ‘positive’ sense of the word ‘liberty’ derives from the wish on the part
of the individual to be his own master. I wish my life and decisions to depend
on myself, not on external forces of whatever kind. I wish to be the instrument
of my own, not of other men’s, acts of will. I wish to be a subject, not an
object; to be moved by reasons, by conscious purposes which are my own, not by
causes which affect me, as it were, from outside. I wish to be somebody, not
nobody; a doer – deciding, not being decided for, self-directed and not acted
upon by external nature or by other men as if I were a thing, or an animal, or
a slave incapable of playing a human role, that is, of conceiving goals and
policies of my own and realizing them. This is at least part of what I mean
when I say that I am rational, and that it is my reason that distinguishes me
as a human being from the rest of the world. I wish, above all, to be conscious
of myself as a thinking, willing, active being, bearing responsibility for his
choices and able to explain them by reference to his own ideas and purposes. I
feel free to the degree that I believe this to be true, and enslaved to the
degree that I am made to realize that it is not.
“The freedom which consists in being one’s own master, and the freedom
which consists in not being prevented from choosing as I do by other men, may,
on the face of it, seem concepts at no great logical distance from each other –
no more than negative and positive ways of saying the same thing. Yet the
‘positive’ and ‘negative’ notions of freedom developed in divergent directions
until, in the end, they came into direct conflict with each other.
“One way of making this clear is in terms of the independent momentum
which the metaphor of self-mastery acquired. ‘I am my own master’; ‘I am slave
to no man’; but may I not (as, for instance, T.H. Green is always saying) be a
slave to nature? Or to my own ‘unbridled’ passions? Are these not so many
species of the identical genus ‘slave’ – some political or legal, others moral
or spiritual? Have not men had the experience of liberating themselves from
spiritual slavery, or slavery to nature, and do they not in the course of it
become aware, on the one hand, of a self which dominates, and, on the other, of
something in them which is brought to heel? This dominant self is then
variously identified with reason, with my ‘higher nature’, with the self which
calculates and aims at what will satisfy it in the long run, with my ‘real’, or
‘ideal’, or ‘autonomous’ self, or with my self ‘at its best’; which is then
contrasted with irrational impulse, uncontrolled desires, my ‘lower’ nature,
the pursuit of immediate pleasures, my ‘empirical’ or ‘heteronomous’ self,
swept by every gust of desire and passion, needing to be rigidly disciplined if
it is ever to rise to the full height of its ‘real’ nature. Presently the two
nature may be represented as something wider than the individual (as the term
is normally understood), as a social ‘whole’ of which the individual is an
element or aspect: a tribe, a race, a church, a state, the great society of the
living and the dead and the yet unborn. This entity is then identified as being
the ‘true’ self which, by imposing its collective, or ‘organic’, single will
upon its recalcitrant ‘members’, achieves its own, and, therefore, their,
‘higher’ freedom. The perils of using organic metaphors to justify the coercion
of some men by others in order to raise them to a ‘higher’ level of freedom
have often been pointed out. But what gives such plausibility as it has to this
kind of language is that we recognize that it is possible, and at times
justifiable, to coerce men in the name of some goal (let us say, justice or
public health) which they would, if they were more enlightened, themselves
pursue, but do not, because they are blind or ignorant or corrupt. This renders
it easy for me to conceive of myself as coercing others for their own sake, in
their, not my, interest. I am then claiming that I know what they truly need
better than they know it themselves. What, at most, this entails is that they
would not resist me if they were rational, and as wise as I, and understood
their interests as I do. But I may go on to claim a good deal more than this. I
may declare that they are actually aiming at what in their benighted state they
consciously resist, because there exists within them an occult entity – their latent
rational will, or their ‘true’ purpose – and that this entity, although it is
belied by all that they overtly feel and do and say, is their ‘real’ self, of
which the poor empirical self in space and time may know nothing or little; and
that this self in space and time is the only self that deserves to have its
wishes taken into account. Once I take this view, I am in a position to ignore
the actual wishes or men or societies, to bully, oppress, torture them in the
name, and on behalf, of their ‘real’ selves, in the secure knowledge that
whatever is the true goal of man (happiness, fulfilment of duty, wisdom, a just
society, self-fulfilment) must be identical with his freedom – the free choice
of his ‘true’, albeit submerged and inarticulate, self.
“This paradox has often been exposed. It is
one thing to say that I know what is good for X, while he himself does not; and
even to ignore his wishes for its – and his – sake; and a very different one to
say that he has eo ipso chosen it, not indeed consciously, not as he
seems in everyday life, but in his role as a rational self which his empirical
self may not know – the ‘real’ self which discerns the good, and cannot help
choosing it once it is revealed. This monstrous impersonation, which consists in
equating what X would choose if he were something he is not, or at least is not
yet, with what X actually seeks and chooses, is at the heart of all political
theories of self-realization. It is one thing to say that I may be coerced for
my own good which I am too blind to see: and another that if it is my good, I
am not being coerced, for I have willed it, whether I know this or not, and am
freed even while my poor earthly body and foolish mind bitterly reject it, and
struggle against those who seek to impose it, with the greatest desperation.
“This magical transformation, or sleight of hand (for which William
James so justly mocked the Hegelians), can no doubt be perpetrated just as
easily with the ‘negative’ concept of freedom, where the self that should not
be interfered with is no longer the individual with his actual wishes and needs
as they are normally conceived, but the ‘real’ man within, identified with the
pursuit of some ideal purpose not dreamed of by his empirical self. And, as in
the case of the ‘positively’ free self, this entity may be inflated into some
super-personal entity – a state, a class, a nation, or the march of history
itself, regarded as a more ‘real’ subject of attributes than the empirical
self. But the ‘positive’ conception of freedom as self-mastery, with its
suggestion of a man divided against himself, lends itself more easily to this
splitting of personality into two: the transcendent, dominant controller, and
the empirical bundle of desires and passions to be disciplined and brought to
heel. This demonstrates (if demonstration of so obvious a truth is needed) that
the conception of freedom directly derives from the view that is taken of what
constitutes a self, a person, a man. Enough manipulation with the definitions of
man, and freedom can be made to mean whatever the manipulator wishes. Recent
history has made it only too clear that the issue is not merely
academic..."[606]
Freemasonry: (1)
The European Element
By the time of the death of Rousseau in 1774 all the essential elements
of the antichristian system that was about to burst upon the world with
unparalleled savagery had already appeared in embryonic form. And by the time
the American revolution had triumphed in 1781 it was clear that the world could
be turned upside down.
However, the old despotic order still reigned in Europe; and with rulers
such as Frederick the Great in Prussia and Catherine the Great in Russia
turning in practice against the ideas they embraced in theory it was clear that
the “mystery of iniquity” needed a new stimulus to recover its momentum and
propel it towards its goal.
That stimulus came in the form of an element that was already well known
to European history, but which only now began to acquire a dominant position in
European politics, first in the West through the French revolution of 1789, and
then in the East through the Russian revolution of 1917 - Jewish power.
One major channel of Jewish influence, as we have seen, was finance. A
second was the movement known as Freemasonry, which because of its close
links with Jewry and Judaism is often called “Judaeo-Masonry”.
Now since belief in the existence of a Judaeo-Masonic conspiracy against
civilisation is often taken as evidence of madness, or at any rate of political
incorrectness, it is necessary to assert from the beginning that, as Tikhomirov
rightly says, “it is strange to attribute to the Masons the whole complexity of
the evolution of human societies. One must not have the idea that people lived
happily and in a healthy state, but then the masonic organisation appeared and
corrupted them all. It is necessary to know the laws of the development of
societies, which would be such as they are if the destruction of the temple in
Jerusalem had never taken place. In general the study of Masonry can be
fruitful only on condition that it is conducted scientifically. Only
such a study is capable of clarifying the true level of influence of this or
that secret society on the evolution of peoples and states.”[607]
While Tikhomirov has no doubts about the existence of the Judaeo-Masonry
conspiracy, he nevertheless insists that the blame for the destruction of
modern society lies “most of all not on some premeditatedly evil influence of
the masons or whatever other organisation, but on the false direction of our
own constructive activities.”[608] And
again: “There has never been a man or a society which has not been corrupted through
his own free will.”[609] In
other words, the masons would have no power over society if society had not
laid itself open to attack by voluntarily abandoning its own defensive
principles and institutions. In the late eighteenth century, these principles
and institutions were the hierarchical principle, respect for tradition and the
institutions of the Church and the Monarchy. The masons did not originate the
attack on these principles and institutions – as we have seen, the roots of
anti-authoritarianism in both Church and State go back at least to the
eleventh-century Papacy. What they did was to use an already existing sceptical
and rationalist climate of opinion to intensify and give direction to the
revolutionary movement, “the mystery of iniquity”. The brushwood had already
been gathered; they simply applied the spark which set the fire alight.
According
to the conventional theory, modern, “Free” or “Symbolic” Masonry began when the
meeting-places, or lodges, of the stonemasons, the builders of the medieval
cathedrals, gradually began to decline in importance with the decline in their
craft, and be joined by intellectuals having nothing to do with stonemasonry,
but using the lodges for their own intellectual, and often heretical or occult,
activities. Perhaps the first modern Mason was the English antiquarian, Elias
Ashmole, who was initiated in 1646 and died in 1692. He also made a good living
as an astrologer.[610]
The period between the initiation of Ashmole and the founding of the
Great Lodge of England in 1717 may be called the gestation period of modern
Masonry. “In this time,” writes Tikhomirov, “the lodges of the stonemasons
completely died out, and the intelligentsia, pushing out the workers, decided
to form a new society keeping the old forms… Out of several of the former
stonemason lodges they formed the Great Lodge, which then began to organize
lodges of a new character under its own leadership. ‘The fraternal union of
real stonemasons,’ says Findel, ‘is turned into the fraternal union of
symbolical builders’. Instead of building stone temples there appeared ‘the
raising of the temple of humanity’.”[611]
The secrecy of these early masons, and their three symbolic degrees,
entrance into which was accompanied by blood-curdling secret oaths and
knowledge of whose proceedings was kept strictly secret from members of lower
degress, naturally aroused suspicions. Thus in 1698 a certain Mr. Winter
circulated a leaflet in London warning “all godly people in the City of London
of the Mischiefs and Evils practised in the Sight of God by those called Freed
Masons… For this devilish Sect of Men are Meeters in secret which swear against
all without their Following. They are the Anti Christ which was to come,
leading Men from fear of God.”[612]
Many have come to concur with
this judgement in the three centuries that have elapsed since this, the earliest
known estimate of Freemasonry, pronounced when it was still in its infancy. For
whatever the conventional theory about its “innocent” origins as a talking-shop
for intellectuals, Masonry has deep, if not easily traceable, roots in the
pagan-occult-revolutionary tradition both of the pre-Christian East and of the
Christian West. According to one hypothesis put forward by the Masons
themselves, Masonry inherited the occult wisdom of the pre-Christian East via
the medieval crusading order of the Templars, which was destroyed by the French
King and the Pope at the beginning of the fourteenth century on suspicion of
terrible blasphemies.
Thus Piers Paul Read writes: “Andrew Ramsay, a Scottish Jacobite exiled
in France who was Chancellor of the French Grand Lodge in the 1730s, claimed
that the first Freemasons had been stonemasons in the crusader states who had
learned the secret rituals and gained the special wisdom of the ancient world.
Ramsay made no specific claim for the Templars, probably because he did not
wish to antagonise his host, the King of France; but in Germany another
Scottish exile, George Frederick Johnson, concocted a myth that transformed
‘the Templars… from their ostensible status of unlearned and fanatical
soldier-monks to that of enlightened and wise knightly seers, who had used
their sojourn in the East to recover its profoundest secrets, and to emancipate
themselves from medieval Catholic credulity’.
“According to the German Freemasons, the Grand Masters of the Order had
learned the secrets and acquired the treasure of the Jewish Essenes which were
handed down from one to the other. James of Molay [the last Grand Master of the
Order], on the night of his execution, had sent the Count of Beaujew to the
crypt of the Temple Church in Paris to recover this treasure which included the
seven-branched candelabra seized by the Emperor Titus, the crown of the Kingdom
of Jerusalem and a shroud. It is undisputed that in evidence given at the trial
of the Templars, a sergeant, John of Châlons, maintained that
Gérard of Villiers, the Preceptor of France, had been tipped off about
his imminent arrest and so had escaped on eighteen galleys with the Templars’
treasure. If this were so, what happened to this treasure? George Frederick Johnson
said that it had been taken to Scotland, one of his followers specifying the
Isle of Mull.”[613]
Whatever the truth about this particular hypothesis, from the beginning,
as we have seen, Freemasonry aroused suspicions of being antichristian in
essence. However, the Masons were saved from persecution by their
success in recruiting members from the aristocracy, who were lured by the
promise of secret knowledge. Their names were immediately published to show how
“respectable” Masonry was.
Moreover, when the Grand Lodge of England came to be established in
1717, and the Constitutions of Masonry were published by Dr. Anderson in
1723, great emphasis was laid on the Masons’ loyalty to King and country: “A
mason is a peaceable subject to the civil powers, wherever he resides or works,
and is never to be concerned in plots and conspiracies against the peace and
welfare of the nation. If a brother should be a rebel against the state, he is
not to be countenanced in his rebellion, however he may be pitied as an unhappy
man; and if convicted of not other crime, though the brotherhood must and ought
to dismiss his rebellion, and give no umbrage or ground of political jealousy
to the government for the time being; they cannot expel him from the lodge, and
his relation to it remains indefeasible.”[614]
If English Masonry by and large kept its promise to stay out of
politics, this was certainly not to be the case with its daughter lodges in
Europe and America. Moreover, even while protesting its innocence, the Constitutions
gave clear evidence of Masonry’s revolutionary potential. This is particularly
obvious when in one and the same breath they both disclaim any interest in
religion and then claim to profess “the best [religion] that ever was, or will
or can be… the true primitive, catholic and universal religion agreed to be so
in all times and ages.”[615]
What was this religion? In some formulations it is like the Deism that
was becoming fashionable in England at the time, in which God is pictured as
the “Great Architect of the Universe” Who creates the laws of nature, sets them
working and then plays no further part in history. At others it is closer to
Pantheism. Thus the Constitutions declare that “it is the law of Nature,
which is the law of God, for God is Nature. It is to love God above all things,
and our neighbour as ourself…”[616] And yet it soon becomes clear it is man, not
God, that it the object of worship of the Masons. This is particularly clearly
expressed in later, continental Masonry. Thus the Convent of the Grand Orient
of France in 1913 declared: “We no longer recognise God as the aim of life; we
have created an ideal which is not God, but humanity.”[617]
Another important feature of the masonic religion is what we would now
call its ecumenism. As religious passions cooled round Europe, the
masons took the lead in preaching religious tolerance. But they went further in
saying that religious differences did not matter, and that underlying all
religions there was a “true, primitive, universal religion”. In accordance with
this principle, Jews were admitted to the masonic lodges as early as 1724.[618]
The ecumenism of Masonry was linked to the
crisis of faith that was taking place in the Anglican church in the early
eighteenth century, and in particular to the loss of faith in the unique truth
and saving power of Christianity. Thus “in 1717,” wrote William Palmer, “a
controversy arose on occasion of the writings of Hoadly, bishop of Bangor, in
which he maintained that it was needless to believe in any particular creed, or
to be united to any particular Church; and that sincerity, or our own
persuasion of the correctness of our opinions (whether well or ill founded) is
sufficient. These doctrines were evidently calculated to subvert the necessity
of believing the articles of the Christian faith, and to justify all classes of
schismatics or separatists from the Church. The convocation deemed these
opinions so mischievous, that a committee was appointed to select propositions
from Hoadly’s books, and to procure their censure; but before his trial could
take place, the convocation was prorogued by an arbitrary exercise of the royal
authority…”[619]
Hardly coincidentally, 1717, the year in which Hoadly’s heretical views
were published was the same year in which the Grand Lodge of England was
founded. And we find a very similar doctrine enshrined in Dr. Anderson’s Constitutions:
“A Mason is obliged, by his tenure, to obey the moral Law; and if he rightly
understands the Art, he will never be a stupid Atheist, nor an irreligious
Libertine. But though in ancient Times Masons were charged in every Country to
be of the Religion of that Country or Nation, whatever it was, yet, ‘tis now
thought more expedient only to oblige them to that Religion in which all men agree,
leaving their particular Opinions to themselves; that is to be good Men and
true, or Men of Honour and Honesty, but whatever Denominations or Persuasions
they may be distinguish’d; whereby Masonry becomes the Centre of Union and the
Means of Conciliating true Friendships among Persons that must have remained at
a perpetual Distance.”[620]
A
new and extremely deceptive concept was here introduced into the bloodstream of
European thought: “that Religion in which all men agree”. There is no such
thing. Even if we exclude the “stupid Atheists” and “irreligious
Libertines” (of whom there are very many), we still find men disagreeing
radically about the most fundamental doctrines: whether God is one, or
one-in-three, or more than three, whether He is to be identified with nature or
distinguished from it, whether He is evolving or unchanging, whether or not He
became incarnate in Jesus Christ, whether or not He spoke to Mohammed, whether
or not He is coming to judge the world, etc. Upon the answers to these questions
depend our whole concept of right and wrong, of what it is “to be good Men and
true”. Far from there being unanimity among “religious” people about this,
there is bound to be the most radical disagreement between them.
Ecumenism may be described as religious egalitarianism, the doctrine
that one religion is as good as any other. When combined, as it was in the
lodges of Europe and America, with political and social egalitarianism, the
doctrine that one person is as good as any other, it made for an
explosive mixture – not just a philosophy, but a programme for revolutionary
action. And this revolutionary potential of Masonry became evident very soon
after it spread from England to the Continent…
Now 1717, the year of the foundation of the Great Lodge of England, was
also important as being the date of an Anglo-French treaty by which the
Catholic Stuart pretender to the English throne was expelled from France and
the Protestant Hanoverian dynasty was recognised by the French government. This
facilitated the spread of Freemasonry to France and the Continent. And so,
writes the anti-masonic Catholic writer Count Leon de Poncins, it “evolved in a
distinctly revolutionary and anti-religious sense. The Grand Orient of France
led this movement, followed, with some reserve, by the Grand Lodge of France,
and became the guide of the Grand Orients of Europe and South America.
Freemasonry in the United States, while maintaining its union and friendly
relations with the Grand Lodge of England, occupies an intermediate position
between English Freemasonry and the Grand Orients of Europe. Some of its
branches are nearer the English conception, and others the European…
“English Freemasonry in 1723 was in no way Christian; it was
rationalist, vaguely deistic and secretly gnostic. The latter source of
inspiration is still active, but it had encountered the conservative,
traditional spirit of England. Most English Freemasons were men who were
scarcely concerned with philosophical or metaphysical preoccupations. The
revolutionary and anti-Christian inspiration which constituted the essence of
contemporary Freemasonry everywhere, encountered a veiled and instinctive
resistance in English Masons. The pact which Freemasonry tacitly concluded with
the Protestant monarchy, to fight against Catholicism [and the Catholic Stuart
pretenders to the English monarchy], which it considered its principal enemy,
contributed to restrain the revolutionary tendencies of English Freemasonry,
whereas they developed freely in Europe and South America, and rather more
timidly in the United States. In short, the revolutionary virus in Freemasonry
is more or less inactive in England, where Freemasonry is more an excuse for
social reunion than an organisation claiming to remake the world.”[621]
This difference between English and Continental Masonry has been denied
by some writers. And of course, from a religious point of view, at least
until Grand Orient Masonry officially adopted atheism in 1877 and was
“excommunicated” by the Grand Lodge of England, there was little or no
difference between the two, both combining ecumenism with a syncretistic pagan
cult or cults (see below). Nevertheless, from a political point of view
the distinction is a valid one; for English Masonry, linked as it was with the
nobility and the monarchy from the beginning, dissociated itself from the
revolutionary activities of its brother lodges on the Continent, and as late as
1929 reaffirmed the ban on discussion of politics and religion within the
lodge.[622]
It was Continental Masonry, springing from the Grand Orient of France, that was
the real revolutionary force in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and
beyond.
The revolutionary political significance of Continental Masonry is most
clearly seen in the 30th degree of the Scottish rite, the Kadosch
degree. Here the myth that forms the core of the earlier degrees, the murder of
Hiram or Adoniram, the supposed architect of Solomon’s Temple, is replaced by
the myth of Jacques de Molay, the last great master of the order of the
Templars, who was burned alive on the orders of King Philippe the Fair of
France and Pope Clement V in 1314, and who was supposed to have founded four
masonic lodges on his deathbed. The initiates of the Kadosch degree avenge the
death of the Templars’ leader by acting out the murder of the French king and
the Pope.
“The Kadosch adept,” writes Ivanov, “tramples on a crown as a symbol of
tyranny in general, and then tramples on the papal tiara as a symbol of
violence over the free human conscience.
“The king and the pope are symbols, and by these symbols we are given to
understand the struggle to the death against ‘civil and ecclesiastical
despotism’.”[623]
This vengeful rite was not just theatre, but a prelude and preparation
for real revolutionary action. Thus in 1784 in Wilhemsbad a pan-European
congress of masons in which the mysterious proto-communist sect of the
“Illuminati” took a leading role (see below), decided on the murder of Louis
XVI of France and Gustavus Adolphus III of Sweden. Both sentences were carried
out…
However, the Continental masons managed to conceal their murderous
intentions under a cover of good works and conviviality. This was enough to
fool even those who should have been best informed. Thus Louis XVI’s queen,
Marie Antoinette, wrote to her sister Maria Christina in 1781: “It seems to me
that you attach too much significance to Masonry in France; it has by no means
played the same role in France as in other countries, thanks to the fact that
here everybody belongs to it and so we know everything that goes on there. What
danger do you see in it? I understand that it would be possible to fear the
spread of Masonry if it were a secret political society, but, you know, this
society exists only for good works and for entertainments; there they do a lot
of eating, drinking, discussing and singing, and the king says that people who
drink and sing cannot be conspirators. Thus it is impossible to call Masonry a
society of convinced atheists, for, as I have heard, they constantly speak
about God there. And besides, they give a lot of alms, educate the children of
the poor or dead members of the brotherhood, give their daughters in marriage –
I truly see nothing in bad in all this. The other day the Princess de Lambal
was elected great mistress of one lodge; she told me how nice they are to her
there, but she said that more was drunk than sung; the other day they offered
to give dowries to two girls. True, it seems to me that it would be possible to
do good without all these ceremonies, but, you know, everyone has his own way
of enjoying himself; as long as they do good, what has the rest to do with us?”[624]
However, one year into the revolution she had discovered that Masonry
had a great deal to do with them. On August 17, 1790 she wrote to her brother,
the Austrian Emperor Leopold II: “Forgive me, dear brother, believe in the
tender sentiments of your unhappy sister. The main thing is, keep away from
every masonic society. In this way all the horrors that are taking place here
are striving to attain one and the same end in all countries.”[625]
The first power in the West clearly to see the threat of Masonry to both
Church and State was the Catholic Church. Catholicism made no radical
distinction between English and French Masonry. In 1738 Masonry of all kinds
was condemned by Pope Clement XII in 1738, in 1751 - by Benedict XIV, in 1821 –
by Pius VII, in 1825 – by Leo XII, in 1829 – by Pius VIII, in 1832 and 1839 –
by Gregory XVI, in 1846, 1864, 1865, 1873 and 1876 – by Pius IX, and in 1884 –
by Leo XIII. The latter’s bull, Humanum Genus declared of the
Freemasons: “Their ultimate has been brought into existence by Christianity,
and to replace it by another in aim is to uproot completely the whole religious
and political order of the world, which harmony with their way of thinking.
This will mean that the foundation and the laws of the new structure of society
will be drawn from pure Naturalism.”[626]
The bull went on: “In the sphere of politics, the Naturalists lay down
that all men have the same rights and that all are equal and alike in every
respect; that everyone is by nature free and independent; that no one has the
right to exercise authority over another; that it is an act of violence to demand
of men obedience to any authority not emanating from themselves. All power is,
therefore, in the free people. Those who exercise authority do so either by the
mandate or the permission of the people, so that, when the popular will
changes, rulers of States may lawfully be deposed even against their will. The
source of all rights and civic duties is held to reside either in the multitude
or in the ruling power in the State, provided that it has been constituted
according to the new principles. They hold also that the State should not
acknowledge God and that, out of the various forms of religion, there is no
reason why one should be preferred to another. According to them, all should be
on the same level.”[627]
Again, in his Encyclical of 19th March, 1902, Leo XIII wrote:
“Freemasonry is the personification of the Revolution; it constitutes a sort of
society in reverse whose aim is to exercise an occult overlordship upon society
as we know it, and whose sole raison d’être consists in waging war
against God and his Church.”[628]
In the East, the Orthodox Church also clearly saw the danger of
Freemasonry and condemned it. Thus Archbishop Cyprian of Cyprus anathematized
it in very strong terms in 1821 before being martyred…
Freemasonry: (2)
The Jewish Element
To what extent is the term “Judaeo-Masonry” appropriate? The
characteristics of Masonry that we have examined so far are purely western in
origin; they amount to a religious expression of Enlightenment rationalist
philosophy. However, when we examine the rites and religious practices of
Masonry, and especially its, a strongly Jewish element is immediately apparent;
for most of the basic religious doctrines and rites of Freemasonry are in
fact Jewish.
Moreover, there is a significant personal input of Jewry into Masonry,
especially at the highest levels. For the three symbolical degrees of Masonry
are supplemented by thirty higher levels, which in turn are crowned by what has
been called “invisible Masonry”. And “all this impenetrably dark power is
crowned, according to the conviction and affirmation of [the former Mason and
investigator of Masonry] Copin Albancelli, by still another level: the
Jewish centre, which pursues the aims of the universal lordship of Israel
and holds in its hands both visible Masonry with its 33 degrees and the
invisible degrees of invisible Masonry or ‘Illuminism’…”[629]
“It is true, of course,” writes Bernard Lazare, “that there were Jews
connected with Freemasonry from its birth, students of the Kabbala, as is shown
by certain rites which survive. It is very probable, too, that in the years
preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution, they entered in greater
numbers than ever into the councils of the secret societies, becoming indeed
themselves the founders of secret associations. There were Jews in the circle
around Weishaupt, and a Jew of Portugese origin, Martinez de Pasquales,
established numerous groups of illuminati in France and gathered around him a
large number of disciples whom he instructed in the doctrines of
re-integration. The lodges which Martinez founded were mystic in character,
whereas the other orders of Freemasonry were, on the whole, rationalistic in
their teachings…. There would be little difficulty in showing how these two
tendencies worked in harmony; how Cazotte, Cagliostro, Martinez, Saint-Martin,
the Comte de Saint Germain and Eckartshausen were practically in alliance with
the Encyclopaedists and Jacobins, and how both, in spite of their seeming
hostility, succeeded in arriving at the same end, the undermining, namely, of
Christianity.
“This, too, then, would tend to show that though the Jews might very
well have been active participants in the agitation carried on by the secret
societies, it was not because they were the founders of such associations, but
merely because the doctrines of the secret societies agreed so well with their
own.”[630]
Thus Freemasonry was not controlled by the Jews, according to Lazare,
but they had a great deal in common: Anti-Christianity (French Grand Orient
Masonry to a much greater extent than English “regular” Masonry), a taste for a
Kabbalistic type of mysticism, revolutionary politics and many members of
Jewish blood. But this is only the beginning. It is when one enters into the
details of the rites, especially the rites of the higher degrees, that the
resemblances become really striking.
“The connections are more intimate,” writes a Parisian Jewish review,
“than one would imagine. Judaism should maintain a lively and profound sympathy
for Freemasonry in general, and no matter concerning this powerful institution
should be a question of indifference to it…
“The spirit of Freemasonry is that of Judaism in its most fundamental
beliefs; its ideas are Judaic, its language is Judaic, its very organisation,
almost, is Judaic. Whenever I approach the sanctuary where the Masonic order
accomplishes its works, I hear the name of Solomon ringing everywhere, and
echoes of Israel. Those symbolic columns are the columns of the Temple where
each Hiram’s workmen received their wages; they enshrine his revered name. The
whole Masonic tradition takes me back to that great epoch when the Jewish
monarch, fulfilling David’s promises, raised up to the God of Abraham, Isaac
and Jacob, a religious monument worthy of the creator of Heaven and earth – a
tradition symbolised by powerful images which have spread outside the limits of
Palestine to the whole world, but which still bear the indelible imprint of
their origin.
“That Temple which must be built, since the sanctuary in Jerusalem has
perished, the secret edifice at which all Masons on earth labour with one mind,
with a word of command and secret rallying-points – it is the moral sanctuary,
the divine asylum wherein all men who have been reconciled will re-unite one
day in holy and fraternal Agapes; it is the social order which shall no longer
know fratricidal wars, nor castes, nor pariahs, and where the human race will
recognise and proclaim anew its original oneness. That is the work on which
every initiate pledges his devotion and undertakes to lay his stone, a sublime
work which has been carried on for centuries.”[631]
This talk of universal fraternity in the rebuilding of the Temple is deception.
“As for the final result of the messianic revolution,” writes Batault, “it will
always be the same: God will overthrow the nations and the kings and will cause
Israel and her king to triumph; the nations will be converted to Judaism and
will obey the Law or else they will be destroyed and the Jews will be the
masters of the world. The Jews’ international dream is to unite the world with
the Jewish law, under the direction and domination of the priestly people – a
general form.. of imperialism…”[632]
However, it remains true that the main aim of Freemasonry, as of
Judaism, is to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. And this alone should be enough
to warn us of its Antichristianity, insofar the Lord decreed that “not one
stone [of it] shall be left upon another that shall not be thrown down” (Matthew
24.2), and every attempt to rebuild it has been destroyed by the Lord, as in
the time of Julian the Apostate. Moreover, the rites of Freemasonry themselves
declare that the secret aim of the rebuilding of the Temple is to undo the
work of Christ on the Cross.
Thus
the 18th or Rosicrucian Degree[633] speaks
of the ninth hour of the day as “the hour when the Veil of the Temple was rent
in twain and darkness overspread the earth, when the true Light departed from
us, the Altar was thrown down, the Blazing Star was eclipsed, the Cubic Stone
poured forth Blood and Water, the Word was lost, and despair and tribulation
sat heavily upon us. It goes on to exhort the Masons: “Since Masonry has
experienced such dire calamities it is our duty, Princes, by renewed labours,
to retrieve our loss.”
The Reverend Walter Hannah, an Anglican clergyman, has justly commented
on this: “For any Christian to declare that Masonry experienced ‘a dire
calamity’ at the Crucifixion, or that Masons suffered a ‘loss’ at the
triumphant death of our Saviour on the Cross which the Excellent and Perfect
Princes of the Rose Croix of Heredom can by their own labour ‘retrieve’ seems
not only heretical but actually blasphemous. The only interpretation which
makes sense of this passage would appear to be that it is not the death of our
Lord which is mourned, but the defeat of Satan.”[634]
Indeed, for “the eclipse of the Blazing Star” can only mean the defeat of
Satan, while the Cubic Stone pouring forth Blood and Water can only mean the
triumph of Christ on the Cross - Christ, Who is “the Stone that the builders
rejected” which became “the chief Corner-Stone” of the New Testament Church (Matthew
21.42), having been rejected as “the wrong shape” by the leaders of Old Israel.
As the Apostle Peter said to the Sanhedrin: “This [Christ] is the Stone which
was rejected by you builders [Jews, Masons], which has become the chief
Corner-Stone” (Acts 4.11). Any Temple which does not have Christ as the
chief Corner-Stone is an abomination to God and will be destroyed by Him just
as the Old Testament Temple was destroyed; for “whoever falls on this Stone
will be broken; but on whomever it falls, it will grind him to power” (Matthew
21.44). It is in the same Rosicrucian Degree that initiates are told to walk
over the Cross of Christ.[635]
Freemasonry: (3) The Satanic Element
At first sight, it might seem that the religion of Masonry is a kind of
syncretistic paganism, as would seem to follow from the name of the Masonic
god, Jah-Bul-On – that is, Jehovah-Baal-Osiris.[636] And
yet as we ascend higher through the elaborate web of deception that Masonry
places in the way of those who would penetrate its secrets, we see that the
higher Masons, as opposed to their junior brethren on the lower levels of
“enlightenment”, do not really believe even in any of the pagan gods.
Thus Tikhomirov writes: “Masonry recognizes only natural religion, and,
in explaining the ritual of the knight of the sun (28th degree of
Masonry), Clavdel directly says that ‘the aim of the knights of the sun is to
establish natural religion on the ruins of the religions established on the
basis of Revelation.
“It goes without saying that
Masonry also rejects original sin and its redemption. ‘Moral and religious
errors, and especially that fateful belief in the natural sinfulness of man,
constitute the cause of all the evil works of man. In fact man was born good
and it is only institutions that are bad’, teaches the Masonic journal Le
Globe. The Mason Pulevi, while sketching the aims of Masonry in his
Parisian lodge, cries out: ‘Let there be no more talk of redemption. Man has
never fallen: on the contrary, he has only been constantly ascending.’”[637]
However, still closer examination reveals the deepest religion of
Freemasonry to be a form of Manichaean dualism, in which two gods are
recognized: Christ and Satan, of whom the one, Christ, is hated, and the other,
Satan, is adored.
Thus at the 1902 Convent of the Grand Orient, the Grand Master, Brother
Delpeche, expressed the hatred of Christ in a striking form: “The triumph of
the Galilean has lasted twenty centuries. In his turn he is dying. That
mysterious voice, which once cried: ‘Great Pan is dead!’ from the mountains of
Epirus, is today proclaiming the end of that deceiving God who had promised an
age of peace and justice to those who would believe in him. The illusion has
lasted long enough; but the lying God is disappearing in his turn; he is going
to take his place, amidst the dust of the ages, with those other divinities of
India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, who saw so many deluded creatures prostrate
themselves before their altars. Freemasons, we realise, not without joy, that
we ourselves are no strangers to this downfall of false prophets. The Church of
Rome, based on the Galilean myth, began to decline rapidly from the very day on
which the Masonic association was established. From a political point of view,
Freemasons have often differed among themselves. But at all times Freemasonry
has stood firm on this principle – to wage war against all superstitions and
against all forms of fanaticism.”[638]
The second element, the worship of Satan, can be seen in the following
statement by the famous American Mason, Albert Pike: “To the crowd we must say:
we worship a God, but it is the God one adores without superstition. To you,
Sovereign Grand Inspectors General, we say this, that you may repeat it to the
brethren of the 32nd, 31st and 30th degrees:
all of us initiates of the high degrees should maintain the Masonic religion in
the purity of the Luciferian doctrine. If Lucifer were not God, would Adonai,
the God of the Christians, whose deeds prove his cruelty, perfidy and hatred of
man, his barbarism and repulsion for science, would Adonai and his priests
calumniate him? Yes, Lucifer is God, and unfortunately Adonai is also God…
religious philosophy in its purity and youth consists in the belief in Lucifer,
the equal of Adonai.”[639]
“We have the testimony of Copin Albancelli,” writes Tikhomirov, “whom we
can in no way suspect of making up things, when he declares positively that he
had genuine documents about this [the Satanism of Masonry] in his hands. I, he
says, had the opportunity several years ago to find a proof that there exist
certain Masonic societies which are satanic societies, not in the sense
that the devil used to come personally to preside at their meetings, as that
charlatan Leo Taxil says, but in the sense that their members confess the
cult of Satan. They adore Lucifer as being supposedly the true God and are
inspired by an irreconcilable hatred against the Christian God.’ They even have
a special formula casting ‘curses’ on Him and proclaiming the glory of and love
for Lucifer…”[640]
And so Masonry is revealed as a web of deceit whose outer layers are
liberalism, scientism, and rationalism; whose inner layers are the overthrow of
the existing world order in both Church and State; and whose innermost sanctum
is the worship of Satan.
The American
Revolution
The first major historical event in which the hand of Masonry is clearly
discernible is the American revolution. The first lodges had been established
in Boston and Philadelphia by 1730[641], and
several of the leaders of the American revolution were Freemasons, including
Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Hancock, James Madison, James
Monrose, Paul Revere, John Paul Jones and La Fayette.[642]
However, many of the leaders of the British forces were also Freemasons, and
“of the 7 Provincial Grand Masters [of American Masonry], 5 supported George
III, and condemned revolutionary agitation against the established authority.”[643]
This confirms the point made above, namely that English, as opposed to
Continental Masonry, was not revolutionary in character; while American
Masonry, being a mixture of the two (Lafayette represented French Masonry, and
Franklin was also influenced by the French), had leading representatives on
both sides of the conflict. But it was not simply a question of English versus
Continental Masonry: the movement in general had the unexpected property of
spawning, as well as most of the leaders of the revolution, several of the
leaders of the counter-revolution.
Hence the paradox that Tom Paine, one of the leading apologists of the
revolution, was not a Freemason, while his reactionary opponent, Edmund Burke,
was; that the anti-revolutionary Comte d’Artois and King Gustavus Adolphus III
of Sweden were Freemasons, while the ultra-revolutionary Danton and Robespierre
were not; that Napoleon, the exporter of the ideals of the revolution, was not
a Freemason, while the reactionary generals who defeated him – Wellington,
Blücher and Kutuzov – all were.
One reason for this paradoxical, but important phenomenon is undoubtedly
the philosophical distinction we have already discussed between freedom as a
negative concept, freedom from, and freedom as a positive concept,
freedom to. Those who joined the ranks of the Masons were lovers of
freedom in a general sense; but when some of them saw how the Rousseauist,
positive concept of freedom led to Jacobinism and all the horrors of the French
revolution, they turned sharply against it. Some still remained members of the
lodge, but others broke all links with it. Thus Wellington never entered a
lodge after his membership lapsed in 1795 and in 1851 wrote that he “had no
recollection of having been admitted a Freemason…”[644]
Another reason has to do with the decentralised, diffuse organisation of
Masonry, and its very broad criteria of membership. This means that a very wide
range of people could enter its ranks, and precluded the degree of control and
discipline that is essential for the attainment and, still more important, the
retention of supreme political power. Masonry is therefore the ideal kind of
organisation for the first stage in the revolutionary process, the
dissemination of revolutionary ideas as quickly as possible through as large a
proportion of the population as possible.
But if “the
mystery of iniquity” is to achieve real political power, this first stage has
to be succeeded by a second in which a more highly disciplined and ruthless,
Communist-style party takes-over the leadership. As we shall see, such a
take-over is discernible in both the French and the Russian revolutions. In
France the masonic constitutionalists, such as Mirabeau and Lafayette, were
pushed aside by the anti-democratic, anti-constitutionalist Jacobins or
“Illuminati”, while in Russia the masonic constitutionalists, such as Kerensky
and Lvov, were pushed aside by Lenin and Stalin… The American revolution was
unique in that the first stage has not been succeeded by the second – yet.
This is partly because it was not that revolutionary. As Barzun
writes: “No new Idea entailing a shift in forms of power – the mark of
revolutions – was proclaimed. The 28 offences that King George was accused of
had long been familiar in England. The language of the Declaration is that of
protest against abuses of power, not of proposals for recasting the government
on new principles.”[645]
Now just as Hume took the principles of Lockean liberalism, made them
self-consistent and thereby showed their absurdity, so the American
revolutionaries took the principles of the English “Glorious Revolution” of
1688, applied them more generally and in a Rousseauist spirit, and thereby
showed that English liberalism was dangerously open-ended, tending to its own
destruction. Indeed, as Niall Ferguson writes, the American revolution “was the
moment when the British ideal of liberty hit back. It was the moment when the
British Empire began to tear itself apart…
“The war [of Independence] is at the very heart of Americans’ conception
of themselves: the idea of a struggle for liberty against an evil empire is the
country’s creation myth. But it is the great paradox of the American
Revolution… that the ones who revolted against British rule were the best-off
of all Britain’s colonial subjects. There is good reason to think that, by the
1770s, New Englanders were about the wealthiest people in the world. Per capita
income was at least equal to that in the United Kingdom and was far more evenly
distributed. The New Englanders had bigger farms, bigger families and better
education than the Old Englanders back home. And, crucially, they paid far less
tax. In 1763 the average Briton paid 26 shillings a year in taxes. The
equivalent figure for a Massachusetts taxpayer was just one shilling. To say
that being British subjects had been good for these people would be an
understatement. And yet it was they, not the indentured labourers of Virginia
or the slaves of Jamaica, who first threw off the yoke of imperial authority.”[646]
In the American, as in all revolutions, idealistic motives were mixed
with greed.[647]
Its idealism, however, had, as Norman Davies writes, “important repercussions
in Europe. For one thing, it pushed France’s financial crisis towards the
brink. It also made Frenchmen, and others, consider their own predicament: if
poor old bumbling George III was to be classed as a tyrant, how should one
classify the other monarchs of Europe? If the Americans could rebel against a 3d.
duty on tea, what possible justification could there be for the massive imposts
under which most Europeans groaned? If the USA had to be created because
Americans had no representation in the British Parliament, what should all
those Europeans think whose countries did not even possess a parliament?”[648]
But there were serious implications for parliamentarism, too. If
parliament placed limits on the king in the name of the people and natural law,
there was no reason why limits should not also be placed on parliament in turn
by other estates of the realm, even colonials – and in the name of the same
people and natural law. Thus the American revolution showed, as one American
historian has put it, that “parliamentary supremacy”, no less than monarchy,
“was vulnerable to riot, agitation and boycott…”[649]
Moreover, the process of rebellion could go on forever; for there were
always people who did not feel that they belonged to this people, and
therefore felt the right to rebel against it. Thus, apart from those loyalists
who were killed in the War of Independence, 80,000 emigrated – “and that still
left a considerable proportion of the population out of sympathy with the state
of affairs in 1783. The unassimilated communities of Germans, Swiss, Dutch and
Finns, and the religious settlements of Quakers, Shakers, Dunkers, Mennonites,
Schwenkenfelders and others carried on as before – oblivious to government and
resistant to national inclusion. The settlers of what later became Kentucky and
Tennessee debated the possibility of switching to Spanish sovereignty. In 1784
the western counties of North Carolina attempted to go their own way. Three
years later the Wyoming Valley tried to secede from Pennsylvania. There was
opposition, rioting and even revolt against the Congress, just as there had
been against Westminster. One reason was that the tax burden had increased
dramatically. In the last years of British rule, the colonies enjoyed lower
taxation than any people in the Western world except for the Poles. By the late
1780s the Massachusetts per capita tax burden of one shilling had gone up to
eighteen shillings; the rise in Virginia was from five pence to ten shillings.
And it is worth remembering that tax was what had sparked off the revolution in
the first place…”[650]
However, all this was not foreseen when Thomas Jefferson presented a
doctrine of “self-evident” natural rights known as the Declaration of
Independence to the Second Continental Congress: “We hold these truths to be
self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and
the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the
governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these
ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it...”
When he was ambassador in Paris, Jefferson was asked why he had
substituted “happiness” for the traditional Lockean emphasis on “property”. He
replied that since the secure possession of property was an important condition
of happiness, there was no real contradiction. However, this was the first time
in history that “the pursuit of Happiness” had been taken to be one of the
purposes of the State, and the failure to achieve this end as a justification
for revolution.
