CHRISTIAN POWER IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION
From
the First French Revolution to the Paris Commune, 1789-1871
Vladimir Moss
© Vladimir Moss, 2004
CONTENTS
Introduction..…………………………………………….……………...…..4
Part
I. Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1789-1830)
1.
The West: The Man-God Arises..…..…….……..…………...…………7
The French Revolution: (1) The
Constitutional Monarchy – Burke versus Paine – The American Constitution and
Slavery - Illuminism – The French Revolution: (2) The Jacobin Terror – The
Revolution and Religion – The French Revolution: (3) Napoleon Bonaparte –
Napoleon and Catholicism - La Grande Nation - The Jews and the
Revolution - Napoleon and the Jews – Napoleon and the Latin American
Revolutions – Romanticism and Nationalism - German Nationalism – The German War
of Liberation - The Ideology of Counter-Revolution
2.
The East: The Man-God Defeated..……….....……………..……….126
Tsar Paul I – The Annexation of
Georgia and the Edinoverie – The Murder of Tsar Paul - The
Golden Age of Masonry – Alexander, Napoleon and Speransky - 1812 – The
Aftermath of Victory – The Holy Alliance - The Polish Question - The Jewish
Question - The Reaction against Masonry - The Serbian Revolution – The Greek
Revolution – The Kollyvades Movement - The Decembrist Rebellion – St. Seraphim
of Sarov
Part II. Liberalism and Autocracy
(1830-1871)
3. The West: The Dual
Revolution….………….………………………216
Art and Revolution: (1) Byronism – Art and
Revolution: (2) The July Days – The Polish Question – Liberalism and Free Trade
– The Irish Famine – The British Empire - De Tocqueville on America – Mill on
Liberty – Victorian Religion - The Collectivist Reaction: (1) English Self-Help
– The Collectivist Reaction: (2) French Socialism – The Collectivist Reaction:
(3) German Historicism – Hegel’s Political Philosophy - Marx’s Historical
Materialism - 1848 and the Spectre of Communism - The World as Will:
Schopenhauer – Nature and Society as Will: Darwin - The American Civil War -
Emperor Napoleon III - Il Risorgimento and the Pope – The Paris Commune
4. The East: The Gendarme of
Europe………………..………………..339
Introduction: Instinct and
Consciousness – Tsar Nicholas I – Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov: The Struggle
against Westernism - Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow: Church and State – Russia
and Europe: (1) Chaadaev vs. Pushkin – Russia and Europe: (2) Belinsky vs.
Gogol – Russia and Europe: (3) Herzen vs. Khomiakov – Russia and Europe: (4)
Kireevsky - Russia and Europe: (5) Dostoyevsky - The Slavophiles on Autocracy:
(1) Kireevsky – The Slavophiles on Autocracy – The Crimean War – St.
Petersburg: the Third Rome? - Relations with Heretics and Schismatics – The
Caucasian Wars – Orthodox America - Nihilism: “Fathers and Sons” – The Great
Reforms: (1) The Emancipation of the Serfs – The Great Reforms: (2) The Zemstvo Assemblies – The Great Reforms: (3)
Crime and Punishment – The Autocracy, the Church and the Revolution
INTRODUCTION
This book
represents a continuation of my earlier books, The Mystery of Christian
Power (to 1453) and Christian Power in the Age of Reason (1453-1789).
It follows the same theme of the struggle between Christian political power and
its enemies into the age of revolution – that is, the age beginning with the
storming of the Bastille in 1789 and ending with the storming of the Paris
Commune in 1871. Of
course, the revolution neither began nor ended in this period. But it may be
called the revolutionary age par excellence insofar as it presented all the main
ideas of the revolution in their classical French expression, and provided the
classic themes and symbolism of the later, and still greater Russian
revolution. Moreover, it is the age in which the counter-revolution - in the
person, in particular, of Orthodox and Autocratic Russia - appeared to have the
measure of its enemies, although a major theme of the book will be the way in
which revolutionary ideas were sapping the foundations of Russian Autocracy,
too.
The book is
divided into two parts, with each part further subdivided into chapters on East
and West on the model of my earlier books. In the first part, we see the first
French revolution, its continuation and internationalisation under Napoleon I,
and its defeat and seeming reversal under the absolutist rule of King Charles
X. The second part continues the story of the French revolutions (of 1830, 1848
and 1871), and their offshoots in other European countries, while outlining the
development of political and economic liberalism in England and America. In the
East, meanwhile, we see Russia, “the Gendarme of Europe”, both administering
the decisive blow to Napoleon I, and, in its suppression of the Polish and
Hungarian uprisings, ensuring that the revolution will not spread to Eastern
Europe. However, Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War at the hands of England,
France and Turkey marks the end of the Congressional System and the first
international attempt to contain the revolution, boding badly for truly
Christian statehood – indeed, for legitimate statehood in general - in the
coming age.
As in my
earlier books, I have tried to look beyond the political and economic events to
the spiritual events that are the real causes of history. For, as Fr. Seraphim
Rose said: “The real cause is the soul and God: whatever God is doing and
whatever the soul is doing. These two things actualise the whole of history;
and all the external events – what treaty was signed, or the economic reasons
for the discontent of the masses, and so forth – are totally secondary. In
fact, if you look at modern history, at the whole revolutionary movement, it is
obvious that it is not the economics that is the governing factor, but various
ideas which get into people’s souls about actually building paradise on earth.
Once that idea gets there, then fantastic things are done, because this is a
spiritual thing. Even though it is from the devil, it is on a spiritual level,
that is where actual history is made…”[1]
In pursuit of
this, the spiritual meaning of history I owe an especial debt to Fr. Seraphim
Rose, Adam Zamoyski, Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, Metropolitan Philaret of
Moscow and the Russian Slavophile philosophers.
Through the
prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us!
December 18/31, 2004.
Holy Martyr Sebastian of Rome.
PART I. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION
(1789-1830)
1. THE WEST: THE MAN-GOD ARISES
Lo, thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word:
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain
fall;
And Universal Darkness buries All.
Alexander Pope, Dunciad.
The human I, wishing to depend only on
itself, not recognising and not accepting any other law besides its own will –
in a word, the human I, taking the place of God, - does not, of course,
constitute something new among men. But such has it become when raised to the
status of a political and social right, and when it strives, by virtue of this
right, to rule society. This is the new phenomenon which acquired the name of
the French revolution in 1789.
F.I. Tiutchev, Russia and the Revolution
(1848).
The
nation, this collective organism, is just as inclined to deify itself as the
individual man. The madness of pride grows in this case in the same
progression, as every passion becomes inflamed in society, being refracted in
thousands and millions of souls.
Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) of New
York.[2]
After the Humanist-Protestant revolution of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, the English revolution of the seventeenth century and the
Enlightenment Programme of the eighteenth century, the French revolution of
1789 marks the fourth major turning-point in Western life and thought. In some
countries – England, for example, and still more America - some of the less
radical ideas of the French revolution were already being put into effect, at
least partially, well before 1789; while in others – Russia and China, for
example – they did not achieve dominance until the twentieth century.
Eventually, however, the French revolutionary ideals of “Liberty, Equality and
Fraternity” and “the Rights of Man”, combined with an essentially secularist
and utilitarian attitude to religion, became the dominant ideology, not only of
Europe and North America, but of the whole world. For, as Eric Hobsbawn writes,
“alone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its
armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so.”[3]
The period 1789-1815 can be compared, for
its profound impact on the destinies of the world, only with the period
1914-45. Both periods are dominated by a national revolution with enormous
international ramifications – the French in the earlier period, the Russian in
the later – and by international war on a previously unprecedented scale. In
both periods the main victors were an Anglo-Saxon nation (Britain in the
earlier period, America in the later), on the one hand, and Russia (Tsarist
Russia in the earlier period, Soviet Russia in the later), on the other. At the
end of each period Russia became the dominant political power on the continent
of Europe, while the Anglo-Saxon nation became the dominant power outside
Europe, going on to dominate the world economically through its exploitation of
important scientific and technological discoveries.
The French revolution, like its English forerunner, went through several
phases, each of which on its own was profoundly influential outside the borders
of France. The first was the constitutional monarchy (1789-92). The second was
the Jacobin terror (1792-94). The third (after the interregnum of the
Directory) was the Napoleonic dictatorship and empire (1799-1815). Just as the
English revolution had its proto-communist elements, which, however, failed in
the end, so did the French (Babeuf’s failed coup of 1796). Just as the upshot
of the English revolution was to transfer power from the king to the landowning
aristocracy, so the upshot of the French revolution was to transfer power from
the king and the aristocrats to the bourgeoisie – a trend which came to
dominate the whole of Western Europe in the course of the nineteenth century.
From a sociological point of view, France in 1789 had not changed in
essence since the eleventh century; it was an agrarian, hierarchical society consisting
of “the three Estates”: those who prayed (the clergy), those who fought (the
nobility) and those who worked (the rest, mainly peasants, but including
lawyers and intellectuals). The ideas of the Enlightenment and Masonry had
infected a narrow stratum of the more educated classes. But the mass of the
population lived and thought as they had lived and thought for centuries.
It is customary to explain the French revolution as the product of
corrupt political, social and economic conditions, and in particular of the
vast gap in wealth and power between the ancien régime and the
people. Discontent with social and economic injustices undoubtedly played a
large part in fuelling this horrific atheist and anti-theist outburst. But it
was not the king who was primarily to blame for these injustices. In the years
1745-89 he and his ministers made numerous attempts at economic reform and a
more equitable redistribution of the tax burden. But they were always foiled by
opposition at court and in the Parlements from the aristocrats, who paid
no tax. Thus when five of his minister Turgot’s Six Edicts were rejected by the
Paris Parlement in 1776, Louis XVI observed: “I see well that there is
no-one here but M. Turgot and myself who love the people.”[4] This
prompted de Tocqueville’s words: “The social order destroyed by a revolution is
almost always better than that which preceded it; and experience shows that the
most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets
about reform. Only great genius can save a ruler who takes on the task of
improving the lot of his subjects after long oppression…”[5]
The aristocrats claimed that their opposition was an expression of
Montesquieu’s doctrine of the necessity of checks on executive power. In fact,
however, they were trying to replace a royal “despotism” with their own
aristocratic one. For, as Hobsbawm writes, “the Revolution began as an
aristocratic attempt to recapture the state.”[6] And
here, as so often in history, the “despotism” of one man standing above the
political fray turned out to be less harmful to the majority of the population
than the despotism of an oligarchical clique pursuing only one class or
factional interest. Indeed, the problem with the French monarchy was not its
excessive strength, but its weakness, its inability to impose its will on the
privileged class.
However, there was much more to the Revolution than a conflict between
king and nobility, letting in the Third Estate that destroyed them both. The
essential conflict was between two ideas of the origin of authority: between
the idea that it comes from above – ultimately, from God, and the idea
that it comes from below – ultimately from what the Masons called “Nature”.
King Louis XVI stated the Christian
principle: “I have taken the firm and sincere decision to remain loftily,
publicly and generously faithful to Him Who holds in His hand kings and
kingdoms. I can only be great through Him, because in Him alone is greatness,
glory, majesty and power; and because I am destined one day to be his living
image on earth.”[7]
This firm, but humble statement of the doctrine, not so much of the Divine right
of kings, as of their Divine dependence on the King of kings, was
opposed by the satanic pride of the revolutionary faith. “The Revolution is
neither an act nor a fact,” said De Mounier. “It is a political doctrine which
claims to found society on the will of man instead of founding it on the will
of God, which puts the sovereignty of human reason in the place of the Divine law.[8]
This anti-theistic character of the French Revolution was confirmed by
the great Anglo-Irish parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, wrote: “We cannot, if we
would, delude ourselves about the true state of this dreadful contest. It is
a religious war. It includes in its object undoubtedly every other interest
of society as well as this; but this is the principal and leading feature. It
is through this destruction of religion that our enemies propose the
accomplishment of all their other views. The French Revolution, impious at once
and fanatical, had no other plan for domestick power and foreign empire. Look
at all the proceedings of the National Assembly from the first day of declaring
itself such in the year 1789, to this very hour, and you will find full half of
their business to be directly on this subject. In fact it is the spirit of the
whole. The religious system, called the Constitutional Church, was on the face
of the whole proceeding set up only as a mere temporary amusement to the
people, and so constantly stated in all their conversations, till the time
should come, when they might with safety cast off the very appearance of all
religion whatsoever, and persecute Christianity throughout Europe with fire and
sword… This religious war is not a controversy between sect and sect as
formerly, but a war against all sects and all religions…”[9]
So the real question that the Revolution sought to answer was not
political or economic, but theological or ideological, not: who pays the
taxes?, but: who rules the universe?
It is striking how similar was the sequence of events in the French
Revolution to that in its English predecessor. Just as the English revolution
started with the king’s compelling need to seek money for his war against the
Scots, so the French revolution started with a severe financial crisis caused
by the king’s intervention in the American War of Independence. And just as the
English parliament’s refusal to accede to the king’s request led successively
to civil war, the overthrowing of the State Church, the execution of the king,
a radicalisation of the country to a state of near-communist revolution,
foreign wars (in Scotland and Ireland), and finally a military dictatorship
under Cromwell that restored order while preserving many of the fruits of the
revolution, so the refusal, first of the Nobles’ Assembly and then of the
Estates General to accede to the French king’s request led to a constitutional
monarchy, the overthrowing of the State Church, the execution of the king, increased
radicalisation and the Great Terror, wars with both internal and external
enemies, and finally a military dictatorship under Napoleon that restored order
while consolidating many of the results of the revolution.
But the French Revolution went much further than the English in the
number of its victims, in the profundity of its effects, not only on France but
also on almost every country in Europe, and in its unprecedented radicalism,
even anti-theism. It really began on June 17, 1789, when the Third Estate
gathered a so-called National Assembly, of which they declared: “To it, and it
alone, belongs the right to interpret and express the general will of the
nation. Between the throne and this Assembly there can exist no veto, no power
of negation.”[10]
This, writes Davies, “was the decisive break. Three days later, locked out of
their usual hall, the deputies met on the adjacent tennis court, le jeu de
paume, and swore an oath never to disband until France was given a
Constitution. ‘Tell your master,’ thundered Count Mirabeau to the troops sent
to disperse them, ‘that we are here by the will of the people, and will not
disperse before the threat of bayonets.’
“Pandemonium ensued. At court, the King’s conciliatory ministers fell
out with their more aggressive colleagues. On 11 July [the chief minister]
Jacques Necker, who had received a rousing welcome at the opening of the
Estates General, was dismissed. Paris exploded. A revolutionary headquarters
coalesced round the Duc d’Orléans at the Palais Royal. The gardens of
the Palais Royal became a notorious playground of free speech and free love.