“This was not, of course,” writes McClelland, “to say that it was
government’s business to regulate the details of people’s lives to make sure
that they were cheerful, but it did mean that a very exact sense emerged of
government’s duty to provide those conditions in which rational men could
pursue happiness, that is further their own interests, without being hindered
unnecessarily either by government or by their fellow men. This was more
radical than it sounds, because in eighteenth-century political thought it
meant that government’s capacity to promote the happiness of its subjects,
however negatively, was connected with the vital question of the legitimacy of
government. No political theory ever invented, and no actual government since
the Flood, had ever had as its proclaimed intention the idea of making men
miserable. All governments more or less claim that they have their subjects’
happiness at heart, but most governments have not based their claims to be
entitled to rule directly on their happiness-creating function. The reason why
governments do not typically base their claim to rule on their capacity to
increase happiness is obvious enough, because to do so would be to invite their
subjects to judge whether their governments are competent or not. Indeed, it
could be argued that most of the justifications for forms of rule which have
been on offer since Plato are all careful to distinguish between questions
about legitimacy and questions about happiness…”[651]
“The Declaration, approved by congress on 4 July 1776 and signed by its
members on 2 August, was greeted with incredulity by the British. The British Gentleman’s
Magazine for September, 1776 ridiculed the idea of equality: ‘We hold, they
say, these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal. In what
are they created equal? Is it in size, strength, understanding, figure, civil
or moral accomplishments, or situation of life?”[652]
The British had a point. But, having been the leaders in political
thought, they were now behind the times. Rousseau had preached the general will
and the nobility of the common man, and it was now the Americans with their
“We, the People” Declaration who were in tune with the latest political ideas.
In any case, was it not a British philosopher, John Locke, who had spoken of an
original state of human equality, and had even looked across the Atlantic to
the primitive societies there for its incarnation, saying: “In the beginning
all the world was America”? And were not the Americans simply applying the same
principle in opposing parliament as the English had in opposing the king nearly
a century before?[653]
However, while Locke had invoked the sovereign power of the people in
order to place limits on the king, he never dreamed that any but those
qualified to be Members of Parliament, i.e. the landowning gentry, should
qualify as “the people” and do the limiting. But the Americans claimed that
“the people” included even unrepresented colonials, and that “the will of the
people” had a wider meaning than “the will of parliament”. The uncomfortable
fact for the British was that, however little basis the doctrine of equality
had in empirical fact, it was in the air of public debate, while the Americans’
feeling that they should be treated equally, that is, on equal terms with
Britons of similar wealth and breeding, was a very powerful force that brooked
no resistance.
But the demand for equality could only go so far without undermining the
basis of American society, too. This was a particular problem in relation to
the black slaves, who numbered about 400,000, one-fifth of the population of the
new country.Thus in April, 1776 Benjamin Franklin admitted “that our struggle
has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices
were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians
slighted their guardians, and negroes grew more insolent to their masters…”[654] And
several of the authors of the Declaration of Independence who spoke so
eloquently about the equality of all, such as Thomas Jefferson and George
Washington, were themselves slave-owners. Jefferson wanted to include a clause
condemning George III for the slave trade, but the delegates from South
Carolina and Georgia succeeded in having it deleted. He himself owned 200
slaves, only seven of whom he ever freed.…[655]
“The irony is,” writes Ferguson, “that having won their independence in
the name of liberty, the American colonists went on to perpetuate slavery in
the southern states. As Samuel Johnson acidly asked in his anti-American
pamphlet Taxation No Tyranny: ‘How is it that the loudest YELPS for
liberty come from the drivers of Negroes?’ By contrast, within a few decades of
having lost the American colonies, the British abolished first the slave trade
and then slavery itself throughout their Empire. Indeed, as early as 1775 the
British Governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had offered emancipation to slaves
who rallied to the British cause. This was not entirely opportunistic: Lord
Mansfield’s famous judgement in Somersett’s case had pronounced slavery illegal
in England three years before. From the point of view of most
African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a
generation. Although slavery was gradually abolished in northern states like
Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island, it remained firmly entrenched
in the South, where most slaves lived.
“Nor was independence good news for the native Americans. During the
Seven Years War the British government had shown itself anxious to conciliate
the Indian tribes, if only to try to lure them away from their alliance with
the French. Treaties had been signed which established the Appalachian
mountains as the limit of British settlement, leaving the land west of it,
including the Ohio Valley, to the Indians. Admittedly, these treaties were not
strictly adhered to when peace came, sparking the war known as Pontiac’s
Uprising in 1763. But the fact remains that the distant imperial authority in
London was more inclined to recognize the rights of the native Americans than
the land-hungry colonists on the spot.”[656]
In 1778 France entered the war on the American side – hardly a wise move
for a state that was more absolutist than Britain and therefore still more
vulnerable to the propaganda of revolution. Indeed, “French assistance to the
rebel Americans helped to bankrupt the royal regime in France and create the
conditions for revolution in 1789.”[657] But
the assistance given to the Americans by the French was decisive in turning the
tide of war: on October 19, 1781 the British marched out of Yorktown to surrender
to the Americans with their bands playing the old song, “The World Turned
Upside Down”…
The American Idea
In 1787 delegates from the Thirteen States assembled at Philadelphia to
draft a new Constitution. Their major motivation was fear of despotism and
distrust of big government; they wanted to create a government which would
interfere as little as possible in the private lives of the citizens. For, as
James Madison put it: “Wherever the real power in government lies, there is the
danger of oppression. In our government the real power lies in the majority of
the community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended,
not from acts of government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from
acts in which the government is the mere instrument of the major number of the
constituents. This is a truth of great importance, but not yet sufficiently
attended to…”[658]
The Constitution included elements that were familiar from the European
liberal philosophers, such as the separation of powers of the executive (the
President), the legislature (the two houses of Congress) and the judiciary (the
Supreme Court). However, the American Founding Fathers went a significant step
further in granting individual citizens the right to bear arms in defence of
their rights. Such a revolutionary innovation was perhaps possible only in
America, whose distance from its most powerful rivals, decentralised system of
semi-sovereign states and ever-expanding frontiers made strong central
government less essential and gave unparalleled freedom to the individualist
farmer-settlers.
There is a rich irony in the fact that the State which in the twentieth
century became the main bulwark of ordered government against the communist
revolution should have been the most revolutionary State of the era prior to
1789. Thus in 1787 Jefferson wrote to the future President, James Madison: “I
hold it, a little rebellion now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in
the political world as storms in the physical… It is a medicine for the sound
health of government.”
Indeed, what can be more revolutionary, more undermining of legitimate
political authority than the statement made by Abraham Lincoln in 1861: “This
country, with its institutions, belongs to the people who inhabit it. Whenever
they shall grow weary of the existing government, they can exercise their
constitutional right of amending it, or their revolutionary right to
dismember or overthrow it…”[659] Or, as
he said two years later at the Gettysburg address: “government of the people,
by the people, for the people”…
Burke pointed to a deeper root of the revolution than its
masonic-rationalist ideology - the indomitably Protestant temper of the
Americans: “The people are Protestants, and of the kind which is the most
adverse to all implicit submission of mind and opinion. All Protestantism is a
sort of dissent. But the religion in our northern colonies is a refinement on
the principle of resistance. It is the dissidence of dissent and the protestantism
of the Protestant religion.”[660]
But there were two kinds of American Protestantism: the Deist
Protestantism of the cultured leaders of the Revolution, who, as Karen
Armstrong writes, “experienced the revolution as a secular event”[661], which
merged easily with Masonry, and the Protestantism of Calvinist lower classes,
which, as we have seen, was the foundation faith of the Founding Fathers.
Calvinism acquired a new lease of life as a result of that emotional
outpouring of ecstatic religion known as the First Great Awakening, whose
participants “were ready to ascribe apocalyptic significance to current
events”.[662]
“The Founding Fathers of the American republic were an aristocratic
elite and their ideas were not typical. The vast majority of Americans were
Calvinists, and they could not relate to this rationalist ethos. Initially,
most of the colonists were just as reluctant to break with England as their
leaders were. Not all joined the revolutionary struggle. Some 30,000 fought on
the British side, and after the war between 80,000 and 100,000 left the new
states and migrated to Canada, the West Indies, or Britain. Those who elected
to fight for independence would be as much motivated by the old myths and
millenial dreams of Christianity as by the secularist ideals of the Founders…
“During the first decade of the revolutionary struggle, people were
loath to make a radical break with the past. Severing relations with Britain
seemed unthinkable, and many still hoped that the British government would
change its policies. Nobody was straining forward excitedly to the future or
dreaming of a new world order. Most Americans still instinctively responded to
the crisis in the old, premodern way: they looked back to an idealized past to
sustain them in their position. The revolutionary leaders and those who
embraced the more secular Radical Whig ideology drew inspiration from the
struggle of the Saxons against the invading Normans in 1066, or the more recent
struggle of the Puritan Parliamentarians during the English Civil War. The
Calvinists harked back to their own Golden Age in New England, recalling the
struggle of the Puritans against the tyrannical Anglican establishment in Old
England; they had sought liberty and freedom from oppression in the New World,
creating a godly society in the American wilderness. The emphasis in the
sermons and revolutionary rhetoric of this period (1763-73) was on the desire
to conserve the precious achievements of the past. The notion of radical change
inspired fears of decline and ruin. The colonists were seeking to preserve
their heritage, according to the old conservative spirit. The past was
presented as idyllic, the future as potentially horrific. The revolutionary
leaders declared that their actions were designed to keep at bay the
catastrophe that would inevitably ensue if there was a radical severance from
tradition. They spoke of the possible consequences of British policy with fear,
using the apocalyptic language of the Bible.
“But this changed. As the British clung obstinately to their
controversial imperial policies, the colonists burned their boats. After the
Boston Tea Party (1773) and the Battles of Lexington and Concord (1775) there
could be no going back. The Declaration of Independence expressed a new and
courageous determination to break away from the old order and go forward to an
unprecedented future. In this respect, the Declaration was a modernizing
document, which articulated in political terms the intellectual independence
and iconoclasm that had characterized the scientific revolution in Europe. But
the majority of the colonists were more inspired by the mytbs [sic] of
Christian prophecy than by John Locke…
“… The Great Awakening had already made New Light Calvinists wary of the
establishment and confident of their ability to effect major change. When
revolutionary leaders spoke of ‘liberty’, they used a term that was already
saturated with religious meaning: it carried associations of grace, of the
freedom of the Gospel and the Sons of God. It was linked with such themes as
the Kingdom of God, in which all oppression would end, and the myth [sic]
of the Chosen People who would become God’s instrument in the transformation of
the world. Timothy Dwight (1752-1817), president of Yale University, spoke
enthusiastically of the revolution ushering in ‘Immanuel’s Land’, and of
America becoming ‘the principal seat of that new, that peculiar Kingdom which
shall be given to the saints of the Most High’. In 1775, the Connecticut
preacher Ebenezer Baldwin insisted that the calamities of the war could only
hasten God’s plans for the New World. Jesus would establish his glorious
Kingdom in America: liberty, religion and learning had been driven out of
Europe and had moved westward, across the Atlantic. The present crisis was
prearing the way for the Last Days of the present corrupt order. For Provost
William Smit of Philadephia, the colonies were God’s ‘chosen seat of Freedom,
Arts and Heavenly Knowledge’.
“But if churchmen were sacralizing politics, secularist leaders also
used the language of Christian utopianism. John Adams looked back on the
settlement of America as God’s plan for the enlightenment of the whole of
humanity. Thomas Paine was convinced that ‘we have it in our power to begin the
world over again. A situation such as the present hath not happened since the
days of Noah until now. The birthday of a new world is at hand’. The rational
pragmatism of the leaders would not itself have been sufficient to help people
make the fearsome journey to an unknown future and break with the motherland.
The enthusiasm, imagery, and mythology of Christian eschatology gave meaning to
the revolutionary struggle and helped secularism and Calvinists alike to make
the decisive, dislocating severance from tradition.”[663]
“Thus,” continues Armstrong, “religion played a key role in the creation
of the first modern secular republic. After the Revolution, however, when the
newly independent states drew up their constitutions, God was mentioned in them
only in the most perfunctory manner. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson disestablished
the Anglican church in Virginia; his bill declared that coercion in matters
faith was ‘sinfull and tyrannical’, that truth would prevail if people were
allowed their own opinions, and that there should be a ‘wall of separation’
between religion and politics. The bill was supported by the Baptists,
Methodists, and Presbyterians of Virginia, who resented the privileged position
of the Church of England in the state. Later the other states followed
Virginia’s lead, and disestablished their own churches, Massachusetts being the
last one to do so, in 1833. In 1787, when the federal Constitution was drafted
at the Philadelphia Convention, God was not mentioned at all, and in the Bill
of Rights (1789), the First Amendment of the Constitution formally separated
religion from the state: ‘Congress shall make no laws respecting the
establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof’.
Henceforth faith would be a private and voluntary affair in the united States.
This was a revolutionary step and has been hailed as one of the great
achievements of the Age of Reason. The thinking behind it was indeed inspired
by the tolerant philosophy of the Enlightenment, but the Founding Fathers were
also moved by more pragmatic considerations. They knew that the federal
Constitution was essential to preserve the unity of the states, but they also
realized that if the federal government established any single one of the
Protestant denominations and made it the official faith of the United States,
the Constitution would not be approved. Congregationalist Massachusetts, for
example, would never ratify a Constitution that established the Anglican Church.
This was also the reason why Article VI, Section 3, of the Constitution
abolished religious tests for office in the federal government. There was idealism
in the Founders’ decision to disestablish religion and to secularize politics,
but the new nation could not base its identity on any one sectarian option and
retain the loyalty of all its subjects. The needs of the modern state demanded
that it be tolerant and, therefore, secular.”[664]
Already in Europe the notion of toleration had undergone a subtle but
important change, the change from toleration as “a utilitarian expedient to
avoid destructive strife” to toleration as “an intrinsic value”.[665] It
became a dogma of the Enlightenment and Masonry that a ruler could not impose
his religion on his subjects.[666] In
fact, certain rulers, such as Frederick the Great, A Mason himself, had taken
religious toleration to the point of almost complete indifference. However, the
complete separation of Church and State, religion and politics, was
still unheard-of in Europe. This idea was first put into practice in the United
States, a land founded mainly by Calvinist refugees fleeing from the State’s
persecution of their religion. It marks the furthest application of the
principle of negative liberty, freedom from. For what the Calvinist
refugees valued above all was the freedom to practice their religion free from
any interference from the State. For, as
K.N. Leontiev writes: “The people who left Old England and laid the
foundations of the States of America were all extremely religious people who
did not want to make any concessions with regard to their burning personal
faith and had not submitted to the State Church of Episcopal Anglicanism, not
out of progressive indifference, but out of godliness.
“The Catholics, Puritans, Quakers, all were agreed about one thing –
that there should be mutual tolerance, not out of coldness, but out of
necessity. And so the State created by them for the reconciliation of all these
burning religious extremes found its centre of gravity outside religion.
Tolerance was imposed by circumstances, there was no inner indifferentism.”[667]
The new doctrine, as we have seen, was enshrined in the Constitution’s
First Amendment (1791): “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment
of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom
of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble,
and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”[668]
The religious toleration of the United States has undoubtedly been a
precious boon for the immigrants from many countries and of many faiths who
have fled there to escape persecution. The assumption underlying it was well
expressed by a law report in 1917: “If… the attitude of the law both civil and
criminal towards all religions depends fundamentally on the safety of the State
and not on the doctrines or metaphysics of those who profess them, it is not
necessary to consider whether or why any given body was relieved by the law at one
time or frowned on at another, or to analyse creeds and tenets, Christian and
other.”[669]
However, the idea that the safety of the State is completely independent
of the religion (or lack of it) confessed by its citizens is false. For, as
Solomon says: “Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any
people” (Proverbs 14.34). The history of the people of Israel, and of
several New Testament nations, demonstrates that their prosperity depended
crucially on their fulfilling of the commandments of God. The idea that the
religion of a State has no bearing on its prosperity could occur only to a
person who has not studied history (or any human science) or believes in a
Deist conception of God as a Being Who created the world but does not interfere
in its history thereafter. In fact, the religion, and hence the morality, of a
nation’s rulers is a vitally important factor determining its destiny.
Also false is the idea that anyone worshipping “according to the
dictates of his own conscience” is for that reason alone worthy of protection.
“Conscience” very often refers, not to the real voice of God speaking in the
soul of man, but any voice, however demonic, that a man thinks is the
voice of God. It is therefore inherently dangerous to consider a religion
worthy of protection, not because it is objectively true, but because the
believers are sincere in their beliefs, whether these are in fact true or
false, profitable to society or profoundly harmful to it. False religion is
always harmful, both for its adherents, and for those right-believers who are
tempted away from the right path by them. We would never accept the argument
that a poison can be sold freely so long as its traders sincerely believe it to
be harmless or because the traders “are accountable to God alone” for the harm
they cause. And the spiritual poison of heresy is far more harmful than
material poison, in that it leads, not simply to the temporal dissolution of
the body, but to the eternal damnation of the soul.
Of course, it is another question how a false religion is to be
combatted. Crude forms of persecution are often counter-productive in that they
strengthen the fanaticism of the persecuted. Persuasion and education that respects the freewill of
the heretic is without question the best means of combatting false belief. The
free will of the heretic is not violated, and he is able to come freely, by the
free exercise of his reasoning power, to a knowledge of the truth.[670]
However, what about those who
are too young to reason for themselves or for some other reason unable to
exercise their reasoning powers? Should they not be protected from the
influence of heretics? If allowed to live in a truly Christian atmosphere,
these weak members of society may become stronger in faith and have less need of the protection of the State. But while
they are still weak, the influence of heretics, if unchecked, could well lead
them astray. It is a generally accepted principle that the young and the weak,
who are not yet fully independent spiritually, are entitled to the protection
of the State against those who would exploit their weakness to their
destruction. So in cases where the heretic is himself stubbornly impenitent,
and is leading others astray, physical forms of oppression may be justified. The spiritually strong may refuse to offer
physical resistance to religious evil, choosing instead the path of voluntary
martyrdom. But the spiritually weak cannot choose this path, and must be
protected from the evil, if necessary by physical means. Indeed, one could
argue that the government that does not protect the weak in this way is itself
persecuting them, laying them open to the most evil and destructive influences.
For, as Sir Thomas More’s King Utopus understood, “the worst men be most
obstinate and stubborn and in their evil opinion most constant”, so that
without some restraint on them “the best and holiest religion would be trodden
underfoot by most vain superstitions, even as good corn is by thorns and weeds
overgrown and choked.”[671]
Lev Tikhomirov writes: “Man is a bodily being. Moral ‘persuasion’ is
inseparable from moral ‘coercion’, and in certain cases also from physical
‘violence’. If one says: ‘Act through moral persuasion, but do not dare to
resort to physical violence’, this is either absurdity or hypocrisy. Every
conviction sooner or later unfailingly finds its expression in forms of
physical action for the simple reason that man is not [only] spirit and lives
in a physical form. All our acts represent a union of spiritual and physical
acts. If a man does something, it is unfailingly accompanied by physical
actions. This relates both to good and to evil. One can oppose evil sometimes
by moral persuasions, but at other times it is impossible to resist it
otherwise than physically, and then ‘resistance’ and ‘violence’ are morally
obligatory.”[672]
In the Lives of the Saints we even find cases in which saints who
are not secular rulers have executed heretics or magicians. Thus the Apostles
Peter and Paul by their prayers brought about the death of Simon Magus; St.
Basil the Great prayed for, and obtained, the death of Julian the Apostate; and
the holy hierarchs Patrick of Ireland and Leo of Catania in effect executed
particularly stubborn perverters of the people.
Of
course, these were very exceptional cases; and in Sulpicius Severus’ Life
of St. Martin of Tours we find the saint refusing to have communion with a
synod of bishops that had executed some Spanish heretics. However, if even
non-ruler saints have killed heretics in exceptional cases, how much greater
justification do Christian rulers have, who “bear not the sword in vain”, in
that they are “God’s ministers, avengers to execute wrath on him who practices
evil” (Romans 13.4)?
Biblical rulers such as Kings David, Solomon and Josiah were required
by God to defend and nourish the faith of the people as their first duty.
The prophets constantly called them to this, and reminded them that they would
be approved or condemned by God primarily in accordance with their fulfilment
or non-fulfilment of this duty. It follows that the idea that “religion is not
in the purview of human government” and that a connection between them is
injurious to both” is false.
Moreover, the State needs religion even more than religion needs the
State. For law and order depend on morality and religion.
As Tikhomirov writes: “The legislative mind cannot fail to value the
religious spirit of a people in view of the unbreakable bond between religion
and morality…
“State order and the energetic pursuit of the aims of the public good
are attained by a good organisation of the governmental mechanism, by the
establishment of rational laws, and by a series of measures of observation,
coercion, punishment, encouragement, etc. But however well worked-out the laws
may be, and however perfected may be the governmental mechanism, courts and
administration, this still will not lead to the attainment of the good ends of
the state if citizens do not strive on their own initiative to live in
accordance with justice and their own moral duty. A living,
self-dependent feeling of moral duty in the souls of citizens is the foundation
of the public good: when this is present, the very oversights of the law and
the authorities do not become particularly fatal, for the citizens will not
hurry to exploit the possibility of abuse, and by their own self-dependent
moral acts will significantly correct the evil permitted by the imperfection of
the law or the governmental mechanism. On the contrary, however, in the absence
of a self-dependent striving of the citizens to act in accordance with
righteousness, there will be no question of the State keeping track of
everyone, and there will be nobody to keeping an eye on them, for the State’s
agents themselves, as products of society, will always have the same character
and the same level of morality as exists in the people.
“Thus a living moral feeling constitutes the foundation for the
success of the State’s actions. But the State does not of itself have the means
to generate this feeling that is necessary to it. The State can take
measures that the moral feeling should not be undermined by the spread of
immoral teachings or the demoralising spectacle of vice triumphant, etc. By a
firm insistence on the fulfilment of the prescribed norms of life and by the
systematic punishment of crime the State can ‘drill’ the citizens, make the
observance of righteousness into a habit. But all this has a useful
significance only if the moral feeling is somehow ‘generated’ in souls, that
is, when the ‘material’ by which the mechanical measures can operate already
exists.
“Whence is this necessary material to be taken? By what is the moral
feeling ‘generated’?
“… In itself, by its very nature, the moral feeling is not social, but religious…
“The moral feeling of man is the demand that his feelings and actions
should be in harmony with a ‘higher’ power of the world’s life… Man wishes to
be in union with this higher power, leaving aside all calculations of benefit
or non-benefit. Out of all that life can give him, he finds the greatest joy in
the consciousness of his union with the very foundation of the world’s powers…
“Man impresses his idea of what is the main, highest world power, and
his striving to be in harmony with it, in all spheres of his creativity,
including Statehood.
“Therefore the State has all the more to protect and support everything
in which the very generation of the moral feeling takes place.
“In the vast majority of cases – this is a general fact of history –
people themselves directly link the source of their moral feeling with the
Divinity. It is precisely in God that they see that higher power, harmony with
which constitutes their morality. Morality flows from religion, religion
interprets and confirms morality.
“Besides, it is a general historical fact that people unite into special
societies in order to live together in accordance with their religious-moral
tasks. These religious organisations interweave with social and political
organisations, but they are never completely merged with them, even in the most
theocratic States. In the Christian world this collective religious life is
carried out, as we know, in the Church…
“In this way the demand to preserve and develop social morality
naturally leads the State to a union with the Church. In trying to help the
Church make society as moral as possible, the State aims to use in its own work
that moral capital which it [the Church] builds up in people….
“Autonomous morality, on the contrary, is founded on the premise that
the innate moral feeling guides man by itself. We do not know from where this
feeling, this ‘altruism’, comes from, but it rules our moral acts just as the
force of gravity rules the movement of the heavenly lights. The religious
principle, qua impulse, is quite unnecessary. To clarify what must and what must not be
done, we need only enlightenment, knowledge of the needs of man and society, an
understanding of the solidarity of human interests, etc.
“From this point of view, the work of the State in the development of
morality comes down to the development of the school and the multiplication of
other means of the development of enlightenment, perhaps with the teaching of
‘courses of morality’….
“The tendency to substitute the school for the Church is now [in 1903]
very strong, and in general the State and the law of contemporary countries
have to all practical purposes already done much for the triumph of the idea of
autonomous morality in place of religious morality….
“’Autonomous’ morality leads to an endless diversity of moral rules, and
to the disappearance of any generally accepted line of behaviour.
“Moreover, the right of the person to have his ‘autonomous’ morality
annihilates the possibility of public moral discipline. Whatever foulness a man
may have committed, he can always declare that according to ‘his’ morality this
act is permissible or even very lofty. Society has no criterion by which to reproach
the lie contained in such a declaration. It can kill such a person, but it
cannot morally judge him or despise him. But this ‘moral’ condemnation is
society’s most powerful weapon for the education of the person, beginning from
childhood and throughout almost the whole course of a man’s life…
“All in all, therefore, the autonomy of morality leads to moral chaos,
in which neither law nor custom nor public opinion are possible – that is, no
social or political discipline in general…
“Even leaving aside plain debauchery, which unbridles predatory
instincts and similar phenomena, developing autonomy under its all-permissive
protection, and taking into consideration only chosen natures that are truly
endowed with a subtle moral feeling, we nevertheless find in them an extremely
harmful, fruitlessly revolutionary type of character, an element that is
forever striving to destroy social-political forms, but which is satisfied with
no new constructions. In the cultured world we have already been observing such
a picture for more than one hundred years now…"[673]
The Enlightenment
Programme: A Critique
J.H. Randall, Jr. writes: “It was from the spread of reason and science
among individual men that the great apostles of the Enlightenment hoped to
bring about the ideal society of mankind. And from there they hoped for a
veritable millenium. From the beginning of the [eighteenth] century onward
there arose one increasing paean of progress through education. Locke,
Helvétius, and Bentham laid the foundations for this generous dream; all
men, of whatever school, save only those who clung… to the Christian doctrine
of original sin, believed with all their ardent natures in the perfectibility
of the human race. At last mankind held in its own hands the key to its
destiny: it could make the future almost what it would. By destroying the
foolish errors of the past and returning to a rational cultivation of nature,
there were scarcely any limits to human welfare that might not be transcended.
“It is difficult for us to realize how recent a thing is this faith in
human progress. The ancient world seems to have had no conception of it; Greeks
and Romans looked back rather to the Golden Age from which man had degenerated.
The Middle Ages, of course, could brook no such thought. The Renaissance, which
actually accomplished so much, could not imagine that man could ever rise again
to the level of glorious antiquity; its thoughts were all on the past. Only
with the growth of science in the seventeenth century could men dare to cherish
such an overweening ambition… All the scientists, from Descartes down, despised
the ancients and carried the day for the faith in progress.”[674]
There were obvious deficiencies in this supremely optimistic view of the
world. In the first place, it failed to explain the existence of evil, much of
which could not simply be ascribed to prejudice and bad education. If this was
the best of all possible worlds, as Leibniz claimed, why did the terrible
earthquake of Lisbon in 1755 take place? Some fault in the harmony of God’s
laws? Or a deliberate irruption of God’s wrath into a sinful world? In either
case one had to admit, with Voltaire himself, that “the world does, after all,
contain evil”, and that either nature was not harmonious and perfect, or
that God did intervene in its workings – postulates that were both
contrary to the Enlightenment creed.
Secondly, it failed to satisfy the cravings of the religious man; for
man, again contrary to the Enlightenment creed, is not only a rational animal,
but also a religious animal. For, as Roger Scruton writes, “Voltaire and
the Encyclopedists, Hume, Smith, and the Scottish Enlightenment, the Kant of Religion
within the Limits of Reason Alone – such thinkers and movements had
collectively remade the God of Christianity as a creature of the head rather
than the heart. God retreated from the world to the far reaches of infinite
space, where only vertiginous thoughts could capture him. Daily life is of
little concern to such a God, who demands no form of obedience except to the
universal precepts of morality. To worship him is to bow in private towards the
unknowable. Worship conceived in such a way offers no threat to the
Enlightenment conception of a purely legal citizenship, established by a social
contract and maintained by a secular power.
“As God retreated from the world,
people reached out for a rival source of membership, and national identity
seemed to answer to the need...”[675]
However, the cult of the nation did not really get underway until the
nineteenth century. But already in the first half of the eighteenth century the
religious cravings suppressed by Enlightenment rationalism were seeking outlets
in more emotional forms of religion, the very opposite of enlightened calm. Such
were Methodism in England and Pietism in Germany, Revivalism and the Great
Awakening in America and “Convulsionarism” in France.
In some ways, however, these very emotional, passionate forms of
religion worked in the same direction as the cult of reason. They, too, tended
to minimise the importance of theology and dogma, and to maximise the
importance of man and human activity and human passion. Thus in American
Revivalism, writes Cragg, “conversion was described in terms of how a man felt,
the new life was defined in terms of how he acted. This was more than an
emphasis on the moral consequences of obedience to God; it was a preoccupation
with man, and it became absorbed in what he did and in the degree to which he
promoted righteousness. In a curious way man’s activity was obscuring the
cardinal fact of God’s rule.”[676]
The French revolution was to bring together the streams of Enlightenment
rationalism and irrational religion in a single, torrential rebellion against
God…
The rationalists became adept at explaining religion without recourse to
God’s rule or revelation. Religion was simply a “need”, no different in
principle from other biological and psychological needs. Indeed, later
rationalists such as Freud came to explain religion in terms of these other
needs. Of course, no religious person – or rather, no person, religious or not,
who simply wishes to examine the facts objectively - will find such
explanations even remotely convincing. But it must be admitted that,
unconvincing though their explanations might be, the Enlightenment philosophers
managed to convince enough people to create whole generations of men possessing
not even a spark of that religious “enthusiasm” which they so despised.
Were they happier for it? Of course, worldly “happiness” as the goal of
life is in itself an Enlightenment criterion, which would be rejected by
believers. But let us see whether the Enlightenment attained the goal it set
itself.
The immediate result of the Enlightenment was the French revolution and
all the revolutions that took their inspiration from it, with all their
attendant bloodshed and misery, destroying both the bodies (and souls) of men
on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Science, reason and education have indeed
spread throughout the world. But poverty has not been abolished, nor war nor
disease nor crime. If it were possible to measure “happiness” scientifically
(which, of course, it is not), then it is highly doubtful whether the majority
of men are any happier at the beginning of the twenty-first century than they
were before the bright beams of the Enlightenment began to dawn on the world.
Condorcet wrote: “The time will come when the sun will shine only upon a world
of free men who recognise no master except their reason, when tyrants and
slaves, priests, and their stupid or hypocritical tools will no longer exist
except in history or on the stage”. That time has not yet come. Most men do
indeed “recognise no master except their reason”. But there are still tyrants
and slaves (and priests) – and no discernible decrease in human misery. It is
especially the savagery of the twentieth century that has convinced us of this.
As Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer write: “In the most general sense of
progressive thought the Enlightenment has always aimed at liberating men from
fear and establishing their sovereignty. Yet the fully enlightened earth
radiates disaster triumphant.”[677] And as
Nadezhda Mandelstam writes: “We have seen the triumph of evil after the values
of humanism have been vilified and trampled on. The reason these values
succumbed was probably that they were based on nothing except boundless
confidence in the human intellect.”[678]
And the reason why “boundless confidence in the human intellect” has
brought us to this pass is that, as L.A. Tikhomirov writes, the cult of reason
“very much wants to establish worldly prosperity, it very much wants to make
people happy, but it will achieve nothing, because it approaches the problem
from the wrong end.
“It may appear strange that people who think only of earthly prosperity,
and who put their whole soul into realising it, attain only disillusionment and
exhaustion. People who, on the contrary, are immersed in cares about the
invisible life beyond the grave, attain here, on earth, results constituting
the highest examples yet known on earth of personal and social development!
However, this strangeness is self-explanatory. The point is that man is
by his nature precisely the kind of being that Christianity understands him to
be by faith; the aims of life that are indicated to him by faith
are precisely the kind of aims that he has in reality, and not the kind that
reason divorced from faith delineates. Therefore in educating a man in
accordance with the Orthodox world-view, we conduct his education correctly,
and thence we get results that are good not only in that which is most
important [salvation] (which unbelievers do not worry about), but also in that
which is secondary (which is the only thing they set their heart on). In losing
faith, and therefore ceasing to worry about the most important thing,
people lost the possibility of developing man in accordance with his true
nature, and so they get distorted results in earthly life, too.”[679]
The problem is that “reason is a subordinate capacity. If it is not
directed by the lofty single organ of religion perception – the feeling of
faith, it will be directed by the lower strivings, which are infinitely
numerous. Hence all the heresies, all the ‘fractions’, all contemporary
reasonings, too. This is a path of seeking which we can beforehand predict will
lead to endless disintegration, splintering and barrenness in all its
manifestations, and so in the end it will only exhaust people and lead them to
a false conviction that in essence religious truth does not exist.”[680]
And yet such a conclusion will be reached only if the concept of reason
is limited in a completely arbitrary manner. For, as Copleston points out, the
idea of reason of the Enlightenment philosophers “was limited and narrow. To
exercise reason meant for them pretty well to think as les philosophes
thought; whereas to anyone who believes that God has revealed Himself it is
rational to accept this revelation and irrational to reject it.”[681]
But the Enlightenment philosophers not only limited and narrowed the
concept of reason: they deified it. As Berlin writes: “Reason is always right.
To every question there is only one true answer which with sufficient assiduity
can be infallibly discovered, and this applies no less to questions of ethics
or politics, of personal and social life, than to the problems of physics or
mathematics. Once found, the putting of a solution into practice is a matter of
mere technical skill; but the traditional enemies of progress [priests and
despots] must first be removed, and men taught the importance of acting in all
questions on the advice of disinterested experts whose knowledge is founded on
reason and experience. Once this has been achieved, the path is clear to the
millenium.
“But the influence of environment is no less important than that of
education. If you should wish to foretell the course of a man’s life, you must
consider such factors as the character of the region in which he lives, its
climate, the fertility of its soil, its distance from the sea, in addition to
his physical characteristics and the nature of his daily occupation. Man is an
object in nature, and the human soul, like material substance, is swayed by no
supernatural influences and possesses no occult properties; its entire
behaviour can be adequately accounted for by means of ordinary verifiable
physical hypotheses. The French materialist La Mettrie developed this
empiricism to, and indeed beyond its fullest limits in a celebrated treatise, L’Homme
Machine, which caused much scandal at the time of its publication. His
views were an extreme example of opinions shared in varying degrees by the
editors of the Encyclopedia, Diderot and d’Alembert, by Holbach,
Helvétius and Condillac, who, whatever their other differences, were
agreed that man’s principal difference from the plants and lower animals lies
in his possession of self-consciousness, in his awareness of certain of his own
processes, in his capacity to use reason and imagination, to conceive ideal
purposes and to attach moral values to any activity or characteristic in
accordance with its tendency to forward or retard the ends which he desires to
realise. A serious difficulty which this view involved was that of reconciling
the existence of free will on the one hand, with complete determination by
character and environment on the other; this was only the old conflict between
free will and divine foreknowledge in a new form, with Nature in the place of
God. Spinoza had observed that if a stone falling through the air could think,
it might well imagine that it had freely chosen its own path, being unaware of
the external causes, such as the aim and force of the thrower and the natural
medium, which determine its fall. Similarly, it is only ignorance of the
natural causes of his behaviour that makes man suppose himself in some fashion
different from the falling stone: omniscience would quickly dispel this vain
delusion, even though the feeling of freedom to which it gives rise may itself
persist, but without its power to deceive. So far as extreme empiricism is
concerned, this deterministic doctrine can be made consistent with optimistic
rationalism: but it carries the very opposite implications with regard to the
possibility of reform in human affairs. For if men are made saints or criminals
solely by the movement of matter in space, the educators are as rigorously
determined to act as they do, as are those whom it is their duty to educate.
Everything occurs as it does as a result of unalterable processes of nature;
and no improvement can be effected by the free decisions of individuals,
however wise, however benevolent and powerful, since they cannot, any more than
any other entity, alter natural necessity. This celebrated crux, stripped of
its old theological dress, emerged even more sharply in its secular form; it
presented equal difficulties to both sides, but became obscured by the larger
issues at stake. Atheists, sceptics, deists, materialists, rationalists,
democrats, utilitarians, belonged to one camp; theists, metaphysicians,
supporters and apologists of the existing order to the other. The rift between
enlightenment and clericalism was so great, and the war between them so savage,
that doctrinal difficulties within each camp passed relatively unperceived.”[682]
The contradiction between freewill and natural necessity was in fact a
much greater problem for the philosophes than for their theist
opponents; but Berlin, being himself an atheist, chose to overlook this. Let us
therefore turn to another, theist philosopher for a deeper explanation of the
contradiction at the heart of the Enlightenment – C.S. Lewis.
Although Lewis’ argument is directed first of all against two later
products of the Enlightenment – Marxism and Freudianism – it applies in a
general way to all attempts to enthrone reason above everything else: “It is a
disastrous discovery, as Emerson says somewhere, that we exist. I mean, it is
disastrous when instead of merely attending to a rose we are forced to think of
ourselves looking at the rose, with a certain type of mind and a certain type
of eyes. It is disastrous because, if you are not very careful, the colour of
the rose gets attributed to our optic nerves and is scent to our noses, and in
the end there is no rose left. The professional philosophers have been bothered
about this universal black-out for over two hundred years, and the world has
not much listened to them. But the same disaster is now occurring on a level we
can all understand.
“We have recently ‘discovered that we exist’ in two new senses. The
Freudians have discovered that we exist as bundles of complexes. The Marxians
have discovered that we exist as members of some economic class. In the old
days, it was supposed that if a thing seemed obviously true to a hundred men,
then it was probably true in fact. Nowadays the Freudian will tell you to go
and analyze the hundred: you will find that they all think Elizabeth [I] a
great queen because they have a mother-complex. Their thoughts are
psychologically tainted at the source. And the Marxist will tell you to go and
examine the economic interests of the hundred; you will find that they all
think freedom a good thing because they are all members of the bourgeoisie
whose prosperity is increased by a policy of laissez-faire. Their
thoughts are ‘ideologically tainted’ at the source.
“Now this is obviously great fun; but it has not always been noticed
that there is a bill to pay for it. There are two questions that people who say
this kind of things ought to be asked. The first is, Are all thoughts
thus tainted at the source, or only some? The second is, Does the taint
invalidate the tainted thought – in the sense of making it untrue – or not?
“If they say that all thoughts are thus tainted, then, of course,
we must remind them that Freudianism and Marxism are as much systems of thought
as Christian theology or philosophical idealism. The Freudian and the Marxist
are in the same boat with all the rest of us, and cannot criticize us from
outside. They have sawn off the branch they were sitting on. If, on the other
hand, they say that the taint need not invalidate their thinking, then neither
need it invalidate ours. In which case they have saved their own branch, but
also saved ours along with it.
“The only line they can really take is to say
that some thoughts are tainted and others are not – which has the advantage (if
Freudians and Marxians regard it as an advantage) of being what every sane man
has always believed. But if that is so, then we must ask how you find out which
are tainted and which are not. It is no earthly use saying that those are
tainted which agree with the secret wishes of the thinker. Some of the
things I should like to believe must in face be true; it is impossible to
arrange a universe which contradicts everyone’s wishes, in every respect, at
every moment. Suppose I think, after doing my accounts, that I have a large
balance at the bank. And suppose you want to find out whether this belief of
mine is ‘wishful thinking’. You can never come to any conclusion by examining
my psychological condition. Your only chance of finding out is to sit down and
work through the sum yourself. When you have checked my figures, then, and then
only, will you know whether I have that balance or not. If you find my
arithmetic correct, then no amount of vapouring about my psychological
condition can be anything but a waste of time. If you find my arithmetic wrong,
then it may be relevant to explain psychologically how I came to be so bad at
my arithmetic, and the doctrine of the concealed wish will become relevant –
but only after you have yourself done the sum and discovered me to be
wrong on purely arithmetical grounds. It is the same with thinking and all
systems of thought. If you try to find out which are tainted by speculating
about the wishes of the thinkers, you are merely making a fool of yourself. You
must find out on purely logical grounds which of them do, in fact, break down
as arguments. Afterwards, if you like, go on and discover the psychological
causes of the error.
“In other words, you must show that a man is wrong before you
start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without
discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this
(the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the
course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have
had to invent a name for it. I call it Bulverism. Some day I am going to write
the biography of its imaginary inventor, Ezekiel Bulver, whose destiny was
determined at the age of five when he heard his mother say to his father – who
had been maintaining that two sides of a triangle were together greater than
the third – ‘Oh you say that because you are a man.’ ‘At that moment,’
E. Bulver assures us, ‘there flashed across my opening mind the great truth
that refutation is no necessary part of argument. Assume that your opponent is
wrong, and then explain his error, and the world will be at your feet. Attempt
to prove that he is wrong or (worse still) try to find out whether he is wrong
or right, and the national dynamism of our age will thrust you to the wall.’
This is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century.
“I find the fruits of his discovery almost everywhere. Thus I see my
religion dismissed on the grounds that ‘the comfortable parson had every reason
for assuring the nineteenth century worker that poverty would be rewarded in
another world’. Well, no doubt he had. On the assumption that Christianity is
an error, I can see early enough that some people would still have a motive for
inculcating it. I see it so easily that I can, of course, play the game the
other way round, by saying that ‘the modern man has every reason for trying to
convince himself that there are no eternal sanctions behind the morality he is
rejecting’. For Bulverism is a truly democratic game in the sense that all can
play it all day long, and that it gives no unfair privilege to the small and
offensive minority who reason. But of course it gets us not one inch nearer to
deciding whether, as a matter of fact, the Christian religion is true or false.
That question remains to be discussed on quite different grounds – a matter of
philosophical and historical argument. However it were decided, the improper
motives of some people, both for believing it and for disbelieving it, would
remain just as they are.
“I see Bulverism at work in every political argument. The capitalists
must be bad economists because we know why they want capitalism, and equally
the Communists must be bad economists because we know why they want Communism.
Thus, the Bulverists on both sides. In reality, of course, either the doctrines
of the capitalists are false, or the doctrines of the Communists, or both; but
you can only find out the rights and wrongs by reasoning – never by being rude
about your opponent’s psychology.
“Until Bulverism is crushed, reason can play no effective part in human
affairs. Each side snatches it early as a weapon against the other; but between
the two reason itself is discredited. And why should reason not be discredited?
It would be easy, in answer, to point to the present state of the world, but
the real answer is even more immediate. The forces discrediting reason, themselves
depend on reasoning. You must reason even to Bulverize. You are trying to prove
that all proofs are invalid. If you fail, you fail. If you succeed, then
you fail even more – for the proof that all proofs are invalid must be invalid
itself.
“The alternative is either self-contradicting idiocy or else some
tenacious belief in our power of reasoning, held in the teeth of all the
evidence that Bulverists can bring for a ‘taint’ in this or that human
reasoner. I am ready to admit, if you like, that this tenacious belief has
something transcendental or mystical about it. What then? Would you rather be a
lunatic than a mystic?
“So we see there is a justification for holding on to our belief in
Reason. But can this be done without theism? Does ‘I know’ involve that God
exists? Everything I know is an inference from sensation (except the present
moment). All our knowledge of the universe beyond our immediate experiences
depends on inferences from these experiences. If our inferences do not give a genuine
insight into reality, then we can know nothing. A theory cannot be accepted if
it does not allow our thinking to be a genuine insight, nor if the fact of our
knowledge is not explicable in terms of that theory.
“But our thoughts can only accepted as a genuine insight under certain
conditions. All beliefs have causes but a distinction must be drawn between (1)
ordinary causes and (2) a special kind of cause called ‘a reason’. Causes are
mindless events which can produce other results than belief. Reasons arise from
axioms and inferences and affect only beliefs. Bulverism tries to show that the
other man has causes and not reasons and that we have reasons and not causes. A
belief which can be accounted for entirely in terms of causes in worthless.
This principle must not be abandoned when we consider the beliefs which are the
basis of others. Our knowledge depends on the certainty about axioms and
inferences. If these are the result of causes, then there is no possibility of
knowledge. Either we can know nothing or thought has reasons only, and no
causes…
“It is admitted that the mind is affected by physical events; a wireless
set is influenced by atmospherics, but it does not originate its deliverances –
we’d take notice of it if we thought it did. Natural events we can relate to
another until we can trace them finally to the space-time continuum. But
thought has no father but thought. It is conditioned, yes, not caused…
“The same argument applies to our values, which are affected by social
factors, but if they are caused by them we cannot know that they are right. One
can reject morality as an illusion, but the man who does so often tacitly
excepts his own ethical motive: for instance the duty of freeing morality from
superstition and of spreading enlightenment.
“Neither Will nor Reason is the product of Nature. Therefore either I am
self-existent (a belief which no one can accept) or I am a colony of
some Thought or Will that are self-existent. Such reason and goodness as we can
attain must be derived from a self-existent Reason and Goodness outside
ourselves, in fact, a Supernatural…”[683]
Thus Lewis does not decry Reason, but vindicates it; but only by showing
that Reason is independent of Nature. However, in doing this he shatters
the foundations of Enlightenment thinking. For the whole Enlightenment
enterprise was based on the axioms: (a) that Truth and Goodness are attainable
by Reason alone, without the need for Divine Revelation; and (b) that Reason,
as a function of Man, and not of God, is entirely a product of Nature. What
Lewis demonstrates is that even if (a) were true, which it is not, it could
only be true if (b) were false. But the Enlightenment insisted that both were
true, and therefore condemned the whole movement of western thought founded
upon it to sterility and degeneration into nihilism.[684]
The whole tragedy of western man since the Enlightenment – or rather,
since the Renaissance, for that is when the exaltation of human reason began -
is that in exalting himself and the single, fallen faculty of his mind to a
position of infallibility, he has denied himself his true dignity and
rationality, making him a function of irrational nature – in effect, sub-human.
But man is great, not because he can reason in the sense of ratiocinate, that
is, make deductions and inferences from axioms and empirical evidence, but
because he can reason in accordance with the Reason that created and sustains
all things, that is, in accordance with the Word and Wisdom of God in Whose image
he was made. It is when man tries to make his reason autonomous, independent of
its origin and inspiration in the Divine Reason, that he falls to the level of
irrationality. For Man, being in honour, did not understand; he is compared
to the mindless cattle, and is become like unto them (Psalm 48.12).
4. THE EAST: THE
PETERSBURG EMPIRE
As for My people, children are their
oppressors, and women rule over them.
O My people! Those who lead you cause you to
err,
And destroy the way of your paths.
Isaiah 3.12
By God’s dispensation it has fallen to me to
correct both the state and the clergy; I am to them both sovereign and
patriarch; they have forgotten that in antiquity these [roles] were combined.
Tsar Peter the Great.
In
humiliating the Church in the eyes of the people, Peter cut down one of the
deepest and most nutritious roots on which the tree of autocracy stood, grew
and developed.
L.A. Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia
Gosudarstvennost’.
“There is no question,” writes Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “that the
Orthodox Sovereign cares 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.”[685]
That Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich sincerely believed this teaching is clear
from his letter to the Patriarch of Jerusalem: “The most important task of the
Orthodox Tsar is care for the faith, the Church, and all the affairs of the
Church.” However, it was he who introduced the Ulozhenie, the first
serious breach in Church-State symphony. And it was he who deposed Patriarch Nicon.
Therefore while it is customary to date the breakdown of Church-State
symphony or agreement in Russia to the time of Peter the Great, the foundations
of Holy Russia had been undermined, already in the time of his father, Tsar
Alexis Mikhailovich. As Lev Lebedev writes, “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’”.[686]
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 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 Monastirskij
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 them. 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…”[687]
Although this conclusion is in general true, there were short periods
when improvements are discernible. Thus Alexander Rozhintsev writes: “’The rule
of Tsarevena Sophia,’ in the words of Tsar Peter’s brother-in-law Prince B.I.
Kurakin, ‘began with all diligence and justice for all, to the satisfaction of
the people, so that there had never been such a wise administration in the
Russian state; and the whole state during her reign of seven years came to a
peak of great wealth; commerce multiplied as did every kind of trade, and the
study of Greek and Latin began to be set up… Then did the satisfaction of the
people triumph.’ These witnesses of Sophia’s enemy, Prince Kurakin, were
confirmed by the observations of foreigners.
“We can judge the peak of great wealth from the fact that in wooden
Moscow, which at that time contained 5000 people, more than 3000 stone houses
were built during Golitsyn’s ministry. And in spite of this, in 1689 Tsarevna
Sophia was supported neither by the boyars, nor by the riflemen, and at the
insistence of the latter she renounced the Throne and was imprisoned in
Novodevichi monastery.
“In 1727 the same Prince B. Kurakin wrote that after the seven-year
reign of Tsarevna Sophia, which had been carried out ‘in all order and
justice’, when ‘the satisfaction of the people triumphed’, there began the
‘anarchical’ time of the reign of Peter’s mother, Natalia Kirillovna
(1689-1696). It was then that there began ‘great bribe-taking and state theft,
which continues at an increasing rate to the present day, and it is hard to
extirpate this plague.’
“Tsar Peter Alexandrovich then and later struggled fiercely but
unsuccessfully with this plague. It is known, as V.O. Kliuchevsky writes, that
once in the Senate, exasperated by such universal unscrupulousness, Peter
Alexandrovich wanted to issue a decree ordering every official who stole enough
to buy even a rope to be hanged. Then ‘the eye of the sovereign’ and guardian
of the law, General-Procurator Yagzhinsky got up and said: ‘Does your Majesty
wanted to reign alone, with servants or subjects? We all steal, only some more
and more noticeably than others.’”[688]
It was at this critical transitional period that the last Patriarch of
Muscovite Russia, Adrian, was enthroned in 1690. He 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…”[689]
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...”[690]
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…
In the eighteenth century the Russian autocracy gradually developed in
the direction of western absolutist monarchy or despotism. The difference
between the Orthodox autocracy and the absolutist monarchies was explained by
Ivan Kireevsky as follows: “Autocracy is distinguished from despotism by the
fact that in the former everyone is bound by the laws except the supreme
sovereign, who supports their force and holiness for their own advantage, while
in a despotic government all the servants of the power are autocrats, thereby
forcibly limiting the autocracy of the highest guardian of the law by their own
lawlessness.”[691]
Again, Nicholas Berdyaev writes: “[In the Orthodox autocracy] there are
no rights to power, but only obligations of power. The power of the tsar is by
no means absolute, unrestricted power. It is autocratic because its source is
not the will of the people and it is not restricted by the people. But it is
restricted by the Church and by Christian righteousness; it is spiritually
subject to the Church; it serves not its own will, but the will of God. The
tsar must not have his own will, but he must serve the will of God. The tsar
and the people are bound together by one and the same faith, by one and the
same subjection to the Church and the righteousness of God. Autocracy
presupposes a wide national social basis living its own self-sufficient life;
it does not signify the suppression of the people’s life. Autocracy is
justified only if the people has beliefs which sanction the power of the tsar.
It cannot be an external violence inflicted on the people. The tsar is
autocratic only if he is a truly Orthodox tsar. The defective Orthodoxy of
Peter the Great and his inclination towards Protestantism made him an absolute,
and not an autocratic monarch. Absolute monarchy is a child of humanism… In
absolutism the tsar is not a servant of the Church. A sign of absolute monarchy
is the subjection of the Church to the State. That is what happened to the
Catholic Church under Louis XIV. Absolutism always develops a bureaucracy and
suppresses the social life of the people.”[692]
The change in the political system of government from autocracy to
absolutism led to a still deeper change in the spiritual life of the nation as
a whole.
“On the whole,”
writes Nikolin, “the 18th century was an age of practically
unceasing attempts on the part of the State power to rework the world-view of
the Russian man, and the way of life of the Russian people, on a German,
Protestant model. It was an age when the State power, instead of working
together with the Church ‘to adorn the life of men’ through the religious
education of the people, set out on the path of its gradual religious
corruption, its alienation from the Church.
“As a result of
the Church, or more accurately anti-Church, reforms of Peter I and the actions
of his successors, there began a cooling towards the Orthodox faith in the
Russian people, in the first place among the nobility. Freethinking and
superstition increased. Russian educated society began to be ashamed of its
faith, the faith of its fathers. Peter I injected into the Russian people, who
were living a life of sincere, childlike, simple-hearted religiousness, the
seeds of rationalist Protestantism – when the mind begins to prevail over the
faith and deceive man by the supposed independence and progressiveness of its
origins. At the same time the Russian Church was deprived of the possibility of
fighting with Protestantism, and of educating men in the true faith. The
actions of the State power led to a situation in which in Rus’ there began to
empty many ‘places sanctified by the exploits of the holy monks. The path along
which the masses of the people walked to the holy elders for instruction, and
to the holy graves for prayer, began to be grown over. Many schools, hospitals
and workhouses attached to the churches and monasteries were closed. Together
with the closing of the monasteries an end [only a temporary end, fortunately]
was also put to the great work of the enlightenment of the natives in Siberia
and other places in boundless Russia.’”[693]
And yet, as so often in history, we see that the seeds of revival were
being sown in this, the nadir of Russian spiritual history. For it was in the
reign of Catherine that St. Paisius Velichkovsky was laying the foundation for
the revival of Russian monasticism in the nineteenth century that would produce
such beautiful fruits as the elders of Optina. And it was in her reign that a
young man called Seraphim entered the monastery of Sarov and from there began
his ascent to the summit of spiritual excellence. For history remains the
domain, not only of psychological, sociological, political and economic laws,
which are in principle predictable, but also of the free will of man and the
grace of God, which no man can predict…
And so, on the
one hand, the results of the transformation of the Russian State from an
autocracy into an absolutist state were spiritually disastrous (even if they
had some good results in the secular realm). And on the other hand, while
groaning beneath this western yoke, the people retained its Orthodox faith,
making possible the slow but steady, if incomplete return of Russia to its
pre-Petrine traditions from the reign of the Emperor Paul onwards. Thus while
the eighteenth century represented the deepest nadir yet in Russian statehood,
Russia still remained recognisably Russia, the chief bearer and defender of
Orthodoxy in the world.
Peter
and the West
The
westernisation of official Russia was accomplished by a revolution from above,
by Tsar Peter I and his successors, especially Catherine II. However, state
power would have been insufficient to carry out such a radical change if it had
not been supported and propelled by the spread of Masonic ideas among the
aristocracy, in whose hands the real power rested after the death of Peter. So
before examining Peter’s reforms, it will be useful to examine the beginnings
of Masonry in Russia.
“There is no
doubt,” writes Ivanov, “that the seeds of Masonry were sown in Russian by the
‘Jacobites’, supporters of the English King James II, who had been cast out of
their country by the revolution and found a hospitable reception at the court
of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich.
“Independently
of the Masonic propaganda of the Jacobite Masons, the Russians had learned of
the existence of the mysterious union of free stonemasons during their journeys
abroad. Thus, for example, Boris Petrovich Sheremetev had got to known Masonry
during his travels. Sheremetev had been given a most triumphant meeting on
Malta. He took part in the great feast of the Maltese order in memory of John the
Forerunner, and they had given him a triumphant banquet there. The grand-master
had bestowed on him the valuable Maltese cross made of gold and diamonds. On
returning to Moscow on February 10, 1699, Sheremetev was presented to the Tsar
at a banquet on February 12 at Lefort’s, dressed in German clothes and wearing
the Maltese cross. He received ‘great mercy’ from the Tsar, who congratulated
him on becoming a Maltese cavalier and gave him permission to wear this cross
at all times. Then a decree was issued that Sheremetev should be accorded the
title of ‘accredited Maltese cavalier’.
“’The early
shoots of Russian Masonry,’ writes Vernadsky, ‘were particularly possible in
the fleet, since the fleet had been created entirely on western models and
under western influence.
“’In one
manuscript of the Public library the story is told that Peter was received into
the Scottish degree of St. Andrew, and ‘made an undertaking that he would
establish this order in Russia, a promise which he carried out (in the form of
the order of St. Andrew the First-Called, which was established in 1698).…
“’Among the
manuscripts of the Mason Lansky, there is a piece of grey paper on which this
fact is recorded: ‘The Emperor Peter I and Lefort were received into the Templars
in Holland.’
“In the Public library manuscript ‘A View on the Philosophers and the
French Revolution’ (1816), it is indicated that Masonry ‘existed during the
time of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich. Bruce was its great master, while Tsar Peter
was its first inspector.’”[694]
One contemporary Masonic source writes: “One Russian tradition has it
that Peter became a Mason on trip to England and brought it back to Russia.
There is no hard evidence of this…”[695]
Why did Russians join the lodges? Because, according to Sir Geoffrey
Hosking, they “became a channel by which young men aspiring to high office or
good social standing could find acquaintances and protectors among their
superiors; in the Russian milieu this meant an easier and pleasanter way of
rising up the Table of Ranks… “[696]
There were deeper reasons, however. “Freemasonry,” as Walicki points
out, “had a dual function: on the one hand, it could draw people away from the
official Church and, by rationalizing religious experience, could contribute to
the gradual secularisation of their world view; on the other hand, it could
attract people back to religion and draw them away from the secular and
rationalistic philosophy of the Enlightenment. The first function was fulfilled
most effectively by the rationalistic and deistic wing of the movement, which
set the authority of reason against that of the Church and stood for tolerance
and the freedom of the individual. The deistic variety of Freemasonry
flourished above all in England, where it had links with the liberal movement,
and in France, where it was often in alliance with the encyclopedists. The
second function was most often fulfilled by the mystical trend, although this
too could represent a modernization of religious faith, since the model of
belief it put forward was fundamentally anti-ecclesiastical and postulated a
far-reaching internalisation of faith founded on the soul’s immediate contact
with God.”[697]
Russians, though
not uninfluenced by the rationalist side of Masonry, were especially drawn by
its mystical side. For while their faith in Orthodoxy was weak, they were by no
means prepared to live without religion altogether. “Finding myself at the
crossroads between Voltairianism and religion”, wrote Novikov, “I had no basis
on which to work, no cornerstone on which to build spiritual tranquillity, and
therefore I fell into the society.”[698]
The conversion of Tsar Peter to Masonry, if it is a fact, was the
fulfilment of the fervent hopes of western Masons such as the philosopher
Leibnitz, who in 1696 had written to Ludolph: “If only the Muscovite kingdom
inclined to the enlightened laws of Europe, Christianity [sic] would
acquire the greatest fruits. There is, however, hope that the Muscovites will
arise from their slumbers. There is no doubt that Tsar Peter is conscious of
the faults of his subjects and desires to root out their ignorance little by
little.”[699]
According to K.F. Valishevsky, Leibnitz “had worked out a grandiose plan
of scientific undertakings, which could be achieved with the help of the
Muscovite monarch and in which the greatest German philosopher marked out a
role for himself. Leibnitz studied the history and language of Russia.”[700] And it
was Leibnitz, together with his pupil Wolf, who played the leading role in the
foundation of the Russian Academy of Sciences.[701]
Tsar Peter’s conversion to Masonry and the western ideals of
civilisation was accompanied by strong eschatological expectations. For “the
coming of the Antichrist,” writes B.A. Uspensky, “was expected in 1666, but
when it was not fulfilled, they began to calculate it as 1666 years not from
the Nativity of Christ, but from His Resurrection, that is, they began to
expect him in 1699 (1666+33=1699). And only a few days before the beginning of
this year (15 August, 1698 (one must bear in mind that the new year began on
the first of September) Peter appeared from his first journey abroad. Besides,
his arrival was immediately marked by a whole range of cultural innovations
(already in the next year there began the forcible shaving of beards; the
destruction of beards was marked for the new year, 1699: it was then that there
also began the struggle against Russian national dress and a range of other
reforms of the same kind).”[702]
Peter learned many useful things on his journey to the West, especially
as related to warfare. But in religion, as we shall see, the influences were
harmful. And many, and not only the Old Believers, were prepared to condemn his
undermining of the foundations of Russian society. Thus in 1699 or 1700, on a
visit to Voronezh, he ordered the bishop of the city, St. Metrophanes, to visit
him at the palace he had erected on an island in the River Voronezh. “Without
delay the holy hierarch set out on foot to go to the tsar. But when he entered
the courtyard which led to the palace, he saw that statues of the ancient Greek
gods and goddesses had been set up there on the tsar’s order, to serve as
architectural adornment. The holy one immediately returned to his residence.
The sovereign was apprised of this, but, not knowing the reason why the holy
Metrophanes had turned back, he sent another messenger to him with orders that
he attend upon the sovereign in the palace. But the saintly bishop replied:
‘Until the sovereign commandeth that the idols, which scandalise all the
people, be taken away, I cannot set foot in the palace!’ Enraged by the holy
hierarch’s reply, the tsar sent him the following message: ‘If he will not
come, he shall incur the death sentence for disobedience to the powers that
be.’ To this threat the saint replied: ‘The sovereign hath authority over my
life, but it is not seemly for a Christian ruler to set up heathen idols and
thus lead the hearts of the simple into temptation.’ Towards evening, the tsar
suddenly heard the great bell of the cathedral toll, summoning the faithful to
church. Since there was no particular feast being celebrated the following day,
he sent to ask the bishop why the bell was being rung. ‘Because His Majesty has
condemned me to be executed, I, as a sinful man, must bring the Lord God
repentance before my death and ask forgiveness of my sins at a general service
of prayer, and for this cause I have ordered an all-night vigil to be served.’
When he learned of this, the tsar laughed and straightway commanded that the
holy hierarch be told that his sovereign forgave him, and that he cease to
alarm the people with the extraordinary tolling. And afterwards, Tsar Peter
ordered the statues removed. One should understand that Peter never gave up his
innovations, and if in this respect he yielded, it merely demonstrates the
great respect he cherished for the bishop of Voronezh…”[703]
It was not only the Church that suffered from Peter’s drive to
westernize and modernize the country. The nobility were chained to public
service in the bureaucracy or the army; the peasants - to the land.[704]
And the whole country was subjected, by force at times, to the cultural,
scientific and educational influence of the West. This transformation was
symbolized especially by the building, at great cost in human lives, of a new
capital at St. Petersburg. Situated at the extreme western end of the vast
empire as Peter's 'window to the West', this extraordinary city was largely
built by Italian architects on the model of Amsterdam, peopled by shaven and
pomaded courtiers who spoke more French than Russian, and ruled, from the
middle of the eighteenth century onwards, by monarchs of German origin.
In building St. Petersburg, Peter was also trying to replace the
traditional idea of Russia as the Third Rome by the western idea of the
secular empire on the model of the First Rome, the Rome of the pagan
Caesars and Augusti.
As van den Bercken writes: “Rome remains an ideological point of
reference in the notion of the Russian state. However, it is no longer the
second Rome but the first Rome to which reference is made, or ancient Rome
takes the place of Orthodox Constantinople. Peter takes over Latin symbols: he
replaces the title tsar by the Latin imperator, designates his state imperia,
calls his advisory council senat, and makes the Latin Rossija the
official name of his land in place of the Slavic Rus’…
“Although the primary orientation is on imperial Rome, there are also
all kinds of references to the Christian Rome. The name of the city, St.
Petersburg, was not just chosen because Peter was the patron saint of the tsar,
but also to associate the apostle Peter with the new Russian capital. That was
both a diminution of the religious significance of Moscow and a religious claim
over papal Rome. The adoption of the religious significance of Rome is also
evident from the cult of the second apostle of Rome, Paul, which is expressed
in the name for the cathedral of the new capital, the St. Peter and Paul
Cathedral. This name was a break with the pious Russian tradition, which does
not regard the two Roman apostles but Andrew as the patron of Russian
Christianity. Thus St. Petersburg is meant to be the new Rome, directly
following on the old Rome, and passing over the second and third Romes…”[705]
And yet the ideal of Russia as precisely the Third Rome remained
in the consciousness of the people. “The service of ‘him that restraineth’,
although undermined, was preserved by Russian monarchical power even after
Peter – and it is necessary to emphasize this. It was preserved because neither
the people nor the Church renounced the very ideal of the Orthodox kingdom,
and, as even V. Klyuchevsky noted, continued to consider as law that which
corresponded to this ideal, and not Peter’s decrees.”[706]
But if Russia was still the Third Rome, it was highly doubtful, in the
people’s view, that Peter was her true Autocrat. For how could one who
undermined the foundations of the Third Rome be her true ruler? The real
Autocrat of Russia, the rumour went, was sealed up in a column in Stockholm,
and Peter was a German who had been substituted for him…
Peter’s Leviathan
Perhaps the most important and dangerous influence that Peter had
received on his journey to the West was that of the Anglican Bishop Gilbert
Burnet. The Tsar and the famous preacher had many long talks, and according to
Burnet what interested the Tsar most was his exposition of the “authority that
the Christian Emperors assumed in matters of religion and the supremacy of our
Kings”. Burnet told the Tsar that “the great and comprehensive rule of all is,
that a king should consider himself as exalted by Almighty God into that high
dignity as into a capacity of doing much good and of being a great blessing to
mankind, and in some sort a god on earth”.[707]
Peter certainly came to believe a similar teaching concerning his role
as tsar.[708]
And he now set out gradually to enslave the Church to the power of the State.
From 1701 to 1718 he acted through a series of piecemeal measures, but was to
some extent inhibited by the intermittent resistance of the locum tenens,
Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky of Ryazan, and of his own son, the Tsarevich
Alexis. However, after the execution of the Tsarevich and the effective replacement
of Yavorsky by a man more after his reforming heart, Metropolitan Theophanes
Prokopovich of Pskov, Peter set about a systematic codification and
consolidation of his reforms in his Ecclesiastical Regulation, published
in 1721.
On January 24, 1701 Peter ordered the re-opening of the Monastirskij
Prikaz which Patriarch Nicon had so struggled against. The Prikaz
was authorized to collect all state taxes and peasant dues from the estates of
the church, as well as purely ecclesiastical emoluments. A large proportion of
this sum was then given to the state to help the war-effort against Sweden. In
other words, while the Church was not formally dispossessed, the State took
complete control over her revenues. St. Demetrius of Rostov protested: “You
want to steal the things of the Church? Ask Heliodorus, Seleucus’ treasurer,
who wanted to go to Jerusalem to steal the things of the Church. He was beaten
by the hands of an angel.”[709]
The Church lost not only her economic independence, but also her judicial
independence, her ability to judge her own people in her own courts. The State
demanded that clergy be defrocked for transgressing certain state laws. It put
limits on the numbers of clergy, and of new church buildings. Monks were
confined to their monasteries, no new monasteries could be founded, and the old
ones were turned into hospitals and rest-homes for retired soldiers.
“Under Peter”, writes Andrew Bessmertny, “a fine for the giving of alms
(from 5 to 10 rubles) was introduced, together with corporal punishments
followed by cutting out of the nostrils and exile to the galleys 'for the
proclamation of visions and miracles’. In 1723 a decree forbidding the
tonsuring of monks was issued, with the result that by 1740 Russian monasticism
consisted of doddery old men, while the founder of eldership, St. Paisius
Velichkovsky, was forced to emigrate to Moldavia. Moreover, in the monasteries
they introduced a ban on paper and ink - so as to deprive the traditional
centres of book-learning and scholarship of their significance. Processions
through the streets with icons and holy water were also banned (almost until
the legislation of 1729)! At the same time, there appeared... the government
ban on Orthodox transferring to other confessions of faith.”[710]
If Peter was a tyrant, he was nevertheless
not a conventional tyrant, but one who genuinely wanted the best for his
country. And in spite of the drunken orgies in which he mocked her institutions
and rites, he did not want to destroy the Church, but only “reform” her in
directions which he thought would make her more efficient and “useful”.[711] Some
of the “reforms” were harmful, like his allowing mixed marriages (the Holy
Synod decreed the next year that the children of these marriages should be
Orthodox, which mitigated, but did not remove the harmfulness of the decree).
Others were beneficial. Thus the decree that the lower age limit for ordination
to the diaconate should be twenty-five, and for the priesthood – thirty,
although motivated by a desire to limit the number of persons claiming
exemption from military service, especially “ignorant and lazy clergy”,
nevertheless corresponded to the canonical ages for ordination. Again, his
measures ensuring regular attendance at church by laypeople, if heavy-handed,
at least demonstrated his genuine zeal for the flourishing of Church life.
Moreover, he encouraged missionary work, especially in Siberia, where the sees
of Tobolsk and Irkutsk were founded and such luminaries as St. John of Tobolsk
and St. Innocent of Irkutsk flourished during his reign. And in spite of his
own Protestant tendencies, he blessed the publication of some, if not all,
books defending the principles of the Orthodox faith against Protestantism.
The measure that most shockingly revealed the extent of the State’s
invasion of the Church’s life was the demand that priests break the seal of
confession and report on any parishioners who confessed anti-government
sentiments. Thus did Peter create a “police state” in which the priests were among
the policemen. Now “a ‘police state’,” writes Florovsky, “is not only, or even
largely, an outward reality, but more an inner reality: it is less a structure
than a style of life; not only a political theory, but also a religious
condition. ‘Policism’ represents the urge to build and ‘regularize’ a country
and a people’s entire life – the entire life of each individual inhabitant –
for the sake of his own and the ‘general welfare’ or ‘common good’. ‘Police’
pathos, the pathos of order and paternalism, proposes to institute nothing less
than universal welfare and well-being, or, quite simply, universal ‘happiness’.
[But] guardianship all too quickly becomes transformed into surveillance.
Through its own paternalist inspiration, the ‘police state’ inescapably turns
against the church. It also usurps the church’s proper function and confers
them upon itself. It takes on the undivided care for the people’s religious and
spiritual welfare.”[712]
Before Peter could complete his reforms, he had to crush the opposition
to them. This meant, in the first place, his son, the Tsarevich Alexis. For the
Tsarevich, whose mother Peter had cast away in favour of the German Anna Mons
and then the Balt Catherine, represented a focus around which all those who
loved the old traditions of Holy Rus’ gathered, on whom they placed their hopes
for a restoration of Patriarchal Orthodoxy. In killing him, therefore, Peter
was striking a blow at the whole Orthodox way of life, and declaring, as it
were, that there was no going back to the old ways. Exactly two centuries
later, in 1918, the Bolsheviks would do the same, and for the same reasons, to
Tsar Nicholas II…
Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes: “On returning from his first trip to the
West in 1698, Peter I, in spite of all the canons and the opinion of
Patriarch Adrian, incarcerated his lawful wife Eudocia Lopukhina in a monastery
in the city of Suzdal, the very same in which the first wife of Basil III,
Solomonia Saburova, had once been kept. But if Basil III married a second time
‘for the sake of royal procreation’ (Solomonia was infertile), Peter I did not
have such a justification for his actions. Eudocia had born him a son, the heir
Alexis, in 1690. Peter divorced his wife, the Tsaritsa, for the sake of
adultery with the German woman Anna Mons. This had never happened in
Rus’ at the height of authority!…
“The Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich grew up as kind, clever and capable, but
weak in health and will. However, he was not completely without will. In this,
as in other capacities, he was perhaps, usual, normal, like the majority
of Russian people of the time – not a genius and not without ability, not a
hero and not a coward, not an ascetic and not a debauchee, not a righteous man,
but also not a criminal. Thus Alexis Petrovich well represented the type of
the normal Russian person of his time.
“Above all the Tsarevich grew up into a sincerely and deeply believing Orthodox
person…He very much loved everything that was Russian and Orthodox from
ages past. And for that reason he from the beginning hated the
corruption of the spiritual principles of Great Russia by his Tsar-father… To
this should be added the fact that Alexis Petrovich, loving his mother by
birth, and seeing her unlawful incarceration and his father’s living with other
women, was naturally penetrated by a feeling of pity for her and disdain for
his father. This disdain sometimes reached the point that Alexis Petrovich
began to wish the death of Peter. Since he himself feared this desire,
he perceived it as a sin which needed Confession. And he confessed. His
spiritual father completely understood him and said: ‘God will forgive you; we
all want his (Peter’s) death’. And so, being a conscious and profound
opponent of the anti-Orthodox acts of his father, the Tsarevich Alexis
Petrovich at the same time tried to be obedient in all things to his father,
fulfilling all his instructions to the measure of his ability…”[713]
Peter could not stand the thought that his heir might reverse everything
that he stood for. So he gave him the choice: “change your attitude and
unhypocritically make yourself worthy to be the heir, or be a monk”. Alexis
chose to be a monk. However, this was not really Peter’s intention. He wanted
to kill him – and kill him he did, once he had found the right excuse.
He found his excuse in the Alexis’ flight to Europe with his mistress.
Although he was tempted back with the promise of complete forgiveness, and the
Tsar even announced publicly that “sympathising with a paternal heart over [his
son], he forgives him and frees him from every punishment”, he was not really
going to be forgiven. For at the same time he let Alexis know that if kept
information about anything or anyone from him, “he would be deprived of life”.
“Usually,” writes Lebedev, “the semi-official historians of Russia have
tried to represent the ‘affair’ of the Tsarevich Alexis as the gradual
revelation of his treason against the State, the creation by him of a terrible
plot against his father the Tsar. But it was not like that at all! It is
sufficient to pay heed to this warning concerning Alexis Petrovich’s execution
made before any clarification… The investigation began. From the
testimonies of the Tsarevich and other people drawn into the case it became
clear that Alexis Petrovich had spoken to various people, mainly orally, but
sometimes in letters, that he did not agree with the changes made to Russian
customs by his father, that he was hoping on the support of the ‘mob’ (people),
the clergy and many in the ruling classes, that he sympathised with his mother
and did not recognise Catherine [Peter’s new wife] to be the Tsaritsa. The
investigation also revealed that people of various ranks and classes were
telling the Tsarevich that they supported his views and feelings. Although such
conversations directed against the actions of the Tsar were already seditious
and people paid for them in those days with their freedom and life, all of this
was just conversation (sometimes when ‘tipsy’). Even the actions of those who helped
Alexis Petrovich to flee to Vienna did not amount to a plot, but looked
like a desire to save the Tsarevich ouf of natural devotion and love towards
him. A special investigation was undertaken in relation to Peter’s first wife
Eudocia (forcibly tonsured as Elena), who was in the Protection monastery in
the city of Suzdal. They wanted to know just in case whether it was not from
her that the ‘harmful’ influence on Alexis Petrovich had proceeded. It turned
out that there had been no influence… They also discovered that the clergy,
including Metropolitan Dositheus of Rostov, commemorated her during the
services as ‘Tsaritsa’. Besides, Dositheus had prophesied to Eudocia that she
would return to her royal dignity; he wanted the death of Peter I and the enthronement
of his son Alexis Petrovich. An ecclesiastical trial was conducted on
Dositheus, at which he declared: ‘Look what is in the hearts of all. Listen to
the people, to what the people are saying…’ The Rostov Vladyka was defrocked
and then executed ‘with a cruel death’ by being placed on the wheel. But
Peter I well knew that Dositheus was by no means the only member of the
hierarchy of the Russian Church who was against him. Thus immediately after the
announcement of the marriage of the Tsar to Catherine Alexeyevna (after which,
by the way, Moscow suffered a terrible fire), on March 17, 1712 such an
obedient person to Peter as Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky ‘shouted’ his famous
sermon in which he loudly denounced the ‘impiety’ of adultery, of abandoning
one’s wife, of breaking the fasts, which the hearers (and later the Tsar
himself) rightly understood as a reference to Peter. The sermon was delivered
on the day of the commemoration of St. Alexis the Man of God and Metropolitan
Stefan called the Tsarevich Alexis Petrovich ‘a true servant of Christ’, ‘our
only hope’….
“Reprisals on the Church and the removal of the Patriarchate were
already planned. But the realisation of a matter that was so unheard-of for the
Russian Land would be the more successful the more guilty ‘the only
hope’ of the churchmen, the Tsarevich Alexis, would turn out to be.”[714] Not
only did the Tsarevich have to appear to be guilty: it has to seem as if it was
not the Tsar himself who was punishing him.
Under torture, the Tsarevich “confessed” to asking the Emperor
Charles for military help in overthrowing Peter. The Church in a conciliar
epistle called on the Tsar to forgive his son. But the Senate decreed the death
sentence, and on June 26, 1718 the Tsarevich was secretly smothered in the
Peter and Paul fortress.
Lebedev writes: “Peter I’s persecution of his own son, ending with the secret
killing of the latter, was in essence the persecution of immemorial Great
Russia, which did not want to change its nature, to be reborn according
to the will of the monarch into something complete opposite to it. It was not
by chance that the characteristics of the personality of the Tsarevich Alexis
Petrovich mirrored so well the characteristics of the personality of the major
part of Russia. In this major part the Tsar continued to be venerated,
in spite of everything, as ‘the Anointed of God’, whom it was necessary to obey
in everything except in matters of the faith, if he began to break or
destroy its root foundations. Peter could not directly and openly war against this
Great Russia (that is, with the majority of his people). Therefor he went
on the path of slander (that his actions were opposed, supposedly, only
by sluggards or traitors) and the hidden, as it were secret
suffocation of everything whose root and core was Holy Rus’, Orthodox Rus’.
On this path Peter was ineluctably forced to resort to one very terrible means:
to cover his deliberately anti-God, dishonourable, if not simply criminal
actions with pious words, using the name of God and other holy names, excerpts
from the Holy Scriptures and Tradition, false oaths, etc. – or in other words,
to act under the mask of Orthodox piety. Such had happened in earlier
history and especially, as we remember, in the form of the actions of the
‘Judaising’ heretics, Ivan IV and Boris Godunov. But from Peter I it becomes as
it were a certain norm, a kind of rule for rulers that did not require
explanation…”[715]
Now that the Tsarevich was dead, Peter could proceed to the completion
of his subjection of the Church to the State. But for that he needed a new
first-hierarch. He found him in Theophanes Prokopovich, the metropolitan of
Pskov.
Prokopovich was distinguished by an extreme pro-westernism that
naturally endeared him to Peter’s heart. Thus he called Germany the mother of
all countries and openly expressed his sympathy with the German theologians.
“Theophanes was naturally accused of Lutheranism,” writes Zyzykin, “if not in
the sense of accepting [its] theological teaching, as in the sense of the
general tendency of his convictions and the direction of his activity. His
child, which he together with Peter I gave birth to, the Ecclesiastical
Regulation, received the most flattering review from the Protestants in a
brochure which came out in Germany under the title, Curieuse Nachrichten von
der itzigen Religion Ihre Kaiserlliched Majestät in Russland Petri
Alexievich unde seines grossen Reichs dass dasselbe ast nach Evangelisch
Lutherischen Grundsätzen eingerichtet sei. The brochure concluded by
declaring that Peter was drawing Orthodox Russia out on the path of
Lutheranizing Russia, although there were still some ‘remnants of Papism’ in
her. ‘Instead of the Pope the Russians had their Patriarch,’ writes the author
of the brochure, ‘whose significance in their country was as great as the
significance of the Pope in Italy and the Roman Catholic Church. The Russians
preserved the veneration of the Saints… Such is the Greek religion. But in
Peter’s rule this religion changed a great deal, for he understood that with
true religion no sciences can bring benefit. In Holland, England and Germany he
learned what is the best, true and saving faith, and he imprinted it firmly in
his mind. His communion with Protestants still more firmly established him in
this manner of thought; we will not be mistaken if we say that His Majesty saw
Lutheranism as the true religion. For, although so far in Russia things have
not been built in accordance with the principles of our true religion,
nevertheless a beginning has been laid, and are not prevented from believing in
a happy outcome by the fact that we know that crude and stubborn minds brought
up in their superstitious Greek religion cannot be changed immediately and
yield only gradually; they must be brought, like children, step by step to the
knowledge of the truth.’ Peter’s ecclesiastical reforms were for the author the
earnest of the victory of Protestantism in Russia: ‘The Tsar has removed the
patriarchate and, following the example of the Protestant princes, has declared
himself to be the supreme bishop of the country.’ The author praised Peter for
setting about the reform of the people’s way of life on his return from abroad.
‘As regards calling on the Saints, His Majesty has indicated that the images of
St. Nicholas should not be anywhere in rooms, and that there should not be the
custom of first bowing to the icons on entering a house, and then to the
master… The system of education in the schools established by the Tsar is
completely Lutheran, and the young people are being brought up in the rules of
the true Evangelical religion. Monasteries have been significantly reduced
since they can no longer serve, as before, as dens for a multitude of idle
people, who were a heavy burden for the state and could be stirred up against
it. Now all the monks are obliged to study something good, and everything is
constructed in a most praiseworthy manner. Miracles and relics also no longer
enjoy their former veneration; in Russia, as in Germany, they have already begun
to believe that in this respect much has been fabricated. If calling on the
Saints will be phased out in Russia, then there will not be faith in personal
merits before God, and in good works, and the opinion that one can obtain a
heavenly reward by going round holy places or by generous contributions to the
clergy and monasteries will also disappear; so that the only means for
attaining blessedness will remain faith in Jesus Christ, Who is the base of
true Evangelical religion.’”[716]
The same attachment to Lutheranism, especially as regards Church-State
relations, is evident in the sermons of Prokopovich, which is what attracted
Peter’s attention to him. Thus in his sermon on Palm Sunday, 1718, he said: “Do
we not see here [in the story of Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem] what
honour is paid to the King? Does this not require us not to remain
silent about the duty of subjects to esteem the supreme authority, and about
the great resistance to this duty that has been exposed in our country at the present
time? For we see that not a small part of the people abide in such ignorance
that they do not know the Christian doctrine concerning the secular
authorities. Nay more, they do not know that the supreme authority is
established and armed with the sword by God, and that to oppose it is a sin
against God Himself, a sin to be punished by death not temporal but eternal…
“Christians have to be subject even to perverse and unbelieving rulers.
How much more must they be utterly devoted to an Orthodox and just sovereign?
For the former are masters, but the latter are also fathers. What am I saying?
That our autocrat [Peter], and all autocrats, are fathers. And where else will
you find this duty of ours, to honour the authorities sincerely and conscientiously,
if not in the commandment: ‘Honour thy father!’ All the wise teachers affirm
this; thus Moses the lawgiver himself instructs us. Moreover the authority of
the state is the primary and ultimate degree of fatherhood, for on it depends
not a single individual, not one household, but the life, the integrity, and
the welfare of the whole great nation.”[717]
Already in a school book published in 1702 Prokopovich had referred to
the emperor as “the rock Peter on whom Christ has built His Church”.[718] And in
another sermon dating from 1718 he “relates Peter, ‘the first of the Russian
tsars’, to his patron saint Peter, ‘the first of the apostles’. Like the
latter, tsar Peter has an ‘apostolic vocation… And what the Lord has commanded
your patron and apostle concerning His Church, you are to carry out in the
Church of this flourishing empire.’ This is a far-reaching theological
comparison…”[719]
In July, 1721 Prokopovich published an essay “expressing the view that
since Constantine’s time the Christian emperors had exercised the powers of a
bishop, ‘in the sense that they appointed the bishops, who ruled the clergy’.
This was, in short, a justification of Peter’s assumption of complete
jurisdiction over the government of the church; for a ‘Christian sovereign’,
Prokopovich concluded in a celebrated definition of the term, is empowered to
nominate not only bishops, ‘but the bishop of bishops, because the Sovereign is
the supreme authority, the perfect, ultimate, and authentic supervisor; that
is, he holds supreme judicial and executive power over all the ranks and
authorities subject to him, whether secular or ecclesiastical’. ‘Patriarchalism
[patriarshestvo]’ – the belief that a patriarch should rule the
autocephalous Russian church – Prokopovich equated with ‘papalism’, and
dismissed it accordingly.”[720]
The notion that not the Patriarch, but only the Tsar, was the father of
the people was developed by Prokopovich in his Primer, which consisted
of an exposition of the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes:
“Question. What is ordained by God in the fifth commandment [‘Honour thy father
and thy mother’]? Answer: To honour all those who are as fathers and mothers to
us. But it is not only parents who are referred to here, but others who
exercise paternal authority over us. Question: Who are such persons? Answer:
The first order of such persons are the supreme authorities instituted by God
to rule the people, of whom the highest authority is the Tsar. It is the duty
of kings to protect their subjects and to seek what is best for them, whether
in religious matters or in the things of this world; and therefore they must
watch over all the ecclesiastical, military, and civil authorities subject to
them and conscientiously see that they discharge their respective duties. That
is, under God, the highest paternal dignity; and subjects, like good sons, must
honour the Tsar. [The second order of persons enjoying paternal authority are]
the supreme rulers of the people who are subordinate to the Tsar, namely: the
ecclesiastical pastors, the senators, the judges, and all other civil and
military authorities.”[721]
As Cracraft justly observes, “the things of God, the people were being
taught by Prokopovich, were the things of Caesar, and vice-versa: the two could
not be distinguished.”[722]
With Prokopovich as his main assistant, Peter now proceeded to the crown
of his caesaropapist legislation, his Ecclesiastical Regulation of 1721,
which established an “Ecclesiastical College” in parallel with nine secular Colleges,
or Ministries, to replace the old patriarchal system.
Peter did not hide the fact that he had abolished the patriarchate
because he did not want rivals to his single and undivided dominion over
Russia. In this he followed the teaching of Thomas Hobbes: “Temporal and
spiritual are two words brought into the world to make men see double, and
mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot obey two masters…”[723] “The
fatherland,” intoned the Regulation, “need not fear from an
administrative council [the Ecclesiastical College] the sedition and disorders
that proceed from the personal rule of a single church ruler. For the common
fold do not perceive how different is the ecclesiastical power from that of the
Autocrat, but dazzled by the great honour and glory of the Supreme Pastor [the
patriarch], they think him a kind of second Sovereign, equal to or even greater
than the Autocrat himself, and imagine that the ecclesiastical order is another
and better state.