Sex shows sprang up alongside every sort of political harangue. ‘The exile of
Necker,’ screamed the fiery orator Camille Desmoulins fearing reprisals, ‘is the
signal for another St. Bartholomew of patriots.’ The royal garrison was won
over. On the 13th a Committee of Public Safety[11] was
created, and 48,000 men were enrolled in a National Guard under General
Lafayette. Bands of insurgents tore down the hated barrières or
internal customs posts in the city, and ransacked the monastery of Saint-Lazare
in the search for arms. On the 14th, after 30,000 muskets were
removed from the Hôtel des Invalides, the royal fortress of the Bastille
was besieged. There was a brief exchange of gunfire, after which the governor
capitulated. The King had lost his capital.”[12]
Power appeared to have passed from the king to the National Assembly and
the Third Estate; but already at this early stage of the revolution (as in
February, 1917 in Russia), real power was neither with the king nor with any of
the Estates, but with the mob – or rather, with those who incited and
controlled the mob. Thus on July 20 Arthur Young wrote: “I hear nothing of
their [the Assembly’s] moving from Versailles; if they stay there under the
control of an armed mob, they must make a government that will please the mob;
but they will, I suppose, be wise enough to move to some central town, Tours,
Blois or Orléans, where their deliberations may be free. But the
Parisian spirit of commotion spreads quickly…”
So quickly, in fact, that a year later Antoine, Comte de Rivarol could
write: “Three million armed peasants, from one end of the kingdom to the other,
stop travellers, check their papers, and bring the victims back to Paris; the
town hall cannot protect them from the fury of the patriotic hangman; the
National Assembly in raising Paris might well have been able to topple the
throne, but it cannot save a single citizen. The time will come… when the National
Assembly will say to the citizen army: ‘You have saved me from authority, but
who will save me from you?’ When authority has been overthrown, its power
passes inevitably to the lowest classes of society… Such is today the state of
France and its capital.”[13]
The success of the Revolution was assured by the weakness of the King;
for when “he who restrains” stops restraining, “then everything is permitted”.
Doyle writes: “News of the king’s surrender to popular resistance broke all
restraints. His acquiescence in the defeat of the privileged orders was taken
as a signal for all his subjects to take their own measures against public
enemies. The prolonged political crisis has spawned countless wild rumours of
plots to thwart the patriotic cause by starving the people. Monastic and noble
granaries, reputedly bulging with the proceeds of the previous season’s rents,
dues, and tithes, seemed obvious evidence of their owners’ wicked intentions.
Equally suspicious were urban merchants scouring country markets far beyond
their usual circuits to provide bread for hungry townsmen. Besides, the roads
were thronged with unprecedented numbers of men seeking work as a result of the
slump. Farmers had good reason to dread the depredations of bands of travelling
vagrants, and now took little persuading that the kingdom was alive with
brigands in aristocratic pay. It was just a year since the notorious storms of
July 1788, and as a promising harvest began to ripen country people were
particularly nervous. All this produced the ‘Great Fear’, a massive panic that
swept whole provinces in the last weeks of July and left only the most
peripheral regions untouched. Peasants assembled, armed themselves, and
prepared to fight off the ruthless hirelings of aristocracy. Seen from a
distance, such armed bands were often taken for brigands themselves, and so the
panic spread.
“In many areas villagers did not wait for the marauders to arrive. Then
it would be too late. They were determined to make sure of aristocratic defeat
by striking pre-emptively. After all, they would only anticipating what the
Assembly was bound to decree. As one country priest explained, ‘When the
inhabitants heard that everything was going to be different they began to
refuse to pay both tithes and dues, considering themselves so permitted, they
said, by the new law to come.’”[14]
On August 4, under pressure of the peasant revolt, the National or
Constituent Assembly declared that it “abolishes the feudal system in its
entirety”. It also proclaimed “King Louis XVI Restorer of French Liberty”…
In his pamphlet What is the Third Estate? published in that year,
Abbé Sieyès asked: What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has
it been in the political order up to the present? Nothing. What does it demand?
To become something…” Now the Third Estate was something. Rarely, if ever, in political history has a
single act had such a huge and immediate effect (the abdication of the Tsar in
February, 1917 is perhaps the only parallel).
On August 26, the Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man
and the Citizen, which listed the following “natural, inalienable and sacred
rights”:
“’I. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social
distinctions can only be founded on public utility.
II. The purpose of every political association is the preservation of
the natural and unprescriptible rights of men. These rights are liberty,
property, and safety from, and resistance to, oppression.
III. The principle of all sovereignty lies in the nation. No body of
men, and no individual, can exercise authority which does not emanate directly
therefrom.
IV. Liberty consists in the ability to do anything which does not harm
others.
V. The Law can only forbid actions which
are injurious to society…
VI. The Law is the expression of the General Will… It should be the same
for all, whether to protect or to punish.
VII. No man can be accused, arrested, or detained except in those
instances which are determined by law.
VIII.
The Law should only establish punishments which are strictly necessary. No
person should be punished by retrospective legislation.
IX. No man [is] presumed innocent till
found guilty…
X. No person should be troubled for his opinions, even religious ones,
so long as their manifestation does not threaten public order.
XI. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of men’s most
precious rights. Every citizen, therefore, can write, speak, and publish
freely, saving only the need to account for abuses defined by law.
XII. A public force is required to guarantee the [above] rights. It is
instituted for the benefit of all, not for the use of those to whom it is
entrusted.
XIII. Public taxation is indispensable for the upkeep of the forces and
the administration. It should be divided among all citizens without
distinction, according to their abilities.
XIV. Citizens… have the right to approve the purposes, levels, and
extent of taxation.
XV. Society has the right to hold every public servant to account.
XVI. Any society in which rights are not guaranteed nor powers separated
does not have a constitution.
XVII. Property being a sacred and inviolable right, no person can be
deprived of it, except by public necessity, legal process, and just
compensation.’
“Social convention held that the ‘Rights of Man’ automatically subsumed
the rights of women. But several bold souls, including Condorcet, disagreed,
arguing that women had simply been neglected.[15] In due
course the original Declaration was joined by new ideas, notably about human
rights in the social and economic sphere. Article XXI of the revised
Declaration of June 1793 stated: ’Public assistance is a sacred obligation [dette].
Society owes subsistence to unfortunate citizens, whether in finding work for
them, or in assuring the means of survival of those incapable of working.’
Slavery was outlawed in 1794. Religious toleration was guaranteed.”[16]
In October a great crowd of hungry women brought the king from
Versailles to Paris. Thereafter the forging of a new Constitution that would
include limited powers for the king went ahead relatively peacefully. However,
the king.could not make up his mind whether to accept or reject the Revolution[17]; and
this vacillation, combined with his arrest at Varennes on June 21, 1791 while
attempting to flee the country, gradually undermined what remained of his
authority.[18]
For, as Hobsbawn points out, “traditional kings who abandon their peoples lose
the right to royalty".[19] In a
similar situation in 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was given the opportunity to flee
by the Provisional Government, but chose not to…
Moreover, while the Assembly passed a large number of laws, it
completely failed to solve the problems which had propelled it to power – the
financial insolvency of the country. It simply printed money which rapidly
deteriorated in value, fuelling inflation, and in 1791 collected only 249
livres in taxes against 822.7 livres expended.[20]
In spite of these problems, the first anniversary of the storming of the
Bastille, witnessed an extraordinary celebration of the revolution in which
even the king took part.
Zamoyski writes: “It was to be a kind of Rousseauist troth-pledging, at
which the nation would come together and symbolically constitute itself as a
body, simultaneously paying homage to itself as such – the first of many acts
of political onanism. Bailly [the mayor of Paris] suggested that the solemnity
should take the form of a ‘National Federation’, with delegations from every
corner of France meeting in Paris while those from surrounding villages
congregated in every provincial town. Lafayette steered the whole exercise into
the military sphere, substituting companies of National Guards from every part
of the country for civilian delegates.
“The capital was to be decked out in a fitting manner to greet those
making their long pilgrimage. Half the population of Paris spent three days in
the pouring rain putting up triumphant arches and decorations. The
Champ-de-Mars was transformed into a vast elliptical arena surrounded by grass
banks on which seats were erected for spectators. At the end nearest the
École Militaire there was a stand draped in the tricolor for the members
of the Assembly and important guests. At the opposite end, nearest the River
Seine, was the entrance, through a triple triumphal arch in the Roman style.
Between the two stood a podium with a throne for the king and seats for the
royal family, and, towering above everything else, a great square plinth with
steps on all four sides, on which stood an altar.
“The morning of 14 July was wetter than ever, and the feet of the
300,000 Parisians soon turned the Champ-de-Mars into a quagmire. This did not
make the event any easier to manage, but good humour triumphed. As they waited
in the rain, people made jokes about being baptized in the national rain, and
groups from different parts of the country showed off regional dances to each
other.
“The king and queen arrived at noon, but it took a long time for them to
be settled into their stand. Then came a march-past by 50,000 National Guards.
It was not until four in the afternoon that the Bishop of Autun, Charles
Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, attended by four hundred priests wearing
the tricolor, began to celebrate mass. The altar at which he officiated was not
a traditional liturgical mensa, but a circular neoclassical affair
redolent of burnt offerings in ancient Rome. It was not the altar of God, on
which sacrifice was offered up to the Almighty, it was the autel de la
patrie, on which citizens pledged their devotion to the motherland.
“Lafayette was much in evidence all day on his white charger, and when
the mass was over, he took centre stage. As if by a miracle, the weather
cleared and the sun came out, bathing the whole scene in a soft luminous aura.
While trumpets blared, Lafayetter ascended the steps of the altar. As he began
to swear loyalty to the king, the nation and the law, he drew his sword with a
flourish and laid it on the altar. Fifty thousand National Guardsmen then
repeated the same oath, followed by the king. Next came the singing of the Te
Deum specially composed by François Gossec, during which people of
all stations embraced tearfully in a hundred thousand acts of national
fraternity. Lafayetter was carried by the crowd to his white horse, on which he
majestically left the field, with people kissing his hands and his clothers…
“The Fête de la
Fédération represented a reconciliation of all the people living
in France, and their betrothal as one nation. It mimicked Rousseau’s vision of
the Corsicans coming together to found their nation through a common pledge.
The festival was also a recognition that the Marquis de Lafayette and the
humblest peasant in France were brothers, both as members of a biological
family and through the ideological kinship represented by the oath. At the same
time, the celebration exposed a new reality. It showed how far the concept of
nationhood had altered from the Enlightenment vision of a congeries living in
consensus to something far more metaphysical and inherently divine…”[21]
Burke versus Paine
The ideas of the French revolution posed a great threat to the British,
who prided themselves on being the home of liberty, but who saw that French
revolutionary “liberty” would speedily destroy their own. Already the Americans
had shown that libertarianism and empire made an uncomfortable fit; and the fit
would look still worse in India and Ireland as the French ideas filtered
through. Moreover, the first effects of the industrial revolution on the
industrial poor, and of the “dark, satanic mills” on England’s “green and
pleasant land”, threatened to arouse revolutionary passions among the poor.
“’Two causes, and only two, will rouse a peasantry to rebellion,’ opined
Robert Southey, a radical turned Tory: ‘intolerable oppression, or religious
zeal’. But that moderately comforting scenario no longer applied: ‘A
manufacturing poor is more easily instigated to revolt: they have no local
attachments… they know enough of what is passing in the political world to
think themselves politicians’. England’s rulers must pay heed: ‘If the
manufacturing system continues to be extended, I believe that revolution
inevitably must come, and in its most fearful shape’.”[22]
Already in the years 1778-83 a debate had begun on whether the ideas of
the founding philosopher of English liberalism, John Locke, had been right
after all. In 1783 the Baptist Noel Turner wondered whether the “present
national propensity” was the deployment of Locke on behalf of the “many-headed
majesty” of “king-people”. And in the same year Josiah Tucker publish his “On
the Evil Consequences Arising from the Propagation of Locke’s Democratic
Principles”. Tucker’s disciple Soame Jenyns declared that he had refuted the
Lockean philosophy of the Whigs, writing:
I controvert these five positions
Which Whigs pretend are the conditions
Of civil rule and liberty;
That men are equal born – and free –
That kings derive their lawful sway
All from the people’s yea and nay –
That compact is the only ground,
On which a prince his rights can found –
Lastly, I scout that idle notion,
That government is put in motion,
And stopt again, like clock or chime,
Just as we want them to keep time.[23]
This debate became more urgent as the atrocities of the French
revolution became known. Could the ideas of the urbane and civilised Locke
really have led to such barbarism? William Jones thought so. Writing in 1798,
he said that “with Mr. Locke in his hand”, that “mischievous infidel Voltaire”
had set about destroying Christianity. And Locke was “the oracle of those who
began and conducted the American Revolution, which led to the French
Revolution; which will lead (unless God in his mercy interfere) to the total
overthrow of religion and government in this kingdom, perhaps in the whole
Christian world.”[24]
However, the most famous ideological attack on the French revolution
came from Edmund Burke, who had adopted a liberal position on America and
Ireland[25], and
who now tried to defend English liberalism while attacking French radicalism.
His Reflexions on the Revolution in France (1790) foresaw saw that the
French revolution would bring in its train, not freedom, but tyranny - and
precisely because of its populist character. For “the tyranny of a multitude,”
he wrote, “is a multiplied tyranny”.[26] Burke
agreed with the Catholic monarchist Joseph de Maistre in calling the revolution
“satanic”. And, as we have seen, he called the war that broke out between
revolutionary France and Britain in 1793 “a religious war”. For truly, the war
between the revolution and its opponents was a religious war, a war
between two opposed ideas of who rules human society: God or the people.
Burke laid great emphasis on the importance of tradition and the organic
forms of social life, which was important at a time when the rage was all for
the destruction of everything that was old and venerable. In this respect
(although not in others) he went against one of the main presuppositions of the
English social contract theorists, following rather in the line of thought of
the German Counter-Enlightenment thinkers Hamann and Herder.
As Berlin writes: “Burke’s famous onslaughts on the principles of the
French revolutionaries was founded upon the selfsame appeal to the myriad
strands that bind human beings into a historically hallowed whole, contrasted
with the utilitarian model of society as a trading-company held together by
contractual obligations, the world of ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and
calculators’ who are blind and deaf to the unanalysable relationships that make
a family, a tribe, a nation, a movement, any association of human beings held
together by something more than a quest for mutual advantage, or by force, or
by anything that is not mutual love, loyalty, common history, emotion and
outlook.”[27]
Society exists over several generations, so why, asked Burke, should
only one generation’s interests be respected in drawing up the social contract?