“Thus the people are accustomed to reason among themselves, a situation
in which the tares of the seditious talk of ambitious clerics multiply and act
as sparks which set dry twigs ablaze. Simple hearts are perverted by these
ideas, so that in some matters they look not so much to their Autocrat as to
the Supreme Pastor. And when they hear of a dispute between the two, they
blindly and stupidly take sides with the ecclesiastical ruler, rather than with
the secular ruler, and dare to conspire and rebel against the latter. The
accursed ones deceive themselves into thinking that they are fighting for God
Himself, that they do not defile but hallow their hands even when they resort
to bloodshed. Criminal and dishonest persons are pleased to discover such ideas
among the people: when they learn of a quarrel between their Sovereign and the
Pastor, because of their animosity towards the former they seize on the chance
to make good their malice, and under pretence of religious zeal do not hesitate
to take up arms against the Lord’s Anointed; and to this iniquity they incite
the common folk as if to the work of God. And what if the Pastor himself,
inflated by such lofty opinions of his office, will not keep quiet? It is
difficult to relate how great are the calamities that thereby ensue.
“These are not our inventions: would to God that they were. But in fact
this has more than once occurred in many states. Let us investigate the history
of Constantinople since Justinian’s time, and we shall discover much of this.
Indeed the Pope by this very means achieved so great a pre-eminence, and not
only completely disrupted the Roman Empire, while usurping a great part of it
for himself, but more than once has profoundly shaken other states and almost
completely destroyed them. Let us not recall similar threats which have
occurred among us.
“In an ecclesiastical administrative council there is no room for such
mischief. For here the president himself enjoys neither the great glory which
amazes the people, nor excessive lustre; there can be no lofty opinion of him;
nor can flatterers exalt him with inordinate praises, because what is done well
by such an administrative council cannot possible be ascribed to the president
alone… Moreover, when the people see that this administrative council has been
established by decree of the Monarch with the concurrence of the Senate, they
will remain meek, and put away any hope of receiving aid in their rebellions
from the ecclesiastical order.”[724]
Thus the purely imaginary threat of a papist revolution in Russia was invoked
to effect a revolution in Church-State relations along Protestant lines. The
Catholic threat was already receding in Peter’s time, although the Jesuits
continued to make strenuous efforts to bring Russia into the Catholic fold. The
real threat came from the Protestant monarchies, where caesaropapism was an
article of faith. Sweden and Prussia were the main models by the time of the Ecclesiastical
Regulation, but the original ideas had come during Peter’s earlier visit to
England and Holland. Thus, according to A. Dobroklonsky, “they say that in
Holland William of Orange [who was also king of England] advised him to make
himself ‘head of religion’, so as to become the complete master in his state.”[725]
The full extent of the Peter’s Protestantisation and secularisation of
the Church administration was revealed by the oath that the clerics appointed
to the Ecclesiastical College were required to swear: “I acknowledge on oath
that the Supreme Judge [Krainij Sud’ia] of this Ecclesiastical College is
the Monarch of All Russia himself, our Most Gracious Sovereign”. And they
promised “to defend unsparingly all the powers, rights, and prerogatives
belonging to the High Autocracy of His Majesty” and his “august and lawful
successors”. The Church historian, Igor Smolitsch, called it the capitulation
document of the Russian Church.[726]
Certainly, no Christian can recognise any mortal man as his supreme judge
in the literal sense.
The fundamental principle of Peter’s reform was borrowed from Hobbes’ Leviathan:
“He who is chief ruler in any Christian state is also chief pastor, and the
rest of the pastors are created by his authority”.[727]
Similarly, according to Peter and Prokopovich, the chief ruler was empowered to
nominate not only bishops, “but the bishop of bishops [i.e. the patriarch],
because the Sovereign is the supreme authority, the perfect, ultimate, and
authentic supervisor; that is, he holds supreme judicial and executive power
over all the ranks and authorities subject to him, whether secular or
ecclesiastical”. The Tsar henceforth took the place of the Patriarch – or
rather, of the Pope, for he consulted with his bishops much less even than a
Patriarch is obliged to with his bishops. Thus, as Uspensky relates, “the
bishops on entering the Emperor’s palace had to leave behind their hierarchical
staffs… The significance of this fact becomes comprehensible if it is borne in
mind that according to a decree of the Council of 1675 hierarchs left their
staffs behind when concelebrating with the Patriarch… Leaving behind the staff
clearly signified hierarchical dependence…”[728]
As Bishop Nicodemus of Yeniseisk (+1874) put it: “The Synod, according
to Peter’s idea, is a political-ecclesiastical institution parallel to every
other State institution and for that reason under the complete supreme
commanding supervision of his Majesty. The idea is from the Reformation, and is
inapplicable to Orthodoxy; it is false. The Church is her own Queen. Her Head
is Christ our God. Her law is the Gospel.” Bishop Nicodemus went on to say that
in worldly matters the Tsar was the supreme power, but “in spiritual matters
his Majesty is a son of the Church” and therefore subject to the authority of
the Church.[729]
M.V. Zyzykin writes: “Basing the unlimitedness of his power in Pravda
Voli Monarshej on Hobbes’ theory, and removing the bounds placed on this
power by the Church, he changed the basis of the power, placing it on the human
base of a contract and thereby subjecting it to all those waverings to which
every human establishment is subject; following Hobbes, he arbitrarily
appropriated ecclesiastical power to himself; through the ‘dechurchification’
of the institution of royal power the latter lost its stability and the
inviolability which is proper to an ecclesiastical institution. It is only by
this dechurchification that one can explain the possibility of the demand for
the abdication of the Tsar from his throne without the participation of the
Church in 1917. The beginning of this ideological undermining of royal power
was laid through the basing of the unlimitedness of royal power in Pravda
Voli Monarshej in accordance with Hobbes, who in the last analysis
confirmed it, not on the Divine call, but on the sovereignty of the people…”[730]
The paradox that Petrine absolutism was based on democracy is confirmed
by L.A. Tikhomirov, who writes: “This Pravda affirms that Russian
subjects first had to conclude a contract amongst themselves, and then the
people ‘by its own will abdicated and gave it [power] to the monarch.’ At this
point it is explained that the sovereign can by law command his people to do
not only anything that is to his benefit, but also simply anything that he
wants. This interpretation of Russian monarchical power entered, alas, as an
official act into the complete collection of laws, where it figures under No.
4888 in volume VII.
“…. In the Ecclesiastical Regulation it is explained that
‘conciliar government is the most perfect and better than one-man rule’ since,
on the one hand, ‘truth is more certainly sought out by a conciliar association
than by one man’, and on the other hand, ‘a conciliar sentence more strongly
inclines towards assurance and obedience than one man’s command’… Of course,
Theophanes forced Peter to say all this to his subjects in order to destroy the
patriarchate, but these positions are advanced as a general principle. If we
were to believe these declarations, then the people need only ask itself: why
do I have to ‘renounce my own will’ if ‘conciliar government is better than one-man
rule and if ‘a conciliar sentence’ elicits greater trust and obedience than one
man’s command?
“It is evident that nothing of the sort could have been written if there
had been even the smallest clarity of monarchical consciousness. Peter’s era in
this respect constitutes a huge regression by comparison with the Muscovite
monarchy.”[731]
Thus did Peter the Great destroy the traditional symphonic pattern of
Church-State relations which had characterized Russian history since the time
of St. Vladimir. Not until the reign of Nicholas II did the Church regain
something like her former freedom. As Karamzin put it, under Peter “we became
citizens of the world, but ceased to be, in some cases, citizens of Russia.
Peter was to blame.”[732]
If we compare Peter I with another great and terrible tsar, Ivan IV, 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 impose a caesaropapist constitution, as it were, on the Church,
Peter (through 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…
Tsar Peter and the
Orthodox East
In September, 1721 Peter wrote to the Ecumenical Patriarch asking for
his formal recognition of the new form of ecclesiastical administration in Russia
– now more traditionally called a “Spiritual Synod” rather than “Ecclesiastical
College”, and endowed “with equal to patriarchal power”.[733]
The reply came on September 23, 1723 in the form of “two nearly identical
letters, one from Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople, written on behalf of
himself and the patriarchs of Jerusalem and Alexandria, and the other from
Patriarch Athanasius of Antioch. Both letters ‘confirmed, ratified, and
declared’ that the Synod established by Peter ‘is, and shall be called, our
holy brother in Christ’; and the patriarchs enjoined all Orthodox clergy and
people to submit to the Synod ‘as to the four Apostolic thrones’.”[734]
If the submission of the Russian Church and people to the new order is
at least comprehensible in view of Peter’s iron grip over his country, the
agreement of the Eastern Patriarchs to this abolition of the patriarchate they
themselves had established needs some more explaining.
The most important reason for the hierarchs’ decision was undoubtedly
the assurance they received from Peter that he had instructed the Synod to rule
the Russian Church “in accordance with the unalterable dogmas of the faith of
the Holy Orthodox Catholic Greek Church”. Of course, if they had known all the
Protestantising tendencies of Peter’s rule, they might not have felt so
assured…
Also relevant, very likely, was the fact that the Russian tsar was the
last independent Orthodox ruler and the main financial support of the churches
and monasteries of the East. This made it very difficult for the Patriarchs to
resist the Tsar in this, as in other requests. Thus in 1716 Patriarch Jeremiah
III acceded to Peter’s request to allow his soldiers to eat meat during all
fasts while they were on campaign[735];
and a little later he permitted the request of the Russian consul in
Constantinople that Lutherans and Calvinists should not be rebaptised on
joining the Orthodox Church.[736]
But a still more likely explanation is the fact that the Eastern
Patriarchs were themselves in an uncanonical situation in relation to their
secular ruler, the Sultan, which would have made any protest against a similar
uncanonicity in Russia seem hypocritical.
In order to understand this situation, we need to go back to the fall of
the Byzantine Empire in 1453, and remind ourselves of the new relationship
between Church and State established by the Turkish sultan. “The Muslims,” as
Bishop Kallistos Ware writes, “drew no distinction between religion and
politics: from their point of view, if Christianity was to be recognized as an
independent religious faith, it was necessary for Christians to be organized as
an independent political unit, an Empire within the Empire. The Orthodox church
therefore became a civil as well as a religious institution: it was turned into
the Rum millet, the ‘Roman nation’. The ecclesiastical structure was
taken over in toto as an instrument of secular administration. The
bishop became government officials, the Patriarch was not only the spiritual
head of the Greek Orthodox Church, but the civil head of the Greek nation – the
ethnarch or millet-bashi.”[737]
The millet system had the consequence that “the Church’s higher
administration became caught up in a degrading system of corruption and simony.
Involved as they were in worldly affairs and matters political, the bishops
fell a prey to ambition and financial greed. Each new Patriarch required a berat
from the Sultan before he could assume office, and for this document he was
obliged to pay heavily. The Patriarch recovered his expenses from the
episcopate, by exacting a fee from each bishop before instituting him in his
diocese; the bishops in turn taxed the parish clergy, and the clergy taxed
their flocks. What was once said of the Papacy was certainly true of the Ecumenical
Patriarchate under the Turks: everything was for sale. “When there were several
candidates for the Patriarchal throne, the Turks virtually sold it to the
highest bidder; and they were quick to see that it was in their financial
interests to change the Patriarch as frequently as possible, so as to multiply
occasions for selling the berat. Patriarchs were removed and reinstated
with kaleidoscopic rapidity.”[738]
This system actually led to the abolition of the Serbian Patriarchate of
Peč in 1765 and its absorption into the Ecumenical Patriarchate (the same
happened to the Bulgarian Church in 1767). For the Serbs could not afford to
pay the sums demanded of them. Thus Noel Malcolm writes: “By 1760, according to
a Catholic report, the Patriarch in Peč was paying 10,000 scudi per annum
to the Greek Patriarch. In 1766, pleading the burdern of the payments they had
to make under this system, the bishops of many Serbian sees, including Skopje,
Niš and Belgrade, together with the Greek-born Patriarch of Peč
himself, sent a petition asking the Sultan to close down the Serbian
Patriarchate and place the whole Church directly under Constantinople. Some
Serbian historians insist that the closure of the Patriarchate was an act of
force; but there is good evidence that the closure was carried out canonically,
by a decision of a Serbian synod. The primary cause of this event was not the
attitude of the Ottoman state (harsh though that was at times) but the
financial oppression of the Greek hierarchy. In the Hapsburg domains,
meanwhile, the Serbian Church based in Karlovci continued to operate, keeping
up its de facto autonomy.”[739]
Thus in the 18th century we have the tragic spectacle of the Orthodox
Church almost everywhere in an uncanonical position vis-à-vis the
secular powers: in Russia, deprived of its lawful head and ruled by a secular,
albeit formally Orthodox ruler; in the Greek lands, under a lawful head, the
Ecumenical Patriarch, who nevertheless unlawfully combined political and
religious roles and was chosen, at least in part, by a Muslim ruler; in the
Balkans, deprived of their lawful heads (the Serbian and Bulgarian patriarchs)
and ruled in both political and religious matters by the Ecumenical Patriarch
while being under the supreme dominion of the same Muslim ruler, or, as in
Montenegro, ruled (from 1782) by prince-bishops of the Petrovic-Njegos family.
Only little Georgia retained something like the traditional symphony of powers.
But even the Georgians were forced, towards the end of the eighteenth century,
to seek the suzerainty of Orthodox Russia in the face of the Muslim threat:
better an Orthodox absolutism than a Muslim one.
The problem for the smaller Orthodox nations was that there was no clear
way out of this situation. Rebellion on a mass scale was out of the question.
So it was natural to look in hope to the north, where Peter, in spite of his
“state heresy” (Glubokovsky’s phrase), was an anointed sovereign who greatly
strengthened Russia militarily and signed all the confessions of the faith of
the Orthodox Church. And their hopes were not unfounded: by the end of the
century the Ottomans had been defeated several times by the Russian armies, who
controlled the northern littoral of the Black Sea. And the threat posed by the
Russian navy to Constantinople itself translated into real influence with the
Sultan, which the Russian emperors and empresses used frequently in order to
help their co-religionists in the Balkans.
Military defeat undermined the authority of the Ottomans. As Philip
Mansel points out, they “owed their authority to military success. Unlike other
Muslim dynasties such as the Sherifs, the senior descendants of the Prophet who
had ruled in Mecca and Medina since the tenth century, they could not claim
long-established right or the blood of the Qureish, the Prophet’s tribe. This
‘legitimacy deficit’ created conflict, even in the mind of a sixteenth-century
Grand Vizier like Lutfi Pasha. Could the Ottoman Sultan be, as he frequently
proclaimed, [the] ‘Shadow of God’?[740]
All these factors persuaded the Eastern Patriarchs to employ “economy”
and bless the absolutist form of government in Russia. Nevertheless, every
transgression of the sacred canons is regrettable. And the transgression in
this case was to have serious long-term consequences…
Was Peter an
Orthodox Tsar?
In view of all that has been said about Peter’s evil deeds, can we count
him as an Orthodox Tsar? There are some, even among conservative historians and
commentators, who believe that Petrine absolutism was not an unmitigated evil,
but even worked in some ways for the good of the Orthodox Christian People, in
accordance with the principle that “all things work together for good for those
who love God” (Romans 8.28). Certainly, even an evil Tsar, while
undesirable and harmful as such, has at least this advantage, that he humbles
the Church and People, reminding them how far they have fallen since they were counted
worthy of a merciful Tsar, and therefore, albeit unwittingly, laying the
foundations for a true resurrection of Orthodoxy at some time in the future…
But some have even seen some of his aims as good in themselves. Thus the
distinguished theorist of monarchism L.A. Tikhomirov wrote: “It would be
superfluous to repeat that in his fundamental task Peter the Great was without
question right and was a great Russian man. He understood that as a monarch, as
the bearer of the duties of the tsar, he was obliged dauntlessly to take upon
his shoulders a heavy task: that of leading Russia as quickly as possible to as
a complete as possible a mastery of all the means of European culture. For
Russia this was a ‘to be or not be’ question. It is terrible even to think what
would have been the case if we had not caught up with Europe before the end of
the 18th century. Under the Petrine reforms we fell into a slavery
to foreigners which has lasted to the present day, but without this reform, of
course, we would have lost our national existence if we had lived in our
barbaric powerlessness until the time of Fredrick the Great, the French
Revolution and the era of Europe’s economic conquest of the whole world. With
an iron hand Peter forced Russia to learn and work – he was, of course, the
saviour of the whole future of the nation.
“Peter was also right in his coercive measures. In general Russia had
for a long time been striving for science, but with insufficient ardour.
Moreover, she was so backward, such terrible labour was set before her in order
to catch up with Europe, that the whole nation could not have done it voluntarily.
Peter was undoubtedly right, and deserved the eternal gratitude of the
fatherland for using the whole of his royal authority and power to create the
cruellest dictatorship and move the country forward by force, enslaving
the whole nation, because of the weakness of her resources, to serve the aims
of the state. There was no other way to save Russia [!]
“But Peter was right only for himself, for his time and for his work.
But when this system of enslaving the people to the state is elevated into a
principle, it becomes murderous for the nation, it destroys all the sources of
the people’s independent life. But Peter indicated no limits to the general
enserfment to the state, he undertook no measures to ensure that a temporary
system should not become permanent, he even took no measures to ensure that
enserfed Russia did not fall into the hands of foreigners, as happened
immediately after his death.”[741]
However, Protopriest Lev Lebedev, even while admitting the useful things
that Peter accomplished, comes to a different and much darker conclusion: “We
are familiar with the words that Peter ‘broke through a window into Europe’.
But no! He ‘broke through a window’ into Russia for Europe, or rather, opened
the gates of the fortress of the soul of Great Russia for the invasion into it
of the hostile spiritual forces of ‘the dark West’. Many actions of this
reformer, for example, the building of the fleet, the building of St.
Petersburg, of the first factories, were accompanied by unjustified cruelties
and merciless dealing with his own people. The historians who praise Peter
either do not mention this, or speak only obliquely about it, and with justification,
so as not to deprive their idol of the aura of ‘the Father of the Fatherland’
and the title ‘Great’. For the Fatherland Peter I was the same kind of ‘father’
as he was for his own son the Tsarevich Alexis, whom he ordered to be killed
– in essence, only because Alexis did not agree with his father’s
destructive reforms for the Fatherland. That means that Peter I did not at all
love Russia and did not care for her glory. He loved his own idea of the
transformation of Russia and the glory of the successes precisely of this idea,
and not of the Homeland, not of the people as it then was, especially in its
best and highest state – the state of Holy Rus’.
“Peter was possessed by ideas that were destructive for the Great
Russian soul and life. It is impossible to explain this only by his delectation
for all things European. Here we may see the influence of his initiation into
the teaching of evil [Masonry] which he voluntarily accepted in the West. Only
a person who had become in spirit not Russian could so hate the most
valuable and important thing in Great Russia – the Orthodox spiritual
foundations of her many-centuried life. Therefore if we noted earlier that
under Peter the monarchy ceased to be Orthodox and Autocratic, now we must say
that in many ways it ceased to be Russian or Great Russian. Then we shall see
how the revolutionary Bolshevik and bloody tyrant Stalin venerated Peter I and
Ivan IV. Only these two Autocrats
were venerated in Soviet times by the communists – the fighters against
autocracy… Now we can understand why they were venerated – for the
antichristian and antirussian essence of their actions and transformations!
“Investigators both for and against Peter I are nevertheless unanimous
in one thing: those transformations in the army, fleet, state administration,
industry, etc. that were useful to Russia could not have been introduced
(even with the use of western models) without breaking the root spiritual
foundations of the life of Great Russia as they had been formed up to Peter. Therefore
when they say that the actions of Peter can be divided into ‘harmful’ and
‘useful’, we must object: that which was useful in them was drowned in that
which was harmful. After all, nobody would think of praising a good drink if a
death-dealing poison were mixed with it…”[742]
Certainly, there were many in Peter’s reign who were prepared to pay
with their lives for their confession that he was, if not the Antichrist, at
any rate a forerunner of the Antichrist. Thus the layman Andrew Ivanov
travelled 400 versts from Nizhni-Novgorod province to tell the Tsar that he was
a heretic and was destroying the foundations of the Christian faith.[743] Others
went further. Thus as early as 1690 Gregory Talitsky circulated a pamphlet
calling Moscow the New Babylon and Peter the Antichrist, for which he was
executed.[744]
In 1718 Hilarion Dokukin publicly refused allegiance to Peter because of his
unlawful removal of the Tsarevich from the Russian throne, and was tortured and
executed.[745]
And in 1722 Monk Varlaam Levin from Penza was publicly executed for calling
Peter the Antichrist.[746]
And yet the consensus of the Church was that Peter was not the
Antichrist. Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna poses the question: “Why, in the
course of two centuries, have we all, both those who are positively disposed
and those who are negatively disposed towards Peter, not consider him as the
Antichrist? Why, next to the pious rebukers of Peter, could there be pious,
very pious venerators of him? Why could St. Metrophanes of Voronezh, who
fearlessly rebuked Peter’s comparatively innocent attraction to Greek-Roman
statues in imitation of the Europeans, nevertheless sincerely and touchingly
love the blasphemer-tsar and enjoy his love and respect in return? Why could Saints
Demetrius of Rostov and Innocent of Irkutsk love him (the latter, as
‘over-hieromonk’ of the fleet, had close relations with him)? Why did the most
ardent and conscious contemporary opponent of Peter’s reforms, the locum
tenens of the Patriarchal Throne, Metropolitan Stefan Yavorsky, who
struggled with Peter’s anti-ecclesiastical reforms and was persecuted and
constrained by him for that, nevertheless not only not recognise Peter as the
Antichrist, but also wrote a book refuting such an opinion? Why in general did
the Church, which has always put forward from its midst holy fighters against
all antichristian phenomena contemporary to it, however much these phenomena
may have been supported by the bearers of supreme power, the Church which
later, under Catherine II, put forward against her far more restrained, veiled
and far less far-reaching anti-ecclesiastical reforms such uncompromising
fighters as Metropolitans Arsenius (Matseyevich) and Paul (Konyuskevich) – why,
under the Emperor Peter, did the Church not put forward against him one holy
man, recognised as such, not one rebuker authorised by Her? Why did our best
Church thinker, who understood the tragedy of the fall of Holy Rus’ with the
greatest clarity and fullness, A.S. Khomiakov, confess that that in Peter’s
reforms, “sensing in them the fruit of pride, the intoxication of earthly
wisdom, we have renounced all our holy things that our native to the heart’,
why could he nevertheless calmly and in a spirit of sober goodwill say of
Peter: ‘Many mistakes darken the glory of the Transformer of Russia, but to him
remains the glory of pushing her forward to strength and a consciousness of her
strength’?
“And finally, the most important question: why is not only Russia, but
the whole of the rest of the world, in which by that time the terrible process
of apostasy from God had already been taking place for centuries, obliged
precisely to Peter for the fact that this process was stopped by the mighty
hand of Russia for more than 200 years? After all, when we rightly and with
reason refer the words of the Apostle Paul: ‘The mystery of lawlessness is
already working, only it will not be completed until he who now restrains is
removed from the midst’ to the Russian tsars, we think mainly of the Russian [St.
Petersburg] emperors, and not of the Muscovite tsars?[747] These
comparatively weak, exotic rulers, to whom the world outside their immediate
dominions related in approximately the way that, in later times, they related
to the Neguses and Negestas of Abyssinia, could not be the restrainers of the
world. Consequently Peter was simultaneously both the Antichrist and the
Restrainer from the Antichrist. But if that is the case, then the whole
exceptional nature of Peter’s spiritual standing disappears, because Christ and
Antichrist, God and the devil fight with each other in every human soul, for
every human soul, and in this case Peter turned out to be only more gifted than
the ordinary man, a historical personality who was both good and evil, but
always powerful, elementally strong. Both the enemies and the friends of Peter
will agree with this characterisation…”[748]
So Peter was not the Antichrist. He did great harm to the Church, but he
also effectively defended her against her external enemies, and supported her
missionary work in Siberia and the East. And he sincerely believed himself to
be, as he once wrote to the Eastern patriarchs, ‘a devoted son of our Most
Beloved Mother the Orthodox Church’.”[749]
Did Peter repent of his anti-Church acts? It is impossible to say. All
we know is that, as Ivanov writes, “from January 23 to 28 he confessed and
received communion three times; while receiving holy unction, he displayed
great compunction of soul and several times repeated: ‘I believe, I hope!’…”[750]
This gives us, too, reason to hope and believe in his salvation. For from that
eternal world his old friend and foe, St. Metrophanes, once appeared to one of
his venerators and said: “If you want to be pleasing to me, pray for the peace
of the soul of the Emperor Peter the Great...”[751]
The Ottoman-Habsburg war of 1683-1699, which almost led to the fall of
Vienna, caused much suffering to the Serbian Orthodox Christians. In the course
of it there took place a great emigration of Serbs into the Habsburg empire in
order to escape the marauding Turks.
In 1690, writes Noel Malcolm, the Austrian Emperor Leopold I issued to
the Serbian Patriarch Arsenius III “what some Serbian historians have
described, quite wrongly, as an ‘invitation’. The text was not inviting the
Patriarch to bring his people to Hungary; on the contrary, it was urging him
and his people to rise up against the Ottomans, so that Austrian rule could be
extended all the way to ‘Albania’. For that purpose, it guaranteed (as Marsigli
had suggested) that Habsburg dominion over their territory would not infringe
their religious freedom or their right to elect their own vojvods. The original
manuscript of this document was endorsed: ‘An exhortation to the Patriarch of the
Rascians, to rouse his people to rebel against the Turks’; and a key passage in
the text said: ‘Do not desert your hearths, or the cultivation of your fields.’
Some nineteenth-century historians of a romantic Serbian persuasion dealt with
this passage in a wonderfully economical way: instead of printing the correct
text, which says non deserite (do not desert), they simply omitted the ‘non’.
“In the summer of 1690, however, all such plans for reconquest were
abandoned. The Ottomans, under their competent Grand Vizier, had built up their
forces, and the military tide had definitely turned. A massive Ottoman army
advanced on Niš and besieged it; it surrendered on 6 September. The
Imperial garrison was allowed to leave, but a large number of ‘Rascian’
soldiers (400 in one account, 4000 in another) were taken out and killed. In
the last week of September, Belgrade was under siege; it held out for just
twelve days, before an Ottoman shell hit the fort’s main powder-store on the
night of 8 October, blowing the whole citadel to smithereens.
“By September Belgrade had become the natural destination of a large
number of refugees. One modern historian estimates that there were 40,000
there; many of these would have come from the Niš region, and the region
between Niš and Belgrade – areas which had been under Austrian
administration for a whole year. But among them also would have been some of
the peole who had fled from the Prishtina-Trepça-Vuçit¸rn area of
Kosovo. Their Patriarch had reached Belgrade much earlier in the year. In June
he had gathered a large assembly of Serbian religious and secular leaders
there, to discuss further negotiations with the Emperor over the question of
religious autonomy in the areas still under Austrian control…
“How – and exactly when – the Serb refugees escaped into Hungary is not
clear… The conditions most of them had to live in, as they camped out in the
central Hungarian region in the winter, were atrocious. Before the end of the
year Patriarch Arsenije sent a petition to the Emperor Leopold begging for
assistance for these people; he also gave an explicit estimate of their
numbers.’There have come to Esztergom, Komárom and Buda men with their
wives and children, completely destitute and bare, coming to a total of more
than 30,000 souls.’ Much later, in 1706, Arsenije made another estimate in a
letter to Leopold’s successor: he said he had come to Hungary with ‘more than
40,000 souls’.”[752]
Arsenije created a metropolitanate at Karlovtsy, while a new Patriarch
was appointed at Peč. There were now three Serbian Churches: the
Patriarchate at Peč under the Turks, the metropolitanate at Karlovtsy
under the Austrians, and a small independent Church in Montenegro which escaped
the dominion of both great powers…
In the eighteenth century, the Orthodox Christians of the Balkans lived
either in the Turkish empire or in the Catholic empire of Austro-Hungary. It
was hard to know which was the more difficult master. The Turks kept their
Christian subjects in poverty and ignorance, but did not, in general, compel
them to renounce their religion. The Austrians were more “enlightened”, but at
the same time a greater threat to the faith of their subjects.
There were also many Romanian Orthodox living in the lands of the Austro-Hungarian
Empire. During the reign of Empress Maria Theresa (1741-1780), the Orthodox of
Transylvania and the Banat suffered great persecution from the Hungarian
Catholics. Among those martyred for the faith then were SS. Bessarion,
Sophronius and Oprea, and the Priests Moses and John.[753]
Fearing papist influence, the great monastic founder Paisius Velichkovsky moved
his monks further west, into Turkish-controlled Moldavia.
This persecution coincided with a Catholic onslaught in other parts of
the Orthodox world. Thus Timothy Ware (Bishop Kallistos of Diocleia) writes:
“In 1724 a large part of the Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch submitted to
Rome; after this the Orthodox authorities, fearing that the same thing might
happen elsewhere in the Turkish Empire, were far stricter in their dealings
with Roman Catholics. The climax in anti-Roman feeling came in 1755, when the
Patriarchs of Constantinople, Alexandria, and Jerusalem declared Latin baptism
to be entirely invalid and demanded that all converts to Orthodoxy be baptized
anew. ‘The baptisms of heretics are to be rejected and abhorred,’ the decree
stated; they are ‘waters which cannot profit… nor give any sanctification to
such as receive them, nor avail at all to the washing away of sins’.”[754]
However, towards the end of the century the
Austrian Emperor Joseph II introduced a certain measure of religious freedom:
“Serfs were emancipated. Religious toleration was extended to Uniates,
Orthodox, Protestants and Jews. Children under nine were forbidden to work.
Civil marriage and divorce were permitted. Capital punishment was abolished.
Freemasonry flourished. Wealth which derived from the secularization of
ecclesiastical property was reflected in a spate of imperial and aristocratic
architectural extravagance.”[755]
However, other
measures introduced by Joseph II caused great harm to the Orthodox. Thus in the
Life of the Serbian Martyr Theodore Sladich we read: “In the late
eighteenth century, many confused Serbs who had grown weary under the Turkish
yoke and who wanted nothing of the Roman heresy, decided to turn to the ‘new’
ideas of the Enlightenment which came first to Voyvodina from Western Europe
via Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, and other European university centers. One of
these ideas was the reduction of the number of holy days celebrated, in order
to facilitate new economic plans and conditions. Some one hundred holy days
were to be erased from the liturgical calendar. Also, under the Turkish system,
Serbian clerical education was rather limited. Emperor Joseph II (1780-1790),
‘the enlightened despot’ in Vienna, with the blessing of Metropolitan Moses
Putnik (1781-1790) in Srenski Karlovci (Lower Karlovac), advocated the closing
of a number of monasteries in order to generate revenue to build various
educational institutions. One supporter of this idea was the famous Serbian man
of the Age of Reason, Dositheus Obradovich (1739-1811). Beginning as a monk in
the Monastery of New Hopovo, he then left for Western Europe, returning to
Vojvodina and later to Serbia as a humanist philosopher, a fierce critic of
Church practices, and as Serbia’s first Minister of Education! In the end, this
opting for the rationalism of the so-called Western European Enlightenment
created within the pious Serbian peasantry a tremendous distrust of Church
leadership, an abiding disdain for Church life and practices, and a
many-faceted regression which was to last well into the nineteenth century.
“With all this
in mind, it can now be easily ascertained why pious Serbs everywhere especially
venerate St. Theodore Sladich. Quite often in his lifetime he was approached by
both propagandists of the Latin Unia and by Serbian converts to Western
rationalism who wanted him to leave the Church and embrace ‘modernistic’ ways
of thought and living. Theodore was an ardent Orthodox and, due to his love for
liturgical ritual and the vision of the doctrines of the Church, he became an
outspoken proponent against the Latin Unia and the rationalistic innovations of
Western Europe… In regard to rationalism and so-called ‘modern’ education,
Theodore responded by explaining that the source of every true knowledge flowed
from the Church – that all worldly knowledge can never replace that which a
true Christian receives in church, God Himself educates the believer wholly: by
acting upon his sight, hearing, smelling, feeling, taste, imagination, mind,
and will, by the splendor of the images and of the building in general, by the
fragrance of the incense, by the veneration of the Gospels, Cross and icons, by
the singing and by the reading of the Scriptures. And most importantly, as
Theodore once said: ‘In no way can secular education bring about the greatest
mystery offered by the Church: the cleansing from sins’.”[756]
The German
Persecution of Orthodoxy
Before his death Peter had instituted a new method of determining the
succession to the throne. Abolishing primogeniture, which he called “a bad
custom”, he decreed “that it should always be in the will of the ruling
sovereign to give the inheritance to whomever he wishes”.[757]
The result was a woman on the throne, his (unlawful) wife Catherine I. “That,”
writes Lebedev, “had never happened before in Great Russia. Moreover,
she was not of the royal family, which nobody in Russia could ever have
imagined up to that time.”[758]
This retrograde step led to a situation in which, in sharp contrast to
the relative stability of succession under the Muscovite tsars, every single
change of monarch from the death of Peter I in 1725 to the assassination of
Paul I in 1801 was a violent coup d’état involving the
intervention of the Guards regiments and their aristocratic
protégés. The result was perhaps the lowest nadir of Russian
statehood, when the state was governed by children or women under the control
of a Masonic aristocratic élite whose own support did not rest on the
people but on the army. This showed that the tsars, far from strengthening
their power-base by the suppression of the Church, had actually weakened it.
Moreover, not only was the nationality of the Emperors and Empresses mainly
German, but the whole culture of their court was predominantly Franco-German,
and most education in ecclesiastical schools was conducted in Latin.
Not only was a foreign culture imposed on the native one: for a short
time the Russian Autocracy could even be said to have been abolished. For when
Anna Ioannovna came to the throne in 1730, it was under certain conditions,
which obliged her “in everything to follow the decisions of the Supreme Secret
Council, not to marry, not to appoint an Heir, and in general to decide
practically nothing on her own. In essence the ‘superiors’ thereby abolished
the Autocracy!”[759]
No sooner was Peter dead than thoughts about the restoration of the
patriarchate re-surfaced. “The very fact of his premature death,” writes
Zyzykin, “was seen as the punishment of God for his assumption of
ecclesiastical power. ‘There you are,’ said Archbishop Theodosius of Novgorod
in the Synod, ‘he had only to touch spiritual matters and possessions and God
took him.’ From the incautious words of Archbishop Theodosius, Theophanes
[Prokopovich] made a case for his having created a rebellion, and he was
arrested on April 27 [1725], condemned on September 11, 1725 and died in 1726.
Archbishop Theophylactus of Tver was also imprisoned in 1736 on a charge of
wanting to become Patriarch. On December 31, 1740 he again received the
insignia of hierarchical rank and died on May 6, 1741. For propagandising the
idea of the patriarchate Archimandrite Marcellus Rodyshevsky was imprisoned in
1732, was later forgiven, and died as a Bishop in 1742.[760] Also
among the opponents of Peter’s Church reform was Bishop George Dashkov of
Rostov, who was put forward in the time of Peter I as a candidate for
Patriarch… After the death of Peter, in 1726, he was made the third hierarch in
the Synod by Catherine I. On July 21, 1730, by a decree of the Empress Anna,
he, together with Theophylactus, was removed from the Synod, and on November 19
of the same year, by an order of the Empress Anna he was imprisoned, and in
February, 1731 took the schema. He was imprisoned in the Spasokamenny monastery
on an island in Kubensk lake, and in 1734 was sent to Nerchinsk monastery – it
was forbidden to receive any declaration whatsoever from him… Thus concerning
the time of the Empress Anna a historian writes what is easy for us to imagine
since Soviet power, but was difficult for a historian living in the 19th
century: ‘Even from a distance of one and a half centuries, it is terrible to
imagine that awful, black and heavy time with its interrogations and
confrontations, with their iron chains and tortures. A man has committed no
crime, but suddenly he is seized, shackled and taken to St. Petersburg or
Moscow - he knows not where, or what for. A year or two before he had spoken
with some suspicious person. What they were talking about – that was the reason
for all those alarms, horrors and tortures. Without the least exaggeration we
can say about that time that on lying down to sleep at night you could not
vouch for yourself that by the morning that you would not be in chains, and
that from the morning to the night you would not land up in a fortress,
although you would not be conscious of any guilt. The guilt of all these clergy
consisted only in their desire to restore the canonical form of administration
of the Russian Church and their non-approval of Peter’s Church reform, which
did not correspond to the views of the people brought up in Orthodoxy.’[761]
“But even under Anna the thought of the patriarchate did not go away,
and its supporters put forward Archimandrite Barlaam, the empress’ spiritual
father, for the position of Patriarch. We shall not name the many others who
suffered from the lower ranks; we shall only say that the main persecutions
dated to the time of the Empress Anna, when the impulse given by Peter to
Church reform produced its natural result, the direct persecution of Orthodoxy.
But after the death of Theophanes in 1736 Bishop Ambrose Yushkevich of Vologda,
a defender of the patriarchate and of the views of Marcellus Rodyshevsky,
became the first member of the Synod. With the enthronement of Elizabeth he
greeted Russia on her deliverance from her internal hidden enemies who were
destroying Orthodoxy. Chistovich writes: ‘The Synod remembered its sufferers
under Elizabeth; a true resurrection from the dead took place. Hundreds,
thousands of people who had disappeared without trace and had been taken for
dead came to life again. After the death of the Empress Anna the released
sufferers dragged themselves back to their homeland, or the places of their
former service, from all the distant corners of Siberia – some with torn out
nostrils, others with their tongue cut out, others with legs worn through by
chains, others with broken spines or arms disfigured from tortures.’ The Church
preachers under Elizabeth attributed this to the hatred for the Russian faith
and the Russian people of Biron, Osterman, Minikh, Levenvold and other Lutheran
Germans who tried to destroy the very root of eastern piety. They were of this
opinion because most of all there suffered the clergy – hierarchs, priests and
monks…”[762]
"In Biron's time,” writes Andrew Bessmertny, “hundreds of clergy
were tonsured, whipped and exiled, and they did the same with protesting
bishops - and there were quite a few of those. 6557 priests were forced into
military service, as a consequence of which in only four northern dioceses 182
churches remained without clergy or readers." [763]
“This is what happened in Russia,” writes Zyzykin, “when the State
secularisation which had begun under Alexis Mikhailovich led to the dominion of
the State over the Church, while the authority in the State itself was in the
hands of genuine Protestants, who did not occupy secondary posts, as under
Peter, but were in leading posts, as under the Empress Anna. The ideology of
royal power laid down under Peter remained throughout the period of the
Emperors; the position of the Church in the State changed in various reigns,
but always under the influence of those ideas which the secular power itself
accepted; it was not defined by the always unchanging teaching of the Orthodox
Church”[764]
– the symphony of powers.
How did the hierarchs themselves remember Biron’s time? Bishop Ambrose
wrote: “They attacked our Orthodox piety and faith, but in such a way and under
such a pretext that they seemed to be rooting out some unneeded and harmful
superstition in Christianity. O how many clergymen and an even greater number
of learned monks were defrocked, tortured and exterminated under that pretense!
Why? No answer is heard except: he is a superstitious person, a bigot, a
hypocrite, a person unfit for anything. These things were done cunningly and
purposefully, so as to extirpate the Orthodox priesthood and replace it with a
newly conceived priestlessness [bezpopovshchina]…
“Our domestic enemies devised a strategem to undermine the Orthodox
faith; they consigned to oblivion religious books already prepared for
publication [like Stefan Yavorsky’s Rock of Faith]; and they forbade
others to be written under penalty of death. They seized not only the teachers,
but also their lessons and books, fettered them, and locked them in prison.
Things reached such a point that in this Orthodox state to open one’s mouth
about religion was dangerous: one could depend on immediate trouble and
persecution.”[765]
Biron’s was a time, recalled Metropolitan Demetrius (Sechenov) of
Novgorod in his sermon on the feast of the Annunciation, 1742, “when our
enemies so raised their heads that they dared to defile the dogma of the holy
faith, the Christian dogmas, on which eternal salvation depends. They did not
call on the aid of the intercessor of our salvation, nor beseech her defence;
they did not venerate the saints of God; they did not bow to the holy icons;
they mocked the sign of the holy cross; they rejected the traditions of the
apostles and holy fathers; they cast out good works, which attract eternal
reward; they ate eat during the holy fasts, and did not want even to hear about
mortifying the flesh; they laughed at the commemoration of the reposed; they
did not believe in the existence of gehenna.”[766]
“This great
destructive work,” comments Ivanov, “ was carried out by the leading people in
the country – Prokopovich, Tatishchev and Kantemir…
“There is no
direct historical data to answer the question whether Theophanes [Prokopovich],
Kantemir and Tatishchev formally belong to Masonry, that is, were members of
Masonic lodges. But this has no significance, for they were all undoubtedly in
the power of the destructive ideas of Masonry.
“There is no
doubt that during the reign of Anna Ioannovna Masonry pushed down deep roots in
Russia.
“In 1731 John
Philipps was appointed great provincial master for Russia. After him there
appears the notable James Cate.
“’Cate,’ writes
Vernadsky, ‘was the representative of a family that united through its activity
three countries – Russia, Scotland and Prussia. James Cate himself fled from
England, and after the unsuccessful outcome of the Jacobite rebellion (in which
Cate himself took part on the side of the Stuart pretender) in 1728 he became a
Russian general. In about 1747 he moved to the service of Prussia; he then took
part in the seven-year war on the side of Prussia and in 1758 was killed in the
battle of Gochrichen.
“’His brother
John Cate (Lord Kintor) was the grand master of English Masonry; George Cate
was the well-known general of Frederick II (and sentenced to death in England
for helping the same Stuart). Finally, there was also a Robert Cate who was
English ambassador in St. Petersburg (a little later, from 1758 to 1762).’
“… The name of
James Cate was greatly respected by Russian Masons… This father and benefactor
of the Russian Masons was none other than the spy and emissary of Frederick II,
an ardent Mason, called Great for his hatred for Christianity.
“’In Germany
itself,’ writes Pypin, ‘Masonry had already acquired very many followers by
1730, and there are reasons to believe that during the time of Anna and Biron
the Germans had Masonic lodges in St. Petersburg. Concerning Cate himself there
is evidence that he had some kind of contacts with the German lodges even
before he became grand master in Russia.’
“… Foreigners were
in charge of all the affairs of the Empire. The ruler of the state was a
foreigner, the first cabinet minister was a foreigner, two army field-marshals
were foreigners. All the more or less significant posts in the army and
administration were occupied by foreigners. Prominent Russian nobles, on the
other hand, were in disgrace and exile.
“The discontent was general. But, suppressed by fear and terror, the
Russians could only express their sorrow at their insults and injury to
themselves…”[767]
By the mercy of
God, the Empress Anna died, and although Biron was appointed regent the next
day, the Germans fell out amongst themselves. So in 1741, after the brief reign
of Ivan VI, the daughter of Peter the Great, Elizabeth, who was both Russian
and truly Orthodox, came to the throne. The Orthodox bishops returned from
prison and exile, and the country breathed a sigh of relief.
Very soon
Elizabeth restored to the Church some of its former privileges. Thus in 1742,
writes Rusak, “the initial judgement on clergy was presented to the Synod, even
with regard to political matters. The Synod was re-established in its former
dignity, as the highest ecclesiastical institution with the title ‘Ruling’.
“The members of the Synod (Archbishop Ambrose Yushkevich of Novgorod,
Metropolitan Arsenius Matseyevich of Rostov, both Ukrainians) gave a report to
the empress in which they wrote that if it was not pleasing to her to restore
the patriarchate, then let her at least give the Synod a president and body composed
only of hierarchs. In addition, they petitioned for the removal of the post of
over-procurator. The empress did not go to the lengths of such serious reforms,
but she did agree to return to the clergy its property and submit the College
of Economics to the Synod.”[768]
However, writes Nikolin, “there was a significant rise in the
significance of the over-procurator, whose post was re-established (during the
reign of Anna Ivanovna it had been suspended). Prince Ya.P. Shakhovskoj, who
was appointed to the post, was given the right to give daily personal reports
to the empress, who entrusted him personally with receiving from her all the
ukazes and oral directives for the Synodal administration. Thereby, however,
there arose a very ambiguous state of affairs. On the one hand, the Synod’s
affairs were being reported directly to the supreme power, but on the other the
idea of the State’s interest, and its priority over the ecclesiastical
interest, was being constantly emphasised. The strengthening of the over-procurator’s
power was aided by an ukaz of the empress introducing a new system of Church
administration in the dioceses – the consistories. In these institutions a
leading role was acquired by the secretaries, who were appointed by the
over-procurator, controlled by him and accountable to him. However, the
noticeable tendency evident in these years towards a strengthening of the
over-procurator’s executive power in the Church was restrained by the personal
goodwill of the empress towards the clergy.”[769]
“On Elizabeth’s
accession to the throne,” continues Ivanov, “a popular movement appeared,
directed against foreigners, which established itself in the two following
reigns. The lower classes were waiting for the expulsion of the foreigners from
Russia. But nothing, except some street brawls with foreigners, took place.
“A reaction
began against the domination of the foreigners who despised everything Russia,
together with a weak turn towards a national regime…
“During the 20
years of Elizabeth’s reign Russia relaxed after her former oppression, and the
Russian Church came to know peaceful days…
“The persecution
of the Orthodox Church begun under Peter I and continued under Anna Ivanovna
began to weaken somewhat, and the clergy raised their voices…
“Under Elizabeth
there began a raising to the hierarchical rank of Great Russian monks, while
earlier the hierarchs had been mainly appointed from the Little Russians…
“Under Elizabeth
the Protestants who remained at court did not begin to speak against Orthodoxy,
whereas in the reign of Anna Ivanovna they had openly persecuted it.
Nevertheless, Protestantism as a weapon of the Masons in their struggle with
Orthodoxy had acquired a sufficiently strong position in the previous reigns.
The soil had been prepared, the minds of society were inclined to accept the
Freemasons.
“’In the reign of Elizabeth German influence began to be replaced by
French,” an investigator of this question tells us. ‘At this time the West
European intelligentsia was beginning to be interested in so-called French
philosophy; even governments were beginning to be ruled by its ideas… In
Russia, as in Western Europe, a fashion for this philosophy appeared. In the
reign of Elizabeth Petrovna a whole generation of its venerators was already
being reared. They included such highly placed people as Count M. Vorontsov and
Shuvalov, Princess Dashkova and the wife of the heir to the throne, Catherine
Alexeyevna. But neither Elizabeth nor Peter III sympathised with it.
“Individual Masons from Peter’s time were organising themselves. Masonry
was developing strongly…”[770]
Nevertheless,
“in society people began to be suspicious of Masonry. Masons in society
acquired the reputation of being heretics and apostates… Most of Elizabethan
society considered Masonry to be an atheistic and criminal matter…
“The Orthodox clergy had also been hostile to Masonry for a long time
already. Preachers at the court began to reprove ‘animal-like and godless
atheists’ and people ‘of Epicurean and Freemasonic morals and mentality’ in
their sermons. The sermons of Gideon Antonsky, Cyril Florinsky, Arsenius
Matseyevich, Cyril Lyashevetsky, Gideon Krinovsky and others reflected the
struggle that was taking place between the defenders of Orthodoxy and their
enemies, the Masons.”[771]
It was in Elizabeth’s reign that the Secret Chancellery made an inquiry
into the nature and membership of the Masonic lodges. The inquiry found that
Masonry was defined by its members as “nothing else than the key of friendship
and eternal brotherhood”. It was found not to be dangerous and was allowed to
continued, “although under police protection”.[772]
Masonry was
particularly strong in the university and among the cadets. “The cadet corps
was the laboratory of the future revolution. From the cadet corps there came
the representatives of Russian progressive literature, which was penetrated
with Masonic ideals….
“Towards the end
of the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna Masonry openly revealed its real nature. At
this time a bitter struggle was developing in the West between Austria and
Prussia for the Austrian succession. In 1756 there began the Seven-Year war, in
which Russia took an active part.
“The Mason
Frederick II was again striving to subject Russia to his influence.
“This aim was to be attained completely by
means of the defeat of the Russian army and her capitulation before the
‘genius’ commander.
“And one has to
say that everything promised victory for Frederick II over the Russian army.
“He had a very
well trained, armed and provisioned army with talented officers.
“Frederick was undoubtedly helped by the Masons – Germans who had taken
high administrative and military posts in Russia.
“The noted James
Cate, the great provincial master for the whole of Russia, was a field-marshal
of the Russian army, but in fact carried out the role of Frederick’s spy; in
1747 he fled [Russia] to serve him and was killed in battle for his adored and
lofty brother.
“In general the
Russian army was teeming with Prussian spies and Russian Mason-traitors.
“The Russian army was deliberately not prepared…
“And at the head
of the Russian army the Masons placed Apraxin, who gave no orders, displayed an
unforgivable slowness and finally entered upon the path of open betrayal.
“The victory at
Gross-Egersford was won exclusively thanks to the courage and bravery of the
Russian soldiers, and was not used as it should have been by the Russian
commander-in-chief. Apraxin had every opportunity to cross conquered Prussia,
extend a hand to the Swedes in Pomerania and appear before the walls of Berlin.
But instead of moving forward he stopped at Tilsit and refused to use the
position that was favourable for the Russian army… Apraxin was only fulfilling
his duty of a Mason, which obliged him to deliver his lofty brother, Frederick
II, from his woes…
“But this was
not the only help extended to Prussia by the Russian Masons. In 1758, instead
of Apraxin, who was placed on trial, Fermor was appointed as
commander-in-chief. He was an active Mason and a supporter of Frederick II.
Fermor acted just like Apraxin. He displayed stunning inactivity and slowness.
At the battle of Tsorndof the commander-in-chief Fermor hid from the field of
battle. Deserted and betrayed by their commander-in-chief the Russian army did
not panic…
“With the
greatest equanimity the soldiers did not think of fleeing or surrendering…
“Frederick II
had everything on his side: complete gun crews, discipline, superior weapons,
the treachery of the Russian commander-in-chief. But he did not have enough
faith and honour, which constituted the strength and glory of the Christ-loving
Russian Army.
“The help of the
dark powers was again required: and the Russian Masons for the third time gave
help to Frederick II.
“At first it was
suggested that Fermor be replaced by Buturlin, whom Esterhazy quite justly
called ‘an idiot’, but when this did not happen, they appointed Peter Saltykov
to the post of commander-in-chief. The soldiers called him ‘moor-hen’ and
openly accused him of treachery. At Könersdorf the Russian commanders
displayed complete incompetence. The left wing of the Russian army under the
command of Golitsyn was crushed. At two o’clock Frederick was the master of
Mulberg, one of the three heights where Saltykov had dug in. By three o’clock
the victory was Frederick’s. And once again the situation was saved by the
Russian soldiers. The king led his army onto the attack three times, and three
times he retreated, ravaged by the Russian batteries. ‘Scoundrels’, ‘swine’,
‘rascals’ was what Frederick called his soldiers, unable to conquer the Russian
soldiers who died kissing their weapons.
“’One can overcome all of them (the Russian
soldiers) to the last man, but not conquer them,’ Frederick II had to admit
after his defeat.
“The victory
remained with the Russian soldiers, strong in the Orthodox faith and devotion
to the autocracy….
“The unexpected death of Elizabeth Petrovna on December 24, 1761 at the
height of her powers and health saved Frederick II from inevitable ruin.”[773]
Unfortunately,
it also brought to an end the recovery of Orthodoxy that had taken place under
Elizabeth…
Catherine II
Elizabeth’s successor, Peter III, brought the war to an end and on
February 18, 1762 issued a manifesto giving freedom from obligatory state
service to the nobility. Although this was, not unnaturally, applauded by the
nobles, within a few months, on June 28, 1762, they staged a coup which led to
the death of the Tsar, who, although he was also probably a Mason, was only
“superficially” so according to Ivanov.[774] His
wife, Catherine, a German, appears to have cooperated with the coup that
brought her to the throne, a coup that was organised by the Masons Panin and
Gregory Orlov…[775]
Catherine’s accession to the throne was doubly illegal. Not only in that
it took place over the dead body of her husband, but also in that the
legitimate successor was her son, the future Tsar Paul I. What we may call the
German persecution of Orthodoxy resumed…
Catherine’s first act was to reward her co-conspirators handsomely with
money and serfs. This pattern of reward became the rule during the reign and
grew in scale as the number of those who needed to be rewarded (mainly her
lovers) increased, as well as the numbers of serfs “on the market” through the
conquest of new territories and the expropriation of church lands. Thus she
took away about a million peasants from the Church, while giving about a
million previously free (state) peasants into the personal possession of the
nobility.[776]
Thus in the
course of the eighteenth century, and especially during Catherine’s reign, the
nobility recovered the dominant position they had lost under the Ivan the
Terrible and the seventeenth-century Tsars. With this dominance of the nobility
came the dominance of westernism in all its forms. As Pipes writes: “It has
been said that under Peter [I] Russia learned western techniques, under Elizabeth
western manners, and under Catherine western morals. Westernization certainly
made giant progress in the eighteenth century; what had begun as mere aping of
the west by the court and its élite developed into close identification
with the very spirit of western culture. With the advance of westernization it
became embarrassing for the state and the dvorianstvo [nobility and
civil servants] to maintain the old service structure. The dvorianstvo wished
to emulate the western aristocracy, to enjoy its status and rights; and the
Russian monarchy, eager to find itself in the forefront of European
enlightenment, was, up to a point, cooperative.
“In the course of the eighteenth century a consensus developed between
the crown and the dvorianstvo that the old system had outlived itself.
It is in this atmosphere that the social, economic and ideological props of the
patrimonial regime were removed….
“Dvoriane
serving in the military were the first to benefit from the general weakening of
the monarchy that occurred after Peter’s death. In 1730, provincial dvoriane
frustrated a move by several boyar families to impose constitutional
limitations on the newly elected Empress Anne. In appreciation, Anne steadily
eased the conditions of service which Peter had imposed on the dvorianstvo…
“These measures culminated in the Manifesto ‘Concerning the Granting of
Freedom and Liberty to the Entire Russian Dvorianstvo’, issued in 1762
by Peter III, which ‘for ever, for all future generations’ exempted Russian dvoriane
from state service in all its forms. The Manifesto further granted them the
right to obtain passports for travel abroad, even if their purpose was to
enroll in the service of foreign rulers – an unexpected restoration of the
ancient boyar right of ‘free departure’ abolished by Ivan III. Under Catherine
II, the Senate on at least three occasions confirmed this Manifesto,
concurrently extending to the dvorianstvo other rights and privileges
(e.g. the right, given in 1783, to maintain private printing presses). In 1785
Catherine issued a Charter of the Dvorianstvo which reconfirmed all the
liberties acquired by this estate since Peter’s death, and added some new ones.
The land which the dvoriane held was now recognized as their legal
property. They were exempt from corporal punishment. These rights made them –
on paper, at any rate – the equals of the upper classes in the most advanced
countries of the west.”[777]
“The nobles,” writes Sir Geoffrey Hosking, “thus possessed certain
secure rights, including that of private property in land. This was an
unprecedented situation in Russian society, and, in the absence of a similar
charter for peasants, it consolidated in practice their right to buy and sell
the serfs who occupied that land as if they too were private property.
“Catherine’s reforms thus took the first step towards creating a civil
society in Russia, but at the cost of deepening yet further the already
considerable juridical, political and cultural gap between the nobles and the
serfs among whom they lived. Serfs became mere chattels in the eyes of their
masters, objects which could be moved around or disposed of at will, as part of
a gambling debt, a marriage settlement or an economic improvement scheme. In
practice, they could normally be sold as commodities, without the land to which
they were theoretically attached, and without members of their own families.
“Lords had judicial and police powers over their serfs, as well as
economic ones, which meant that they could punish serfs in any way they saw
fit: they could flog them, send them to the army or exile them to Siberia.
Theoretically, they were not permitted to kill a serf, but if a harsh flogging
or other ill-treatment caused a serf’s death, there was very little his fellow peasants
could do about it. Not that the great majority of lords were remotely so brutal
or careless. But the mentality induced by this impunity nevertheless blunted
the lord’s sense of responsibility for the consequences of his own actions.”[778]
Catherine also gave the nobles the right to trade… and the right to
organize local associations which would elect local government officials. All
this would seem to indicate the influence on Catherine of her reading of
Montesquieu and Diderot. Thus Montesquieu had argued for the creation of
aristocratic “intermediate institutions” between the king and the people –
institutions such as the parlements and Estates General in France; he
believed that “no monarch, no nobility, no nobility, no monarch.”[779]
However, Montesquieu’s aim had been that these institutions and the nobility
should check the power of the king. Catherine, on the other hand, was
attempting to buttress her power by buying the support of the nobles.[780]
But if the
sovereign and the nobility were coming closer together, this only emphasized
the gulf between this westernized élite and the masses of the Russian
people. Even their concept of Russianness was different. As Hosking writes,
“the nobles’ Russianness was very different from that of the peasants, and for
that matter of the great majority of merchants and clergy. It was definitely an
imperial Russianness, centred on elite school, Guards regiment and imperial
court. Even their landed estates were islands of European culture in what they
themselves often regarded as an ocean of semi-barbarism. The Russianness of the
village was important to them, especially since it was bathed in childhood
memories, but they knew it was something different.”[781]
Above all, the Russianness of the nobles was different from that of the
peasants because the latter was based on Orthodoxy. But the nobles had
different ideals, those of the French Enlightenment. Even the sovereign, the
incarnation of Holy Russia, was becoming a bearer of the French ideals rather
than those of the mass of his people. Moreover, with the growth in the power of
the bureaucracy he was becoming increasingly isolated from ordinary people and
unable to hear their voice.
The Muscovite tsars had created a Chelobitnij Prikaz which
enabled the ordinary people to bring their complaints directly to the tsar.
Even Peter, who, as we have seen, created the beginnings of a powerful
bureaucracy, had retained sufficient control over the bureaucrats to ensure
that he was not cut off from the people and remained the real ruler of the
country. “But after his death, as L.A. Tikhomirov explained, “the supreme power
was cut off from the people, and at the same time was penetrated by a European
spirit of absolutism. This latter circumstance was aided by the fact that the
bearers of supreme power were themselves not of Russian origin during this
period, and the education of everyone in general was not Russian. [This]
imitation of administrative creativity continued throughout the eighteenth
century.”[782]
Catherine went even further than Peter I in expropriating ecclesiastical
and monastic lands. Already between 1762 and 1764 the number of monasteries was
reduced from 1072 to 452, and of monastics – from 12,444 to 5105! It goes
without saying, therefore, that Catherine was no fan of the traditionally
Orthodox “symphonic” model of Church-State relations. “[The Archbishop of Novgorod],” she wrote to
Voltaire, “is neither a persecutor nor a fanatic. He abhors the idea of the two
powers”.[783]
And in her correspondence with the Austrian Emperor Joseph II she called
herself head of the Greek Church.[784]
Under Peter, the election of bishops had been as follows: the Synod
presented two candidates for the episcopacy of a vacant see to the monarch, and
he chose one of them. The newly elected bishop then had to swear an oath that
included recognizing the monarch as “supreme Judge” of the Church.
Catherine did not change this arrangement; and she restricted the power
of the bishops still further in that out of fear of “fanaticism”, as Rusak
writes, “cases dealing with religious blasphemies, the violation of order in
Divine services, and magic and superstition were removed from the competence of
the spiritual court…”[785]
Catherine’s choice of over-procurators further fettered the expression
of a truly Orthodox spirit in the Church. “The first over-procurator in the
reign of Catherine II,” writes Rusak, “was Prince A. Kozlovsky, who was not
particularly distinguished in anything, but under whom the secularisation of the
Church lands took place.
“His two
successors, according to the definition of Kartashev, were ‘bearers of the most
modern, anti-clerical, enlightenment ideology’. In 1765 there followed the
appointment of I. Melissino as over-procurator. His world-view was very vividly
reflected in his ‘Points’ – a project for an order to the Synod. Among others
were the following points:
“3)… to weaken and shorten the fasts…
“5)… to purify
the Church from superstitions and ‘artificial’ miracles and superstitions
concerning relics and icons: for the study of this problem, to appoint a
special commission from various unblended-by-prejudices people;
“7) to remove
something from the long Church rites; so as to avoid pagan much speaking in
prayer, to remove the multitude of verses, canons, troparia, etc., that have
been composed in recent times, to remove many unnecessary feast days, and to
appoint short prayer-services with useful instructions to the people instead of
Vespers and All-Night Vigils…
“10)
to allow the clergy to wear more fitting clothing;
“11) would it
not be more rational completely to remove the habit of commemorating the dead
(such a habit only provides the clergy with an extra excuse for various kinds
of extortions)…
“In other points
married bishops, making divorces easier, etc., were suggested.
“As successor to
Melessino there was appointed Chebyshev, a Mason, who openly proclaimed his
atheism. He forbade the printing of works in which the existence of God was
demonstrated. ‘There is no God!’ he said aloud more than once. Besides, he was
suspected, and not without reason, of spending large sums of Synodal money.
“In 1774 he was
sacked. In his place there was appointed the pious S. Akchurin, then A. Naumov.
Both of them established good relations with the members of the Synod. The last
over-procurator in the reign of Catherine II was the active Count A.
Musin-Pushkin, the well-known archaeologist, a member of the Academy of
Sciences, who later revealed the “Word on Igor’s Regiment’. He took into his
hands the whole of the Synodal Chancellery. Being a Church person, he did not
hinder the members of the Synod from making personal reports to the empress and
receive orders directly from her.”[786]
The best hierarchs
of the time were inhibited from attending Synodal sessions by the impiety of
most of the over-procurators. Thus Metropolitan Platon of Moscow protested “on
seeing that the over-procurators in the Synod (Melessino and Chebyshev) were
penetrated with the spirit of freethinking, and that the opinions of the
members of the Synod were paralysed by the influence of the then all-powerful
in church matters spiritual father of the empress, Protopriest Ioann
Pamphilov”.[787]
With the
hierarchs in paralysis, it is not surprising that in the eighteenth century the
lower clergy were in a still more humiliating condition, and were even
subjected to physical violence by governors and landowners.
This continued
under Catherine, writes Dobroklonsky, “in spite of the fact that educated
society was in ferment with the humane ideas of French philosophy.
Unfortunately for the clergy, after the noblemen had been given their charter
of freedom (1785) liberating them from the obligation of military service, they
began to live more than before on their estates and therefore more often come
into conflict with the parish clergy. Moreover, under the influence of the
fashionable philosophy, they were imbued with contempt for the clergy as being
a supposedly ignorant class that supported the people’s superstitions. It is
not surprising that it then became common for the landowners to mock the
readers and insult the priests – it was even considered a sign of education; it
is not surprising that some of the clergy took part in the peasant disturbances
against the nobility. The government of Catherine II did nothing new, although
it promised much, to raise the civil rights of the clergy. This question was
discussed in detail at the deputies’ commission in 1767, and at that time while
some wanted to make the clergy equal to the nobility, others, on the contrary,
wanted to remove the privileges they had before and number them in the middle
class. The projected ulozhenie even had a chapter on the white clergy
recommending this, and it was only thanks to Metropolitan Gabriel of St.
Petersburg’s insistence that the clergy were placed in a priveleged position as
before.
“However, much
was done in the reign of Catherine II to raise the clergy’s position in the
sphere of ecclesiastical courts and administration. Formerly there had reigned
in that sphere the same crudity of manners, arbitrariness and despotism as in
the civil administration. Physical punishments…, imprisonment, placing in
chains and stocks, hard labour in the monastery, the bishop’s house or the
seminary, interrogations with the aid of torture – all this was the most common
phenomenon in episcopal administration. Neither rank nor sex liberated one from
physical punishment. Anyone could apply them who had any power over the clergy…
Moreover, the punishments were often carried out in public and were far from
corresponding, in their severity, to the importance of the misdeeds. Everything
depended on the arbitrary will of the authorities. It was in this way that the
threatening images of the hierarchs who terrified the clergy subject to them…
were worked out. All protests on the part of the clergy were useless, and so
they bore their burden in silence, the more so in that almost the whole of the
Church administration was in the hands of the monastic clergy. The government
of Catherine II condemned such practices. By a decree of 1766 it ordered all
punishments exacted in the spiritual administration to be conducted in a
moderate manner, taking human weaknesses into account. Then by its decrees of
1767, 1771 and 1772 it forbade the spiritual authorities from subjecting
priests and deacons to physical punishment so that through this they should not
lose fitting respect in society. However, in the civil courts physical punishments
of church-servers remained in place. To
limit arbitrary self-will the diocesan authorities were forbidden from
defrocking clergy without the permission of the Synod, and from using them on
works in the bishop’s houses; in the consistory it was ordered that
representatives of the while clergy should be appointed together with the
monastics. Finally, collections from the clergy going to the bishop’s purse
were removed; these had turned them into a taxable class before the diocesan
authorities. These measures significantly raised the formerly downtrodden
clergy. In many cases protests against the arbitrary wilfulness and cruelty of
the diocesan hierarchs began to appear. A powerful intercessor for the while
clergy was the empress’ spiritual father, Protopriest Ioann Pamphilov, who was
a very influential member of the Synod. Clergy who had been offended by the
diocesan authorities often appealed to him for help. The self-consciousness of
the white clergy developed to such a degree that some of them began to speak of
the possibility and fittingness of ordaining bishops from the while clergy
without their being tonsured (Protopriest Alekseev). Alongside all this there
went a rapid spreading of humane ideas in society. In the place of the old
types of threatening bishops, who had gone into their graves or been deprived
of their sees, there came representatives of humane principles who themselves
began to care for the softening of administrative practices. Gabriel Petrov,
metropolitan of St. Petersburg, Platon Levshin, metropolitan of Moscow, St.
Tikhon Sokolov, bishop of Voronezh, Parthenius Sopkovsky, bishop of Smolensk,
Simon Lagov, bishop of Kostroma and later Ryazan, and others. St. Tikhon
already in 1766 forbade his consistory from subjecting clergy to physical
punishments; he forced the members of the consistory to act as he himself
acted, with reverence towards the clergy; he defended them from grievances from
the secular authorities and strove to raise their social status through
education and an improvement of morals. Metropolitan Platon did everything he
could to develop a sense of personal dignity… in the white clergy; for this he
decreed that clerical superiors should treat their clerical juniors with
respect, and should observe gradualism when punishing the guilty, fitting the
punishment to the importance of the offence; he abolished humiliating
punishments such as lashing and left only the verdict, a fine, prostrations
and, in extreme cases, defrocking. In order to arouse a noble competitiveness
between clergy he himself strictly observed the degrees of honour between them,
distinguishing the learned from the unlearned, the fined from the not-fined,
etc. Finally, he tried to raise their social position through education and
through introducing them into a circle of noble people. Not in vain did he say
of himself that he found the clergy in bast shoes, but put them in boots and
introduced them into drawing-rooms.”[788]
“Under Catherine
II,” writes Lebedev, “the age-old Russian home and church schools for children
were forbidden as not being scientific and aiding superstition. The local
authorities were ordered ‘from the highest levels’ to introduce ‘correct’
schools with good teaching. But at that time for a series of reason they were
not able to do this, while the schools of the aold ‘amateur’ type disappeared
both in the cities and in the countryside. And it turned out that ‘the
enlightened age of Catherine’ laid a beginning to the wide spreading of illiteracy
and ignorance in the masses of the Great Russian people, both in the lower
classes of the city population and even more in the country. In the cities…
schools and gymnasia were built mainly for the higher classes. It was at that
time that lycea for men and the women’s Smolny institute appeared… There they
studied the secular sciences thoroughly, but it was necessary to teach
something spiritual there as well! The imperial power understood that it was
impossible not to teach religion. On the contrary, in the interests of the
authorities the Orthodox Faith and Church and Orthodox education were used as a
means to educating the ‘new breed’ of noble (above all noble) fathers and
mothers in the spirit of devotion to the authorities, a definite ‘morality’ and
the honourable fulfilment of duty. But in ‘society’ at that time the Law of God
was considered to be a purely ‘priestly’ subject. It was ordered that ‘children
should not be infected with superstition and fanaticism’, that is, they were
not to speak to them about the Old Testament punishments of God or about
miracles and the Terrible Judgement (!), but they were to instil in them
primarily ‘the rules of morality’, ‘natural (?!) religion and ‘the
importance of religious tolerance’. We shall see later what kind of ‘new breed’
of people were the product of this kind of ‘Law of God’…”[789]
Pugachev’s Rebellion
Few were those who, in this nadir of Russian statehood and spirituality,
had the courage to expose the vices of Russian society while proposing
solutions in the spirit of a truly Orthodox piety. One of the few, as we have
seen, was St. Tikhon, Bishop of Zadonsk. He both rebuked tsars and nobles for
their profligate lives and injustice to their serfs; and criticized the western
education they were giving their children: “God will not ask you whether you
taught your children French, German or Italian or the politics of society life
– but you will not escape Divine reprobation for not having instilled goodness
into them. I speak plainly but I tell the truth: if your children are bad, your
grandchildren will be worse… and the evil will thus increase… and the root of
all this is our thoroughly bad education…”[790]
Another
righteous one was Metropolitan Arsenius (Matseyevich) of Rostov, who rejected
Catherine’s expropriation of the monasteries in 1763-1764, saying that the
decline of monasticism in Russia might in the end lead “to atheism”. He also
refused to swear an oath of allegiance to her as head of the Church. For this
he was defrocked and exiled to the Therapontov monastery (where Patriarch Nicon
had once been kept). But since he continued to write letters against
secularisation, he was deprived of monasticism and under the name of “Andrew
the Liar” was incarcerated for life in the prison of the castle in Revel
(Tallinn). There he died in 1772, after accurately prophesying the fates of
those bishops who had acquiesced in his unjust sentence.[791]
Neither Saint Tikhon nor Metropolitan Arsenius counselled armed
rebellion against the State. However, some of the people, seeing the increasing
alienation of their sovereigns from traditional Orthodoxy, took action to
liberate, as they saw it, the Russian tsardom from foreign and heterodox
influence.
Thus the rebellion of Pugachev in 1774, while superficially a rebellion
for the sake of freedom, and the rights of Cossacks and other minorities, was
the very opposite of a democratic rebellion in the western style. For
Pugachev did not seek to destroy the institution of the tsardom: on the
contrary, he proclaimed himself to be Tsar Peter III, the husband of the
Empress Catherine. He was claiming to be the real Tsar, who would
restore the real Orthodox traditions of pre-Petrine Russia – by which he
meant Old Believerism.
As we have seen, a false legitimism,
as opposed to liberalism, was also characteristic of the popular
rebellions in the Time of Troubles. K.N. Leontiev considered it to be
characteristic also of Stenka Razin’s rebellion in 1671, and saw this
legitimism as another proof of how deeply the Great Russian people was
penetrated by the Byzantine spirit: “Even almost all our major rebellions have
never had a Protestant or liberal-democratic character, but have borne upon
themselves the idiosyncratic seal of false-legitimism, that is, of that native
and religious monarchist principle, which created the whole greatness of our
State.
“The rebellion of Stenka Razin failed
immediately people became convinced that the tsar did not agree with their
ataman. Moreover, Razin constantly tried to show that he was fighting, not
against royal blood, but only against the boyars and the clergy who agreed with
them.
“Pugachev was cleverer in fighting against the government of Catherine,
whose strength was incomparably greater than the strength of pre-Petrine Rus'.
He deceived the people, he used that legitimism of the Great Russian people of
which I have been speaking" [792]
“The slogan of Pugachev’s movement,” writes Ivanov, “was The Freedom
of the Orthodox Faith. In his manifestos Pugachev bestowed ‘the cross and
the beard’ on the Old Believers. He promised that in his new kingdom, after
Petersburg had been destroyed, everyone would ‘hold the old faith, the shaving
of beards will be strictly forbidden, as well as the wearing of German
clothes.’ The present churches, went the rumour, would be razed, seven-domed
ones would be built, the sign of the cross would be made, not with three
fingers, but with two. In Pugachev the people saw the longed-for lawful
tsar. It was in this that the power of
Pugachev’s movement consisted. There is no doubt that economic reasons played a
significant role in this movement. The dominance of foreigners and Russian
rubbish under Peter I and of the Masonic oligarchy under his successors had
created fertile soil for popular discontent. The Masonic oligarchy acted in its
own egoistic interests, despising the needs and interests of the people.”[793]
However, the Church and the great mass of the people still recognised
Catherine as the lawful anointed sovereign, and the hierarchs of the Church
publicly called on the people to reject the pretender. As a result, “it is not
surprising that Pugachev dealt cruelly with the clergy. From their midst he
created at this time no fewer than 237 martyrs for faithfulness to the throne.”[794]
There were weighty reasons for this. The eighteenth-century sovereigns
of Russia, while being despotic in their administration and non-Russian in
their culture, never formally renounced the Orthodox faith, and even defended
it at times. Thus “Peter I, who allowed himself a relaxed attitude towards the
institutions of the Church, and even clowning parodies of sacred actions,
nevertheless considered it necessary to restrain others. There was a case when
he beat Tatischev with a rod for having permitted himself some liberty in
relation to church traditions, adding: ‘Don’t lead believing souls astray,
don’t introduce free-thinking, which is harmful for the public well-being; I
did not teach you to be an enemy of society and the Church.’ On another
occasion he subjected Prince Khovansky and some youg princes and courtiers to
cruel physical punishments for having performed a blasphemous rite of burial on
a guest who was drunk to the point of unconsciousness and mocked church
vessels. While breaking the fast himself, Peter I, so as not to lead others
astray, asked for a dispensation for himself from the patriarch. Anna
Ioannovna, the former duchess of Courland, who was surrounded by Germans,
neverthless paid her dues of veneration for the institutions of the Orthodox
Church; every day she attended Divine services, zealously built and adorned
churches, and even went on pilgrimages. Elizabeth Petrovna was a model of
sincere pity: she gave generous alms for the upkeep of churches, the adornment
of icons and shrines both with money and with the work of her own hand: in her
beloved Alexandrovsk sloboda she was present at Divine services every day, rode
or went on foot on pilgrimages to monasteries, observed the fast in strict
abstinence and withdrawal, even renouncing official audiences. There is a
tradition that before her death she had the intention of becoming tonsured as a
nun. Even Catherine II, in spite of the fact that she was a fan of the
fashionable French philosophy, considered it necessary to carry out the demands
of piety: on feastdays she was without fail present at Divine services; she
venerated the clergy and kissed the hands of priests…”[795]
Moreover, the eighteenth-century sovereigns undoubtedly served the ends
of Divine Providence in other important ways. Thus it was under Peter I, and
with his active support, that the Russian Spiritual Mission in Beijing was
established.[796]
Again, it was towards the end of the eighteenth century that the Russian
mission to Alaska began. Moreover, it was under Catherine especially that the
age-old persecutor of Russian Orthodoxy, Poland, was humbled, literally
disappearing from the map of Europe (see below), while Ottoman Turkey was
driven from the north shore of the Black Sea, thus enabling the fertile lands
of southern Russia to be colonised and exploited.
These important military triumphs, which were essential for the survival
of the Orthodox Empire into the next century (although they created their own
problems, as we shall see), would have been impossible, given Russia’s lack of
economic development, without a very authoritarian power at the helm. Moreover,
it must be remembered that at this low point in Russia’s spiritual progress, a
rigid straitjacket may well have been necessary. Thus with regard to religion,
as the historian Mikhail Pogodin once commented, “if the ban on apostasy had
been lifted, half the Russian peasants would have joined the raskol [Old
Believers], while half the aristocrats would have converted to Catholicism.”[797]
Although this is clearly an exaggeration, it nevertheless contains this
kernel of truth: that the greater initiative and responsibility given to the
Church and people in a true Orthodox autocracy would have been too great a
burden for the Russian Church and people to sustain at this time. They were
simply not prepared for it. Sometimes the body needs to regain its strength
before the soul can begin the process of regeneration. A broken limb needs to
be strapped in a rigid encasement of plaster of Paris until the break has
healed, the plaster can be removed and the restored limb is strong enough to
step out without any support. In the same say, the straitjacket of
"Orthodox absolutism”, contrary to the Orthodox ideal though it was, was
perhaps necessary until the double fracture in Russian society caused by
westernism and the Old Believer schism could be healed…
Poland: Nation
without a State
Even after the union of the Eastern Ukraine with Russian in 1686, very
extensive Russian lands still remained under Polish control. However, in 1717,
as a result of civil war between King Augustus II and his nobles, Poland fell
under the effective control of Russia. And so Poland’s domination of the South
Russian lands from the fourteenth century onwards now began to be reversed…
“By acting as mediator,” writes Norman Davies, “Peter the Great could
save the Polish nobles from their Saxon king while imposing conditions that
would reduce the Republic to dependence.” Among the resolutions passed at the
“Silent Sejm[the Polish parliament]” was the upholding of the “golden liberties”
of the nobles, whereby the central government could be paralysed by the liberum
veto of even a single delegate to the Sejm – one of the most perverse
constitutional provisions in the history of European statehood, and an enduring
monument to the folly of excessive freedom.
“Under August III,” continues Davies, “the central government collapsed
completely. The King had to be installed by a Russian army which had overturned
the re-election of Stanslaw Leszcynski, thereby sparking off the War of the Polish
Succession… The Sejm was regularly summoned, but regularly blocked by the liberum
veto before it could meet. Only one session in 30 years was able to pass
legislation… Government was left to the magnates and to the provincial
dietines. The Republic had no diplomacy, no treasury, no defence. It could
enact no reforms. It was the butt of the philosophes. When the first
edition of the French Encyclopédie was published in 1751, the
prominent article on ‘Anarchie’ was all about Poland.
“The reforming party fled abroad…. Stanislaw Leszczynski, twice elected
king and twice driven out by the Russians, took refuge in France. Having
married his daughter to Louis XV he was given the Duchy of Lorraine where, at
Nancy, as le bon roi Stanislas he could practise the enlightened
government forbidden at home.
“Stanislaw August Poniatowski (r. 1764-95), the last King of Poland, was
a tragic and in some ways a noble figure. One of Catherine the Great’s earlier
lovers, he was put in place with the impossible task of reforming the Republic
whilst preserving the Russian supremacy. As it was, shackled by the
constitution of 1717, he provoked the very convulsions which reform was
supposed to avoid. How could one curtail the nobles’ sacred right of resistance
without some nobles’ resisting? How could one limit the Russians’ right of
intervention without the Russians intervening? How could one abolish the liberum
veto without someone exercising the liberum veto? The King tried to
break the vicious circle on three occasions; and on three occasions he failed.
One each occasion a Russian army arrived to restore order, and one each
occasion the Republic was punished with partition… In 1794-5 the King’s
adherence to the national rising of Tadeusz Kosciuszko led to the final denouement.
After the Third Partition, there was no Republic left over which to reign.
Poniatowski abdicated on St. Catherine’s Day 1795, and died in Russian exile.”[798]
The constitutional weakness of Poland was compounded by her
revolutionary fervour. Thus the Confederation of Bar (1768-1772) was perhaps
the earliest harbinger of the revolutionary turmoil that was to sweep the whole
of Europe, containing within itself the seeds of the libertarian, nationalist
and romantic ideas that were not to become commonplace until fifty years later.
It based itself, writes Adam Zamoyski, “on an imagined ideal past, when
the Poles were supposedly all brave and uncorrupted Sarmatians. Nostalgia for
lost virtues fused with opposition to the king’s attempts to modernize the
country; the defence of noble privilege was confused with republican mythology;
Catholic devotionalism mixed up with tribal instincts. With its luridly
expressed rejection of the alleged corruption of the Warsaw court, the movement
set itself up as the defender of the nation’s honour, its morals, its very
soul. Its first marshal, Jozef Pulaski, set the tone in a speech at Bar on 30
June 1768. ‘We are to die so that the motherland may live; for while we live
the motherland is dying,’ he began, and carried on in much the same
pathological vein. This was something more than the accepted notion of ‘dulce
et decorum est pro patria mori’; it actually demanded death as the price of
the nation’s life which, in this case, had little to do with actual political
liberty. The Barians entertained a mythopoeic conviction that their ancestors,
the legendary Sarmatians, had lived in a kind of ideal republican anarchy. It
was this state of being, this Eden, they were dying to recover. These and other
sentiments were echoed in an abundant crop of political poetry, woven on a loom
of Catholic mysticism.
“In line with
the Enlightenment’s usual obloquy of all things Christian, Voltaire condemned
the rebels as grotesque religious fanatics, but for once he did not go
unchallenged. Few people had any idea of what the struggle was really about,
but they were learning to sentimentalise politics. And as soon as people began
to talk in terms of a nation struggling for its existence, sympathy veered to
the side of the confederates. Rousseau met one of the few intelligent members
of the Confederation, its agent in Paris Count Michal Wielhorski, who gave him
his views on the government appropriate to Poland.
“Rousseau seized on these as a pretext for a theoretical discourse,
actually a kind of utopian fantasy on the subject of nationhood. His Considérations
sur le gouvernment de Pologne celebrates the form of the Confederation as a
‘political masterpiece’, allowing as it did a group of public-spirited men to
stand up in the name of the nation and to assert its sovereignty by virtue of
their will. He extolled the act of fighting for liberty as something great in
itself. Realizing that the Confederation would probably be crushed, Rousseau
urged the Poles to ‘grasp the opportunity given by the present event to raise
souls to the tone of the souls of antiquity’. But they must look to Moses as
well as to the state-builders of Greece and Rome, for there was more to a
nation than just a state. ‘The laws of Solon, of Numa, of Lycurgus are dead
while the even older laws of Moses still live,’ he reminded them. ‘Athens,
Sparta, Rome have perished and have left no children on earth. Zion, while
destroyed, did not lose its children… They no longer have leaders and yet they
are a people, they no longer have a country and yet they are citizens.’ This
asserted the primacy of the nation over the state and the geographical
motherland, and suggested a role for it akin to that of a religious
brotherhood. The title of ‘citizen’, which designated member of this community
was, by inference, the most honourable a man could have.”[799]
In view of this cross-fertilisation between revolutionary currents in
Poland and France, it is not surprising that at the time of the Confederation
of Targowica in 1792 Catherine II should have taken fright, seeing Warsaw as “a
brazier of Jacobinism” (a Jacobin Club was founded in Warsaw in 1794). However,
the invasion that followed, and the Second Partition, did not discourage the
Polish patriots. For the battle of Valmy in the same year, during which the
French revolutionary armies defeated Prussia, encouraged them to believe “that
a free nation in arms was invincible”.[800]
Even after the revolution of 1792-4 had been comprehensively defeated,
and the Third Partition of the country had blotted the name of Poland from the
map altogether, the Poles in exile did not give up. In 1818 a movement for the
liberation of the country from Russia arose, which led to the failed rebellions
of 1830-31, 1846 and 1848.
“’The nation is formed through the law of nature alone’, ran the
manifesto of the Society of Polish Republicans, founded in exile. ‘Government
stems from the will of the nation. The nation stands before all things and is
the source of all things. Its will is always law. Above it and before it is but
the law of nature alone. By virtue of its very existence, the nation is all
things that it may be. The nation cannot surrender its rights to a tyrant.’
“Rousseau’s fantasies had been prophetic. The Poles had become a nation
without a state, and, repeating the history of the Jews, they were henceforth
to carry their Polishness with them.”[801]
The political weakness and revolutionary fervour of the Polish nobility
were not the only, or even the most fundamental causes, of the nation’s demise.
Still more important was their unremitting persecution of the Orthodox living
in Poland.
Thus the Polish nobility, writes Vital, were “overwhelmingly opposed to
giving non-Roman Catholic Christians (the Orthodox, the Lutherans, and the
Calvinists) political rights until well into the eighteenth century. Only in
1768 did ‘dissidents’ get ‘partial equality’. They were admitted to municipal
citizenship in 1775. They lost it two years later.”[802]
“The Orthodox,” writes Dobroklonsky, “suffered every possible
restriction. In 1717 the Sejm deprived them of their right to elect deputies to
the sejms and forbade the construction of new and the repairing of old
churches; in 1733 the sejm removed them from all public posts. If that is how
the government itself treated them, their enemies could boldly fall upon them
with fanatical spite. The Orthodox were deprived of all their dioceses and with
great difficulty held on to one, the Belorussian; together with them, they were
deprived of their brotherhoods, which either disappeared or accepted the unia.
Monasteries and parish churches with their lands were forcibly taken from them.
… From 1721 to 1747, according to the calculations of the Belorussian Bishop
Jerome, 165 Orthodox churches were removed, so that by 1755 in the whole of the
Belorussian diocese there remained only 130; and these were in a pitiful state…
Orthodox religious processions were broken up, and Orthodox holy things were
subjected to mockery… The Dominicans and
Basilians acted in the same way, being sent as missionaries to Belorussia and
the Ukraine – those ‘lands of the infidels’, as the Catholics called them, - to
convert the Orthodox… They went round the villages and recruited people to the
unia; any of those recruited who carried out Orthodox needs was punished as an
apostate. Orthodox monasteries were often subjected to attacks by peasants and
schoolboys; the monks suffered beatings, mutilations and death. ‘How many of
them,’ exclaimed [Bishop] George Konissky, ‘were thrown out of their homes,
many of them were put in prisons, in deep pits, they were shut up in kennels
with the dogs, they were starved by hunger and thrist, fed on hay; how many
were beaten and mutilated, and some even killed!’… The Orthodox white clergy
were reduced to poverty, ignorance and extreme humiliation. All the Belorussian
bishops were subjected to insults, and some of them even to armed assault….
“The Orthodox sought defenders for themselves in Russia, constantly
sending complaints and requests to the court and the Holy Synod. The Russian
government acc ording to the eternal peace of 1686 had reserved for itself the
right to protect the Orthodox inhabitants of Poland, and often sent its notes
to the Polish court and through its ambassadors in Poland demanded that the
Orthodox should be given back the dioceses that had been granted to them
according to the eternal peace and that the persecutions should cease; it also
wrote about this to Rome, even threatening to deprive the Catholics living in
Russia of freedom of worship; more than once it appointed special commissars to
Poland for the defence of the Orthodox
from abuse and in order to nvestigate complaints. But the Polish government
either replied with promises or was silent and dragged out the affair from one
Sejm to another. True, there were cases when the king issued orders for the
cessation of persecutions… But such instructions were usually not listened to,
and the persecution of the Orthodox continued. Meanwhile the Russian government
insufficiently insisted on the carrying out of its demands.