For, as Roger Scruton writes, interpreting his thought, “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.”[28]
“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.”[29]
Burke rejected the idea that the French Revolution was simply the
English Revolution writ large. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not a
revolution in the new, French sense, because it left English traditions,
including English traditions of liberty, intact: it “was made to preserve our ancient
indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of
government which is our only security for law and liberty… We wished at the
period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an
inheritance from our forefathers… All the reformations we have hitherto
made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity.”[30] In
fact, far from making the people the sovereign power, the English parliament in
1688 had sworn “in the name of the people” to “most humbly and faithfully
submit themselves, their heirs and posterities” to the Monarchs William and
Mary “for ever”. The French Revolution, by contrast, rejected all tradition.
“You had,” he told the French, “the elements of a constitution very nearly as
good as could be wished…; but you chose to act as if you have never been
moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill,
because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.” “Your
constitution, it is true,… suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed
in some parts the walls and, in all, the foundations of a noble and venerable
castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old
foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected.” “Rage
and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, that prudence, deliberation,
and foresight can build up in an hundred years.”[31] There
was in fact nothing new about the French Revolution. It was just another
disaster “brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust,
sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal”. The “rights of man” were just a
“pretext” invented by the “wickedness” of human nature.[32]
“It was Burke’s Reflections,” writes G.P. Gooch, “which overthrew
the supremacy of Locke [for the time being], and formed the starting-point of a
number of schools of thought, agreeing in the rejection of the individualistic
rationalism which had dominated the eighteenth century. The work is not only
the greatest exposition of the philosophic basis of conservatism ever written,
but a declaration of the principles of evolution, continuity, and solidarity,
which must hold their place in all sound political thinking. Against the
omnipotence of the individual, he sets the collective reason; against the
claims of the present, he sets the accumulated experience of the past; for
natural rights he offers social rights; for liberty he substitutes law. Society
is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those
who are yet to be born.”[33]
Burke, writes Doyle, attributed the fall of the old order “to a
conspiracy. On the one hand were the ‘moneyed interest’, resentful at their
lack of esteem and greedy for new profits; on the other, and even more important,
were the so-called philosophers of the Enlightenment, a ‘literary cabal’
committed to the destruction of Christianity by any and every available means.
The idea of a philosophic conspiracy was not new. It went back to the only one
ever conclusively proved to have existed, the plot of the self-styled
Illuminati to undermine the Church-dominated government of Bavaria. The
Bavarian government published a sensational collection of documents to
illustrate its gravity, and Burke had read it. Although he was not the first to
attribute events in France to conspiracy of the sort thwarted in Bavaria, the
way he included the idea in the most comprehensive denunciation of the
Revolution yet to appear lent it unprecedented authority. Nor was the
destruction of Christianity and the triumph of atheism the only catastrophe he
predicted. Disgusted by the way the ‘Republic of Paris’ and its ‘swinish
multitude’ held the government captive, the provinces would eventually cut
loose and France would fall apart. The assignats would drive out sound coinage
and hasten, rather than avert, bankruptcy. The only possible end to France’s
self-induced anarchy would come when ‘some popular general, who understand the
art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command,
shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his
personal account… the moment in which that event will happen, the person who
really commands the army is your master.’”[34]
Burke’s Reflections were answered by Tom Paine’s Rights of Man,
which sold still more copies – an astonishing 250,000 in two years. This debate
between two Englishmen, which was eagerly followed all over Europe, turned out
to be the first of the major debates between “right” and “left” that have
dominated European intellectual life since 1789, taking the place of the old
Catholic-Protestant polemics. Burke proved to be more accurate than Paine in
its forecasts about the future of the revolution (he predicted both the killing
of the king and the military dictatorship); but it was to be Paine’s ideas that
proved to be the more popular and influential.
[35]
Paine admitted that Louis XVI had “natural moderation”; but the
revolution, he argued, was not against people, but against principles
– in particular, the principle of despotism. In any case, he wrote, “[Burke] is
not affected by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities
the plumage, but forgets the dying bird… His hero or his heroine must be a
tragedy victim, expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding
into death in the silence of a dungeon.”[36]
However, Paine himself was soon to become “a real prisoner of misery” in a
Jacobin dungeon, just one of the hundreds of thousands of people –
including the “naturally moderate” King and vast numbers of the poorer classes
– far more than the ancien régime had caused in centuries.
As for the principle of despotism, Paine saw it everywhere: “When
despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not
in the person of the King only that it resides. It has the appearance of being
so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice, and in
fact. It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its
despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and
every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the
person of the King, divides and subdivides itself into a thousand shapes and
forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case
in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an
endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible,
there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of
duty, and tyrannizes under the pretence of obeying.
“When a man reflects on the condition which France was in from the
nature of her government, he will see other causes for revolt than those which
immediately connect themselves with the person or character of Louis XVI. There
were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France,
which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became
so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. Between the monarchy,
the parliament, and the church, there was a rivalship of despotism,
besides the feudal despotism operating locally, and the ministerial despotism
operating everywhere.”[37]
So even parliament was despotic! Paine gives himself away here: his real
target is not despotism, but hierarchy, every relationship in society
which involves the submission of one person to another. He rejected the role of
tradition in politics as radically as Luther and Calvin had rejected it in
theology.
“Every age and generation,” he wrote, “must be as free to act for
itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The
vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous
and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any
generation property in the generations which are to follow. The parliament or
the people of 1688, or of any other period, has no more right to dispose of the
people of the present day, or to bind or to control those who are to live a
hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent
to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the
dead, that are to be accomodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his
wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of
this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its
governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered…. I am
contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed
away by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead…
“The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity,
respecting the rights of man, is, that they do not go far enough into
antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate
stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a
rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still
farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice
prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities
may be produced, successively contradicting each other:
“…If the mere name of antiquity is to govern the affairs of life, the
people who are to live an hundred or a thousand years hence, may as well take
us for a precedent, as we make a precedent of those who lived an hundred or a
thousand years ago. The fact is, that portions of antiquity, by proving
everything, establish nothing. It is authority against authority all the way,
till we come to the divine origin of the rights of man at the creation. Here
our inquiries find a resting-place, and our reason finds a home. If a dispute
about the rights of man had arisen at the distance of an hundred years from the
creation, it is to this same source of authority they must have referred, and
it is to the same source of authority that we must now refer.
“Though I mean not to touch upon any sectarian principle of religion,
yet it may be worth observing, that the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam.
Why then not trace the rights of man to the creation of man? I will answer the
question. Because there have been upstart governments, thrusting themselves
between, and presumptuously working to un-make man.
“If any generation of men ever possessed the
right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it
was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no
succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up.
The illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man, (for it has
its origin from the Maker of man) relates, not only to the living individuals,
but to generations of men succeeding each other. Every generation is equal in
rights to the generations which preceded it, by the same rule that every
individual is born equal in rights with his contemporary.”[38]
Paine had a point. Arguments based on merely human tradition are
relative; one precedent from antiquity is cancelled out by another. Human
tradition needs to be supported by Divine Tradition – that is, the
Tradition handed down from God to His Chosen People and passed on by them from
generation to generation in the Church.
Burke had this problem not only in relation to Paine, but also in
relation to other contemporary English radicals. If he claimed that British
liberties “were an entailed inheritance peculiar to the inhabitants of the
island” and going back to William the Conqueror, “his radical opponents, who
were rather less keen on entails, claimed that their rights were derived from
the alleged practices of free-born Englishmen before the days of the ‘Norman
yoke’.”[39] And the
precedent his opponents pointed to was both older and more noble; for, as Paine
pointed out, if any ruler was a despot and usurper, - that is, a destroyer
of tradition - it was William the Conqueror. And he was right: it had been
William who, in 1066, cut off England from the One, True Church in the East and
destroyed her traditions, both human and Divine.
Again, since Burke accepted the legitimacy of both the English and
American revolutions (while preferring to rest on their least revolutionary
moments), he could not attack the French revolution from a position of basic
principle (for its principles were not fundamentally different from those of
its Anglo-Saxon predecessors), but only because it carried those principles
“too far”. But if the principle itself is accepted, who is to say when the
application of the principle has gone “too far”? In any case, both Burke and
his English radical opponents (but not Paine) agreed that the rights they were
talking about “did not rest on principle and had no relevance to foreigners”[40] - and
so had no relevance to the French revolution, either.
And yet Burke was not defending just the English way of doing things,
which was relevant only to Englishmen (in other of his works he defended the
rights of the Irish and the Indians to keep their own traditions within the
British Empire). The French revolution attacked the very foundation of society
– religion.
So in defending the Christian religion Burke was defending a universal
principle: “We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly[41], that
religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all
comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of
superstition… that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not
prefer to impiety… We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his
constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason,
but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if… we should uncover
our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been
our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilisation amongst us, and
among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind
will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading
superstition might take the place of it.”[42]
The
very radicalism of Paine’s rejection of tradition and hierarchy undermined the
validity of his argument. First, no society can exist without tradition or
hierarchy – least of all revolutionary ones, which immediately act to fill the
void they have created. Secondly, if sovereignty resides in the Nation,
as Paine affirms, the question arises: what is the Nation if it has to be
constantly re-inventing itself, holding nothing from the past as sacred and
starting again from a tabula rasa with every new generation? A Nation
defines itself precisely by its continuity over time and over many generations;
there must be some loyalty to, and preservation of, the past if the Nation is
to recognise itself as the same Nation throughout its transformations.
But Paine, true revolutionary that he was, was as sweeping in his
rejection of temporal tradition as he was of spatial hierarchy. Not
surprisingly, therefore, he had little time for religion, the main guarantor of
both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of society. “My country is the
world,” he wrote, “and my religion is to do good”.[43] There
was no one, true dogmatic religion for Paine, only conflicting human opinions
which he made no attempt to evaluate: “With respect to what are called
denominations of religion, if everyone is left to judge of his own religion,
there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of
each other’s religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and
therefore, all the world is right, or all the world is wrong…”[44] “Every
religion is good that teaches man to be good”. “I do not believe in the creed
professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by
the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of.
My own mind is my own church.”[45]
Paine was not anti-religious as such; but in his attitude to religion
there was more than a hint of contempt: “All religions are in their nature kind
and benign [!], and united with principles of morality. They could not have
made proselytes at first, by professing anything that was vicious, cruel,
persecuting, or immoral. Like everything else, they had their beginning; and
they proceeded by persuasion, exhortation, and example. How then is it that
they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant?
“It proceeds from the connexion which Mr. Burke recommends. By
engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of
destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called The Church
established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent
mother on which it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys.”[46]
On this principle, Paine should have been very happy in America, where
he spent his last years, insofar as the American Constitution made a complete
separation between Church and State. But where there is no persecution from the
State, there can still be criticism from individuals – indeed, that is their
right according to Paine’s own principles. And the Americans criticised him for
his Deist views, so that Paine spent his last years in loneliness and misery.
For all his Rousseauist iconoclasm, Paine’s revolutionary zeal was
profoundly non-Rousseauist, Anglo-Saxon and individualist. Society exists,
according to him, for the sake of the individual and his needs, especially his
need to be free from various ills. There is no place in his system for a
general will that is superior to the individual and which forces him to be free
to be himself. “Civil power, properly considered as such, is made up of
the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes
defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not to his purpose;
but when collected to a focus, becomes competent to the purpose of every one.”[47] In
other words, the State has no special rights over an individual unless he
interferes with the rights of other individuals; it simply exists to service
the individual(s), to help him to do things he would not be able to do on his
own.
Paine was more influential than Burke, and even the stolid and
traditionalist British found themselves moving along the path that he
indicated. Thus, as Hampson points out, “it was the British who moved towards the
attitudes proclaimed by the French Revolution… After 1832 it was conceded that,
irrespective of precedent and tradition, whole categories of Englishmen had a
right to vote.”[48]
Moreover, Paine’s vision of a welfare state outlined in part two of The
Rights of Man was to inspire generations of British and American radicals.
And yet, it was Burke, not Paine, who was right on the Revolution…
The
American Constitution and Slavery
The success of the American revolution had provided an inspiration for the French revolution in its first phase; and the French revolution in its turn influenced the further development of the American. The debate between Burke and Paine had its analogues in the controversies among the Founding Fathers. Some, such as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, still looked towards the more conservative and authoritarian British model of democracy, in spite of the experience of the War of Independence; while others, such as Thomas Jefferson, drew inspiration from the French revolution even in its later, Jacobin phase in his almost anarchical drive to “rekindle the old spirit of 1776”.
Thus Hamilton said to the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced… All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second… Nothing but a permanent body can check the impudence of democracy.”[49]
Jefferson, on the other hand, believed that a rebellion every 20 years or so was necessary to stop the arteries of freedom from becoming sclerotic. As he wrote to William Stephens Smith in 1787: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”[50] And to James Madison he wrote in the same year: “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.”[51]
These different understandings of democracy were reflected in different views on the two most important issues of the day: the relative powers of the central government and the states, and slavery.
With regard to the first issue, the champions of a strong central government, the federalists, believed that a strong central government was necessary in order to preserve the gains of the revolution, to guarantee taxation income, and preserve law and order. As George Washington put it: “Let then the reins of government be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended. If defective, let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled on whilst it has an existence.”[52]
Not surprisingly, many of the antifederalists thought that Washington himself was substituting his own style of monarchy for the British king. As Joseph J. Ellis writes, they were haunted by “the ideological fear, so effective as a weapon against the taxes imposed by Parliament and decrees of George III, that once arbitrary power was acknowledged to reside elsewhere [than in the states], all liberty was lost. And at a primal level it suggested the unconscious fear of being completely consumed, eaten alive.”[53]
With regard to slavery, there can be no question that the main thrust of the ideology of the American revolution was against it. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 declared that it was “not possible that one man should have property in person of another”. “Removing slavery, however, was not like removing British officials or revising constitutions. In isolated pockets of New York and New Jersey, and more panoramically in the entire region south of the Potomac, slavery was woven into the fabric of American society in ways that defied appeals to logic and morality. It also enjoyed the protection of one of the Revolution’s most potent legacies, the right to dispose of one’s property without arbitrary interference from others, especially when the others resided far away or claimed the authority of some distant government. There were, to be sure, radical implications latent in the ‘principles of ‘76’ capable of challenging privileged appeals to property rights, but the secret of their success lay in their latency – that is, the gradual and surreptitious ways they revealed their egalitarian implications over the course of the nineteenth century. If slavery’s cancerous growth was to be arrested and the dangerous malignancy removed, it demanded immediate surgery. The radical implications of the revolutionary legacy were no help at all so long as they remained only implications.
“The depth and apparent intractability of the problem became much clearer during the debates surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Although the final draft of the document was conspicuously silent on slavery, the subject itself haunted the closed-door debates. No less a source than Madison believed that slavery was the central cause of the most elemental division in the Constitutional Convention: ‘the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size,’ Madison observed, ‘but principally from their having or not having slaves… It did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.’
“The delegates from New England and most of the Middle Atlantic states drew directly on the inspirational rhetoric of the revolutionary legacy to argue that slavery was inherently incompatible with the republican values on which the American Republic had been based. They wanted an immediate end to the slave trade, an explicit statement prohibiting the expansion of slavery into the western territories as a condition for admission into the union, and the adoption of a national plan for gradual emancipation analogous to those state plans already adopted in the North…
“The southern position might more accurately be described as ‘deep southern’, since it did not include Virginia. Its major advocates were South Carolina and Georgia, and the chief burden for making the case in the Constitutional Convention fell almost entirely on the South Carolina delegation. The underlying assumption of this position was most openly acknowledged by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina – namely, that ‘South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves’. What those from the Deep South wanted was open-ended access to African imports to stock their plantations. They also wanted equivalently open access to western lands, meaning no federal legislation restricting the property rights of slave owners…
“Neither side got what it wanted at Philadelphia in 1787. The Constitution contained no provision that committed the newly created federal government to a policy of gradual emancipation, or in any clear sense placed slavery on the road to ultimate extinction. On the other hand, the Constitution contained no provisions that specifically sanctioned slavery as a permanent and protected institution south of the Potomac or anywhere else. The distinguishing feature of the document when it came to slavery was its evasiveness. It was neither a ‘contract with abolition’ nor a ‘covenant with death’, but rather a prudent exercise in ambiguity. The circumlocutions required to place a chronological limit on the slave trade or to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House, all without ever using the forbidden word, capture the intentionally elusive ethos of the Constitution. The underlying reason for this calculated orchestration of non-commitment was obvious: Any clear resolution of the slavery question one way or the other rendered ratification of the Constitution virtually impossible…”[54]
Even Washington was silent about slavery when he came to make his
retirement address in 1796. “His silence on the slavery question was strategic,
believing as he did that slavery was a cancer on the body politic of America
that could not at present be removed without killing the patient…”[55] And
with reason; for by 1790 the slave population was 700,000, up from about
500,000 in 1776. This, and the implicit threat that South Carolina and Georgia
would secede from the Union if slavery were outlawed, made it clear that
abolition was impractical as politics (but not on a personal level – Washington
decreed in his will that all his slaves should be freed after his wife’s death).
And so “the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically
opposed to remaining a united nation.”[56]
Illuminism
In order to understand how the French Revolution passed from its first,
democratic and relatively non-violent phase to the second, proto-communistic
and exceedingly bloody phase, it is necessary to study the history of the
secret society known as the Illuminati. Illuminism arose as a kind of
parasite feeding on the body of Masonry. Its appearance was preceded by an
astonishing increase in the number of masonic lodges in France. Zamoyski writes
that “there were 104 lodges in France in 1772, 198 by 1776, and a staggering
629 by 1789. Their membership included virtually every grandee, writer, artist,
lawyer, soldier or other professional in the country, as well as notable
foreigners such as Franklin and Jefferson – some 30,000 people.”[57]
“Between 800 and 900 masonic lodges,” writes Doyle, “were founded in
France between 1732 and 1793, two-thirds of them after 1760. Between 1773 and
1779 well over 20,000 members were recruited. Few towns of any consequence were
without one or more lodges by the 1780s and, despite several papal
condemnations of a deistic cult that had originated in Protestant England, the
élite of society flocked to join. Voltaire was drafted in on his last
visit to Paris, and it was before the assembled brethren of the Nine Sisters
Lodge that he exchanged symbolic embraces with Franklin.”[58]
Franklin, as we have seen, was an American mason, a famous scientist,
and a major player in the American revolution in which French and Americans had
co-operated in overthrowing British monarchical rule. The American revolution
had demonstrated that the ideas of the philosophes were not just
philosophical theory, but could be translated into reality. And the meeting of
Franklin and Voltaire showed that science and philosophy could meet in the womb
of Masonry to bring forth the common dream - liberty and “the pursuit of
happiness”.
But just as the American Revolution was child’s play compared with the
savagery and radicalism of the French Revolution, so these earlier masonic
lodges and orders were innocent by comparison with the profound evil of
Illuminism, which was founded on May 1, 1776[59] by a
Bavarian professor called Weishaupt, who assumed the name of “Spartacus” (from
the slave who rebelled against Rome in the first century BC). It appears to
have arisen out of the dissatisfaction of a group of Masons with the general
state of Masonry. Thus another founder member, the famous Count Mirabeau, noted
in his Memoir in the same year of 1776: “The Lodge Theodore de Bon Conseil
at Munich, where there were a few men with brains and hearts, was tired of
being tossed about by the vain promises and quarrels of Masonry. The heads
resolved to graft on to their branch another secret association to which they
gave the name of the Order of the Illuminés. They modelled it on
the Society of Jesus, whilst proposing to themselves diametrically opposed.”[60]
“Our strength,” wrote Weishaupt, “lies in secrecy. Therefore we must
without hesitation use as a cover some innocent societies. The lodges of blue
masonry are a fitting veil to hide our real aims, since the world is accustomed
to expecting nothing important or constructive from them. Their ceremonies are
considered pretty trifles for the amusement of big children. The name of a
learned society is also a magnificent mask behind which we can hide our lower
degrees.”[61]
“Weishaupt construced his
organization on several levels, revealing his most radical plans only to his
chosen co-workers. Weishaupt chose the members of his organization mainly
amidst young people, carefully studying each candidature.
“Having sifted out the unreliable and dubious, the leaders of the order performed
on the rest a rite of consecration, which took place after a three-day fast in
a dark basement. Every candidate was consecrated separately, having first had
his arms and legs bound. [Then] from various corners of the dark basement the
most unexpected questions were showered upon the initiate.
“Having replied to the questions, he swore absolute obedience to the
leaders of the order. Every new member signed that he would preserve the
secrets of the organization under fear of the death penalty.
“However, the newcomer was not yet considered to be a full member of the
organization, but received the status of novice and for one to three months had
to be under the observation of an experienced illuminé. He was told to
keep a special diary and regularly present it to the leaders. The novice filled
in numerous questionnaires, and also prepared monthly accounts of all matters
linking him with the order. Having passed through all the trials, the novice
underwent a second initiation, now as a fully-fledged member.
“After his initiation the new member was given a distinguishing sign,
gesture and password, which changed depending on the rank he occupied.
“The newcomer received a special pseudonym (order’s name), usually
borrowed from ancient history…, and got to know an ancient Persian method of
timekeeping, the geography of the order, and also a secret code.
“Weishaupt imposed into the order a system of global spying and mutual
tailing.
“Most of the members were at the lowest level
of the hierarchy.
“No less than a thousand people entered the organization, but for
conspiratorial purposes each member knew only a few people. As Weishaupt
himself noted, ‘directly under me there are to, who are completely inspired by
me myself, while under each of them are two, etc. Thus I can stir up and put
into motion a thousand people. This is how one must command and act in
politics.”[62]
“Do you realize sufficiently,” he wrote in the discourse of the
reception of the Illuminatus Dirigens, “what it means to rule – to rule
in a secret society? Not only over the lesser or more important of the
populace, but over the best men, over men of all ranks, nations, and religions,
to rule without external force, to unite them indissolubly, to breathe one
spirit and soul into them, men distributed over all parts of the world?” [63]
The supposed aim of the new Order was to improve the present
system of government and to abolish “the slavery of the peasants, the servitude
of men to the soil, the rights of main morte and all the customs and privileges
which abase humanity, the corvées under the condition of an equitable
equivalent, all the corporations, all the maîtrises, all the burdens
imposed on industry and commerce by customs, excise duties, and taxes… to
procure a universal toleration for all religious opinions… to take away all the
arms of superstitions, to favour the liberty of the press, etc.”[64] This
was almost exactly the same programme as that carried out by the Constituent
Assembly at the beginning of the French revolution in 1789-91 under the
leadership of, among others, the same Count Mirabeau – a remarkable
coincidence!
However, this liberal democratic
programme was soon forgotten when Weishaupt took over control of the Order. For
“Spartacus” had elaborated a much more radical programme, a programme that was
to resemble the socialism of the later, more radical stages of the revolution.
“Weishaupt had made into an absolute theory the misanthropic gibes [boutades]
of Rousseau at the invention of property and society, and without taking into
account the statement so distinctly formulated by Rousseau on the impossibility
of suppressing property and society once they had been established, he proposed
as the end of Illuminism the abolition of property, social authority, of
nationality, and the return of the human race to the happy state in which it
formed only a single family without artificial needs, without useless sciences,
every father being priest and magistrate. Priest of we know not what religion,
for in spite of their frequent invocations of the God of Nature, many
indications lead us to conclude that Weishaupt had, like Diderot and d’Holbach,
no other God than Nature herself…”[65]
Weishaupt proceeded to create an inner secret circle concealed within
Masonry. He used the religious forms of Masonry, and invented a few “mysteries”
himself. But his aim was the foundation of a political secret
organisation controlled by himself.
His political theory, according to Webster, was “no other than that of
modern Anarchy, that man should govern himself and rulers should be gradually
done away with. But he is careful to deprecate all ideas of violent revolution
– the process is to be accomplished by the most peaceful methods. Let us see
how gently he leads up to the final conclusion:
“’The first stage in the life of
the whole human race is savagery, rough nature, in which the family is the only
society, and hunger and thirst are easily satisfied… in which man enjoys the
two most excellent goods, Equality and Liberty, to their fullest extent. … In
these circumstances… health was his usual condition… Happy men, who were not
yet enough enlightened to lose their peace of mind and to be conscious of the
unhappy mainsprings and causes of our misery, love of power… envy… illnesses
and all the results of imagination.’
“The manner in which man fell from this primitive state of felicity is
then described:
“’As families increased, means of subsistence began to lack, the nomadic
life ceased, property was instituted, men established themselves firmly, and
through agriculture families drew near each other, thereby language developed
and through living together men began to measure themselves against each other,
etc… But here was the cause of the downfall of freedom; equality vanished. Man
felt new unknown needs…’
“Thus men became dependent like minors under the guardianship of kings;
the human must attain to majority and become self-governing:
“’Why should it be impossible that the human race should attain to its
highest perfection, the capacity to guide itself? Why should anyone be
eternally led who understands how to lead himself?’
“Further, men must learn not only to be independent of kings but of each
other:
“’Who has need of another depends on him
and has resigned his rights. So to need little is the first step to freedom;
therefore savages and the most highly enlightened are perhaps the only free
men. The art of more and more limiting one’s needs is at the same time the art
of attaining freedom…’
“Weishaupt then goes on to show how the further evil of Patriotism
arose:
“’With the origin of nations and peoples the world ceased to be a great
family, a single kingdom: the great tie of nature was torn… Nationalism took
the place of human love…. Now it became a virtue to magnify one’s fatherland at
the expense of whoever was not enclosed within its limits, now as a means to
this narrow end it was allowed to despise and outwit foreigners or indeed even
to insult them. This virtue was called Patriotism…’
“And so by narrowing down affection to one’s fellow-citizens, the
members of one’s own family, and even to oneself:
“’There arose out of Patriotism, Localism, the family spirit, and
finally Egoism… Diminish Patriotism, then men will learn to know each other
again as such, their dependence on each other will be lost, the bond of union
will widen out…’
“… Whilst the ancient religions taught the hope of a Redeemer who should
restore man to his former state, Weishaupt looks to man alone for his
restoration. ‘Men,’ he observes, ‘no longer loved men but only such and such
men. The word was quite lost…’ Thus in Weishaupt’s masonic system the ‘lost
word’ is ‘Man,’ and its recovery is interpreted by the idea that Man should
find himself again. Further on Weishaupt goes on to show how ‘the redemption of
the human race is to be brought about’:
“’These means are secret schools of wisdom, these were from all time the
archives of Nature and of human rights, through them will Man be saved from his
Fall, princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the
human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men.
Morality alone will bring about this change imperceptibly. Every father of a
family will be, as formerly Abraham and the patriarchs, the priest and
unfettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the only code of Man. This is
one of our greatest secrets…’
“… His first idea was to make Fire Worship the religion of Illuminism;
the profession of Christianity therefore appears to have been an after-thought.
Evidently Weishaupt discovered, as others have done, that Christianity lends
itself more readily to subversive ideas than any other religion. And in the
passages which follow we find adopting the old ruse of representing Christ as a
Communist and as a secret-society adept. Thus he goes on to explain that ‘if
Jesus preaches contempt of riches, He wishes to teach us the reasonable use of
them and prepare for the community of goods introduced by Him,’ and in which,
Weishaupt adds later, He lived with His disciples. But this secret doctrine is
only to be apprehended by initiates…
“Weishaupt thus contrives to give a purely political interpretation to
Christ’s teaching:
“’The secret preserved through the Disciplinam Arcani, and the
aim appearing through all His words and deeds, is to give back to men their
original liberty and equality… Now one can understand how far Jesus was the
Redeemer and Saviour of the world.’
“The mission of Christ was therefore by means of Reason to make men
capable of freedom: ‘When at last reason becomes the religion of man, so will
the problem be solved.’
“Weishaupt goes on to show that Freemasonry can be interpreted in the
same manner. The secret doctrine concealed in the teaching of Christ was handed
down by initiates who ‘hid themselves and their doctrine under the cover of
Freemasonry,’ and in a long explanation of Masonic hieroglyphics he indicates the
analogies between the Hiramic legend and the story of Christ. ‘I say then Hiram
is Christ.’… In this manner Weishaupt demonstrates that ‘Freemasonry is hidden
Christianity… But this is of course only the secret of what Weishaupt calls
‘real Freemasonry’ in contradistinction to the official kind, which he regards
as totally unenlightened.”[66]
But the whole of this religious side of Weishaupt’s system is in fact
simply a ruse, a cover, by which to attract religious men. Weishaupt himself
despised religion: “You cannot imagine,” he wrote, “what consideration and
sensation our Priest’s degree is arousing. The most wonderful thing is that
great Protestant and reformed theologians who belong to Q [Illuminism] still believe that
the religious teaching imparted in it contains the true and genuine spirit of
the Christian religion. Oh! men, of what cannot you be persuaded? I never
thought that I should become the founder of a new religion.”[67]
Only gradually, and only to a very few of his closest associates, did
Weishaupt reveal the real purpose of his order – the revolutionary overthrow of
the whole of society, civil and religious. Elements of all religions and
philosophical systems, including Christianity and Masonry, were used by
Weishaupt to enrol a body of influential men (about 2500 at one time[68]) who
would obey him in all things while knowing neither him personally nor the real
aims of the secret society they had been initiated into. The pyramidal
structure of his organization, whereby nobody on a lower level knew what was
happening on the one above his, while those on the higher levels knew
everything about what was happening below them, was copied by all succeeding
revolutionary organizations.