“Only from the time of Catherine II did the circumstances change. On
arriving at her coronation in Moscow, George Konissky vividly described for her
the wretched condition of the Orthodox in Poland and besought her intervention
(1762). A year later all the Orthodox of Poland interceded with her about this.
The empress promised her protection and made the usual representation to the
Polish court. At that time a new king, Stanislav Poniatovsky, had been
established, with her assistance, on the Polish throne. George Konissky
personally appeared before him and described the sufferings of the Orthodox in
such a lively manner that the king promised to do everything to restore the
rights of the Orthodox (1765) and actually issued a decree on the confrimation
of their religious rights, demanding that the uniate authorities cut short
their violence. However, the uniate and Catholic authorities were not thinking
of obeying the king. Their spite against the Orthodox found fresh food for
itself. In 1765-1766, amidst the Russian population of Poland, and mainly in
Little Russia, a powerful mass movement against the unia had begun. Its heart
was the Orthodox see of Pereyaslavl headed by Bishop Gervasius Lintsevsky and
the Motroninsky monastery led by Abbot Melchizedek Znachko-Yavorsky. Multitudes
of the people went there and were there inspired to the task of returning from
the unia to Orthodoxy. Crowds of people gathered everywhere in the villages; together
they swore to uphold the Orthodox faith to the last drop of their blood, they
restored Orthodox churches and restored Orthodox priests provided for them by
Gervasius. They persuaded uniate priests to return to Orthodoxy, and if they
refused either drove them out of the parishes or locked the churches. Whole
parishes returned to Orthodoxy. The uniate authorities decide to stop this
movement. The uniate metropolitan sent a fanatical zealot for the unia, the
official Mokritsky, to the Ukraine with a band of soldiers. The Orthodox
churches began to be sealed or confiscated; the people was forced by beatings
to renounce Orthodoxy. Abbot Melchizedek was subjected to tortures and thrown
into prison. There were even cases of killings for the faith… This violence
el\icited a fresh representation from the Russian court. Moreover, the courts
of Prussia, England, Sweden and Denmark demanded that the Poles reviewed the
question of the dissidents (Orthodox and Protestants) at the sejm and protected
their rights. However, the sejm that took place in 1766 still further
restricted their religious liberty. The Catholic bishops Soltyk and Krasinsky
by their epistles stirred up the people against the dissidents; the Pope
himself (Clement XIII) tried to persuade Stanislav not to make concessions.
Then the dissidents began to act in a more friendly manner towards each other.
In Torn and Slutsk conferences of noblemen were convened, and in other places
up to 200 similar unions appeared with the aim of obtaining rights for the
non-Catholics of Poland. In her turn Russia, in order to support these demands,
moved her army into Poland. Relying on it, the Russian ambassador in Poland
Repin demanded a review of the question of the dissidents at the new sejm in
1767. When at this sejm the Catholic bishops Soltyk, Zalusky and some others
continued to resist any concessions in favour of the dissidents, Repin arrested
them and the Sejm agreed upon some important concessions: everything published
against the dissidents was rescinded, complete freedom of faith and Divine
services was proclaimed, they were given the right to build churches and
schools, convene councils, take part in Sejms and in the Senate, educate
children born from mixed marriages in the faith of their parents – sons in the
faith of their fathers and daughters in the faith of their mothers, and
forcible conversions to the unia were forbidden. These decrees were confirmed
by a treaty between Russia and Poland in 1768. It was then decided that the
Belorussian see should remain forever in the power of the Orthodox together
with all the monasteries, churches and church properties, while the monasteries
and churches that had been incorretly taken from them were to be returned. For
this a special mixed commission of Catholics and dissidents – the latter led by
George Konissky – was appointed. In these circumstances the movement among the
uniates that had begun before was renewed with fresh force. Most of them –
sometimes in whole parishes – declared their desire to return to Orthodoxy;
these declarations were addressed to George Konissky, presented to Repin and
written down in official books; even the uniate bishops turned to the king with
a request that they be allowed to enter into discussions concerning a reunion
of the uniates with the Greco-Russian Church. But the indecisiveness of the
Polish and Russian governments hindered the realisation of these desires.
Comparatively few parishes succeeded in returning to Orthodoxy, and then the
matter of their reunion was stopped for a time. Immediately the Russian army
left the boundaries of Poland, the Polish fanatics again set about their
customary way of behaving. Bishop Krasinsky of Kamenets went round Poland in
the clothes of a pilgrim and everywhere stirred up hatred against the dissidents;
the papal nuncio fanned the flames of this hatred in appeals to the clergy, and
sometimes also in instructions to the people. Those who were discontented with
the sejm of 1767 convened the conference of Bar in order to deprive the
dissidents of the rights that had been granted them. Again there arose a
persecution of the Orthodox, who could not stand the violence. In Trans-Dniper
Ukraine, under the leadership of the zaporozhets Maxim Zhelezniak, a popular
uprising known as the Koliivschina began. The anger of the rebels was vented
most of all on the landowners, the Jews, the Catholic priests and the uniate
priests. They were all mercilessly beaten up, their homes were burned down,
their property was looted; even the whole small town of Uman was ravaged. The
rebellion enveloped the whole western region. The Polish government was not
able to cope with it. The Russian armies under Krechetnikov came to its aid.
The revolt was put down. But unfortunately, Krechetnikov and Repin, listening
to the insinuations of the Poles and not seeing the true reasons for the
rebellion, looked on it as an exclusively anti-state peasants’ rebellion, and
so they themselves helped in destroying that which stood for Orthodoxy and
Russian nationality in the Ukraine. Gervasius and Melchizedek, being suspected
of rebellion, were retired; the Orthodox people, being accused of stirring up
the people, had to hide in order to avoid punishment. The uniate priests took
possession of many Orthodox parishes; in many places the Orthodox were forced
to appeal with requests to perform needs to parishless priests coming from
Moldavia and Wallachia. Fortunately, in 1772 there came the first division of
Poland, in accordance with which Belorussia with its population of 1,360,000
was united with Russia. At this the
Polish government was obliged to take measures to pacify the Orthodox who
remained in their power, but in actual fact nothing was done. A new woe was
then added to the already difficult position of the Orthodox: With the union of
Belorussia with Russia not one Orthodox bishop was left within the confines of
Poland, and for ordinations the Orthodox were forced to turn to Russia or
Wallachia. Only in 1785 did the Russian government, with the agreement of the
Polish king, appoint a special bishop for them, Victor Sadkovsky, with the
title of Bishop of Pereyaslavl and vicar of Kiev, with a salary and place of
residence in Slutsk monastery. But when, with his arrival, another movement in
favour of Orthodoxy arose among the Ukrainian uniates, the Poles were
disturbed. Rumours spread that another Koliivschina was being prepared and that
the clergy were inciting the people to rebel. Whatever Victor did to quash
these rumours, they continued to grow. They began to say that arms for a
planned beating up of the Catholics and uniates were being stored in the
hierarchical house and in the monasteries. In accordance with an order of the
sejm, Victor was seized and taken in fetters to Warsaw, where he was thrown
into an arms depot (1789); some Orthodox priests were subjected to the same
treatment; many were forced to save themselves by fleeing to Russia. The whole
of the Orthodox clergy were rounded up to swear an oath of allegiance to the
king. After this the thought was voiced in the Sejm of 1791 of freeing the
Orthodox Church within the confines of Poland from Russian influence by making
it independent of the Russian Synod and transferring it into the immediate
jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople. The Pinsk congregation, made
up of representatives of the clergy and brotherhoods, did indeed work out a
project for the conciliar administration of the Church. But it was not fated to
be put into effect. Soon there followed, one after the other, the second (1793)
and third (1795) divisions of Poland, in accordance with which Russian acquired
all the ancient Russian lands with the exception of Galicia, and the Lithuanian
region with a population of more than 4 million.
“With the union of Belorussia and the south-western regions to Russia
there finally came to an end the age-old sufferings of the Orthodox there. At
the same time there came the right opportunity for the uniates to throw off the
fetters of the unia which had been forcibly imposed upon them. The Belorussian
Archbishop George Konissky received many declaration from uniate parishes
wishing to return to Orthodoxy. Although the Russian government did not allow
him to do anything about these declarations without special permission, and
itself did not give permission for about 8 years, the striving of the uniates
for Orthodoxy did not wane. When, finally, permission was given, up to 130,000
uniates went over to Orthodoxy. In the south-western region an energetic
assistant of George Konissky in the work of uniting the uniates was Victor Sadkovsky,
who had been released from prison and raised to the see of Minks (1793). With
the permission of the government, he published an appeal to the uniates of his
diocese urging them to return to Orthodoxy. Soon, on the orders of the
government, the same was done in the Belorussian region. Moreover, the
government told local authorities to remove all obstacles that might appear in
the unification of the uniates on the part of the Roman Catholic clergy and
landowners, and threatened the guilty with responsibility before the law, while
at the same time forbidding their forcible union. The appeals had an
extraordinary success. In less than a year (from the middle of 1794 to the
beginning of 1795), more than one-and-a-half uniates had joined the Orthodox
Church; the numbers of those united by the end of the reign of Catherine II
came to no less than two million.”[803]
This was a great triumph. And yet we may agree with Lebedev that “from
the point of view of the interests of Great Russia, it was necessary to pacify
Poland, but not seize the age-old Polish and purely Lithuanian lands. This
wrong attitude of Russia to the neighbouring peoples then became a ‘mine’ which
later more than once exploded with bad consequences for Russia…”[804]
Throughout the medieval and early modern periods, the Jews had been
forbidden to settle in Russia. From the beginning of the Muscovite kingdom,
however, Jews had begun to infiltrate into Russia from Poland-Lithuania, where,
as we have seen, the Polish landowners had given considerable privileges to
them, employing them to collect very heavy taxes, fees, tolls and produce from
the Russian serfs.[805] In
some cases the Poles even handed over churches and monasteries to the Jews, who
would extort fees from the Orthodox for the celebration of sacraments. [806]
Relations between the Russians and the Jews continued to be tense. The
main reason for this was the hostile attitude of the Jews to the Christians.
The Russians, for their part, looked on the Jews as enemies both of the Faith
and of the State. And with reason. For, as David Vital writes: “Having no
earthly masters to whom he thought he owed unquestioning political obedience
(the special case of the Hasidic rebbe or zaddik and his devotees
aside), ‘[the European Jew’s] was… a spirit that, for his times, was remarkably
free. Permitted no land, he had no territorial lord. Admitted to no guild, he
was free of the authority of established master-craftsmen. Not being a
Christian, he had neither bishop nor priest to direct him. And while he could
be charged or punished for insubordination to state or sovereign, he could not
properly be charged with disloyalty. Betrayal only entered into the life of the
Jews in regard to their own community or, more broadly, to Jewry as a whole. It
was to their own nation alone that they accepted that they owed undeviating
loyalty.”[807]
As we have seen, in 1648, infuriated by their Jewish and Polish
oppressors, the Ukrainian Cossacks and peasants rose up in rebellion and
appealed to the Tsar for help. The Tsarist armies triumphed, and by the treaty
of Andrusovo in 1667 the Eastern Ukraine and the Smolensk region were ceded –
together with their Jewish population – to Russia. 1667 was the very year in
which Patriarch Nicon was unjustly deposed; so the first major influx of Jews
into Russia coincided with the first step seriously to undermine Church-State
relations in Russia. [808]
Hartley writes that these Jews “lived mostly in the Ukraine although a
small Jewish community became established in Moscow. The government legislated
to contain and control the Jewish population within the empire’s borders. Both
Catherine I (1725-27) and Elizabeth (1741-62) attempted to ban Jews from
Russia; one estimate is that 35,000 Jews were banished in 1741.”[809]
However, as a consequence of the three partitions of Poland, the Russian
empire acquired a vast new influx of Jews, as many as a million according to
one estimate.[810]
As the worried Catherine II wrote: “what seemed a child’s game is becoming a
most serious matter. The Russian state has bumped into the most numerous Jewish
masses in Europe”.[811]
Now at the beginning of her reign, according to Lebedev, “Catherine was
convinced that it was impossible to forbid the entrance of the Jews into
Russia, it was necessary to let them in. But she considered it dangerous to do
this at the very beginning of her reign, since she understood that she
had to deal with the Russian people, ‘a religious people’, who saw in her ‘the
defender of the Orthodox Faith’, and that the clergy were extremly upset by
Peter III’s order on the expropriation of the Church’s land-holdings. Moreover,
she had been shown the resolution of Elizabeth Petrovna on the entrance of the
Jews: ‘I wish to derive no profit from the enemies of Christ’. The matter was
put off, but only for a time…”[812]
A
possible solution of “the Jewish problem” was presented by emancipation, which
had been legislated for by the French National Assembly in 1789-91; for it led,
hopefully, to assimilation and therefore the disappearance of the problem.
Although fiercely rejected by most Jewish leaders[813],
Catherine - influenced, no doubt, by her Masonic courtiers and by the Toleranzpatent
(1782) of her fellow “enlightened despot”, Joseph II of Austria - appears to
have shared this optimistic outlook. “In 1785 and again in 1795 (on the
occasion of the Third Partition),” writes Vital, “the principle that Jewish
town-dwellers and merchants were entitled to treatment on an equal footing with
all other town-dwellers and merchants was authoritatively restated. Allowance
was made for Jews of the appropriate class to serve as electors to municipal
office and to be elected themselves. But precisely what social class or classes
Jews should be permitted to belong to was (and would remain) a vexed question.
Clearly, they were not peasants (krestyaniny). They were certainly not
serfs (krepostnye). They were not of the gentry (dvoryanstvo).
They might be merchants (kuptsy), but membership of the guilds of
merchants, especially the higher guilds, was a costly affair and few Jews were
of the requisite wealth and standing to join them; and, in any event, such
membership entailed rights to which the ‘native’ or ‘indigenous’ people (korennoye
naseleniye), namely the ethnic Russian (and of course the Polish)
merchants, objected. That left the class of town-dwellers (meshchantsvo);
but the fact was that the great majority of the Jews of Russia and Poland at
this time were not town-dwellers…”[814]
Catherine not only let in the Jews: she also allowed the Masons to reach
the peak of their influence in Russia. In her reign there were about 2500
Masons in about 100 lodges in St. Petersburg, Moscow and some provincial towns. [815]
“By the middle of the 1780s,” writes Dobroklonsky, “it had even penetrated as
far as Tobolsk and Irkutsk; Masonic lodges existed in all the more or less
important towns. Many of those who were not satisfied by the fashionable
scepticism of French philosophy or, after being drawn by it, became
disillusioned by it, sought satisfaction for their heart and mind in Masonry”.[816]
Florovsky writes: “The freemasons of Catherine’s reign maintained an
ambivalent relationship with the Church. In any event, the formal piety of
freemasonry was not openly disruptive. Many freemasons fulfilled all church
‘obligations’ and rituals. Others emphatically insisted on the complete
immutability and sacredness of the rites and orders ‘particularly of the Greek
religion’. However, the Orthodox service, with its wealth and plasticity of
images and symbols, greatly attracted them. Freemasons highly valued
Orthodoxy’s tradition of symbols whose roots reach back deeply into classical
antiquity. But every symbol was for them only a transparent sign or guidepost.
One must ascend to that which is being signified, that is, from the visible to
the invisible, from ‘historical’ Christianity to spiritual or ‘true’
Christianity, from the outer church to the ‘inner’ church. The freemasons
considered their Order to be the ‘inner’ church, containing its own rites and
‘sacraments’. This is once again the Alexandrian [Gnostic] dream of an esoteric
circle of chosen ones who are dedicated to preserving sacred traditions: a
truth revealed only to a few chosen for extraordinary illumination.”[817]
Hartley writes: “Freemasonry only became popular amongst the nobility in
the reign of Catherine II. This was partly because freemasonry was one of many
manifestations of the cultural influence of western and central Europe on the
nobility at the time, and partly because, after their freedom from compulsory
service in 1762, they had the leisure and opportunity to become involved in
private social activities of this nature, both in the capitals and in the
provinces.
“Russian lodges were based on English, German or Swedish systems. Ivan
Elagin, an influential figure at court in the early years of Catherine II,
founded the Russian Grand Provincial Lodge in 1771, modelled on the English
system, which involved progression through three degrees within the lodge. Some
14 lodges were opened in St. Petersburg, Moscow and the provinces based on this
model. Many Russians, however, were attracted to lodges which had more complex
degrees and mystical elements. Baron P.B. Reichel established the Apollo lodge
in 1771, which depended on the Grand Lodge of Zinnendorf in Berlin, and soon
controlled 8 lodges in German-speaking Riga and Reval. In 1776 the Reichel and
Elagin lodges merged and accepted the leadership of the Berlin lodge, and
Elagin became the grand master of the new united Grand Provincial lodge. Almost
immediately, members of this new lodge became influenced by the Swedish Order
of the Temple, a lodge which comprised ten degrees, and whose elaborate robes
and knightly degrees particularly appealed to a Russian nobility which lacked
knightly orders and traditions of medieval chivalry. In 1778 the first
Swedish-style lodge, the Phoenix, was set up in St. Petersburg, followed in
1780 by the Swedish Grand National lodge under the direction of Prince G.P.
Gagarin. In the early 1780s there were 14 Swedish lodges in St. Petersburg and
Moscow and a few more in the provinces. Most of the Elagin lodges, however, did
not join the Swedish system, partly because a direct association with Sweden at
a time of diplomatic tension between Russia and Sweden seemed inappropriate.
“Adherents of freemasonry continued to seek new models to help them in
their search for further illumination or for more satisfying rituals and
structures. I.G. Schwartz, a member of the Harmonia lodge in Moscow, founded by
Nikolai Novikov in 1781, brought Russian freemasonry into close association
with the strict observance lodge of the grand master Duke Ferdinand of
Brunswick. The lodge became the VIIIth province of the Brunswick lodge, under
the acting head of Prince N. Trubestkoi. It is not known how many of the Elagin
lodges joined the VIIIth province. Within the VIIIth province there emerged a
small esoteric group of masons who were heavily influenced by the Rosicrucian
movement, knowledge of whose charters and seven degrees had been brought back
to Russia from Berlin by Schwartz. Masonic and Rosicrucian literature spread
through Russia, largely as a result of the activity of the private printing
press set up by Novikov (until the 1790s when masonic publications were
censured and banned). Lodges were also set up in the provinces, particularly
when provincial governors were masons. Governor-General A.P. Mel’gunov, for
example, opened a lodge in Iaroslavl’. Vigel’ founded a lodge in remote Penza
in the late eighteenth century. Even where there was no lodge, provincial
nobles could become acquainted with masonry through subscriptions to
publications such as Novikov’s Morning Light.
“Who became freemasons? The Russian historian Vernadsky estimated that
in 1777 4 of the 11-member Council of State, 11 of the 31 gentlemen of the
bedchamber, 2 of the 5 senators of the first department of the Senate, 2 of the
5 members of the College of Foreign Affairs and the vice-president of the
Admiralty College were masons (there were none known at this date in the War
College). A large number of the noble deputies in the Legislative Commission
were masons. Members of the high aristocracy and prominent figures at court
were attracted to freemasonry, including the Repnins, Trubetskois, Vorontsovs
and Panins. Special lodges attracted army officers (like the Mars lodge,
founded at Iasi in Bessarabia in 1774) and naval officers (like the Neptune
lodge, founded in 1781 in Kronstadt). There were masons amongst the governors of
provinces established after 1775 (including A.P. Mel’gunov in Yaroslavl’ and
J.E. Sievers in Tver’), and amongst senior officials in central and provincial
institutions. Almost all Russian poets, playwrights, authors and academics were
masons. Other lodges had a predominantly foreign membership, which included
academics, members of professions, bankers and merchants….
“Catherine II had little sympathy for the mystical elements of
freemasonry and their educational work and feared that lodges could become
venues for conspiracies against the throne. In the 1790s, at a time of
international tension following the French Revolution, Catherine became more
suspicious of freemasonry, following rumours that Grand Duke Paul… was being
induced to join a Moscow lodge. In 1792 (shortly after the assassination of
Gustavus III of Sweden), Novikov’s house was searched and masonic books were
found which had been banned as harmful in 1786. Novikov was arrested and
sentenced, without any formal trial, to fifteen years imprisonment, though he
was freed when Paul came to the throne in 1796. In 1794, Catherine ordered the
closure of all lodges.”[818]
Catherine was not wrong in her suspicion that the Masons were aiming at
the Russian throne. Already in 1781, at their convention in Frankfurt, the Illuminati
“had decided to create in Russia two capitularies ‘of the theoretical degree’
under the general direction of Schwartz. One of the capitularies was ruled by
Tatischev, and the other by Prince Trubetskoj. At a convention of the Mason-Illuminati
in 1782 Russia was declared to be ‘the Eighth Province of the Strict
Observance’. It was here that the Masons swore to murder Louis XVI and his wife
and the Swedish King Gustavus III, which sentences were later carried out. In
those 80s of the 18th century Masonry had decreed that it should
strive to destroy the monarchy and the Church, beginning with France and continuing
with Russia. But openly, ‘for the public’, and those accepted into the
lower degrees, the Masons said that they were striving to end enmity between
people and nations because of religious and national quarrels, that they
believed in God, that they carried out charitable work and wanted to educate
humanity in the principles of morality and goodness, that they were the faithful
citizens of their countries and kings…”[819]
Critics of
Absolutism
However, eighteenth-century Russian Masonry, unlike its contemporary
French counterpart, was not very radical in its politics. Thus Novikov,
according to Pipes, must be classified as “a political conservative because of
his determination to work ‘within the system’, as one would put it today. A
freemason and a follower of Saint-Martin, he thought all evil stemmed from
man’s corruption, not from institutions under which he lived. He mercilessly
exposed ‘vice’ and promoted with such enthusiasm useful knowledge because of
the conviction that only improving man could one improve mankind. He never
questioned the autocratic form of government or even serfdom. This stress on
man rather than the environment became a hallmark of Russian conservatism.”[820]
Another Mason who was conservative in his political thought was Prince
Michael Shcherbatov, who represented the extreme right wing of the aristocratic
opposition to Catherine. He was a monarchist who believed in the close alliance
of tsar and aristocrats, and opposed all concessions to the peasantry or the
merchants. He believed that Russia’s traditional autocracy had been replaced by
despotism under Peter, who treated the aristocrats brutally and opened the way
for widespread “voluptuousness” in Russian life.
“Shcherbatov,” writes Walicki, “drew special attention to the
individualization of personal relations and to the consequent changes in the
attitude to women. In Peter’s reign it became customary for the bride and
bridegroom to meet before the wedding, joint ‘assemblies’ were organized for
men and women, and more attention was paid to personal appearance. ‘Passionate
love, unknown in earlier primitive conditions, began to hold sway over
sensitive hearts.’ The only hairdresser in Moscow was besieged by her clients –
for feast days some of them came to her three days in advance and had to sleep
sitting upright for three nights in order not to spoil their coiffure. Dandies
of both capitals vied with each other in extravagance and fashionable dress.
Peter, Shcherbatov admitted, had no great love of luxury himself, but he
encouraged excess in others in order to stimulate industry, handicrafts, and
trade.
“Another cause of the corruption of morals was the bureaucratic
hierarchy established by Peter, which encouraged personal ambition and placed
government officials above the nobility. ‘Is it possible,’ Shcherbatov asked,
‘for people who from early youth tremble at the stick in the hands of their
superiors to preserve virtue and strength of character?’ The brutal suddenness
of the reforms had been injurious to the nation’s morals: Peter had waged too
radical a war on superstition; Shcherbatov compared him to an inexperienced
gardener who prunes his trees too far. ‘There was less superstition, but also
less faith; the former servile fear of hell disappeared, but so did love of God
and His holy laws.’
“In his criticism of the Petrine reforms and his unusually acute and
comprehensive treatment of the issue of ‘ancient and modern Russia’,
Shcherbatov was to some extent a precursor of the Slavophiles, as Herzen was to
point out. It is significant that Shcherbatov, like the Slavophiles, was
strongly critical of the transfer of the capital from the old boyar stronghold
of Moscow to the newly built St. Petersburg, which personified the supremacy of
bureaucratic absolutism.
“The analogy between Shcherbatov and Slavophilism is, however, largely
superficial and even unreliable. In his Discourse there is no antithesis
between Russia and Europe; and his views on juridical questions, social
systems, and the significance of political rights clearly derived from Western
European (especially Enlightenment) sources and were therefore far removed from
the romanticism of the Slavophiles and their idealization of the common people.
His faith in the role of the aristocracy was equally ‘occidental’; the
Slavophiles,… viewed ‘aristocratism’ as a negative phenomenon that was
fortunately quite alien to the ‘truly Christian’ principles of ancient Russia.
“An interesting light is cast on Shcherbatov’s political ideals by his
utopian tale Journey to the Land of Ophir (1784). In the apt description
of a contemporary scholar, this presents an idealized version of the ‘orderly
police state’. This work would not have been to the taste of either the
Slavophiles or Montesquieu, from whose writings Shcherbatov drew arguments in
support of his critique of despotism.
“The population of Ophir is divided into hermetically sealed-off free
estates and serfs, whom the author quite simply calls ‘slaves’. The daily life
of every inhabitant is subject to the most detailed control, and excessive
luxury or the relaxation of morals is severely punished. Strict regulations lay
down what clothes a citizen of each class may wear, how large a house he may
live in, how many servants he may have, what utensils he may use, and even what
gratuities he may dispense. In his ideal state the opponent of bureaucracy and
depotism carried the despotic and bureaucratic regimentation of life to
extremes. To Shcherbatov himself there was no contradiction in this, since he
did not consider the strict control of morals to be inconsistent with political
liberty. In the state of Ophir there were, after all, such guarantees against
despotism as ‘fundamental rights,’ representation of the estates, the abolition
of the household guard, and so on. One of the important guarantees of liberty
was to be the law forbidding peasants to lay complaint against their masters to
the sovereign. In Shcherbatov’s eyes the right to peition the emperor was only
likely to reinforce the uncouth peasantry’s belief in the ‘good tsar’, whereas
rulers, made aware of the people’s support, might become presumptuous and turn
into despots.
“Some of the
features of Shcherbatov’s utopia can be traced to his Freemasonry and the
Masonic cult of formalism, hierarchy, and outward distinctions. This influence
is most obvious in the sections devoted to education and religion. Education in
Ophir is free and compulsory for every citizen, although its extent differs for
every estate. Religion is reduced to a rationalistic cult of the supreme being,
and there is no separate priesthood that gains a livelihood from religious practices.
Sacraments, offerings, and all mysteries are discarded, prayers are short and
few, and communal prayers resemble Masonic ritual. Atheism, however, is
forbidden, and attendance at church is compulsory, on pain of punishment.
“The Masonic provenance of certain elements of the utopia does not
account for it altogether. The best key to an understanding of Shcherbatov’s
tale is probably to be found in his views on ‘ancient and modern Russia’.
Attention has been drawn to the fact that the detailed bureaucratic system of
the state of Ophir reflects certain features of post-Petrine Russia. However, a
comparison between Ophir and the picture of pre-Petrine Russia drawn in the Discourse
would seem to offer an even more fruitful approarch. In both cases private life
is governed by strict regulations and norms – in one by legal decrees, and in
the other by hallowed traditions and religion. In both cases the division into
estates and the hermetic isolation of those estates – especially the isolation
of the nobility – are guarantees of social cohesion and the flowering of civic
virtues. Finally, in both cases strict morals and moderate requirements prevent
the spread of the insidious ‘voluptuousness’. It is important to note that his
examination of the differences between ancient and modern Russia had convinced
Shcherbatov that strict control and regimentation of morals should not be
confused with despotism. Ancient Russia, he claimed, had not on the whole been
a despotic society, largely because it had remained faithful to a traditional
way of life that set out appropriate spheres of activity for everyone –
including the tsar – and thus precluded arbitrary rule. In modern Russia, on
the other hand, despotism had spawned ‘the corruption of morals that was to
become its most faithful ally.’”[821]
If Shcherbatov
represented a nobleman pining nostalgically for the non-despotic orderliness of
pre-Petrine Russia, Count Nikita Panin and Alexander Radishchev represented a
more radical, forward-looking element in the aristocracy. Panin and his brother
had already, as we have seen, taken part in the coup against Peter III which
brought Catherine to the throne. But when Catherine refused to adopt Nikita’s
plan for a reduction in the powers of the autocrat and an extension of the
powers of the aristocratic Senate, they plotted to overthrow her, too. Their
plot was discovered; but Catherine pardoned them. Nothing daunted, Nikita wrote
a Discourse on the Disappearance in Russia of All Forms of Government,
intended for his pupil, Crown Prince Paul, in which he declared: “Where the
arbitrary rule of one man is the highest law, there can be no lasting or
unifying bonds; there is a state, but no fatherland; there are subjects, but no
citizens; there is no body politic whose members are linked to each other by a
network of duties and privileges.”[822]
With Alexander
Radishchev, we come to the first true Enlightenment figure in Russian history.
His Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (1790), writes Pipes, “exposed
the seamier sides of Russian provincial life…[He] drank deeply at the source of
the French Enlightenment, showing a marked preference for its more extreme
materialist wing (Helvétius and d’Holbach).”[823]
Thus if
Voltaire, Rousseau and the other philosophes introduced English social
contract theory into France, thereby providing the philosophical justification
for the French revolution, it was Radishchev, whose favourite countries were
England and the United States, who introduced the theory into Russia, thereby
laying the foundation for the Russian revolution. “Radishchev thought of the
original presocial state of mankind as a form of isolated existence in which
men were not subject to any hierarchical pressures. Human imperfections,
however, made it impossible for this state to continue; men formed nations and
thus entered the social state. Radischchev had a wholly rationalist and
nominalist view of the nation as ‘a collection of citizens’ rather than a
supra-individual whole endowed with a ‘collective soul’. A nation, as he put
it, is a ‘collection of individuals’, a political society composed of men who
‘have come together in order to safeguard their own interests and security by
their collective efforts; it is a society submitting to authority. Since all
men, however, are by nature free, and no one has the right to deprive them of
this freedom, the setting up of a society always assumes real or tacit
agreement.’ As this quotation shows, ‘nation’ for Radishchev was a
juridico-political concept indistinguishable from society, which in its turn
was inseparably bound up with state organization. Radishchev even attempted to
make a legal definition of ‘fatherland’ as a set of people linked together by
mutually binding laws and civic duties. The essay On What It Means to Be a
Son of the Fatherland is an excellent illustration of this. Only a man who
enjoys civic rights can be a son of his fatherland, Radishchev argues. Peasants
cannot claim this privilege since they bear ‘the yoke of serfdom’; they are not
‘members of the state’, or even people, but ‘machines driven by their
tormentors, lifeless corpses, draft oxen.’ In order to be a son of the
fatherland it is not enough, however, to possess civic rights; it is equally
important to show civic virtue by doing one’s best to fulfil one’s duties. Men
who are without nobility or honor, who make no contribution to the general
good, and who do not respect prevailing laws cannot therefore claim to be sons
of the fatherland.
“In keeping with current thinking, Radishchev distinguished between
natural law and civil law, the first being an unwritten, innate right, an
inalienable attribute of humanity, the second being a written code that only
comes into being after the establishment of the social contract. The worst
political system is despotism, since in it the arbitrary will of the ruler is
placed above the law. Even in his first work – the notes to his translation of
Mably’s Observations sur l’histoire de la Grèce – Radishchev
gives the following definition of autocracy: ‘Autocracy is the system most
repugnant to human nature… If we relinquish part of our rights and our inborn
sovereignty in favor of an all-embracing law, it is in order that it might be
used to our advantage; to this end we conclude a tacit agreement with society.
If this is infringed, then we too are released from our obligations. The
injustice of the sovereign gives the people, who are his judges, the same or an
even greater right over him than the law gives him to judge criminals. The
sovereign is the first citizen of the people’s commonwealth….
“In the Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow, a nobleman tells
his sons who are about to enter government service: ‘The law, however bad it
is, is the bond that holds society together.’ In keeping with this assumption,
Radishchev regarded legality – i.e. respect for civil law by all, including the
sovereign – as the basic requirement for the proper functioning of society. But
it is not enough to replace arbitrary rule by the rule of law; civil law cannot
be contrary to natural law and must be founded on the agreement of the entire
nation. Where natural law conflicted with civil law, Radishchev gave priority
to the former. In the Journey he wrote:
“’Every man is born into the world equal to all others. All have the same
bodily parts, all have reason and will. Consequently, apart from his relation
to society, man is a being that depends on no one in his actions. But he puts
limits to his own freedom of action, he agrees not to follows his own will in
everything, he subjects himself to the commands of his equals; in a word, he
becomes a citizen. For what reason does he control his passions? Why does he
set up a governing authority over himself? Why, though free to see fulfilment
of his will, does he confine himself within the bounds of obedience? For his
own advantage, reason will say; for his own advantage, inner feeling will say;
for his own advantage, wise legislation will say. Consequently, wherever being
a citizen is not to his advantage, he is not a citizen… If the law is unable or
unwilling to protect him, or if its power cannot furnish him immediate aid in
the face of clear and present danger, then the citizen has recourse to the
natural law of self-defence, self-preservation, and well-being… No matter to
what estate may have decreed a citizen’s birth, he is and will always remain a
man; and so long as he is a man, the law of nature as an abundant wellspring of
goodness will never run dray in him, and whosoever dares wound him in his
natural and inviolable right is a criminal.’”[824]
This is pure westernism; and Radishchev represents the first truly
modern, completely westernised Russian. The ideas of duty, of self-sacrifice,
of God and immortality… play no part in his thought. Rightly, therefore, has
the Journey been called “the first trial balloon of revolutionary
propaganda in Russia”.[825] For
everything in it is based on the idea of individual advantage, self-interest
pure and simple. Nothing of the sacred, of the veneration due to that which is
established by God, remains. Only: “The sovereign is the first citizen of the
people’s commonwealth.” “Wherever being a citizen is not to his advantage, he
is not a citizen.”
Such ideas lead logically to the self-annihilation of society. In his
personal case, they led to suicide.
“There are grounds for assuming,” writes Walicki, “that this act was not
the result of a temporary fit of depression. Suicide had never been far from
his thoughts. In the Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow he wrote: ‘If
outrageous fortune hurl upon you all its slings and arrows, if there is no
refuge left on earth for your virtue, if, driven to extremes, you find no
sanctuary from oppression, then remember this: you are a man, call to mind your
greatness and seize the crown of bliss which they are trying to take from you.
Die.”[826]
Radischev
clearly exemplifies the bitter fruits of the westernizing reforms of Peter the
Great and his successors. It was this mad, proud striving for mastery of one’s
life, without acknowledgement of the Master, God, that was to lead much of
Europe to a kind of collective suicide in the next age. And its appearance in
Orthodox Russia was the result, in large part, of the “reforms” of Peter I and
Catherine II.
Russia and the West
So were the
Petrine reforms and their completion under Catherine good or bad for Russia and
the world in the long term? We have produced abundant evidence to show that
they divided the country into two nations, the Europeanized upper class and the
Orthodox peasantry, and that the Europeanization of the upper class led to its
perdition in the strict sense of the word, mixing Orthodoxy with elements of
neo-paganism until Orthodoxy was eventually completely corrupted and remained
only in a very few members of the class. Since this corruption eventually
filtered down to the lower classes, making the revolution of 1917 both possible
and inevitable, it would appear that only a negative answer to our question is
possible.
However, before
concluding it will be worth considering the opinion of the writer Fyodor
Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky on the significance of the eighteenth century in
Russian history. “Throughout these hundred and fifty years after Peter we have
done nothing but live through a communion with all human civilization,
affiliating ourselves with their history and their ideals. We have learned, and
trained ourselves, to love the French, the Germans and everybody else, as if
they were our brethren – notwithstanding the fact that they never liked us and
made up their minds never to like us. However, this was the essence of our
reform – the whole Peter cause; we have derived from it, during that century
and a half, an expansion of our view, which, perhaps, was unprecedented
and cannot be traced in any other nation, whether in the ancient or the new
world. The pre-Peter Russia was active and solid, although politically she was
slow to form herself; she had evolved unity within herself and she had been
ready to consolidate her border regions. And she had tacitly comprehended that
she bore within herself a treasure which was no longer existent anywhere else –
Orthodoxy; that she was the conservatrix of Christ’s truth, genuine truth – the
true image of Christ which had been dimmed in all other religions and in all
other nations. This treasure, this eternal truth inherent in Russia and of
which she had become the custodian, according to the view of the best Russians
of those days, as it were, relieved their conscience of the duty of any other
enlightenment. Moreover, in Moscow the conception had been formed that any
closer intercourse with Europe might even exercise a harmful and corrupt
influence upon the Russian mind and the Russian idea; that it might
distort Orthodoxy itself and lead Russia along the path to perdition ‘much in
the same way as all other peoples’. Thus ancient Russia, in her isolation, was
getting ready to be unjust – unjust to mankind, having taken the resolution
to preserve passively her treasure, her Orthodoxy, for herself, to seclude
herself from Europe – that is, mankind – much as our schismatics who refuse to
eat with you from the same dish and who believe it to be a holy practice that
everyone should have his own cup and spoon. This is a correct simile because
prior to Peter’s advent, there had developed in Russia almost precisely this
kind of political and spiritual relation with Europe. With Peter’s reform there
ensued an unparalleled broadening of the view, and herein – I repeat – is
Peter’s whole exploit. This is also that very treasure about which I spoke in
one of the preceding issues of the Diary – a treasure which we, the
upper cultured Russian stratum, are bringing to the people after our
century-and-a-half absence from Russia, and which the people, after we
ourselves shall have bowed before their truth, must accept from us sine qua
non, ‘without which the fusion of both strata would prove impossible and
everything would come to ruin.’ Now, what is this ‘expansion of the view’, what
does it consist of, and what does it signify? Properly speaking, this is not
enlightenment, nor is it science; nor is it a betrayal of the popular Russian
moral principles for the sake of European civilization. No, this is precisely
something inherent only in the Russian people, since nowhere and at no time has
there ever been such a reform. This is actually, and in truth, almost our
brotherly fifty-year-long living experience of our intercourse with them. This
is our urge to render universal service to humanity, sometimes even to the
detriment of our own momentous and immediate interests. This is our
reconciliation with their civilizations; cognition and excuse of their
ideals even though these be in discord with ours; this is our acquired faculty
of discovering and revealing in each one of the European civilizations – or,
more correctly, in each of the European individualities – the truth contained
in it, even though there be much with which it would be impossible to agree.
Finally, this is the longing, above all, to be just and to seek nothing but
truth. Briefly, this is, perhaps, the beginning of that active application of
our treasure – of Orthodoxy – to the universal service of mankind to which
Orthodoxy is designated and which, in fact, constitutes its essence. Thus,
through Peter’s reform our former idea – the Russian Moscow idea – was
broadened and its conception was magnified and strengthened. Thereby we got to
understand our universal mission, our individuality and our role in humankind;
at the same time we could not help but comprehend that this mission and role do
not resemble those of other nations since, there, every national individuality
lives solely for, and within, itself. We, on the other hand, will begin – now
that the hour has come – precisely with becoming servants to all nations, for
the sake of general pacification. And in this there is nothing disgraceful; on
the contrary, therein is our grandeur because this leads to the ultimate unity
of mankind. He who wishes to be first in the Kingdom of God must become a
servant to everybody. This is how I understand the Russian mission in its
ideal.”[827]
For one who
believes in Divine Providence and the Truth of Orthodoxy, Dostoyevsky’s views
cannot be dismissed out of hand, however unlikely – exceedingly unlikely –
their fulfilment in reality would seem to be today, in 2004. The opening of
Russia to the West, while opening the path for the introduction of Western
corruption and atheism into Russia, also made possible the conversion of the
West to Russia. For since there can be no true missionary work where there is no
sympathy for the person or nation to be converted, and since sympathy for and
with is not possible without knowledge of, the great ideal of the
flowing out of “light from the East”, Holy Orthodoxy, to the darkened heretical
West could not come about unless there had been a prior “expansion of view” to
embrace without succumbing to the viewpoints of the West.
Unfortunately,
of course, in the end it was not the Eastern light that enlightened the West,
except in isolated instances, but rather the Western darkness that engulfed the
East, except for some flickering candles in the catacombs of Holy Russia. And
yet it is not yet the end of history; and as long as there is some corner of
Holy Russia that has not yet succumbed to the western apostasy, then the
conversion of what is now a single apostate civilization from Los Angeles to
Vladivostok is possible. For, as Elder Aristocles of Moscow (+1918) prophesied:
"The Cross of Christ will shine over the whole world and our Homeland will
be magnified and will become as a lighthouse in the darkness for all."
For, as
Dostoyevsky says, “Who knows the ways of Providence?”[828]
[1] Braudel, A History of
Civilizations, London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 315-316.
[2] Braudel, op. cit., p.
322.
[3]
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…” (A History of Western Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 172, 173)
[4] Spellman, Monarchies, London:
Reaktion Books, 2001, pp. 179-180. This development was the result, first, of
the Magna Carta of 1215, and then of the temporarily successful
rebellion of Simon de Montfort against King Henry III in 1264. Simon brought
not only bishops and barons, but also important burghers, into the king’s
council. And he introduced the idea – later abrogated – that if the king broke his contract with the
leading men of the kingdom, they could take up arms against him.
[5] Erasmus,
in John Adair, Puritans, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998, p. 28.
[6] Leontiev, “Vizantizm i
Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism), in Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo
(The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow, 1996, p. 142 (in Russian).
[7] 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.)
[8] Norman Davies, Europe,
London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 471, 479.
[9] Braudel, op. cit., pp.
348-349.
[10] Braudel, op. cit., p.
326.
[11] Brianchaninov, “The concept of
heresy: article 3”, Tserkovnaia Zhizn’ (Church Life), ¹¹5-6,
September –December, 2002, pp. 35-36 (in Russian).
[12] Tikhomirov, Religioznie-filosofskie
osnovy istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow,
1997, p. 363 (in Russian).
[13] Archbishop Averky (Taushev),
"O Polozhenii Pravoslavnogo Khristianina v Sovremennom Mire” (On the
Situation of the Orthodox Christian in the Contemporary World), Istinnoe
Pravoslavie i Sovremennij Mir (True Orthodoxy in the Contemporary World),
Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, pp. 19-21 (in Russian).
[14]
Armstrong, The Battle for God: a History of Fundamentalism, New York:
Ballantine Books, 2001, pp. 3-4.
[15] Armstrong, op. cit., p. 7.
However the Jewish Professor Norman Cantor disputes this figure, giving the
true figure as “only around forty thousand, about half the practicing Jews left
the country in 1492” (The Sacred Chain, London: Fontana, 1996, pp.