Weishaupt was well on the way to taking over Freemasonry (under the
guise of its reform) when, in July, 1785, an Illuminatus was struck by
lightning and papers found on him led to the Bavarian government banning the
organisation. However, both Illuminism and Weishaupt continued in existence –
only France rather than Germany became the centre of their operations. Thus the
Parisian lodge of the Amis Réunis, renamed the Ennemis Réunis,
gathered together all the really radical Masons from various other lodges, many
of which were still royalist, and turned them, often unconsciously, into agents
of Weishaupt. These adepts included no less than thirty princes. For it was
characteristic of the revolution that among those who were most swept up by the
madness of its intoxication were those who stood to lose most from it.
Some far-sighted men, such as the Apostolic Nuncio in Vienna and the
Marquis de Luchet, warned against Illuminism, and de Luchet predicted almost
exactly the course of events that the revolution would take on the basis of his
knowledge of the order. But no one paid any attention. But then, in October,
1789 a pamphlet was seized in the house of the wife of Mirabeau’s publisher
among Mirabeau’s papers and published two years later.
“Beginning with a diatribe against the French monarchy,” writes Webster,
“the document goes on to say that ‘in order to triumph over this hydra-headed
monster these are my ideas’:
“’We must overthrow all order, suppress all laws, annul all power, and
leave the people in anarchy. The law we establish will not perhaps be in force
at once, but at any rate, having given back the power to the people, they will
resist for the sake of the liberty which they will believe they are preserving.
We must caress their vanity, flatter their hopes, promise them happiness after
our work has been in operation; we must elude their caprices and their systems
at will, for the people as legislators are very dangerous, they only establish
laws which coincide with their passions, their want of knowledge would besides
only give birth to abuses. But as the people are a lever which legislators can
move at their will, we must necessarily use them as a support, and render
hateful to them everything we wish to destroy and sow illusions in their path;
we must also buy all the mercenary pens which propagate our methods and which
will instruct the people concerning their enemies which we attack. The clergy,
being the most powerful through public opinion, can only be destroyed by
ridiculing religion, rendering its ministers odious, and only representing them
as hypocritical monsters… Libels must at every moment show fresh traces of
hatred against the clergy. To exaggerate their riches, to makes the sins of an
individual appear to be common to all, to attribute to them all vices; calumny,
murder, irreligion, sacrilege, all is permitted in times of revolution.’
“’We must degrade the noblesse and attribute it to an odious
origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but which will
flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most obstinate, burn and destroy
their property in order to intimidate the rest, so that if we cannot entirely
destroy this prejudice we can weaken it and the people will avenge their vanity
and their jealousy by all the excesses which will bring them to submission.’
“After describing how the soldiers are to be seduced from their
allegiance, and the magistrates represented to the people as despots, ‘since
the people, brutal and ignorant, only see the evil and never the good of
things,’ the writer explains they must be given only limited power in the
municipalities.
“’Let us beware above all of giving them too much force; their despotism
is too dangerous, we must flatter the people by gratuitous justice, promise
them a great diminution in taxes and a more equal division, more extension in
fortunes, and less humiliation. These phantasies [vertiges] will
fanaticise the people, who will flatten out all resistance. What matter the
victims and their numbers? Spoliations, destructions, burnings, and all the
necessary effects of a revolution? Nothing must be sacred and we can say with
Machiavelli: “What matter the means as long as one arrives at the end?”’”[69]
The early phase of the revolution appears to have been driven by the
more idealistic kind of Freemasons – men such as the Duc d’Orléans. But
its later stages were controlled by the Illuminati with their more
radically destructive plans. Thus “according to Lombard de Langres [writing in
1820]: ’France in 1789 counted more than 2,000 lodges affiliated to the Grand
Orient; the number of adepts was more than 100,000. The first events of 1789
were only Masonry in action. All the revolutionaries of the Constituent
Assembly were initiated into the third degree. We place in this class the Duc
d’Orléans, Valence, Syllery, Laclos, Sièyes, Pétion,
Menou, Biron, Montesquiou, Fauchet, Condorcet, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Garat,
Rabaud, Dubois-Crancé, Thiébaud, Larochefoucauld, and others.’
“Amongst these others [continues Webster] were not only the Brissotins,
who formed the nucleus of the Girondin party, but the men of the Terror –
Marat, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins.
“It was these fiercer elements, true disciples of the Illuminati,
who were to sweep away the visionary Masons dreaming of equality and brotherhood.
Following the precedent set by Weishaupt, classical pseudonyms were adopted by
these leaders of the Jacobins, thus Chaumette was known as Anaxagoras, Clootz
as Anacharsis, Danton as Horace, Lacroix as Publicola, and Ronsin as Scaevola;
again, after the manner of the Illuminati, the names of towns were changed and
a revolutionary calendar was adopted. The red cap and loose hair affected by
the Jacobins appear also to have been foreshadowed in the lodges of the Illuminati.
“Yet faithfully as the Terrorists carried out the plan of the Illuminati,
it would seem that they themselves were not initiated into the innermost
secrets of the conspiracy. Behind the Convention, behind the clubs, behind the
Revolutionary Tribunal, there existed, says Lombard de Langres, that ‘most
secret convention [convention sécrétissime] which directed
everything after May 31, an occult and terrible power of which the other
Convention became the slave and which was composed of the prime initiates of
Illuminism. This power was above Robespierre and the committees of the
government,… it was this occult power which appropriated to itself the
treasures of the nation and distributed them to the brothers and friends who
had helped on the great work.’”[70]
Illuminism represents perhaps the first clearly organised expression of
that philosophy which Hieromonk Seraphim Rose called “the Nihilism of
Destruction”.[71]
Fr. Seraphim considered that this philosophy was unique to the twentieth
century; but the evidence for its existence already in the eighteenth century
is overwhelming. With Illuminism, therefore, we enter the atmosphere of the
twentieth-century totalitarian revolutions....
The French Revolution: (2) The
Jacobin Terror
In June, 1791 Louis XVI tried, unsuccessfully, to flee abroad, and in
August the monarchs of Austria and Prussia met at Pillnitz to co-ordinate
action against the Revolution. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Catherine of
Russia also prepared to crush the “orang-outangs of Europe”. From the summer of
1791 to the summer of 1792 power steadily slipped away from the elected
Constituent Assembly, which was still broadly in favour of a constitutional
monarchy, and into the hands of the mob, or the Paris Commune. Their passionate
hatred of refractory priests and monarchists inside the country was inflamed by
the first attempts of the foreign powers to invade France and restore
legitimate authority from outside.
The rhetoric became increasingly bloody. Thus on April 25, 1792 the
“Marseillaise” was composed for the army of the Rhine; “impure blood, it
exulted, would drench the tracks of the conquering French armies.”[72] And on
the same day the new invention of the Guillotine claimed its first victim…
On June 20 the mob or sansculottes (without breeches), invaded
the Tuileries. “By sheer weight of numbers,” writes Zamoyski, “the crowd pushed
through the gates of the royal palace and came face to face with Louis XVI in
one of the upstairs salons, where the defenceless monarch had to endure the
abuse of the mob. Pistols and drawn sabres were waved in his face, and he was
threatened with death. More significantly, he was made to don a red cap [symbol
of the revolution] and drink the health of the nation – and thereby to
acknowledge its sovereignty. By acquiescing, he toasted himself off the
throne.”[73]
For a brief moment, on July 14, the third anniversary of the storming of
the Bastille, it looked as if constitutional monarchy could be saved. Louis was
called “king of the French” and “father
of his country”. But on the same day Marie Antoinette’s nephew, Francis II, was
crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt in a ceremony that reaffirmed with
great splendour the principle of autocratic monarchy. Between the revolution
celebrated in France and the autocracy celebrated in Germany there could be no
permanent compromise. The centre, constitutional monarchy, could not hold…
Pressure mounted on the Assembly to declare the dethronement of the
king. Finally, on August 10, the Tuileries was again invaded, 600 Swiss guards
were brutally massacred, and the king was imprisoned. The Assembly “had little
alternative but to ‘invite’ the French people to form a convention ‘to assure
the sovereignty of the people and the reign of liberty and equality. The next
day it decreed that the new assembly was to be elected by manhood suffrage,
without distinction between citizens. Only servants and the unemployed had no
vote.”[74]
Paris was ruled by the mob now. In September the prisons were opened and
suspected royalists were slaughtered. On September 20 the Prussian army was
defeated at Valmy, and the next day the monarchy was officially abolished.[75]
The newly elected Convention’s task was to legislate for a new
republican Constitution. It was divided between “Montagnards” (Jacobins) on the
left, led by Marat, Danton, Robespierre and the Parisian delegates, and the
“Girondins” on the right, led by Brissot, Vergniaud and the “faction of the
Gironde”. The Montagnards were identified with the interests of the Paris mob
and the most radical ideas of the Revolution; the Girondins – with the
interests of the provinces and the original liberal ideals of 1789. The
Montagnards stood for disposing of the king as soon as possible; the Girondins
wanted a referendum of the whole people to decide.
The Montagnard Saint-Just said that a trial was unnecessary; the people
had already judged the king on August 10; it remained only to punish him. For
“there is no innocent reign… every King is a rebel and a usurper.”[76]
Robespierre had voted against the death penalty in the Assembly, but now he
said that “Louis must die that the country may love”. And he agreed with
Saint-Just: “Louis cannot be judged, he has already been judged. He has been
condemned, or else the Republic is not blameless. To suggest putting Louis XVI
on trial, in whatever way, is a step back towards royal and constitutional
despotism; it is a counter-revolutionary idea; because it puts the Revolution
itself in the dock. After all, if Louis can still be put on trial, Louis can be
acquitted; he might be innocent. Or rather, he is presumed to be until he is
found guilty. But if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the
Revolution?”[77]
There was a certain logic in these words: since the Revolution
undermined all the foundations of the ancien régime, the
possibility that the head of that régime might be innocent implied that
the Revolution might be guilty. So “revolutionary justice” required straight
execution rather than a trial; it could not afford to question the foundations
of the Revolution itself. It was the same logic that led to the execution
without trial of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917.
But the majority of the deputies were not yet as “advanced” in their
thinking as Robespierre. So “during the third week of January 1793,” writes
Ridley, “the Convention voted four times on the issue. A resolution finding
Louis guilty of treason, and rejecting the idea of an appeal to the people by a
plebiscite [so much for Rousseauist democracy!], was carried by 426 votes to 278;
the decision to impose the death penalty was carried by 387 to 314. Philippe
Egalité [the Duke of Orléans and cousin of the king who became
Grand Master of the Masons, then a Jacobin, renouncing his title for the name
‘Philippe Egalité’] voted to convict Louis and for the death penalty. A
deputy then proposed that the question of what to do with Louis should be
postponed indefinitely. This was defeated by 361 to 360, a single vote.
Philippe Egalité voted against the proposal, so his vote decided the
issue. On 20 January a resolution that the death sentence should be immediately
carried out was passed by 380 to 310, and Louis was guillotined the next day.”[78]
After the execution a huge old man with a long beard who had been
prominent in the murdering of priests during the September riots mounted the
scaffold, plunged both hands into the kind’s blood and sprinkled the people
with it, shouting: “People of France! I baptise you in the name of Jacob and
Freedom!”[79]
“Traditionally,” writes Zamoyski, “the death of a king of France was
announced with the phrase: ‘Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!’, in order to
stress the continuity of the institution of monarchy. When the king’s head, was
held aloft on that sunless day, the crowd assembled around the scaffold shouted:
‘Vive la Nation!’ The message was unequivocal. The nation had replaced
the king as the sovereign and therefore as the validating element in the state.
The dead king’s God had been superseded by ‘Our Lord Mankind’, to use the words
of one prominent revolutionary.”[80]
“The condemnation of the king,” wrote Camus, “is the crux of
contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the
disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to now, God played a part in history
through the medium of kings. But His representative in history has been
killed…”[81]
The execution of the king was the signal for the abandonment of all
restraint. The cause of the Revolution became the absolute value to which every
other value was to be subordinated and sacrificed. In February, 1793, after the
British broke off relations because of the execution of the king, the
Convention declared war on the British and the Dutch, and in effect “bade
defiance to the whole of Europe. ‘They threaten you with kings!’ roared Danton
to the Convention. ‘You have thrown down your gauntlet to them, and this
gauntlet is a king’s head, the signal of their coming death.’ ‘We cannot be
calm,’ claimed the ever-bombastic Brissot, ‘until Europe, all Europe, is in
flames.’ In token of this defiance, annexations were now vigorously pursued…”[82] No
matter that the Declaration of the Rights of Man had declared for the freedom
of every nation: revolutionary casuistry interpreted sovereignty to be the
right only of revolutionary nations; all others deserved to become slaves of
the Republic.
Moreover, on December 15, 1792 “generals were authorized in all occupied
territories to introduce the full social programme of the French Republic. All
existing taxes, tithes, feudal dues, and servitudes were to be abolished. So
was nobility, and all types of privilege. The French motto would be, declared
some deputies, War on the castles, peace to the cottages! In the name of
peace, help, fraternity, liberty and equality, they would assist all people to
establish ‘free and popular’ governments, with whom they would then
co-operate.”[83]
But practice did not match theory: the theory of cosmopolitan
universalism too often gave way to the practice of imperialist nationalism.
Thus when Holland was conquered by the revolutionary armies, “it was compelled
to cede various southern territories, including control of the mouth of the
Scheldt, and pay for the upkeep of a French occupying army of 25,000 men.
Finally, it was forced to conclude an alliance with the French Republic whose
chief attraction was to place the supposedly formidable Dutch navy in the
balance against Great Britain. This, then, was what the fraternity and help of
the French Republic actually meant: total subordination to French needs and purposes.”[84]
Imperialism abroad was matched by despotism at home, forced conscription
and crippling taxes. And now for the first time there was massive resistance.