189-190).
[16] Cohn-Sherbok, Atlas of Jewish
History, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 112.
[17] Cantor, op. cit., p. 189.
[18] Armstrong, op. cit., p.
15.
[19] Cantor, op. cit., pp.
192-193.
[20] Armstrong, op. cit., pp.
22, 23-24.
[21] Quoted in V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia
Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do Nashikh Dnej (The Russian
Intelligentsia and Masonry: from Peter I to our Days), Harbin, 1934,
Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 75 (in Russian).
[22] Barzun, From Dawn to
Decadence, 1500 to the Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 11.
[23] Martin Luthers Werke
Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Weimar, 1885, 405, 35. Quoted by Deacon John
Whiteford in ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU
(Orthodox Christianity), September 6, 1999.
[24] Archbishop Hilarion, Christianity
or the Church?, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, p. 28.
[25] Kireevsky, “Indifferentizm”
(“Indifferentism”), in Razum na puti k istine (Reason on the Path to Truth),
Moscow, 2002, pp. 88-91 (in Russian).
[26] 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.
[27]
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.”
[28] Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp.
472-474.
[29] Zhukovsky, “O stikhotvorenii
‘Sviataia Rus’” (“On the Poem ‘Holy Rus’”), in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 74.
[30] 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.
[31] Gilbert
Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre (Emperor and Priest), Gallimard, 1996,
pp 292-293 (in French).
[32] Luther, “Secular Authority: To
What Extent it Should be Obeyed”, in Englander, op. cit., p. 190.
[33] George, op. cit., pp.
55-56, 57.
[34] Peter Matheson, “Thomas
Müntzer’s idea of an audience”, History, vol. 76, no. 247, June,
1991, pp. 192, 193.
[35] Luther, Against the Thievish,
Murderous Hordes of Peasants; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 357.
[36] For the same reason Luther was
compelled 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). Müntzer had a point in
calling him “Dr. Liar”!
[37] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-filosofskie
osnovy istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of History), op.
cit., p. 271.
[38] Peter Ackroyd, The Life of
Thomas More, London: Vintage, 1999, p. 261.
[39] Ackroyd, op. cit., p.
223.
[40] See John Guy, “More to Thomas
than a man for all seasons”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 2, no. 2,
February, 2001, p. 53.
[41] Ackroyd, op. cit., pp.
224-225, 221.
[42] Ackroyd, op. cit., p.
279.
[43] 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.
[44] Ackroyd, op. cit., p.
354.
[45] Ackroyd, op. cit., p.
388.
[46] Ackroyd, op. cit., p.
394.
[47] Calvin, Institutes
IV.xi.3.
[48] Chadwick, The Reformation,
Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 83, 86-87.
[49] McClelland, op. cit., p.
175.
[50] McClelland, op. cit., p.
174.
[51] Gascoigne, A Brief History of
Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, pp. 116-117.
[52] Spellman, op. cit., pp.
194-195.
[53] Chadwick, op. cit., pp.
190-191.
[54] Quoted in Jay, op. cit.,
p. 178.
[55] Quoted in Jay, op. cit.,
p. 179.
[56] 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).
[57] Davies, op.
cit., p. 453.
[58] Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to
Empire: the Making of a World Power, 1492-1763, Allen Lane: The Penguin
Press, 2002.
[59] Spellman, op. cit., pp.
91-92.
[60] Salazar, in M.J. Cohen and John
Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 334.
[61] Belloc, Richelieu,
London: Ernest Benn, 1930, pp. 67-68.
[62] 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.
[63] 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.)
[64] Las Casas, Aqui
se contienen treinta proposiciones muy juridicas, Propositions XVI, XVII,
in Englander, op. cit., p. 327. Las Casas is famous
for his protection of the rights of the native Indians against the cruelties of
the Spanish colonialists. In a debate at Valladolid in 1550 he pressed the case
for the full humanity of the Indians against Sepulveda, who argued, following
Aristotle, that they were so inferior as to be intended by God to be slaves.
[65] Gilbert Dagron, Vostochnij
tsezaropapizm (istoria i kritika odnoj kontseptsii) (Eastern Caesaropapism (the
history and critique of a concept), http://portal-credo.ru/site/?act=lib&id=177
(in Russian).
[66] Las Casas, op. cit.,
Proposition XI, in Englander, op. cit., p. 325.
[67]
John Warrington, introduction to More’s Utopia, London: Dent,
1974, p. xi.
[68] De Mariana, The King and the
Education of the King, in Englander, op. cit., p. 265.
[69] Belloc, How the Reformation Happened,
p. 233, footnote.
[70] Quoted in Jeremy Paxman, The
English, London: Penguin Books, 1998, 1999. p. 98.
[71] Barzun, 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 istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of Hisotry), 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] 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).
[84] Davies, Europe,
London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 534, 536, 538.
[85] Mark Almond,
Revolution, London: De Agostini Editions, 1996, p. 44.
[86] Davies, op.
cit., pp. 538-539.
[87] Davies, op.
cit., pp. 538, 539.
[88] De Saumaise, in
Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches, 1987, p. 188.
[89] Geyl, quoted in Charles George, 500
Years of Revolution: European Radicals from Hus to Lenin, Chicago: Charles
H. Kerr Publishing Co., 1998, p. 64.
[90] J.S. McClelland, A History of
Western Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 287.
[91] John Adair writes, “when
religion decays, what is left but worldliness? The paradoxes of faith collapse
into mere contradictions.” (Puritans, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1998,
p. 267).
[92] Belloc, How the Reformation
Happened, pp. 126, 127.
[93] Landes, The Wealth and
Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 174-176, 177-178.
[94] Cantor, op. cit., pp.
198-199.
[95] Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, New York: Fontana, 1968, pp. 37, 40.
[96] J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of
the West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 149.
[97] Tocqueville, op.
cit., pp. 43-44.
[98] Reagan,
in Adair, Puritans,
op. cit, p. 280.
[99] Tocqueville, op.
cit., p. 45.
[100] Adair, op. cit., p. 166.
[101] Quoted in Jay, The Church,
London: SPCK, 1977, p. 214.
[102] Lopukhin, A.P. Zakonodatel'stvo
Moisea (The Legislation of Moses). Saint Petersburg, 1888, p. 233; quoted
in Alexeyev, N.N. “Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhii” (“Christianity and the Idea
of the Monarchy”), Put' (The Way), ¹ 6, January, 1927, p. 557 (in
Russian).
[103] Berdyaev, N. “Tsarstvo Bozhie i
Tsarstvo Kesaria” (“The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Caesar”), Put'
(The Way), September, ¹
1, September, 1925, p. 44 (in Russian).
[104] Tocqueville, op.
cit., pp. 47-49.
[105] Quoted in Barzun, op. cit.,
p. 278.
[106] Bamber Gascoigne, A Brief
History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 154.
[107] Gascoigne, op.
cit., p. 158.
[108] Doran, “Elizabeth I’s Religion:
The Evidence of Her Letters”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol.
51, no. 4.
[109] Quoted in M.J. Cohen and John
Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 379.
[110] The words of William Pitt the
Elder in 1760 (Barzun, op. cit., p. 33). The Arminians were Calvinists
who ascribed a greater role to free will than was acceptable to the Calvinist
orthodoxy.
[111] Lyall, “India. (1) The Mogul
Empire”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Eighteenth
Century, pp. 514-515.
[112] Lewis, "Myth became
Fact", God in the Dock: Essays on Theology, Fount Paperbacks, 1979,
p. 64.
[113] A better word here would be
“providential”. It is God, not chance, that places monarchs on their thrones (Wisdom
6.3). (V.M.)
[114] Scruton, England: An Elegy,
London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, p. 188.
[115] Chadwick, op. cit., p.
222.
[116] George, op. cit., pp.
73-75, 77.
[117] Coleridge, Table Talk, 9
November, 1833.
[118] George, op. cit., p.
viii.
[119] Guizot, op. cit., p. 217.
[120] Quoted by Barzun, op. cit.,
p. 270.
[121] Milton, To the Lords and
Commons of England, 1644.
[122] 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.
[123] 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 of 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).
[124] Quoted in Harold Nicolson, Monarchy,
London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 201.
[125] Nicolson, op. cit., p.
200.
[126] M.J. Cohen and John Major, History
in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 419.
[127] Nicolson, op. cit., p.
194.
[128] Barzun, op. cit., pp.
250-251.
[129] Quoted by Ashton, The English
Civil War, p. 7.
[130] Barzun, op. cit., p. 249.
[131] Ashton, op. cit., pp. 7,
8.
[132] J.R. Western, Monarchy and
Revolution, London: Blandford Press, 1972, p. 8.
[133] 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.
[134] Nicolson, op. cit., pp.
9-10.
[135] Religious radicalism always
leads to secularism. 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.)
[136] Taylor Downing and Maggie Millman,
Civil War, London: Parkgate books, 1991, pp. 109, 112-116.
[137] Thus among Winstanley’s
“revelations” “was one, That the earth shall be made a common Treasury of
livelihood to whole mankind, without respect of persons; and I had a voice
within me declare it all abroad, which I did obey…” (Watch Word to the City
of London).
[138] Downing and Millman, op.
cit., pp. 119-121, 125.
[139] Hill, Milton and the English
Revolution, London: Faber & Faber, 1997, p. 172.
[140] Quoted in John Dover Wilson, The
Essential Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1967, p. 92.
[141] Downing and Millman, op. cit.,
pp. 134-135.
[142] Kelsey, “The Trial of Charles I:
A New Perspective”, History Today, vol. 49 (1), January, 1999, p. 37.
[143] Quoted in Almond, op. cit.,
p. 51.
[144] As Guizot wrote, Cromwell “was successively a Danton and a Buonaparte”
(The History of Civilization in Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1847,
1997, p. 221).
[145] Metropolitan Anastasius, “The
Dark Visage of Revolution”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVII, no. 5,
September-October, 1996, p. 10.
[146] Sir Edmund Leach, “Melchisedech
and the Emperor: Icons of Subversion and Orthodoxy”, Proceedings of the
Royal Anthropological Society, 1972, p. 6.
[147] Quoted in Hill, Milton and
the English Revolution, op. cit., p. 167.
[148]
Quoted in Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, op. cit., pp.
100, 101, 169.
[149] Quoted in Hill, op. cit.,
p. 169.
[150] Brown, Love’s Body, New
York, 1966, p. 114; quoted in Hill, op. cit., p. 171.
[151] Quoted in Hill, op. cit.,
pp. 173-174.
[152] Barzun, From Dawn to
Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 265.
[153] 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.”
[154] Donne, The First Anniversarie
(1611), quoted in Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, London: Macmillan,
1990, p. 130.
[155] Bacon, New Atlantis; see
Porter, op. cit., p. 17.
[156] Bacon, The Advancement of Learning,
Book I, 1, 3.
[157] Bacon, The Interpretation of
Nature, proemium.
[158] Bacon, The Great
Instauration, “The Plan of the Work”.
[159] Roberts, The Triumph of the
West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 160.
[160] Erasmus, The Praise of Folly,
in Charles H. George, 500 Years of Revolution: European Radicals from
Hus to Lenin, Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Co., 1998, p. 38.
[161] Rose, in Monk Damascene
Christensen, Not of this World: The Life and Teachings of Fr. Seraphim Rose,
Forestville, CA: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1993, p. 594. C.S. Lewis writes:
“There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating
both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal
problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been
knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the
problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a
technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things
hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious – such as digging up and mutilating
the dead” (quoted in Fr. Seraphim Johnson, “A Sane Family in an Insane World”,
www.trueorthodoxy.net/a_sane_family_in_an_insane_world.htm).
[162] 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, ¹ 3, May-June, 1989, p. 29.
[163] Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, p. 179.
[164] Richards, in Lee Strobel, The
Case for a Creator, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2004, pp. 162-163.
[165] Strobel, op. cit., p.
163.
[166] Richards, in Strobel, op.
cit., p. 163.
[167] Cf. Isaiah 40.22: “It is
He Who sits above the circle of the earth”. So the Pope need not have
worried.
[168] St. Gregory of Nyssa calls the
earth “spherical” in his On the Soul and the Resurrection, chapter 4.
[169] Lindberg, in Strobel, op. cit., p. 164. On this controversy, see Peter De Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, pp. 221-231.
[170] Barzun, From Dawn to
Decadence, 1500 to the Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, pp. 119-120.
[171] Barzun, op. cit., p. 125.
[172] Neal Ascherson, Black Sea, London:
Vintage, 1996, pp. 180-181.
[173] M.J. Trow, Vlad the Impaler: In Search of the Real Dracula, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2003.
[174] Archimandrite Ioanichie Balan, Romanian Patericon, Forestville, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, volume I, 1996, pp. 189, 191.
[175] Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo po
istorii russkoj tserkvi (A Guide to the History of the Russian Church), Moscow,
2001, pp. 149-155 (in Russian).
[176] Nazarov, Taina Rossii (The
Mystery of Russia), Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1999, p. 538 (in Russian).
[177] Òrapezuntios, quoted in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of
Princes: The Life of Potemkin, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, C. 215.
[178] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia
Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 164 (in
Russian).
[179] Dominic Lieven, Empire,
London: John Murray, 2000, pp. 262, 278.
[180] 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.
[181] 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.”
[182]
Boyeikov, Tserkov', Rus' i Rim (The Church, Rus’ and Rome), Jordanville,
N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983 (in Russian).
[183] 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.
[184] “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).
[185] Simeon of Suzdal, in Fomin, S.
& Fomina, T., Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second
Coming), Moscow, 1994, p. 242 (in Russian).
[186] Meyendorff, “Was there an
Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, Rome, Constantinople, Moscow,
op. cit., p. 108.
[187] Meyendorff, “Was there an
Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, op. cit., pp. 109-110.
[188] Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great
Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 44 (in Russian).
[189] Meyendorff, “Was there an
Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, op. cit., p. 109.
[190] Meyendorff, “Was There Ever a
‘Third Rome’? Remarks on the Byzantine Legacy in Russia”, in Rome,
Constantinople, Moscow, op. cit., p. 135.
[191] Quoted in Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe,
London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 114.
[192] Ya.S. Lourié, “Perepiska
Groznogo s Kurbskim v Obschestvennoj Mysli Drevnej Rusi” (“The Correspondence
of the Terrible one with Kurbsky in the Political Thought of Ancient Rus’”), in
Ya.S. Lourié and Yu.D. Rykov, Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem
Kurbskim (The Correspondence of the Terrible one with Andrew Kurbsky), Ìîscow: “Nauka”, 1993, p. 230 (in
Russian).
[193] Philotheus, Letter against
the Astronomers and the Latins. In van den Bercken, op. cit.
[194]
See N. Ulyanov, "Kompleks Filofea" (“The Philotheus Complex”),
Voprosy Filosofii (Questions of Philosophy), 1994, no. 4, pp. 152-162 (in
Russian).
[195] Paul Johnson, A History of
the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, pp. 231,
[196] Koestler, 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).
[197] O.A. Platonov, Ternovij
Venets Rossii (Russia’s Thorny Crown), Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, pp. 74-76, 87
(in Russian).
[198] Nechvolodov, A. L'Empereur
Nicolas II et les Juifs (Nicholas II and the Jews), Paris, 1924, p. 183 (in
French).
[199] 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.
[200] 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). (V.M.)
[201]
Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov' (The Russian Orthodox Church),
Publication of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1988, pp. 25-26 (in Russian).
[202] “If this second Judas is not rooted out,” he wrote, “little by little the
apostasy will encompass everybody”. (V.M.)
[203] Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 189-192.
[204] “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” (“Joseph of Volotsk”),
http://webforum.land.ru/mes.php?id=4176471&fs=0&board=287&1st=&arhv
(09/08/02) (in
Russian).
[205] However, the tsar, too, had not
been without blame. Once he summoned St. Joseph and said to him: Forgive me,
Father. I knew about the Novgorodian heretics, but thought that they were
mainly occupied in astrology.” “Is it for me to forgive you?” asked the saint.
“No, father, please, forgive me!” said the tsar (Lebedev, op. cit., p.
50). (V.M.)
[206] St. Joseph, Prosvetitel’ (The
Enlightener),
Word 16.
[207] 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 (The Moscow Patericon), Moscow: “Stolitsa”, 1991, p. 46 (in Russian)). (V.M.)
[208] Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon
(Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw, 1931, part I, pp. 153-154. 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”. (Îcherki po Istorii Russkoj Sviatosti (Sketches on the
History of Russian Sanctity), Brussels, 1961, p. 204 (in
Russian)).
[209] St. Joseph, Prosvetitel’ (The
Enlightener),
Word 16.
[210] Zyzykin, op. cit., part
I, p. 151.
[211] Zyzykin, op. cit., part
I, p. 158. 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.” (quoted in G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind,
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, volume II, 1966, pp. 168, 255).
[212] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 51.
[213] Zyzykin, op. cit., part
I, p. 152.
[214] “Our Father among the Saints
Maxim the Greek”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XIII, no. 1, January-February,
1991, p. 11.
[215] Francis Carr, Ivan the
Terrible, London: David & Charles, 1981, pp. 61-62.
[216] Lourié, “Sergianstvo: parasinagoga,
pereshedshaia v raskol” (“Sergianism: a parasynagogue turning into a
schism”), http://web.referent.ru/nvc/forum/0/co/BC415C9E/179
[217] Metropolitan Macarius, Istoria
Russkoj Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Church) ,Moscow, 1996, vol. 4,
part 2, pp. 91, 93 (in Russian).
[218] It should be remembered that the
word groznij, which is translated “terrible” in the title “Ivan the
Terrible”, should better be translated as “threatening”. And so Ivan IV was
“Ivan the Threatening”, a title that sounded much less terrible to Russian
ears. (V.M.)
[219] Ya.S.
Lourié, op. cit., pp. 230-231.
[220] Hosking, Russia: People and
Empire, 1552-1917, London: Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 48-49.
[221] Pokrovsky, quoted in Solonevich,
Narodnaia Monarkhia (Popular Monarchy), Minsk, 1998, p. 331 (in
Russian).
[222] Solonevich, op. cit., p.
340.
[223] Lourié,
op. cit., p. 232.
[224] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
392.
[225] Ivan IV, Sochinenia (Works),
St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000, p. 49 (in Russian).
[226] One of the last to be absorbed
by Moscow was Pskov, in 1509. The chronicler, mourning over his native city of
Pskov, wrote that “the glory of the Pskovian land perished because of their
self-will and refusal to submit to each other, for their evil slanders and evil
ways, for shouting at veches. They were not able to rule their own
homes, but wanted to rule the city”. As Lebedev rightly remarks: “A good
denunciation of democracy!” (op. cit., p. 61).
[227] Ivan IV, op. cit., p. 40.
[228] Ivan IV,
op. cit., p. 37.
[229] Peter Budzilovich, “O
vozmozhnosti vosstanovlenia monarkhii v Rossii” (“On the Possibility of the
Restoration of the Monarchy in Russia”), Russkoe Vozrozhdenie (Russian
Regeneration), 1986, ¹ 34, http://www.russia.talk.com/monarchy.htm.
[230]
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.
[231] St. Irenaeus, Against
Heresies, v, 24, 3; translated in Maurice Wiles & Mark Santer, Documents
in Early Christian Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 226.
[232] St. Isidore, Letter 6,
quoted in Selected Letters of Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, Liberty,
TN: St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1989, p. 36.
[233] Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “ O
Petre Velikom” (“On Peter the Great”), Epokha (The Epoch), ¹ 10, 2000, no. 1, p. 38 (in
Russian).
[234] Kurbsky, letter to Monk Vassian
of the Pskov Caves monastery; translated in van den Bercken, op. cit.,
pp. 157-158.
[235] Kireevsky, “Pis’mo k A.I.
Koshelevu” (“Letter to A.I. Koshelev”), Razum na puit k istine (Reason on the Way to Truth), St.
Petersburg, 2000, p. 107 (in Russian).
[236] “Sviatoj Filipp Mitropolit”
(“The Holy Metropolitan Philip”), in Troitsky Paterik (Trinity
Patericon), Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, 1896; reprinted in Nadezhda,
14, Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1988, p. 66 (in Russian).
[237] Van den Bercken, op. cit.,
p. 153.
[238] Zhitia Russkikh Sviatykh
(Lives of the Russian Saints), Òàtaev,
2000, vol. 2, pp. 695, 696 (in Russian).
[239] Ivan IV, op. cit., p. 37.
[240] 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.
[241] Lebedev has even suggested that
that the half-military, half-monastic nature of Ivan’s oprichina was
modelled on the Templars, and that the terrible change in his appearance that
took place after his return to Moscow from Alexandrov in 1564 was the result of
“a terrible inner upheaval”, his initiation into a satanic, masonic-like sect (op.
cit., p. 97).
[242] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 90.
[243] Alferov, “Monarkhia i
Khristianskoe Soznanie” (“The Monarchy and Christian Consciousness”), http://catacomb.org.ua/rubr10/R10_11.htm,
pp. 8-13 (in Russian).
[244] Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great
Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 105 (in Russian).
[245] Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo po
istorii russkoj tserkvi (A Guide to the History of the Russian Church), Moscow,
2001, pp. 280-281 (in Russian).
[246] P. Ioseliani, A Short History
of the Georgian Church, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983,
pp. 146-148.
[247] Dobroklonsky, op. cit.,
pp. 278-279. Among the Georgian martyrs of this period we may mention the 6000
monks inhabiting twelve monasteries in the wilderness of David-Garejeli who
were martyred by Shah Abbas I in 1615. 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
[248]
See A.V. Kartashev, Ocherki po Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi (Sketches in the
History of the Russian Church), Paris: YMCA Press, 1959, pp. 10-46,
Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Church),
1988, pp. 152-156, Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 282-285; and the life of
St. Job, first patriarch of Moscow, in Moskovskij Paterik (The Moscow
Patericon), Moscow: Stolitsa, 1991, pp. 110-113 (in Russian).
[249] This anathema was confirmed by
two further Pan-Orthodox Councils in 1587 and 1593, and by several conciliar
statements in later centuries. See Fr. Basile Sakkas, The Calendar Question,
Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1973, chapter 2.
[250] See Fr. Georges Florovsky,
“Patriarch Jeremiah II and the Lutheran Divines”, in Christianity and
Culture, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1974, chapter VII.
[251] 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).
[252] Appendix to Protopresbyter
Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman
of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984, p. 379.
[253] Cantor, The Sacred Chain, London:
Fontana, 1996, p. 182.
[254] At Tulchin the Cossacks said to
the Poles: “We will spare you as long as you pay a ransom, then we will leave.
But we will not have mercy on the Jews for any money. They are our accursed
enemies; they have insulted our faith, and we have sworn to destroy their
tribe. Expel them from the city and be in agreement with us” (O. Platonov,
Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Thorny Crown), Moscow, 1998, p. 228 (in
Russian)).
[255] Johnson, op. cit., pp.
250-252, 258-260.
[256] Cantor, op. cit., p. 184.
[257] Smirnov, Istoria
Khristianskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi (A History of the Orthodox Christian Church),
Ìîscow, 2000, pp. 203-204 (in
Russian).
[258]
Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge, 1968.
[259]
See New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1985.
[260]
Runciman, op. cit. On the unia, see Boyeikov, Tserkov', Rus' i Rim (The
Church, Rus’ and Rome), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983,
ch. 4; A.V. Kartashev, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 267-310.
[261]
See Timothy Ware, Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under
Turkish Rule, Oxford, 1964.
[262]
See Boyeikov, op cit.; Kartashev, op. cit.; Russkaia
Pravoslavnaia Tserkov' (The Russian Orthodox Church), Publication of the
Moscow Patriarchate, 1988, pp. 45-48(in Russian).
[263]
See Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, Mass.: Institute
for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1985.
[264] Smirnov, op. cit.,
205-207, 208.
[265] Platonov, op. cit., p.
224.
[266] Sapega, quoted in Ludmilla
Perepiolkina, Ecumenism – A Path to Perdition, St. Petersburg, 1999, pp.
227-228.
[267] Perepiolkina, op. cit.,
p. 228.
[268] Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p.
312.
[269] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
105.
[270] Graham, Boris Godunof,
London: Ernest Benn, 1933, p. 116.
[271] Quoted in Archbishop Seraphim
(Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia (The Russian Ideology), St. Petersburg:
Suvorina, 1992, p. 64 (in Russian).
[272] Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), op.
cit., p. 65.
[273] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie
Zakona o Prestolonasledii v Rossii (The Origin of the Law of Succession in
Russia); in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?” (“Hereditariness or
Elections?”), Svecha Pokayania (Candle of Repentance), ¹ 4, February, 2000, p. 12 (in
Russian).
[274] Ivan Solonevich, Nardodnaia
Monarkhia (Popular Monarchy), Minsk, 1998, p. 81 (in Russian).
[275] The cellarer of the Holy Trinity
Monastery, Abraham Palitsyn, said that he “was a good pander to the heresies of
the Armenians and Latins” (in Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St.
Petersburg, 1999, p. 114 (in Russian)).
[276] Solonevich, op. cit., p.
82.
[277] St. John Maximovich, op. cit.,
p. 13.
[278] Fomin & Fomina, Rossia
pered vtorym prishestviem (Russian before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1998,
vol. I, p. 255 (in Russian).
[279] According to Protopriest Lev
Lebedev, Patriarch Job’s blindness and expulsion from his see were his
punishment for lying during the Council of 1598 that Ivan the Terrible had
“ordered” that Boris Godunov be crowned in the case of the death of his son
Theodore, and for lying again in covering up Boris’ guilt in the murder of the
Tsarevich Demetrius (Velikorossia (Great Russia), op. cit., p.
112).
[280]
Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), op. cit., pp. 118-121.
[281] Hosking, op. cit., p. 60.
[282] Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great
Russia), op. cit., pp. 121-123.
[283] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), Moscow: “Veche”, 1995, p. 14 (in Russian).
[284] The Life of St. Irinarchus,
in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., pp. 16-17.
[285] Archbishop Nicon, “Dostoslavnoe
Trekhsotletie” (“A worthy 300-hundred-year anniversary”), in Mech
Oboiudoostrij, 1913 (The Double-Edged Sword, 1913), St. Petersburg, 1995,
pp. 25-26 (in Russian).
[286] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Russia), op. cit., pp. 63, 64.
[287] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., pp. 18-19.
[288] 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).
[289] Solonevich, op. cit., pp.
82-83.
[290] St. John Maximovich, op. cit.,
p. 13.
[291] Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great
Russia), op. cit., p. 126.
[292] St. John, op. cit., pp.
43-45.
[293] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia
(Works), 1848, vol. 2, p. 134; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life),
49, ¹ 9 (573),
September, 1997, p. 6 (in Russian).
[294] Solonevich, op. cit., pp.
84, 85.
[295] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia
(Works), 1861, vol. 3, p. 226; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life),
49, ¹ 9 (573),
September, 1997, p. 8.
[296] Solonevich, op. cit., pp.
85-86.
[297] Solonevich, op. cit., p.
86.
[298] Solonevich, op. cit., p.
87.
[299] Brianchaninov, “On the
Judgements of God”.
[300] Brianchaninov, Pis’ma
(Letters), Moscow, 2000, p. 781 (in Russian).
[301] Solonevich, op. cit., pp.
87-88, 89-90, 91-92.
[302] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia
(Works), 1861, vol. 3, pp. 322-323; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life),
49, ¹ 9 (573),
September, 1997, p. 9.
[303] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia
(Works), 1877, vol. 3, p. 442; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, 49, ¹ 9 (573), September, 1997,
p. 5.
[304] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., p. 20.
[305] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., p. 20.
[306] Dobroklonksy, op. cit.,
pp. 323-324.
[307] For, as Patriarch
Philaret said, “the Latins-papists are the most evil and defiled of all
heretics, for they have received into their law the accursed heresies of all the
Hellenes, the Judaizers, the Hagarenes (that is, the Muslims) and the heretical
faiths, and in general they all think and act together with all the pagans and
heretics.” (in Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), op. cit., p. 130).
[308] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia
Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), op. cit., pp. 270-271,
272.
[309] Archbishop Andronicus, O
Tserkvi Rossii (On the Church of Russia), Fryazino, 1997, pp. 132-133 (in
Russian).
[310] Solzhenitsyn, Le
‘Problème Russe’ à la fin du xxe siècle, Paris:
Fayard, 1994, p. 13 (in French).
[311] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit.,
vol. I, p. 259.
[312] Quoted in Sergius Fomin, Rossia
pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Sergiev Posad:
Holy Trinity – St. Sergius monastery, first edition, 1993, p. 20 (in Russian).
[313] Lourié, “O Vozmozhnosti
Kontsa Sveta v Odnoj Otdel’no Vzyatoj Strane” (“On the Possibility of the End
of the World in One Separate Country”), pp. 1-2 (MS) (in Russian).
[314] Thus “Protopriests Neronov,
Habbakuk, Longinus and others considered that the faith of the Greeks ‘had
become leprous from the Godless Turks’, and that it was impossible to trust the
Greeks” (Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), op. cit., p. 136).
[315] But not to Russian practice
since the Stoglav council of 1551, which had legislated in favour of the
two-fingered sign because in some places the two-fingered sign was used, and in
others the three-fingered (Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), op.
cit., p. 70). (V.M.)
[316] 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).” (V.M.)
[317] This elicited the following
comments by Epiphany Slavinetsky, one of the main correctors of the books:
“Blind ignoramuses, hardly able to read one syllable at a time, having no
understanding 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 Ritualists to Korah
and Abiram, who had rebelled against Moses (in Paul Meyendorff, Russia,
Ritual & Reform, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991,
p. 113).
[318] In this tolerance Nicon followed
the advice of Patriarch Paisius of Constantinople. (V.M.)
[319] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., pp. 36-37.
[320] Meyendorff, op. cit.,
p. 33.
[321] Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov’
nakanune peremen (konets 1890-kh – 1918 gg.) (The Russian Church on the Eve of
the Changes (the end of the 1890s to 1918) Moscow, 2002, p. 252 (in
Russian).
[322] Meyendorff, op. cit., pp.
61, 62.
[323] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., p. 37.
[324] Lourié, “O Vozmozhnosti”, op. cit., p. 14.
[325]
See Michael Cherniavsky, "The Old Believers and the New Religion", Slavic
Review, vol. 25, 1966, pp. 27-33.
[326] Robert Massie, Peter the
Great, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 63.
[327] Avvakum, translated in van den
Bercken, op. cit., p. 165.
[328] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., pp. 40-41.
[329] 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
[330] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., p. 87. 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” (quoted in Hackel, op.
cit., p. 8).
[331] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., pp. 88-89.
[332] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit.,
volume I, p. 281.
[333] Zyzykin, op. cit., part
II, p. 101.
[334] “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 he is innocent and in
danger, 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.”
[335] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit.,
volume I, p. 23; Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 105.
[336] Zyzykin, op. cit., part
II, p. 104.
[337] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., p. 141. Italics mine (V.M.).
[338] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, pp. 106-107.
[339] Hackel, op. cit., p. 9.
[340] Fomin, op. cit., volume
I, pp. 24-25.
[341] Vladimir Rusak, Istoria
Rossijskoj Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Church), USA, 1993, p. 191(in
Russian). There were one or two better-founded charges, as, for example, that
Nicon had on his own, without a Council, defrocked and imprisoned Bishop Paul
of Kolomna (Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 290). But this was not the
essence of the charges against him.
[342] Ironically, they also
transgressed those articles of the Ulozhenie, chapter X, which envisaged
various punishments for offending the clergy (Priest Alexis Nikolin, Tserkov’
i Gosudarstvo (Church and State), Izdanie Sretenskogo monastyria, 1997, p.
71 (in Russian)).
[343] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., p. 100. The Old Believers also
accuse Nicon of ordering the torture and death of Bishop Paul (see S.G. Burgaft
and I.A. Ushakov, Staroobriadchestvo (Old Ritualism), Moscow, 1996, pp.
206-207 (in Russian). However, Lebedev (ibid.) asserts that he perished
“in unclear circumstances”. The Old Ritualists also assert that Bishop Paul
said that, in view of Nicon’s “violation” of Orthodoxy, his people should be
received into communion with the Old Ritualists by the second rite, i.e.
chrismation.
[344] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia
(Patriarchal Moscow), op. cit., p. 132.
[345]
Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 350.
[346] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part III, pp. 274, 275.
[347] Quoted by Vyacheslav (now Ali)
Polosin, in “Pochemy ia, pravoslavnij svyashchennik, prinial islam” (“Why I, an
Orthodox priest, accepted Islam”), http://www/lebed.com/art1181.htm
(in Russian).
[348] 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).
[349] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 9.
[350] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 15.
[351] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 16.
[352] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 41.
[353] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 91.
[354] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 86.
[355] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 17.
[356] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, pp. 30, 32.
[357] 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).
[358] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 55.
[359] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, pp. 19-20.
[360] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 59.
[361] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 62.
[362] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, pp. 63-64.
[363] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, pp. 24-25, 28.
[364] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 27.
[365] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part II, p. 48.
[366] Quoted in Hackel, op. cit.,
p. 9.
[367] Zyzykin, op. cit., part
I, p. 165.
[368] Rusak, op. cit., p. 194.
[369] Zyzykin, op. cit., part
I, p. 26.
[370] Rusak, op. cit., pp.
193-194.
[371] Bishop Gregory Grabbe writes: “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.” (Pis’ma (Letters),
Moscow, 1998, p. 24 (in Russian)). (V.M.)
[372] Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great
Russia), pp. 154-156.
[373] Grabbe, op. cit.
[374] Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov characterised the difference between the Popovtsi
(with priests) and Bespopovtsi (without priests) Old Believers as
follows: “The former are different in certain rites which have no influence on
the essence of Christianity, while the latter have no Bishop over themselves,
contrary to the ecclesiastical canons. The formation of the former was aided in
part by ignorance ascribing to certain rites and customs a greater importance
that these rites have; while the formation of the latter was aided by the
Protestant tendency of certain individual people.” (“O Raskole” (“On the
Schism”), in “Neizdannia proizvedenia episkopa Ignatia (Brianchaninova)”
(“Unpublished Works of Bishop Ignatius (Brianchaninov)”), Tserkovnaia Zhizn’
(Church Life), ¹¹ 1-2, January-February-March-April, 2003, p. 18 (in
Russian)).
[375] Zenkovsky, in Hosking, op.
cit., p. 72.
[376] Florovsky, Ways of Russian
Theology, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, part I, 1979, pp. 98, 99.
[377] Hosking, op. cit., p. 73.
[378] Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950, London: HarperCollins, 2004; Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 356.
[379] Armstrong, The
Battle for God: a History of Fundamentalism, New York: Ballantine
Books, 2001, pp.
13-14.
[380] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
358. According to Armstrong (op. cit., p. 11), “by 1650, Lurianic
Kabbalah had become a mass movement, the only theological system to win such
general acceptance among Jews at this time.”
[381] Johnson, op. cit., pp.
260-261.
[382] 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).
[383] Dan Cohn-Sherbok writes that
Nathan “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…” (Atlas
of Jewish History, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 119) (V.M.)
[384] Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp.
358-360.
[385] Hill, Milton and the English
Revolution, London: Faber & Faber, 1997, p. 181.
[386] Buruma, “China and Liberty”, Prospect,
May, 2000, p. 37.
[387] Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin, 1946, p. 520.
[388] Russell, op. cit., p.
529.
[389] Russell, op. cit., p.
529.
[390] Hobbes, Leviathan.
[391] Scruton, Modern Philosophy,
London: Arrow Books, 1997, p. 415.
[392] McClelland, A History of
Western Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 199.
[393] McClelland, op. cit., p.
207.
[394] Russell, op. cit., p.
575.
[395] McClelland, op. cit., p. 203.
[396] Russell, op. cit., p.
579.
[397] McClelland, op. cit., p.
201.
[398] Smith, op. cit., pp.
786-787.
[399] Smith, op. cit., p. 789.
[400] Smith, op. cit., p. 791.
[401] For “even before the Reformation,” as Russell writes, “theologians tended
to believe in setting limits to kingly power” (op. cit., p. 643).
[402] Locke, Second Treatise of
Civil Government. Locke’s criticism of
Hobbes was later echoed by the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury, who asked:
had not the author of Leviathan “forgot to mention Kindness, Friendship,
Sociableness, Love of Company and Converse, Natural affection, or anything of
this kind?” (quoted in Roy Porter, Enlightenment, London: Penguin
Books, p. 160).
[403] Locke, Second Treatise of
Civil Government, chapter 2, section 6.
[404] Locke, Second Treatise of
Civil Government, chapter 13, section 149.
[405] Quoted in Russell, op. cit.,
p. 651.
[406] McClelland, op. cit., p.
234.
[407] McClelland, op. cit., p.
236.
[408] McClelland, op. cit., p.
237.
[409] Locke, Two Treatises on
Government; quoted by David Held, Models of Democracy, Oxford:
Polity Press, 1987, p. 51.
[410] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; quoted by
Held, op. cit., p. 57.
[411] However, as Held writes, “a
fundamental difficulty lay at the very heart of his conception of liberty.
Liberty, he wrote, ‘is the right of doing whatever the law permits’. People are
free to pursue their activities within the framework of the law. But if freedom
is definied in direct relation to the law, there is no possibility of arguing
coherently that freedom might depend on altering the law or that the law itself
might under certain circumstances articulate tyranny” (op. cit., pp.
59-60).
[412] Smith, op. cit., p. 809.
[413] Weston, op. cit., p. 24.
[414] Locke, An Essay concerning
the true, original, extent, and end of Civil Government (1690).
[415] Locke, Second Treatise of
Civil Government, chapter 13, section 149.
[416] Russell, op. cit., pp.
662-663.
[417] Locke, Second Treatise of
Civil Government, treatise 2, chapter 14, section 168.
[418] Weston, op. cit., p. 25.
[419] Scruton, op.
cit., p. 416.
[420] Andrezev Walicki, A History of
Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 39.
[421] Scruton, op.
cit., p. 417.
[422] Tikhomirov, “Demokratia
liberal’naia i sotsial’naia” (“Liberal and Social Democracy”), in Kritika
Demokratia (A Critique of Democracy), Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 122 (in
Russian).
[423] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia
(Works), Moscow, 1877, vol. 3, pp. 448, 449; reprinted in Pravoslavnaia
Zhizn’ (Orthodox Life), 49, ¹ 9 (573), September, 1997, pp. 3-4 (in
Russian).
[424] Ben Rogers, “Portrait: John
Rawls”, Prospect, June, 1999, p. 51.
[425] Roger Scruton, The West and
the Rest, London: ISI Books, 2002, pp. 10-11.
[426] McClelland, op. cit., pp.
281-282, 283, 284.
[427] Belloc, Richelieu,
op. cit., pp. 83-84.
[428] Belloc, Richelieu,
op. cit., p. 304.
[429] Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons,
London: Constable, 1999, p. 62.
[430] Roger Price, A Concise
History of France, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 59.
[431] M.J. Cohen and John Major, History
in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 467.
[432] Davies, op.
cit., pp. 620, 621.
[433] Quoted in Robert Massie, Peter
the Great, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 193.
[434] Quoted in William Doyle, The
Oxford History of the French Revolution, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989, p. 38.
[435] Guizot, op. cit, pp.
140-141.
[436] Norman Davies, op. cit.,
p. 568.
[437] Quoted in Robin Lane Fox, Pagans
and Christians, London: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 637.
[438] Quoted by Fr. Antonious Henein,
orthodox-tradition@egroups.com , 8 August, 2000.
[439] Patapios, “On Caution regarding
Anathematization”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVII, ¹ 1, January, 2000, p. 22.
[440] More, Utopia, book II,
pp. 119-120.
[441] Bettenson & Maunder, op.
cit., p. 241.
[442] Edwards, in Porter, op. cit.,
p. 105.
[443] Winstanley, quoted in Downing
and Millman, op. cit., p. 136.
[444] Milton, Areopagitica.
[445] Barzun, op. cit., p. 276.
[446] Porter, op. cit., p. 50.
[447] Hobbes, Leviathan; in
Christopher Hill, “Thomas Hobbes and the Revolution in Political Thought”, Puritanism
and Revolution, London: Penguin books, 1958, p. 277.
[448] Hobbes, Leviathan; in
Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, op. cit., p. 283.
[449] 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.)
[450] Porter, op. cit., pp.
106-197.
[451] Locke, A Letter concerning
Toleration (1689).
[452] Smith, op. cit., p. 813.
[453] Bettenson & Maunder, op.
cit., p. 342.
[454] 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).
[455] Porter, op. cit., p. 108.
[456] Porter, op. cit., pp.
21-22.
[457] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 184.
[458] Vital, op. cit., pp. 38, 39.
[459] Johnson, op. cit., p.
278.
[460] 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).
[461] Platonov, op. cit., pp.
144-145, 147.
[462] Johnson, op. cit., p.
174.
[463] Hence the English word “slave”,
and the French “esclave”, come from “Slav”.
[464] As we have seen, these figures
are considered vastly exaggerated by Norman Cantor, The Sacred Chain, London:
Fontana, 1996, p. 189 (V.M.)
[465] Platonov, op. cit., pp.
148-149.
[466] Cohn-Sherbok, op. cit.,
p. 115.
[467] Tawney, Religion and the Rise
of Capitalism, 1926, 1937, p. 78; in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History
in Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 323.
[468] York, Letters, History Today,
vol. 50 (12), December, 2000, p. 61.
[469] 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).
[470] 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).
[471] Johnson, op. cit., pp.
256-258.
[472] Johnson, op. cit., p.
281.
[473] Arendt, “On Totalitarianism”, in
Mikhail Nazarov, Tajna Rossii (The Mystery of Russia), Moscow: “Russkaia
idea”, 1999, p. 394 (in Russian).
[474] Quoted in Philip Mansel, Constantinople,
London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 124.
[475] Mansel, op. cit., p. 126.
[476] Johnson, op. cit., pp.
245-246, 247, 283, 285, 286.
[477] Michael White, Isaac Newton:
The Last Sorcerer, London: Fourth Estate, 1998, p. 106.
[478] White, op. cit., p. 140.
[479] White, op. cit., p. 121. So assiduous was he in his search for the Philosophers’ Stone that Keynes
considered him to have been not so much the first of the men of the Age of
Reason as the last of the magicians…
[480] Clarke, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 371.
[481] White, op. cit., p. 122.
[482] White, op. cit., p. 128.
[483] White, op. cit., p. 129.
[484] White, op. cit., p. 155.
[485] In a recent television programme
on Newton, it is claimed that in a manuscript of his now in Jerusalem he
calculated that the Apocalypse would come in the year 2060.
[486] White, op. cit., pp. 157,
158.
[487] Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1959, p. 512.
[488] Polanyi, “The Two
Cultures", Encounter, 1959, 13, p. 61.
[489] “The
Enlightenment was not a crusade, “ writes Mark Goldie, “but a tone of
voice, a sensibility” (“Priesthood and the Birth of Whiggism”, quoted in Roy
Porter, Enlightenment, London: Penguin, 2000, p. xxi).
[490] Norman Davies,
Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 625.
[491] Quoted in Jacques Barzun, From
Dawn to Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 322.