First came the peasant counter-revolution in the western regions of Brittany
and the Vendée, which was crushed with great cruelty[85] with
the loss of about 250,000 lives, about ten times more than were claimed by the
guillotine. At about the same time the revolutionary army under Dumouriez was
defeated by the Austrians at Neerwinden. Dumouriez then changed sides, and it
was only the army’s refusal to co-operate that prevented him from marching on
Paris to restore the constitution of 1791 with Louis XVII as king.[86]
The peasant revolt in the Vendée was by far the most serious and
prolonged that the revolutionaries had to face, and it is significant that it
was fought under the banner of the restoration of the king and the Church. The
rebels wore “sacred hearts, crosses, and the white cockade of royalism. ‘Long
live the king and our good priests,’ was their cry. ‘We want our king, our
priests and the old regime.’”[87]
However, the counter-revolution in other parts of the country, and
especially among the bourgeoisie of such large cities as Marseilles,
Lyons and Bourdeaux, was less principled and therefore much less effective. As
one general reported of the Bordelais: “They appeared to me determined not to
involve themselves in Parisian affairs, but more determined still to retain
their liberty, their property, their opulence… They don’t want a king: they
want a republic, but a rich and tranquil republic.”[88]
This difference in motivation between different parts of the
counter-revolution, and the failure of many of its leaders to condemn the
revolution in toto and as such, and not just some of its wilder
excesses, doomed it to failure in the long term. As long as the revolutionaries
held the centre, and were able to use the methods of terror and mass
conscription to send large armies into the field against their enemies, the
advantage lay with them. And their position was strengthened still further by
the coup against the Girondist deputies carried out between May 31 and June 2,
1793.
“In July 1793,” writes Ridley, “a young Girondin woman, Charlotte
Corday, gained admission to Marat’s house by pretending that she wished to give
him a list of names of Girondins to be guillotined. She found him sitting as
usual in his bath to cure his skin disease, and she stabbed him to death.[89] She was
guillotined, and the Girondin party was suppressed.
“In Lyons, the Girondins had gained control
of the Freemasons’ lodges. In the summer of 1793 the Girondins there defied the
authority of the Jacobin government in Paris, and guillotined one of the local
Jacobin leaders. The Lyons Freemasons played a leading part in the rising
against the Paris Jacobins; but the Jacobins suppressed the revolt, and several
of the leading Girondin Freemasons of Lyons were guillotined.”[90]
And so the Revolution was frenziedly devouring its own children.[91] Or
rather, the Masons were devouring their own brothers; for the struggle between
the Girondists and the Montagnards was in fact, according to Lev Tikhomirov, a
struggle between different layers of Masonry.[92]
“However, in the period of the terror the majority of Masonic lodges were
closed. As Louis Blanc explains, a significant number of Masons, though
extremely liberal-minded, could still not, in accordance with their personal
interests, character and public position, sympathise with the incitement of the
maddened masses against the rich, to whom they themselves belonged. In the
hottest battle of the revolution it was those who split off into the highest
degrees who acted. The Masonic lodges were replaced by political clubs,
although in the political clubs, too, there began a sifting of the
revolutionaries into the more moderate and the extremists, so that quite a few
Masons perished on the scaffolds from the hands of their ‘brothers’. After the
overthrow of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor the Masonic lodges were again opened.”[93]
Now the Terror went into overdrive. The guillotine was used to eliminate
traitors, backsliders, suspects, speculators and “egoists”. “The spirit of
moderation,” declared Leclerc, needed to be expunged.[94]
On September 17 a comprehensive Law of Suspects was passed, which
empowered watch committees “to arrest anyone who ‘either by their conduct,
their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be
supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or to be enemies of liberty’, as well as
a number of more specific categories such as former nobles ‘who have not
constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.’ Practically anybody
might fall foul of such a sweeping law. In the weeks following even everyday
speech acquired a sansculotte style. Those who refused to call each other
‘citizen’ rather than the deferential ‘Monsieur’, and to use the familiar form
of address (tutoiement), fell under automatic suspicion. Then on 29
September the Convention passed a General Maximum Law which imposed price
controls on a wide range of goods defined as of first necessity from food and
drink to fuel, clothing, and even tobacco. Those who sold them above the
maximum would be fined and placed on the list of suspects. The Revolutionary
Army was at last set on foot…”[95]
The Committee of Public Safety now took over control of the government,
subject only to the oversight of the Convention. This anti-democratic move was
said to be temporary and justified by the emergency situation. “It is
impossible,” said Saint-Just in the Committee’s name, “for revolutionary laws
to be executed if the government itself is not constituted in a revolutionary
way.”[96]
The revolutionary government now took terrible revenge on its defeated
enemies. On October 12 the Committee “moved a decree that Lyons should be
destroyed. Its very name was to disappear, except on a monument among the ruins
which would proclaim ‘Lyons made war on Liberty. Lyons is no more.’”[97] Lyons
was not completely destroyed, but whole ranges of houses were burnt and
thousands were guillotined and shot. “The effect… was designed to be a salutory
one. ‘What cement for the Revolution,’ gloated Achard in a letter to Paris.”[98]
In order to carry out its totalitarian programme of control of the whole
population, the government issued “certificates of civisme – identity
cards and testimonials of public reliability all in one. Originally only
foreigners had been required to carry these documents, but the Law of Suspects
made the requirement general [thereby showing that for the revolutionary
government all citizens were aliens]. Those without them were liable to arrest
and imprisonment; and in fact up to half a million people may have been
imprisoned as suspects of one sort or another during the Terror. Up to 10,000
may have died in custody, crowded into prisons never intended for such numbers,
or makeshift quarters no better equipped. These too deserve to be numbered
among the victims of the Terror, although not formally condemned. So do those
who were murdered or lynched without trial or official record during the
chaotic, violent autumn of 1793, when the supreme law of public safety seemed
to override more conventional and cumbersome procedures. Altogether the true
total of those who died under the Terror may have been twice the official
figure – around 30,000 people in just under a year… Nor is it true that most of
those killed in the Terror were members of the former ‘privileged orders’,
whatever the Revolution’s anti-aristocratic rhetoric might suggest. Of the
official death sentences passed, less than 9 per cent fell upon nobles, and
less than 7 per cent on the clergy. Disproportionately high as these figures
may have been relative to the numbers of these groups in the population as a
whole, they were not as high as the quarter of the Terror’s victims who came
from the middle classes. And the vast majority of those who lost their lives in
the proscriptions of 1793-4 – two-thirds of those officially condemned and
doubtless a far higher proportion of those who disappeared unofficially – were
ordinary people caught up in tragic circumstances not of their own making, who
made wrong choices in lethal times, when indifference itself counted as a
crime.”[99]
The incarnation of the revolution in this, its bloodiest phase was the
lawyer Maximilien Robespierre. Uniting in his own person the despotism of Louis
XIV and the freedom-worship of Rousseau, he said: “I am not a flatterer, a
conciliator, an orator, a protector of the people; I myself am the
people.” Again, uniting opposites in thoroughly Hegelian fashion, he said: “The
impulse behind the people’s revolutionary government is virtue and terror:
virtue without which terror is pernicious; terror without which virtue is
impotent… The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty over
tyranny…”[100]
As the Girondin Manon Roland said just before his execution: “Oh,
Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!”[101]
The institution which suffered most in the years 1789-91 was
the Catholic Church. It lost its feudal dues in August and its lands in
October, 1789. In February, 1790 all monasteries and convents, except those
devoted to educational and charitable work, were dissolved, and new religious
vows were forbidden. The Assembly then “replaced the 135 bishops with 85, one
for each départment, and provided one curé for
every 6,000 inhabitants. Bishops were henceforth to be elected (by an
electorate including non-believers, Protestants and Jews) without reference to
Rome.”[102]
The weakened position of the Church encouraged the Protestants, and in
June 300 died in clashes between Catholics and Protestants in Nîmes.
Meanwhile, 150,000 papal subjects living in Avignon and the Comtat agitated for
integration with France. Pope Pius VI rejected this, and on March 29 he also
rejected the Declaration of the Rights of Man and all the religious legislation
so far passed in the Assembly. On July 12 a Civil Constitution for the Clergy
was passed, rationalising the Church’s organisation, putting all the clergy on
the State’s pay-roll and decreeing the election of the clergy by lay assemblies
who might included Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics. The Pope had
already, on July 10, pleaded with the King to veto the Civil Constitution, but
the king, advised by weak bishops, had already given his preliminary sanction.
With the Pope against the Civil Constitution, its acceptance or
rejection became a test of faith for Catholics. As opinion polarised, on
October 30 thirty bishops from the Assembly signed an Exposition of
Principles, explaining that, as Doyle writes, “they could not connive at
such radical changes without consulting the Church through either a council or
the Pope. Nevertheless patriots saw it as an incitement to disobey the law, and
local authorities, clamorously supported by Jacobin clubs, began to enforce it.
Bishops began to be expelled from suppressed sees; chapters were dissolved. In
October and early November the first departmental bishops were elected. But this
time the clergy did not meekly accept its fate. There were protests. ‘I can no
more’, declared the incumbent of the doomed see of Senez, ‘renounce the
spiritual contract which binds me to my Church than I can renounce the promises
of my baptism… I belong to my flock in life and in death… If God wishes to test
his own, the eighteenth century, like the first century, will have its
martyrs.’ The first elected bishop, the deputy Expilly, who was chosen by the
Finistère department, was refused confirmation by the archbishop of
Rennes. In Soissons, the bishop was dismissed by the departmental authorities
for denouncing the Civil Constitution. It was impossible to dismiss all the 104
priests of Nantes who did the same, but their salaries were stopped. Evidently there
was to be no peaceful transition to a new ecclesiastical order, and indignant
local authorities bombarded the Assembly with demands for action. Eventually,
on 27 November, action was taken. The deputies decided, after two days of
bitter debate, to dismiss at once all clerics who did not accept the new order
unequivocally. And to test this acceptance they imposed an oath. All beneficed
clergy were to swear after mass on the first available Sunday ‘to be faithful
to the nation, the King and the law, and to uphold with all their power the
constitution declared by the National Assembly and accepted by the king.’ All
who refused were to be replaced at once through the procedures laid down in the
Civil Constitution.
“The French Revolution had many turning-points: but the oath of the
clergy was, if not the greatest, unquestionably one of them. It was certainly
the Constituent Assembly’s most serious mistake. For the first time the
revolutionaries forced fellow citizens to choose; to declare themselves publicly
for or against the new order… With no word from Rome, the king sanctioned the
new decree of 26 December, so that oath-taking (or refusal) dominated public
life throughout the country in January and February 1791. The clergy in the
Assembly themselves set the pattern, in that they were completely divided. Only
109 took the oath, and only two bishops, one of them Talleyrand. As the
deadline approached on 4 January the Assembly was surrounded by crowds shouting
for nonjurors to be lynched; and the patriots, led unpersuasively by the
Protestant Barnave, used every possible argument and procedural ploy to sway
waverers. But there were none. And faced with this example from the majority of
clerical deputies, it is little wonder that so many clerics in the country at
large became refractories (as nonjurors were soon being called)… Above all,
there was a massive refusal of the oath throughout the west…In the end, about
54 per cent of the parish clergy took the oath. This suggests that well over a
third of the country was now prepared to signal that the Revolution had gone
far enough…”[103]
There is a bitter irony in these events. How often, since 1066 and the
Investitures Conflict, had Popes bent western kings to their evil will!
However, as present events now demonstrated, these were pyrrhic victories,
which, in weakening the Monarchy, ultimately weakened the Church, too, in that
Church and Monarchy are the two essential pillars of every Christian society.
Right up to the Reformation the Popes had failed to understand that attacks on
the throne were also attacks on the altar, and that an accusation of “royal
despotism” would almost invariably be linked with one of “episcopal despotism”.
The Counter-Reformation Popes were more careful to respect monarchical authority,
and Louis XIV’s abrupt about-turn from Gallicanism to Ultramontanism witnessed
to their continuing influence. But the constant political intrigues of the
papal society of the Jesuits, which made them a kind of “state within the
state”, led to their being banned by all the governments of Western Europe - a
severe blow from which the power of the Popes never fully recovered and which
was an important condition of the success of the revolution. The Masons and
even more radical groups like the “Illuminati” (see below) were quick to take
the place of the Jesuits as the main threat to established authority, while
using the Jesuits’ methods. And now, at the end of the eighteenth century, when
papism was in full retreat before the onslaught of enlightened despots like
Joseph II and revolutionary democrats like the French National Assembly, and
the Popes were desperately in need of the support of “Most Catholic Kings” such
as Louis XVI, they paid the price for centuries of papal anti-monarchism.
Indeed, since it was Papism that destroyed the Orthodox symphony of powers, and
thereby created the conditions for the revolution, there was some sense in
Catherine II’s suggestion that the European powers “embrace the Greek religion
to save themselves from this immoral, anarchic, wicked and diabolical plague…”[104]
In its second, Jacobin phase the revolution revealed its anti-Christian
essence most clearly. Thus at the funeral of Marat in July, 1793, the following
eulogy was given: “O heart of Marat, sacré coeur… can the
works and benevolence of the son of Mary be compared with those of the Friend
of the People and his apostles to the Jacobins of our holy Mountain?… Their
Jesus was but a false prophet but Marat is a god…”[105]
The revolution was in essence anti-Christian because it came to provide
a new faith instead of Christianity: the cult of the nation. Let us recall the
earlier stages in the rise of the cult of the nation: the oath to the nation
that Rousseau provided for Napoleon’s native Corsica; the speech of the Polish
marshal, Josef Pulaski at Bar in 1768, when he said: “We are to die so that the
motherland may live; for while we live the motherland is dying”[106]; the
birth of the American nation in 1776; the abortive Irish revolution of 1783;
the abortive Dutch revolution of 1785, which declared liberty the “inalienable
right” of every citizen, and whose “Leiden draft” declared: “the Sovereign is
no other than the vote of the people”.[107]
But these were merely dress-rehearsals for the full emergence of the new
nationalist faith, whose foundation stone, as we have seen, was the third of
the Rights of Man declared by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789:
“The principle of all sovereignty lies in the nation. No body of men, and no
individual, can exercise authority which does not emanate directly therefrom.”
It should be understood that this was not simply an expression of
patriotism, but precisely a new faith to replace all existing faiths.