[492] Temperley, “The Age of Walpole
and the Pelhams”, The Cambridge Modern History, Cambridge University
Press, 1934, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, pp. 76, 77.
[493] Quoted in Bamber Gascoigne, A
Brief History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 168.
[494] Porter, op. cit., p. 3.
[495] Barzun, op. cit., p. 361.
[496] F.F. Willert, “Philosophy and
the Revolution”, The Cambridge Modern History, Cambridge University
Press, vol. VIII: The French Revolution, 1934, pp. 2-3.
[497] Pope, “Epitaph: Intended for Sir
Isaac Newton” (1730).
[498] Porter, Enlightenment, London:
Penguin books, 2000, pp. 135-136, 137, 138, 142.
[499] Sherrard, The Rape of Man and
Nature, Ipswich: Golgonooza Press, 1987, p. 69.
[500] Whichcote, quoted in Porter, op.
cit., p. 99.
[501] Locke, An Essay concerning
Human Understanding, book IV, chapter 19.
[502] Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx,
London: Fontana Press, 1995, pp. 27-28.
[503] Porter, op. cit., p. 62.
[504] Porter, op. cit., p. 100.
[505] Cited in Henry Bettenson and
Christ Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University
Press, third edition, 1999, p. 345.
[506] Quoted in Stephen J. Lee, Aspects
of European History, 1494-1789, London & New York: Routledge, 1994, p.
252.
[507] Porter, op. cit., p. 100.
“Indeed,” writes Berlin, “this task was of crucial importance: for without it a
true and clear picture of the principal ‘faculties’ and operations of the human
mind, one could not be certain how much credence to give to various types of
thought or reasoning, nor how to determine the sources and limits of human
knowledge, nor the relationship between its varieties. But unless this was
known the claims of ignoramuses and charlatans could not be properly exposed;
nor the new picture of the material world adequately related to other matters
of interest to men – moral conduct, aesthetic principles, laws of history and
of social and political life, the ‘inner’ workings of the passions and the
imagination, and all the other issues of central interest to human beings. A
science of nature had been created; a science of the mind had yet to be made.”
(“The Philosophers of the Enlightenment”, in The Power of Ideas, op.
cit., p. 40)
[508] Pope, An Essay on Man,
ii, 1-2 (1733).
[509] Pope, An Essay on Man,
ii, 3-10. “How blind are we,” wrote Rousseau, “in the midst of so much
enlightenment” (Letter to D’Alembert (1758)).
[510] Gascoigne, op.
cit., p. 164.
[511] Porter, “Architects of
Happiness”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 1, no. 8, December, 2000, pp.
15-16.
[512] Smith, The Wealth of Nations,
Book 1, chapter 2.
[513] Kant, “An Answer to the
Question: What is Enlightenment?” (1784, in Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant’s
Political Writings, 1970, p. 54).
[514] Porter, The Enlightenment, pp.
31,32.
[515] Isaiah Berlin, “My Intellectual
Path”, in The Power of Ideas, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, p. 4.
[516] Gerald R. Cragg, The Church
and the Age of Reason, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, pp. 235-236.
[517] Cragg, op. cit., p. 239.
[518] Cragg, op. cit., p. 237.
[519] Lee, op. cit., p. 253.
[520] Voltaire, in Cragg, op. cit.,
p. 241.
[521] Quoted in Barzun, op. cit.,
p. 368.
[522] Barzun, op. cit., pp.
364-365.
[523] Cragg, op. cit., p. 245.
[524] Azkoul, Anti-Christianity and
the New Atheism, Montreal: Monastery Press, 1984, p. 26.
[525] See I.R. Shafarevich, Sotsializm
kak yavlenie mirovoj istorii (Socialism as a Phenomenon of World History),
Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 194-204 (in Russian).
[526] This refers to their toleration
of the cult of ancestors during their missionary work in China. The Pope
eventually banned this toleration, which led to the collapse of the mission.
(V.M.)
[527] Norman Davies, Europe,
London: Pimlico, 1997, pp. 593-594.
[528] Robert Massie, Peter the
Great, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 314.
[529] William Doyle, The Oxford
History of the French Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1990, p. 314.
[529] William Doyle, op. cit.,
p. 197.
[530] And in Portugal, where “John V
(r. 1706-50), known as ‘The Faithful’, was a priest-king, one of whose sons by
an abbess became Inquisitor-General” (Stone, op. cit., p. 638).
[531] Quoted in Davies, op. cit.,
p. 648. He also gave refuge to Rousseau.
[532] Eric Hobsbawn, The Age of
Revolution: 1789-1848, London: Abacus, 1977, p. 36.
[533] Porter, op. cit., pp.
26-27.
[534] Porter, op. cit., p. 29.
[535] Cragg, op. cit., p. 218.
[536] Diderot, Refutation of
Helvétius, ed. Garnier, p. 610 (in French).
[537] Quoted in Frederick Copleston, A
History of Philosophy, New York: Image Books, 1964, volume 5, part II, p.
74.
[538] Copleston, op. cit., p.
106.
[539] Copleston, op. cit., p.
88.
[540] Russell, op. cit., p.
693.
[541] Copleston, op. cit., p.
92.
[542] Russell, op. cit., p.
697.
[543] Russell, op. cit.., p.
697.
[544] Copleston, op. cit., p.
112.
[545] Copleston, op. cit., p.
113.
[546] Skidelsky, “England’s doubt”, Prospect,
July, 1999, p. 34.
[547] Hume, A Treatise of Human
Nature, book II, section 3.
[548] Hume, Of Suicide.
[549] Copleston, op. cit., p. 130.
[550] Copleston, op. cit., p.
123.
[551] Porter, op. cit., p. 178.
[552] Burt, The English
Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, pp. 593-594; in Rose, op. cit., p.
319.
[553] Russell, op. cit., p.
685.
[554] Copleston, op. cit., p.
148.
[555] Copleston, op. cit., p.
147.
[556] Copleston, op. cit., p.
149.
[557] Copleston, op. cit., pp.
150-151.
[558] Copleston, op. cit., pp.
151-153.
[559] Kant, Critique of Pure Reason,
first edition, XVII.
[560] Kant, Opus
Postumum, XXI.
[561] Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the
Romantic Will”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico, 1998,
pp. 561-564.
[562] Benita Eisler, Byron,
London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 13.
[563] Berlin, “The Apotheosis of the
Romantic Will”, op. cit. p. 566.
[564] Berlin, “The
Counter-Enlightenment”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico,
1998, p. 248-
[565] Berlin, “The
Counter-Enlightenment”, op. cit., pp. 253-254.
[566] Herder, in Berlin, “Herder and
the Enlightenment”, in The Proper Study of Man, London: Pimlico, 1998,
p. 405.
[567] Herder, in Berlin, “Herder and
the Enlightenment”, op. cit., p. 388.
[568] Herder, in Berlin, “Herder and
the Enlightenment”, op. cit., p. 429.
[569] Rousseau, J.J. The Social
Contract, book I, introduction; in The Social Contract and Discourses,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993, p. 181.
[570] Barzun, op. cit., p. 384.
[571] Rousseau, op. cit., I,
introduction; p. 181.
[572] Rousseau, op. cit., I, 2,
p. 182.
[573] Rousseau has another, more
facetious argument against Filmer: “I have said nothing of King Adam, or
Emperor Noah, father of the three great monarchs who shared out the universe,
like the children of Saturn, whom some scholars have recognized in them. I
trust to getting thanks for my moderation; for, being a direct descendant of
one of these princes, perhaps of the eldest branch, how do I know that a
verification of titles might not leave me the legitimate king of the human
race? In any case, there can be no doubt that Adam was sovereign of the world,
as Robinson Crusoe was of his island, as long as he was its only inhabitant;
and this empire had the advantage that the monarch, safe on his throne, had no
rebellions, wars, or conspirators to fear” (op. cit., I, 2, pp.
183-184).
[574] Rousseau, op. cit., I, 3,
4; pp. 184, 185.
[575] By contrast, the French Prime
Minister after the Restoration, François Guizot, placed “the great
tranquillity” at the core of his vision of the good society. See George L.
Mosse, The Culture of Western Europe, Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press,
1988, p. 144.
[576] Rousseau, op. cit., I, 4;
pp. 186, 189.
[577] Hampson, The First European
Revolution, 1776-1815, London: Thames & Hudson, 1969, pp. 181, 32.
[578] Quoted in Hampson, op. cit., pp. 32, 34.
[579] Rousseau, op. cit., I, 1;
p. 181. The term “noble savage” first appears in John Dryden’s The Conquest
of Granada (Act 1, scene 1) in 1672:
I am as free as Nature first made
man
‘Ere the base Laws of servitude
began
When wild in woods the noble
Savage ran.
[580] Young, The Great Divide,
Richfield Springs, N.Y.: Nikodemos, 1989, p. 21.
[581] Rousseau, op.
cit., III, 15; p. 266.
[582]
Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 22-23.
[583]
Rousseau, op. cit., I, 6, p. 191.
[584] Rousseau,
op. cit., I, 6. On which Voltaire commented: “All that is wrong. I am
certainly not prepared to hand myself over to my fellow-citizens unreservedly.
I am not going to give them the power to kill me and rob me by majority vote.”
[585] Rousseau, op.
cit., II, 3, p. 203.
[586] Rousseau, op.
cit., II, 3, p. 203.
[587] Russell, op. cit., p.
725.
[588] Rousseau, op.
cit., II, 3, pp. 203-204.
[589] David Helm, Models of
Democracy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987, p. 78.
[590] Rousseau, op. cit., I, 6;
pp. 191-192.
[591] Rousseau, op. cit., I, 7;
p. 195.
[592] Russell, op. cit., p.
717.
[593]
Rousseau, op. cit., p. 286 ; quoted in Gascoigne, op. cit.,
p. 214.
[594] Gascoigne, op.
cit., p. 214.
[595] Barzun, op. cit., p. 387.
[596] Tikhomirov, “Demokratia
liberal’naia i sotsial’naia” (“Liberal and Social Democracy”), in Kritika
Demokratii (A Critique of Democracy), Moscow: Moskva, 1997, pp. 116-119,
165-170 (in Russian).
[597] Cf. Madame Germaine de Stael:
“In a democratic state, one must be continually on guard against the desire for
popularity. It leads to aping the behaviour of the worst. And soon people come
to think that it is of no use – indeed, it is dangerous – to show too plain a
superiority over the multitude which one wants to win over” (On Literature
and Society (1800), in Barzun, op. cit., p. 451). (V.M.)
[598] Locke, Second Treatise on
Government, 57.
[599] Locke, op. cit., 57.
[600] Locke, op. cit., 63.
[601] Rousseau, Letters written
from the Mountain, 1764, Oeuvres, vol. III, ed. Gallimard, p. 841
(in French).
[602] “All his life,” writes Berlin’s
biographer, Michael Ignatieff, “he attributed to Englishness nearly all the
propositional content of his liberalism: ‘that decent respect for others and
the toleration of dissent is better than pride and a sense of national mission;
that liberty may be incompatible with, and better than, too much efficiency;
that pluralism and untidiness are, to those who value freedom, better than the
rigorous imposition of all-embracing systems, no matter how rational and
disinterested, better than the rule of majorities against which there is no appeal’.
All of this, he insisted, was ‘deeply and uniquely English’ (A Life of
Isaiah Berlin, p. 36).
[603] Berlin, Two Concepts of
Liberty, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958, pp. 7-11.
[604] Indeed, it is arguable that in
the Prussia of Frederick the Great or in the Austria of Josef II, men of
imagination, originality, and creative genius, and, indeed, minorities of all
kinds, were less persecuted and felt the pressure, both of institutions and
customs, less heavy upon them than in many an earlier or later democracy.
(Berlin’s note)
[605] Berlin, Two Concepts, op.
cit., pp. 14-16.
[606] Berlin, op. cit., pp.
17-19.
[607] Tikhomirov, “K voprosu o
masonakh” (“Towards the Question on the Masons”), Khristianstvo i Politika
(Christianity and Politics), op. cit., pp. 330-331.
[608] Tikhomirov, “V chem nasha
opasnost?” (“In What does the Danger to Us Consist?”), Khristianstvo i
Politika (Christianity and Politics), op. cit., p. 333.
[609] Tikhomirov, “Bor’ba s
masonstvom” (“The Struggle with Masonry”), Khristianstvo i Politika
(Christianity and Politics), op. cit., p. 336.
[610] Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons,
London: Constable, 1999, p. 22; G. Toppin, “Starred First”, Oxford Today,
vol. 12, ¹ 1,
Michaelmas term, 1999, pp. 32-34.
[611] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie
Osnovy Istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow,
1997, pp. 439-441 (in Russian).
[612] Ridley, op. cit., p. 32.
[613] Read, The Templars, London:
Phoenix Press, 2001, pp. 303-304.
[614] Ridley, op. cit., p. 40.
[615] Ridley, op. cit., p. 41.
[616] Ridley, op. cit., p. 41.
[617] V.F. Ivanov, Russkaya
Intelligentisya i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do nashikh dnej (The Russian
Intelligentsia and Masonry: from Peter I to our Days), Harbin, 1934,
Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 67 (in Russian).
[618] Ridley, op. cit., p. 40.
[619] Palmer, A Compendious
Ecclesiastical History, New York: Stanford & Swords, 1850, p. 165.
[620] Quoted in Webster, op. cit.,
p. 129.
[621] Vicomte Léon de Poncins, Freemasonry
and the Vatican, London: Britons Publishing Company, 1968, p. 116.
[622] Ridley, op. cit., p. 263.
[623] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 64.
[624] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 82.
[625] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 83.
[626] De Poncins, op.
cit., p. 31.
[627] De Poncins, op.
cit., p. 32.
[628] De Poncins, op.
cit., pp. 49-50.
[629] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
443.
[630] Lazare, Antisemitisme
(Antisemitism), pp. 308-309; De Poncins, op. cit., pp. 71-72.
[631] La
Vérité Israélite (The Israelite Truth), 1861, vol. 5,
p. 74; De Poncins, op. cit., pp. 75-76.
[632] G. Batault, Le
Problème juif (The Jewish Problem); De Poncins, op. cit., pp.
77-78.
[633] On Rosicrucianism as a separate
order with Masonry, see Platonov, op. cit., chapter 21. It was founded
in 1757 in Frankfurt-on-Main and counted among its leading adepts the
charlatans Johann Welner, Saint-Germain and Caliostro.
[634] Hannah, Darkness Visible,
London: Augustine Press, 1952, p. 203.
[635] H.T. F. Rhodes, The Satanic
Mass, London: Jarrolds, 1968, p. 219-220.
[636] The Royal Arch degree, which
contains the name Jah-Bul-On, was introduced into Masonry in about 1750. As
Ridley writes: “In the admission ceremony to the Royal Arch, the initiate is
told the name of God, the Great Architect of the Universe. This is one of the
most closely guarded secrets of the Freemasons. In recent years they have
published many of the secrets that they have guarded for centuries, but not the
name of God, which is revealed to the members of the Royal Arch. Renegades from
Freemasonry have published it, and it is now generally know that the name is
Jahbulon, with the ‘Jah’ standing for Jehovah, the ‘Bul’ for Baal, and the ‘On’
for Osiris.
“The anti-masons have made great play with
the masons’ worship of Jahbulon. The Egyptian God, Osiris, might be acceptable
[!], but the masons’ worship of Baal outrages them. The bishops of the Church
of England who have become Freemasons are asked to explain how they can
reconcile their Christian beliefs with a worship of Baal, who is regarded in
the Bible as absolute evil; and these bishops have been very embarrassed by the
question…” (op. cit., pp. 70-71).
[637]
Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 447.
[638] De Poncins, op.
cit., p. 73.
[639] Pike, in A.C.
de la Rive, La Femme et l’Enfant dans la Franc-Maçonnerie Universelle
(The Womand and the Child in Universal Freemasonry), p. 588, and De
Poncins, op. cit., p. 6.
[640] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
448.
[641] Ridley, op. cit., p. 91.
[642] Ridley, op. cit., pp.
108-109.
[643] Ridley, op. cit., p. 100.
[644] Ridley, op. cit., p. 161.
[645] Barzun, op. cit., p. 397.
[646] Ferguson, Empire: How Britain
made the Modern World, London: Penguin, 2004, pp. 84, 85.
[647]
Thus Sir Winston Churchill wrote: “Vast territories had fallen to the Crown on
the conclusion of the Seven Years War. From the Canadian border to the Gulf of
Mexico the entire hinterland of the American colonies became British soil, and the
parcelling out of these new lands led to further trouble with the colonists.
Many of them, like George Washington, had formed companies to buy these
frontier tracts from the Indians, but a royal proclamation restrained any
purchasing and prohibited their settlement. Washington, among others, ignored
the ban and wrote to his land agent ordering him ‘to secure some of the most
valuable lands in the King’s part [on the Ohio], which I think may be
accomplished after a while, notwithstanding the proclamation that restrains it
at present, and prohibits the settling of them at all; for I can never look
upon that proclamation in any other light (but this I must say between
ourselves) than as a temporary expedient to quiet the minds of the Indians.’
(italics – WSC). This attempt by the British government to regulate the new
lands caused much discontent among the planters, particularly in the Middle and
Southern colonies.” (A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, London:
Educational Book Company, 1957, volume III, pp. 151-152):
[648] Davies, op.
cit., p. 678.
[649] Barbara Tuchman, The March of
Folly, London: Michael Joseph, 1984, p. 166.
[650] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
38.
[651] McClelland, op. cit., pp.
354-355.
[652] Mark Almond, Revolution,
London: De Agostino, 1996, p. 59.
[653] Thus Edmund Burke “considered
the Americans as standing at that time and in that controversy, as England did
to King James II in 1688” (Almond, op. cit., p. 63).
[654] Almond, op. cit., p. 63.
[655] Ferguson, op. cit., p.
100.
[656] Ferguson, op. cit., pp.
100-101.
[657] Almond, op. cit., p. 69.
[658] Madison, in James M. Rafferty, Prophetic
Insights into the New World Order, Malo, WA: Light Bearers Ministry, 1992,
p. 73.
[659] Almond, op. cit., p. 69.
[660] Burke, Speech on Conciliation
with America (March, 1775); quoted in Barzun, op. cit., p. 398.
[661] Armstrong, The Battle for
God, New York: Ballantine books, 2000, p. 81.
[662] Armstrong, op. cit., p.
80.
[663] Armstrong, op. cit., pp.
82-84.
[664] Armstrong, op. cit., p.
85.
[665] Isaiah Berlin, “Nationalism”, in
The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico, 1998, p. 581. An example
of toleration as a utilitarian expedient is provided by England’s attitude to
Roman Catholics before the twentieth century. As Joseph Sobran writes: “For
centuries England tolerated Roman Catholics, who were regarded as heretics
owing their chief loyalty to a foreign power (the papacy). But Roman Catholics
were also barred from public offices, universities, and other positions of
influence. Toleration wasn’t considered a virtue: it was only a policy, based
on the assumption that ideally there should be no Roman Catholics in England.
The policy was to allow Roman Catholicism to exist (in private), while
discouraging people from embracing it” (The Wanderer, July 1, 1999). In
the twentieth century, however, toleration of Catholics has been seen as a
positive virtue, and the only remnant of the old, utilitarian attitude is the
ban on a Roman Catholic becoming king or queen of England.
[666] According to Enlightenment
philosophers, “physical matter in identical circumstances would always behave
in the same way: all stones dropped from a great height fall to the ground.
What applied to the physical world applied to the human world too. All human
beings in human circumstances other than their own would act in very different
ways. How human beings conducted themselves was not accidental, but the
accident of birth into particular societies at particular moments in those
societies’ development determined what kinds of people they would eventually
turn out to be. The implications of this view were clear: if you were born in
Persia, instead of France, you would have been a Muslim, not a Catholic; if you
had been born poor and brought up in bad company you would probably end up a
thief; if you had been born a Protestant in northern Europe, rather than a
Catholic in southern Europe, then you would be tolerant and love liberty,
whereas southerners tended to be intolerant and to put up with autocratic
government. If what human beings were like was the necessary effect of the
circumstances they were born to, then nobody had a right to be too censorious
about anybody else. A certain toleration of other ways of doing things, and a
certain moderation in the criticism of social and political habits, customs and
institutions, seemed the natural corollary of the materialistic view of
mankind” (McClelland, op. cit., p. 297).
[667] Leontiev, “Vizantizm i
Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism”), in Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo
(The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow, 1996, p. 124 (in Russian).
[668] Rafferty, op. cit., p.
54.
Some further quotations will show what
this meant for the early Americans. Thus Benjamin Franklin said: “When religion
is good, it will take care of itself; when it is not able to take care of
itself, and God does not see fit to take care of it, so that it has to appeal
to the civil power for support, it is evident to my mind that its cause is a
bad one.” (Rafferty, op. cit., p. 71).
Again, in 1786 Thomas Jefferson “drew up
for Virginia a statute of religious freedom, the first ever passed by a popular
assembly. It said: ‘Be it therefore enacted by the General Assembly,
That no man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship,
place or ministry… but that all men shall be free to profess, and by arguments
to maintain their opinions in matters of religion and that the same shall in no
wise diminish, enlarge or affect their civil capability” (in De Rosa, Vicars
of Christ, London: Bantam books, 1988, p. 147).
Again, in 1787 Thomas Jefferson wrote:
“The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious
to others. But it does no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods,
or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg…” (Notes on Virginia,
Query 17)
Again, in 1789 George Washington said:
“Any man, conducting himself as a good citizen and being accountable to God
alone for his religious opinions, ought to be protected in worshipping the
Deity according to the dictates of his own conscience.” (Rafferty, op. cit.,
p. 53).
Again, in 1823 James Madison said:
“Religion is not in the purview of human government. Religion is essentially
distinct from civil government, and exempt from its cognizance; a connection
between them is injurious to both.” (Rafferty, op. cit., p. 53).
[669] Bowman v. Secular Society, Litd.
(1917) A.C. 406. Quoted in Huntingdon Cairns (ed.), The Limits of Art,
Washington D.C.: Pantheon Books, 1948, p. 1353.
[670] That is why St. Photius the
Great, when writing to the Emperor Basil I who had exiled him, complained most
bitterly, not about his physical privations, but about his being deprived of
the possibility of reading, for the reason that reading enabled people to
exercise their reasoning power better and thereby come to a knowledge of the
truth: “No one of the Orthodox has suffered such a thing even at the hands of
the heterodox. Athanasios, who suffered much, had often been driven from see
both by heretics and by pagans, but no one passed a judgement that he be
deprived of his books. Eustathios, the admirable, endured the same treachery at
the hands of the Arianizers, but his books were not, as in our case, taken away
from him, nor from Paulos, the confessor, John, the golden-mouthed, Flavianos,
the inspired; and countless others. Why, pray, should I enumerate those whom
the Book of Heaven has enrolled? And why should I mention the Orthodox and most
holy Patriarchs? The great Constantine exiled Eusebios, Theogonos, and along
with them other heretical men for their impiety and the fickleness of their
views. But he neither deprived them of their belongings nor punished them in
the matter of their books. For he was ashamed to hinder from reasoning those
whom he used to exile because they acted contrary to reason…” (D.S. White, Patriarch
Photios of Constantinople, Brookline, Mass.: Holy Cross Orthodox Press,
1981, pp. 161-162.).
[671] More, Utopia, op. cit.,
book II, pp. 119-120.
[672] Tikhomirov, “O Smysle Vojny”
(“On the Meaning of War”), in Khristianstvo i Politika (Christianity and
Politics), Moscow: GUP “Oblizdat”, 1999, pp. 206-207.
[673] Tikhomirov, “Gosudarstvennost’ i
religia” (“Statehood and Religion”), in Khristianstvo i Politika
(Christianity and Politics), op. cit., pp. 37, 38-39, 40-41, 42.
[674] Randall, The Making of the
Modern Mind, pp. 381-382; quoted in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation
and Early Man, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, p. 318.
[675] Scruton, The West and the
Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat, London: Continuum, 2002, p.
43.
[676] Cragg, op. cit., p. 181.
[677] Adorno and Hokheimer, Dialectic
of Enlightenment, 1972, p. 3; in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in
Quotations, London: Cassell, p. 487.
[678] Nadezhda Mandelstam, Hope
against Hope.
[679] Tikhomirov, “Dukhovenstvo i
obshchestvo v sovremennom religioznom dvizhenii” (“The Clergy and Society in
the Contemporary Religious Movement”), in Khristianstvo i Politika
(Christianity and Politics), Moscow, 1999, pp. 30-31 (in Russian).
[680] Tikhomirov, “Dukhovenstvo i
obshchestvo…” (“The Clergy and Society…”), op. cit., p. 32.
[681] Frederick Copleston, A History
of Philosophy, vol. 6, part II, New York: Image Books, 1964, p. 209.
[682] Berlin, Marx,
op. cit., pp. 30-31.
[683] Lewis, “’Bulverism’ or the
Foundation of 20th Century Thought”, in God in the Dock,
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997, pp. 271-275, 276. Alvin Plantinga has recently
produced a similar argument to refute Darwinism. See Jim Holt, “Divine
Evolution”, Prospect, May, 2002, p. 13.
[684] See Fr. Seraphim Rose, Nihilism,
Forestville, C.A.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 1994.
[685] Lebedev, “Razmyshlenia vozle
sten novogo Ierusalima” (“Thoughts next to the Walls of New Jerusalem”), Vozvrashchenie
(Return), ¹¹ 12-13, 1999, p. 60 (in Russian).
[686] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit.,
volume I, pp. 280, 283.
[687] Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “O
Petre Velikom” (“On Peter the Great”), Epokha (The Epoch), ¹ 10, 2000, no. 1, pp. 39-41 (in
Russian).
[688] Rozhintsev, “Patriarkh Ioakim”
(“Patriarch Joachim”), Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Rus’), ¹ 4
(1745), February 15/28, 2004, p. 13.
[689] Quoted by Hackel, op. cit.,
p. 10.
[690] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part III, pp. 218-220.
[691] Kireevsky, “Ob otnoshenii k
tsarkoj vlasti” (“On the Relationship to Royal Power”), in Razum na puti k
istine (Reason on the Way to Truth), Moscow, 2002, p. 67 (in Russian).
[692] Berdyaev, “Tsarstvo Bozhie i
tsarstvo kesaria” (“The Kingdom of God and the Kingdom of Caesar”), Put’
(The Way), September, 1925, pp. 39-40 (in Russian).
[693] Nikolin, Tserkov’ i
Gosudarstvo (Church and State), Moscow, 1997, p. 103 (in Russian).
[694] V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia
Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do nashikh dnej (The Russian
Intelligentsia and Masonry: from Peter I to our Days), Harbin, 1934, Moscow,
1997, pp. 95-96 (in Russian). Keith founded his Russian lodge in 1741-1742, and
left Russia in 1747.
[695] Richard I. Rhoda, “Russian Freemasonry: A New Dawn”, paper delivered at Orient Lodge no. 15 on june 29, 1996, http://members.aol.com/houltonme/rus.htm.
[696] Hosking, Russia: People &
Empire, London: HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 164-165
[697] Andrezev Walicki, A History
of Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 19.
[698] Novikov, in Janet M. Hartley, A
Social History of the Russian Empire, 1650-1825, Oxford University Press,
1999, p. 232
[699] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 110.
[700] Valishevsky, Petr Velikij
(Peter the Great), in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 120.
[701] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 137.
[702] Quoted in Fomin & Fomin, Rossia
pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Sergiev Posad,
1998, volume I, p. 268 (in Russian).
[703] “The Life of our Father among
the Saints Metrophanes, Bishop of Voronezh”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XII,
no. 6, November-December, 1990, p. 16.
[704] “Under Peter I a beginning was
laid to that serfdom which for a long time became the shame and illness
of Russia. Before Peter from time immemorial not only state peasants,
but also those of the landowners were not deprived of rights, they were under
the protection of the laws, that is, they could never be serfs or slaves, the property
of their lords! We have already seen that there were measures to limit and,
finally, to ban the free departure of peasants, or their transfer from one lord
to another. And there were measures to tie the Russian peasants to the land (but
not to the lords!) with the aim of preserving the cultivation of the land in
the central lands of Great Russia, keeping in them the cultivators themselves,
the peasants that were capable of working. But Russian landowners always had
bond-slaves, people who had fallen into complete dependence on the lords,
mortgaging themselves for debts, or runaways, or others who were hiding from
persecution. Gradually (not immediately) the landowners began to provide these
bond-slaves, too, with their own (not common) land, forcing them to work
on it to increase the lords’ profits, which at that time consisted mainly in
the products of the cultivation of the land. Peter I, in introducing a new form
of taxation, a poll-tax (on the person), and not on the plot of land and not on
the ‘yard’ composed of several families, as had been the case before him, also
taxed the bond-slaves with this poll-tax, thereby putting them in the same
rank as the peasants. From that time the lords gradually began to look on
their free peasants, too, as bond-slaves, that is, as their own property.
Soon, under Catherine II, this was already legalised, so that the Empress
called the peasants ‘slaves’, which had never been the case in Russia!”
(Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia, St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 173-174
(in Russian)).
[705] Wil van den Brecken, Holy
Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, pp. 168-169.
[706] Priest Timothy and Hieromonk
Dionysius Alferov, O Tserkvi, pravoslavnom Tsarstve i poslednem vremeni (On
the Church, the Orthodox Kingdom and the Last Times), Moscow: “Russkaia
Idea”, 1998, p. 66 (in Russian).
[707] Quoted in James Cracraft, The
Church Reform of Peter the Great, London: Macmillan, 1971, pp. 37, 35.
[708] It had not always been so. Thus
early in his reign, in 1701, he replied to some Catholic Saxons who proposed a
union between the Orthodox and Catholic churches: “Sovereigns have rights only
over the bodies of their people. Christ is the sovereign of their souls. For
such a union, a general consent of the people is necessary and that is in the
power of God alone….” (Robert Massie, Peter the Great, London:
Phoenix, 2001, p. 345).
[709] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit.,
volume I, p. 290.
[710]
Bessmertny, “Natsionalizm i Universalizm v russkom religioznom soznanii”
(“Nationalism and Universalism in the Russian Religious Consciousness”), in Na
puti k svobode sovesti (On the Path to Freedom of Conscience), Moscow:
Progress, 1989, p. 136 (in Russian).
[711] “We know of a case when he beat
Tatischev with a club for permitting a certain liberty relative to church
traditions. He added: ‘Don’t scandalise believing souls, don’t introduce
freethinking which is harmful to public good order; I did not teach you to be
an enemy of society and the Church” (A.P. Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo po
istorii russkoj tserkvi (Guide to the History of the Russian Church),
Moscow, 2001, p. 717 (in Russian)).
[712] Florovsky, The Ways of
Russian Theology, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, 1979, p. 115.
[713] Lebedev,
op. cit., pp. 184, 185, 186.
[714] Lebedev,
op. cit., pp. 191-192.
[715] Lebedev,
op. cit., p. 194.
[716] M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon
(Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw: Synodal Press, 1931, part III, pp. 227-228 (in
Russian).
[717] Cracraft, op. cit., pp.
57, 58-59.
[718] Van den Brecken, op. cit.,
p. 176.
[719] Van den Brecken, op. cit.,
p. 174.
[720] Cracraft, op. cit., p.
60. It should be noted that according to some synodal canonists, notably
Zaozersky, Peter’s church reforms were not that different from Byzantine
practice. “Byzantium under Justinian and Russia under Peter had, according to
Zaozersky, one and the same form of Church administration, ‘state-synodal’, and
he gives quite a convincing basis for this view… In the thinking of Theophan
Prokopovich, according to their analysis, the dominant elements were Byzantine,
not Protestant, that is, the very direction of Peter’s reforms had their roots
in Byzantine tradition and organically proceeded from it.” (Evgenij,
“Dorevoliutsionnie kanonisty i sinodal’nij stroj” (“The Pre-revolutionary
Canonists and the Synodal Order”), http://webforum.land.ru/mes.php?id=4895762&fs=0&ord=0&1st=&board=12871&arhv
(06/11/02).
[721] Cracraft, op. cit., p.
284.
[722] Cracraft, op. cit., p.
285.
[723] Hobbes, Leviathan.
[724] Cracroft, op. cit., pp.
154-155; Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, pp. 229-230.
[725] Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo po
istorii Russkoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi, in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 132.
[726] Smolitsch, Geschichte der
russischen Kirche 1700-1917, vol. I, Leiden, 1964, p. 106 (in German).
[727] Hobbes, Leviathan, I,
161; in Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, p. 237.
[728] Fomin &
Fomin, op. cit., volume 1, p. 297.
[729] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit.,
volume I, p. 296.
[730] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part III, p. 239.
[731] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia
Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp.
302-303 (in Russian).
[732] Karamzin, in Ivanov, op. cit.,
p. 137.
[733] Vladimir Rusak, Istoria
Rossijskoj Tserkvi (A History of the Russian Church), USA, 1993, p. 266 (in
Russian).
[734] Cracraft, op. cit., p.
223.
[735] However, “Christopher Hermann
von Manstein found that during the Ochakov campaign in the 1730s ‘though the
synod grants them a dispensation for eating flesh during the actual campaign,
there are few that choose to take the benefit of it, preferring death to the
sin of breaking their rule” (in Hartley, op. cit., p. 242).
[736] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit.,
part I, p. 294. At the Moscow council of 1666-67, it had been decreed, under
pressure from Ligarides, that papists should be received, not by baptism, but
by chrismation.
[737] Ware, The Orthodox Church,
London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 89.
[738] Ware, op. cit., pp.
89-90.
[739] Malcolm, Kosovo,
London:
Papermac, 1998, p. 171.
[740] Mansel, Constantinople, City
of the World’s Desire, 1453-1924, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 28.
[741] Tikhomirov, op. cit., pp.
295-296.
[742] Lebedev,
op. cit., p. 175.
[743] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part III, p. 259.
[744] Van den Bercken, op. cit.,
p. 176.
[745] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
196.
[746] Yavorsky is said to have
modified this judgement, saying that Peter was “not the Antichrist, but an iconoclast”
– which was a contemporary Russian word for “Protestant” (Cracraft, op. cit.,
pp. 163-164).
[747] The assertion that in the
presence of the Orthodox Kingdom – the Russian Empire – that terrible universal
outpouring of evil which we observe today could not be complete, is not an
arbitrary claim. This is witnessed to by one of the founders of the bloodiest
forms of contemporary anti-theism, Soviet communism – Friedrich Engels, who
wrote: “Not one revolution in Europe and in the whole world can attain final
victory while the present Russian state exists” (“Karl Marx and the
revolutionary movement in Russia”).
[748] Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “O
Petre Velikom” (“On Peter the Great”), Epokha (The Epoch), ¹ 10, 2000, no. 1, pp. 35-36 (in
Russian).
[749] Cracraft, op. cit., pp.
27-28.
[750] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 140. See
also “Smert’ Imperatora Petra I kak obrazets khristianskoj konchiny” (“The
Death of Peter I as a Model of Christian Death”), Svecha Pokaiania (The
Candle of Repentance), ¹
1, March, 1999, pp. 6-7 (in Russian).
[751] Svecha Pokaiania (The Candle
of Repentance), ¹
1, March, 1999, p. 7.
[752] Malcolm, Kosovo, London:
Papermac Books, 1998, pp. 159-160, 161.
[753] Hieromonk Makarios, The
Synaxarion, Ormylia (Chalkidike), 1998, October 21, pp. 450-454.
[754] Ware, The
Orthodox Church, Lond: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 98.
[755] Davies, op.
cit., p. 672.
[756] Fr. Daniel Rogich, Serbian
Patericon, vol. I, Forestville, CA: St. Paisius Abbey Press, 1994, pp.
150-152. St. Theodore and 150 followers
were burned to death by the Turks in 1788.
[757] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
300.
[758] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
200.
[759] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
206.
[760] He tried to explain that “the
patriarchate is not only the oldest but also the only lawful form of government
(understanding by the patriarchate the leadership of the Church by one of her
bishops)” (Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, p. 263).
[761] Tikhomirov writes: “In the first
decade after the establishment of the Synod most of the Russian bishops were in
prison, were defrocked, beaten with whips, etc. I checked this from the lists
of bishops in the indicated work of Dobroklonsky. In the history of the
Constantinopolitan Church after the Turkish conquest we do not find a single
period when there was such devastation wrought among the bishops and such lack
of ceremony in relation to Church property” (op. cit., p. 300). (V.M.)
[762] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part III, pp. 261-262.
[763]
Bessmertny, “Natsionalizm i Universalizm v russkom religioznom soznanii”
(“Nationalism and Universalism in the Russian Religious Consciousness”), in
Furman, D.E. and Fr. Mark (Smirnov) (eds.), Na puti k svobode sovesti (On
the Path to Freedom of Conscience), Moscow: Progress, 1989, p. 136 (in
Russian).
[764] Zyzykin, op.
cit., part III, p. 263.
[765] Ambrose, in Florovsky, op.
cit., pp. 128-129.
[766] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 155.
[767] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 155, 157-159.
[768] Rusak, op. cit., p. 273.
[769] Nikolin, op. cit., p. 96.
[770] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 160, 161, 162-163.
[771] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 165, 166.
[772] Rhoda,
« Russian Freemasonry : A New Dawn », op. cit.
[773] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 169, 170, 171-172.
[774] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 173.
[775] According to Lebedev, the famous
French Mason Count Saint-Germain, who was in Russia in 1762, also took part (op.
cit., p. 215).
[776] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
217.
[777] Richard Pipes, Russia under
the Old Regime, London: Penguin Books, 1995, pp. 132, 133. Lebedev
writes that “nobility itself was now also transferred by heredity insofar as
the nobles had been completely freed from the obligation to serve anywhere.
They could send their serfs to forced labour without trial, apply
physical punishments to them, by and sell them (‘exchange them for
wolfhounds’…) Catherine II forbade only the sale of families of peasants one by
one: but (this became usual) ordered them to be sold in families. But in
practice this ruling was violated pretty often.” (op. cit., p.
227).
[778] Hosking, Russia: People and
Empire, 1552-1917, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 158. “Only extreme
cruelty in relation to serfs (and that in the rarest cases!), sadistic torture
and murder was punished, insofar as all this sickened the ‘moral feelings’ of
the nobles, who considered themselves an ‘enlightened’ class. They paid no
attention at all to ‘ordinary’ cruelty, it was in the nature of things. The
serfs no longer vowed allegiance to the Tsars, and their testimonies
were not admitted in court and they themselves could not take anybody to court.
Their whole life, destiny, land and property was the personal property of the
landowners. By forbidding the transfer of peasants from their lords in Little
Russia, Catherine II began to spread serfdom into the Ukraine.” (Lebedev,
op. cit., p. 227).
[779] Montesquieu, The Spirit of
the Laws; in Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford:
Clarendon, 1988, p. 26.
[780] Hosking, op. cit., p.
102.
[781] Hosking, op. cit., p.
159.
[782] L.A. Tikhomirov, op. cit.,
p. 341 (in Russian).
[783] Isabel de Madariaga, Russia
in the Age of Catherine the Great, London: Phoenix, 2002, p. 114.
[784] She once said to Countess
Dashkova: “Also strike out ‘as a beneficent Deity’ - this apotheosis does not
agree with the Christian religion, and, I fear, I have no right to sanctity
insofar as I have laid certain restrictions on the Church’s property” (Fomin
& Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 299).
[785] Rusak, op. cit., p. 276.
Cf. Nikolin, op. cit., pp. 100, 101.
[786] Rusak, op.
cit., pp. 275-276.
[787]
Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 549.
[788]
Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 566-568.
[789] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
260.
[790] Quoted in Nadejda Gorodetzky, Saint
Tikhon of Zadonsk, London: S.P.C.K., 1976, p. 127.
[791] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
221. Metropolitan Arsenius has recently been canonised by the Moscow
Patriarchate.
[792] Leontiev, “Vizantinizm i
Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavism”), in Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo
(The East, Russia and Slavism), Moscow: “Respublika”, 1996, p. 105 (in
Russian).
[793] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 182-183.
[794] Dobroklonsky, op. cit.,
p. 579.
[795] Dobroklonsky, op cit., pp. 717-718.
[796] Dr. Jeremias Norman, “The
Orthodox Mission to the Chinese”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVIII, N 1,
2001, pp. 29-35.
[797] Hosking, op. cit., p.
237.
[798] Davies, Europe,
London: Pimlico, 1997, pp. 665-666.
[799] Zamoyski, Holy Madness,
London: Wedenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, pp. 25-26.
[800] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
91.
[801] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
94.
[802] David Vital, A People Apart:
The Jews in Europe 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 74.
[803]
Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 647-652.
[804] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
232.
[805] Dan Cohn-Serbok, Atlas of
Jewish History, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 121.
[806] Hieromonk Patapios, “A
Traditionalist Critique of ‘The Orthodox Church’”, Orthodox Tradition,
volume XVI, no. 1, 1999, pp. 44-45.
[807] Vital, op. cit., pp.
18-19.
[808] L.A. Tikhomirov, “Yevrei i
Rossia” (“The Jews and Russia”), Kritika Demokratii (A Critique of
Democracy), Moscow, 1997, p. 487 (in Russian).
[809] Janet M. Hartley, A Social
History of the Russian Empire, 1650-1825, London and New York: Longman,
1999, p. 15.
[810] Martin Gilbert, The Dent
Atlas of Russian History, London: Dent, 1993, p. 42. However, Hartley (op.
cit., p. 15) gives “anything between 155,000 and 900,000 persons, but probably
closer to the lower figure”.
[811] Platonov, Ternovij Venets
Rossii (Russia’s Thorny Crown), Moscow, 1998, p. 237 (in Russian).
[812] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
217.
[813] One exception was Shelomo
Polonus of Vilna, who wrote: “If 50,000 Jews have convinced the French nation,
this refined and enlightened nation of Europe, that… they will help their
country with the wealth of their life, if these Jews have been granted civic
rights and have been put on an equal footing with any Frenchman, then there are
even fewer reasons to doubt whether nearly one million Jews in the Polish state
will through enlightenment become happy and useful to their country.” (Vital, op.
cit., p. 76).
[814] Vital, op. cit., pp.
84-85.
[815] Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, A
History of Russia.
[816] Dobroklonsky, op. cit.,
p. 664.
[817] Florovsky, op. cit., pp.
155-156.
[818] Hartley, op. cit., pp.
233-235. “I made a mistake,” said
Catherine, “let us close our high-brow books and set to the ABC” (quoted in
Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 662).
[819] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
243.
[820] Pipes, op. cit., p. 258.
[821] Walicki, op. cit., pp.
29-31.
[822] Walicki, op. cit., p. 33.
[823] Pipes, op. cit., p. 258.
[824] Walicki, op. cit., pp.
40-42.
[825] Olga Eliseeva, “Puteshestvie iz
Peterburga v Sibir’” (“Journey from Petersburg to Siberia”), Rodina
(Homeland), ¹ 3, 2004, p. 48 (in Russian).
[826] Walicki, op. cit., p. 38.
[827] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, London: Cassell, trans. Boris Brasol, vol. I, June, 1876, “The Utopian
Conception of History”, pp. 360-362.
[828] Dostoyevsky, op. cit., p.
365.