For “the nation, as Abbé Siéyès put it, recognized no interest
on earth above its own, and accepted no law or authority other than its own –
neither that of humanity at large nor of other nations”[108] – nor,
it goes without saying, of God. The nation therefore stood in the place of God;
in the strict sense of the word, it was an idol. So Hobsbawm rightly comments:
“’The people’ identified with ‘the nation’ was a revolutionary concept; more
revolutionary than the bourgeois-liberal programme which purported to express
it.”[109]
But what precisely was the nation, and how was it revealed? To this
question the most revolutionary of the philosophes and the prophet of
nationalism, Rousseau, had provided the answer. The nation, he said, is
revealed in the general will, which was not to be identified with the will of
any individual, such as the king, or group, such as a parliamentary majority,
but only in some spontaneous, mystical upswelling of emotion that carried all
before it and was not to be questioned or criticised by any rational
considerations. It was a “holy madness”, to use Lafayette’s phrase.[110]
“’He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to
feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each
individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere
part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive
his life and his being,’ Rousseau had written. He understood that any polity,
however logical, simple, elegant, poetic or modern, would be inadequate to
replace the layered sacrality of something like the Crown of France and the
whole theological and mythical charge of the Catholic Church. Human emotions
needed something richer to feed on than a mere ‘system’ if they were to be
engaged. And engaged they must be, for if one removed religious control of
social behaviour and the monarch’s role as ultimate arbiter, the very
fount-head of civil sanction would dry up. Something had to be put in their
place. The question was ultimately how to induce people to be good in a godless
society.
“As it was the people themselves who gave the state its legitimacy, it
was they who had to be invested with divinity. The monarch would be replaced by
a disembodied sovereign in the shape of the nation, which all citizens must be
taught to ‘adore’. ‘It is education that must give to the souls of men the
national form, and so direct their thoughts and their tastes, that they will be
patriotic by inclination, by passion, by necessity,’ Rousseau explained. This
education included not only teaching but also sport and public ceremonies
designed to inculcate the desired values. ‘From the excitement caused by this
common emulation will be born that patriotic intoxication which alone can
elevate men above themselves, and without which liberty is no more than an
empty word and legislation but an illusion.’
“A precondition of this was the the total elimination of Christianity.
Being a sentimental person, Rousseau could not remain entirely unmoved by what
he saw as the ‘sublime’ core of Christianity. But the existence of a morally
independent religion alongside the civil institutions was bound to be
destructive. ‘Far from binding the hearts of the citizens to the state, it
detaches them from it, as from all earthly things,’ he writes: ‘I can think of
nothing more contrary to the social spirit.’ It forced on people ‘two sets of
laws, two leaders, two motherlands’, subjecting them to ‘contradictory duties’
and preventing them from being ‘both devout practitioners and good citizens’.
Christianity demanded self-denial and submission, but only to God, and not to
any creation of Man’s. A Christian’s soul could not be fused with the
‘collective soul’ of the nation, challenging the very basis of Rousseau’s
proposition. His assertion that ‘a man is virtuous when his particular will is
in accordance in every respect with the general will’, was heresy in Christian
terms, according to which virtue consists in doing the will of God. There was
no room for someone whose ultimate loyalty was to God in Rousseau’s model,
which substituted the nation for God.”[111]
Zamoyski continues: “Anthropologically visualized as a universal ideal
female, the nation kindled desire for selfless sacrifice in its cause, and that
was the great strength of the French revolution. ‘Since it appeared to be more
concerned with the regeneration of the human race than with reforming France,
it aroused feelings that no political revolutions had hitherto managed to
inspire,’ explained Tocqueville. ‘It inspired proselytism and gave birth to the
propagande,’ he continued, and, ‘like Islam, flooded the whole world
with its soldiers, its apostles and its martyrs.’”[112]
A
programme known as de-christianization was now launched. The calendar and
festivals of the old religion were replaced by those of the new, civic religion
of the nation. Thus July 14, August 10, January 21 (the day of the execution of
Louis XVI) and May 31 (the day of the establishment of the Jacobin tyranny)
were commanded to be celebrated as feast-days.
Bamber Gascoigne writes: “August 10th was the first
anniversary of the day on which the Paris mob had stormed the Tuileries and had
put an effective end to the monarchy. The occasion was celebrated with a
Festival of Regeneration, also known by the even more uninspiring name of
Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic. Among the ruins of
the Bastille Jacques-Louis David had built a huge figure of a seated woman. She
was Mother Nature. From her breasts there spurted two jets of water, at which
delegates filled their cups and drank libations. Three months later there was a
Festival of Reason, in which an actress from the opera played the Goddess of
Reason and was enthroned in the cathedral of Notre-Dame – with the red bonnet
of Liberty on her head and a crucifix beneath one of her elegant feet.”[113]
All the churches in Paris were closed, and the royal tombs were
destroyed. Then there arrived in the Nièvre in September, 1793 the
representative Fouché, who “transformed it into a beacon of religious
terror. Fouché, himself a former priest, came from the Vendée,
where he had witnessed the ability of the clergy to inspire fanatical
resistance to the Revolution’s authority. Christianity, he concluded, could not
coexist in any form with the Revolution and, brushing aside what was left of
the ‘constitutional’ Church, he inaugurated a civic religion of his own
devising with a ‘Feast of Brutus’ on 22 September at which he denounced
‘religious sophistry’. Fouché particularly deplored clerical celibacy:
it set the clergy apart, and in any case made no contribution to society’s need
for children. Clerics who refused to marry were ordered to adopt and support
orphans or aged citizens. The French people, Fouché declared in a
manifesto published on 10 October, recognized no other cult but that of
universal morality; and although the exercise of all creeds was proclaimed to
be free and equal, none might henceforth be practised in public. Graveyards
should exhibit no religious symbols, and at the gate of each would be an
inscription Death is an eternal sleep. Thus began the movement known as
dechristianization. Soon afterwards Fouché moved on to Lyons; but during
his weeks in Nevers his work had been watched by Chaumette, visiting his native
town from Paris. He was to carry the idea back to the capital, where it was
energetically taken up by his colleagues at the commune.
“Other representatives on mission, meanwhile, had also taken to
attacking the outward manifestations of the Catholic religion. At Abbeville, on
the edge of priest-ridden Flanders, Dumont favoured forced public abjuration of
orders, preferably by constitutional clergy whose continued loyalty to the
Revolution could only now be proved by such gestures. On October 7 in Rheims,
Ruhl personally supervised the smashing of the phial holding the sacred oil of
Clovis used to anoint French kings. None of this was authorized by the
Convention: on the other hand the adoption on 5 October of a new republican
calendar marked a further stage in the divorce between the French State and any
sort of religion. Years would no longer be numbered from the birth of Christ,
but from the inauguration of the French Republic on 22 September 1792. Thus it was already the Year II. There would
be twelve thirty-day months with evocative, seasonal names; each month would
have three ten-day weeks (décades) ending in a rest-day (décadi).
Sundays therefore disappeared and could not be observed unless they coincided
with the less-frequent décadis. The introduction of the system at
this moment only encouraged representatives on mission to intensify their lead;
and dechristianization became an important feature of the Terror in all the
former centres of rebellion when they were brought to heel. Once launched it
was eminently democratic. Anybody could join in smashing images, vandalizing
churches (the very word was coined to describe this outburst of iconoclasm),
and theft of vestments to wear in blasphemous mock ceremonies. Those needing
pretexts could preach national necessity when they tore down bells or walked
off with plate that could be recast into guns or coinage. Such activities were
particular favourites among the Revolutionary Armies. The Parisian detachments
marching to Lyons left a trail of pillaged and closed churches, and smouldering
bonfires of ornaments, vestments, and holy pictures all along their route.
Other contributions took more organization, but Jacobin clubs and popular
societies, not to mention local authorities, were quite happy to orchestrate
festivals of reason, harmony, wisdom, and other such worthy attributes to
former churches; and to recruit parties of priests who, at climactic moments in
these ceremonies, would renounce their vows and declare themselves ready to
marry. If their choice fell on a former nun, so much the better.
“When Chaumetter returned from Nevers, the Paris Commune made
dechristianization its official policy. On 23 October the images of kings on
the front of Notre-Dame were ordered to be removed: the royal tombs at Saint-Denis
had already been emptied and desecrated by order of the Convention in August.
The word Saint began to be removed from street names, and busts of Marat
replaced religious statues. Again the Convention appeared to be encouraging the
trend when it decreed, on 20 October, that any priest (constitutional or
refractory) denounced for lack of civisme by six citizens would be
subject to deportation, and any previously sentenced to deportation but found
in France should be executed. Clerical dress was now forbidden in Paris, and on
7 November Gobel, the elected constitutional bishop, who had already sanctioned
clerical marriage for his clergy, came with eleven of them to the Convention
and ceremonially resigned his see. Removing the episcopal insignia, he put on a
cap of liberty and declared that the only religion of a free people should be
that of Liberty and Equality. In the next few days the handful of priests who
were deputies followed his example. Soon Grégoire, constitutional bishop
of Blois, was the only deputy left clinging to his priesthood and clerical
dress. The sections meanwhile were passing anti-clerical motions, and on 12
November that of Gravilliers, whose idol had so recently been Jacques Roux,
sent a deputation to the Convention draped in ‘ornaments from churches in their
district, spoils taken from the superstitious credulity of our forefathers and
repossessed by the reason of free men’ to announce that all churches in the
section had been closed. This display followed a great public ceremony held in
Notre-Dame, or the ‘Temple of Reason’, as it was now redesignated, on the
tenth. On this occasion relays of patriotic maidens in virginal white paraded
reverently before a temple of philosophy erected where the high altar had
stood. From it emerged, at the climax of the ceremony, a red-capped female
figure representing Liberty. Appreciatively described by an official recorder
of the scene as ‘a masterpiece of nature’, in daily life she was an actress;
but in her symbolic role she led the officials of the commune to the
Convention, where she received the fraternal embrace of the president and
secretaries.
“However carefully choreographed, there was not much dignity about these
posturings; and attacks on parish churches and their incumbents (who were
mostly now popularly elected) risked making the Revolution more enemies than
friends. Small-town and anti-religious Jacobin zeal, for example, provoked a
minor revolt in the Brie in the second week in December. To shouts of Long
live the Catholic Religion, we want our priests, we want the Mass on Sundays
and Holy Days, crowds of peasants sacked the local club. Several thousands
took up arms and joined the movement, and only a force of National Guards and
sansculottes from the Revolutionary Army restored order in a district whose
tranquillity was vital to the regular passage of food supplies to the capital
from southern Champagne. But even before this the Committee of Public Safety
was growing anxious about the counter-productive effects of dechristianization.
Robespierre in particular, who [following his teacher, Rousseau] believed that
religious faith was indispensable to orderly, civilized society, sounded the
alarm. On November 21 he denounced anti-religious excesses at the Jacobin club.
They smacked of more fanaticism than they extinguished.[114] The
people believed in a Supreme Being, he warned, whereas atheism was
aristocratic.[115]
At the same time he persuaded the Committee to circularize popular societies
warning them not to fan superstition and fanaticism by persecution. On 6
December, finally, the Convention agreed to reiterate the principle of
religious freedom in a decree which formally prohibited all violence or threats
against the ‘liberty of cults’. But by then it was too late. The example of
Paris had encouraged Jacobin zealots everywhere, and with the repression of
revolt in full swing and the role of priests in the Vendée particularly
notorious, the remaining trappings of religion were too tempting a target to
ignore. The commune’s response to Robespierre on 23 November had been to decree
the closing of all churches in the capital; and soon local authorities were
shutting them wholesale throughout the country. By the spring, churches were
open for public worship only in the remotest corners of France, such as the
Jura mountains. By then, perhaps 20,000 priests had been bullied into giving up
their status, and 6,000 had given their renunciation the ultimate confirmation
by marrying. In some areas, such as Provence, dechristianization only reached
its peak in March or April 1794."[116]
On October 31 the Girondists went to the guillotine. By the Law
of 14 Frumaire (4 December) extreme centralisation was decreed, heralding the
end of the Terror, but accelerating the Terror within the central
administration itself. In March it was the turn of the Hébertists; in
April – of the Dantonists. On March 27 the Revolutionary Army was disbanded. By
the end of April the commune had been purged.
Robespierre was still alive, preaching the new, revolutionary virtue and
religion. By the Decree of 18 Floréal (7 May) it was declared that the
French people recognised a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, and
that a cult worthy of the Supreme Being was the fulfilment of a man’s civic
duties. Thus the emphasis was still on man’s civic duties: religion had
no independent function outside the State, in accordance with the words of
Abbé Guillaume Raynal in 1780: “The State, it seems to me, is not made
for religion, but religion for the State.”[117]
It was the same with morality, which was now defined to include among
the highest virtues “the hatred of bad faith and tyranny, the punishment of
tyrants and traitors, help to the unhappy, respect for the weak, protection to
the oppressed, to do all the good possible to others and to be unjust to nobody.”[118]
On 20 Prairial (8 June), Robespierre moved that “the nation should
celebrate the Supreme Being. Thus every locality was given a month to make its
preparations. The fact that 8 June was also Whit Sunday may or may not have
been a coincidence; if not, it could have been conceived either as a challenge
or as an olive branch to Christianity. In the event little direction was given
to the localities on how to organize the festival. Some adopted the props of
all-too-recent festivals of reason, merely painting out old slogans with new
ones. Others used the opportunity to allow mass to be said publicly for the
first time in months. But in Paris the organization of the occasion was
entrusted to the experienced hands of the painter David, himself a member of
the Committee of General Security. He built an artificial mountain in the Champ
de Mars, surmounted by a tree of liberty, and thither a mass procession made
its way from the Tuileries. At its head marched the members of the Convention,
led by their president, who happened that week to be Robespierre. He used the
opportunity to deliver two more eulogies of virtue and republican religion,
pointedly ignoring, though not failing to notice, the smirks of his fellow
deputies at the posturings of this pseudo-Pope. Others found it no laughing
matter. ‘Look at the bugger,’ muttered Thuriot, an old associate of Danton.
‘It’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God.’”[119]
Like the other gods of the revolution[120],
Robespierre did not survive its terror. On 22 Prairial (10 June, 1794),
witnesses and defending counsels were decreed to be no longer necessary in
trials – so no one was safe. On 9 Thermidor (27 June) Robespierre fell from
power. The next day, screaming in terror, he was executed.
While the fall of Robespierre marked the end of the most fanatical phase
in the revolution, normal life was not restored quickly. “On 18 September 1794,
the Convention had carried the drift of the Revolution since 1790 to a logical
conclusion when it finally renounced the constitutional Church. The Republic,
it decreed, would no longer pay the costs or wages of any cult – not that it
had been paying them in practice for a considerable time already. It meant the
end of state recognition for the Supreme Being, a cult too closely identified
with Robespierre. But above all it marked the abandonment of the Revolution’s
own creation, the constitutional Church. For the first time ever in France,
Church and State were now formally separated. To some this decree looked like a
return to dechristianization, and here and there in the provinces there were
renewed bursts of persecution against refractories. But most read it,
correctly, as an attempt to deflect the hostility of those still faithful to
the Church from the Republic. The natural corollary came with the decree of 21
February 1795 which proclaimed the freedom of all cults to worship as they
liked. The tone of the law was grudging, and it was introduced with much
gratuitous denigration of priestcraft and superstition. Religion was defined as
a private affair, and local authorities were forbidden to lend it any
recognition or support. All outward signs of religious affiliation in the form
of priestly dress, ceremonies, or church bells remained strictly forbidden. The
faithful would have to buy or rent their own places of worship and pay their
own priests or ministers…”[121]
The
French Revolution: (3) Babeuf and the Directory
Let us summarise the effects of the revolution so far. “Where the Church
was concerned,” writes Hampson, “the Civil Constitution of 1790 had the social
effect of a Reformation, in the sense that it deprived a wealthy corporate
institution of its autonomous position within the state. Politically, this was
the opposite of a Reformation, since it destroyed the basis of the Gallican
Church and made the French clergy dependent upon Rome.”[122]
“Nobles were never proscribed as such and their property was not
confiscated unless they went into exile or were condemned for political
offences. Some noble families suffered very heavy casualties during the Terror;
others survived without much difficulty. The ‘anti-feudal’ legislation of the
Constituent Assembly bore heavily on those who income was derived mainly from
manorial dues; those whose wealth came from their extensive acres may have
gained more from the abolition of tithes than they lost from increased
taxation. Some made profitable investments in church land which were the ‘best
buy’ of the revolution since massive inflation reduced to a nominal figure the
price paid by those who had opted to buy in instalments…Over the country as a
whole the proportion of land owned by the nobility was somewhat reduced by the
revolution but in most parts a substantial proportion of the landowners still
came from the nobility, and the land was the most important source of wealth
until well into the nineteenth century.”[123]
“The urban radicals whom the more radical – but nevertheless gentlemanly
– revolutionary leaders liked to eulogize as sans-culottes, fared badly… As an
observer reported in 1793, ‘That class has suffered badly; it took the
Bastille, was responsible for the tenth of August and so on… Hébert and
Marat, two of the most extreme of the radical journalists, agreed that the
sans-culottes were worse off than they had been in 1789. Soon, of course, all
this was going to change… but it never did.”[124]
“The revolution did not ‘give the
land to the peasants’. They already possessed about a quarter of it, although
most of them did not own enough to be self-sufficient. The Church lands were
mostly snapped up by the wealthier farmers or by outside speculators… The
prevailing economic theories persuaded the various assemblies to concentrate
very heavily on direct taxation, most of which fell on the land. Requisitioning
of food, horses and carts was borne exclusively by the peasants….
“Once again the revolution greatly increased the impact of the state on
the day-to-day life of the community. This was especially obvious where
religion was concerned.”[125]
After Thermidor and the execution of Robespierre, a new phase of the
Revolution began. In 1795 a committee of five, the Directory, was established.
Fearing coups from the royalist right as well as the Jacobin left, it continued
the slow torture of the Dauphin (Louis XVII), who died in prison on June 10.
“With the Directory,” writes Edmund Wilson, “the French Revolution had
passed into the period of reaction which was to make possible the domination of
Bonaparte. The great rising of the bourgeoisie, which, breaking out of the
feudal forms of the monarchy, dispossessing the nobility and the clergy, had
presented itself to society as a movement of liberation, had ended by
depositing the wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of people and
creating a new conflict of classes. With the reaction against the Terror, the
ideals of the Revolution were allowed to go by the board. The five politicians
of the Directory and the merchants and financiers allied with them were
speculating in confiscated property, profiteering in army supplies, recklessly
inflating the currency and gambling on the falling gold louis. And in the
meantime, during the winter of 1795-96, the working people of Paris were dying
of hunger and cold in the streets.”[126]
This situation led to attempts to overthrow the government, the most
significant of which was that of “Gracchus” Babeuf, who “rallied around him
those elements of the Revolution who were trying to insist on its original
aims. In his paper, The Tribune of the People, he denounced the new
constitution of 1795, which had abolished universal suffrage and imposed a high
property qualification. He demanded not merely political but also economic
equality. He declared that he would prefer civil war itself to ‘this horrible
concord which strangles the hungry’. But the men who had expropriated the
nobles and the Church remained loyal to the principle of property itself. The
Tribune of the People was stopped, and Babeuf and his associates were sent
to prison.
“While Babeuf was in jail, his seven-year-old daughter died of hunger.
He had managed to remain poor all his life. His popularity had been all with
the poor. His official posts had earned him only trouble. Now, as soon as he
was free again, he proceeded to found a political club, which opposed the
policies of the Directory and which came to be known as the Society of the
Equals. They demanded in a Manifesto of the Equals (not, however, at that time made public) that
there should be ‘no more individual property in land; the land belonged to no
one… We declare that we can no longer endure, with the enormous majority of
men, labor and sweat in the service and for the benefit of a small minority. It
is has now been long enough and too long that less than a million individuals
have been disposing of that which belongs to more than twenty millions of their
kind… Never has a vaster design been conceived or put into execution. Certain
men of genius, certain sages, have spoken of it from time to time in a low and
trembling voice. Not one of them has had the courage to tell the whole truth…
People of France! Open your eyes and your heart to the fullness of happiness.
Recognize and proclaim with us the Republic of Equals!’
“The Society of Equals was also suppressed; Bonaparte himself closed the
club. But, driven underground, they now plotted an insurrection; they proposed
to set up a new directory. And they drafted a constitution that provided for ‘a
great national community of goods’ and worked out with some precision the
mechanics of a planned society. The cities were to be deflaed and the
population distributed in villages. The State was to ‘seize upon the new-born
individual, watch over his early moments, guarantee the milk and care of his
mother and bring him to the maison nationale, where he was to acquire
the virtue and enlightenment of a true citizen.’ There was thus to be equal
education for all. All able-bodied persons were to work, and the work that was
unpleasant or arduous was to be accomplished by everybody’s taking turns. The
necessities of life were to be supplied by the government, and the people were
to eat at communal tables. The government was to control all foreign trade and
to pass on everything printed.
“In the meantime, the value of the paper money had depreciated almost to
zero. The Directory tried to save the situation by converting the currency into
land warrants, which were at a discount of eight-two per cent the day they were
issued; and there was a general belief on the part of the public that the government
had gone bankrupt. There were in Paris along some five hundred thousand people
in need of relief. The Babouvistes placarded the city with a manifesto…; they
declared that Nature had given to every man an equal right to the enjoyment of
every good, and it was the purpose of society to defend that right, that Nature
had imposed on every man the obligation to work, and that no one could escape
this obligation without committing a crime; that in ‘a true society’ there
would be neither rich nor poor; that the object of the Revolution had been to
destroy every inequality and to establish the well-being of all; that they
Revolution was therefore ‘not finished’, and that those who had done away with
the Constitution of 1793 were guilty of lese majesté against the
people…
“Babeuf’s ‘insurrectionary committee’ had agents in the army and the
police, and they were doing such effective work that the government tried to
send its troops out of Paris, and, when they refused to obey, disbanded them.
During the early days of May, 1796, on the eve of the projected uprising, the
Equals were betrayed by a stool pigeon and their leaders were arrested and put
in jail. The followers of Babeuf made an attempt to rally a sympathetic police
squadron, but were cut down by a new Battalion of the Guard which had been
pressed into service for the occasion.
“Babeuf was made a public example by being taken to Vendôme in a
cage – an indignity which not long before had filled the Parisians with furty
when the Austrians had inflicted it on a Frenchman…
“[At this trial] the vote, after much disagreement, went against Babeuf.
One of his sons had smuggled in to him a tin dagger made out of a candlestick,
and when he heard the verdict pronounced, he stabbed himself in the Roman
fashion, but only wounded himself horribly and did not die. The next morning
(May 27, 1797) he went to the guillotine. Of his followers thirty were executed
and many sentenced to penal servitude or deportation.”[127]
The
French Revolution: (4) Napoleon Bonaparte
Thus the revolution appeared to have lost its way, consumed in poverty,
corruption and mutual blood-letting. It was saved by a young soldier, Napoleon
Bonaparte, who was as sincerely faithful to the spirit of the revolution as
Cromwell had been. Madame de Stael called Robespierre on horseback After all,
he came from Corsica, which in 1755 had successfully rebelled from Genoa, and
for which Rousseau wrote one of his most seminal works, Project de
constitution pour la Corse, in 1765. But, like Cromwell (and Caesar), he
found that in order to save the republic he had to take control of it and rule
it like a king.
His chance came on 19 Brumaire (November 10), 1799, when he overthrew the Directory (he described
parliamentarism as “hot air”), and frightened the two elective assemblies into
submission. On December 13 a new constitution was proclaimed with Bonaparte as
the first of three Consuls with full executive powers. And on December 15 the
three Consuls declared: “Citizens, the Revolution is established upon its
original principles: it is consummated…”[128]
Paul Johnson writes, “the new First Consul
was far more powerful than Louis XIV, since he dominated the armed forces
directly in a country that was now organized as a military state. All the
ancient restraints on divine-right kingship – the Church, the aristocracy and
its resources, the courts, the cities and their charters, the universities and
their privileges, the guilds and their immunities – all had been swept away by
the Revolution, leaving France a legal blank on which Bonaparte could stamp the
irresistible force of his personality.”[129]
But, again like Caesar and Cromwell, he could never confess to being a
king in the traditional sense. Under him, in Davies’ phrase, “a pseudo-monarchy
headed pseudo-democratic institutions; and an efficient centralized
administration ran on a strange cocktail of legislative leftovers and bold
innovation.”[130]
So, as J.M. Roberts writes, while Napoleon reinstituted monarchy, “it was in no
sense a restoration. Indeed, he took care so to affront the exiled Bourbon
family that any reconciliation with it was inconceivable. He sought popular
approval for the empire in a plebiscite and got it.[131]
This was a monarchy Frenchmen had voted for; it rested on popular
sovereignty, that is, the Revolution. It assumed the consolidation of the
Revolution which the Consulate had already begun. All the great institutional
reforms of the 1790s were confirmed or at least left intact; there was no
disturbance of the land sales which had followed the confiscation of Church
property, no resurrection of the old corporations, no questioning of the
principle of equality before the law. Some measures were even taken further,
notably when each department was given an administrative head, the prefect, who
was in his powers something like one of the emergency emissaries of the Terror
(many former revolutionaries became prefects)…”[132]
Cromwell had eschewed the trappings and ceremonial of monarchy, but
Napoleon embraced them with avidity. The trend towards monarchy and hierarchy
was already evident elsewhere; and “earlier than is generally thought,” writes
Philip Mansel, “the First Consul Bonaparte aligned himself with this
monarchical trend, acquiring in succession a guard (1799), a palace (1800),
court receptions and costumes (1800-02), a household (1802-04), a dynasty
(1804), finally a nobility (1808)… The proclamation of the empire in May 1804,
the establishment of the households of the Emperor, the Empress and the Imperial
Family in July, the coronation by the pope in December of that year, were
confirmations of an existing monarchical reality.”[133]
Moreover, Napoleon spread monarchy throughout Europe. In the wake of his
conquests, and excluding the direct annexations to the French Empire, the
kingdoms and Grand Duchies of Italy, Venice, Rome, Naples, Lucca, Dubrovnik,
Holland, Mainz, Bavaria, Württemburg, Saxony, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt,
Westphalia and Spain were all established or re-established with still greater
monarchical power - and all ruled by Napoleon’s relations by blood or marriage.
According to Stendhal, Napoleon’s court “totally corrupted” him “and exalted
his amour propre to the state of a disease… He was on the point of
making Europe one vast monarchy.”[134]
“As one of his secretaries Baron Meneval wrote, he saw himself as ‘the
pillar of royalty in Europe’. On January 18th, 1813, he wrote to his
brother Jerome that his enemies, by appealing to popular feeling, represented
‘upheavals and revolutions… pernicious doctrines.’ In Napoleon’s opinion his
fellow monarchs were traitors to ‘their own cause’ when in 1813 they began to
desert the French Empire, or in 1814 refused to accept his territorial terms
for peace…”[135]
Jocelyn Hunt writes: “Kings before 1791 were said to be absolute but
were limited by all kinds of constraints and controls. The Church had an almost
autonomous status. Bonaparte ensured that the Church was merely a branch of the
civil service. Kings were anointed by the Church, and thus owed their authority
to God: Bonaparte took power through his own strength, camouflaged as ‘the
General Will’ which, as Correlli Barnett acidly remarks, ‘became synonymous
with General Bonaparte’.[136]
Indeed, when he became emperor in 1804, he crowned himself...
“The First Consul’s choice of ministers was a far more personal one than
had been possible for the kings of France. Bonaparte established a system of
meeting his ministers individually, in order to give his instructions. In the
same way, Bonaparte chose which ‘ordinary’ citizens he would consult; kings of
France had mechanisms for consulting ‘the people’ but these had fallen into
disuse and thus, when the Estates General met in 1789, the effect was
revolutionary. Bonaparte’s legislative body was, until 1814, submissive and
compliant.…
“Police control and limitations on personal freedom had been a focus of
condemnation by the Philosophes before the Revolution, but had not been
entirely efficient: a whole industry of importing and distributing banned texts
had flourished in the 1770s and 1780s. Bonaparte’s police were more thorough,
and so swingeing were the penalties that self-censorship rapidly became the
safest path for a newspaper to take. Bonaparte closed down sixty of the
seventy-three newspapers in Paris in January, 1800, and had a weekly summary
prepared of all printed material, but he was soon able to tell his Chief of
Police, Fouché, ‘They only print what I want them to.’[137] In the
same way, the hated lettres de cachet appear limited and inefficient
when compared to Bonaparte’s and Fouché’s record of police spies, trials
without jury and imprisonment without trial. Bonaparte’s brief experience as a
Jacobin leader in Ajaccio had taught him how to recognise, and deal with,
potential opponents.[138]
“The judiciary had stood apart from the kings of the ancien
régime: while the King was nominally the supreme Judge, the training
of lawyers and judges had been a matter for the Parlements, with their inherent
privileges and mechanisms. The Parlements decided whether the King’s laws were
acceptable within the fundamental laws of France. Under the Consulate, there
were no such constraints on the legislator. The judges were his appointees, and
held office entirely at his pleasure; the courts disposed of those who opposed
or questioned the government, far more rapidly that had been possible in the
reign of Louis XVI. Imprisonment and deportation became regularly used
instruments of control under Bonaparte.
“Kings of France were fathers to their people and had a sense of duty
and service. Bonaparte, too, believed that he was essential to the good and
glory of France, but was able to make his own decisions about what constituted
the good of France in a way which was not open to the king. Finally, while the
monarchy of France was hereditary and permanent, and the position of First
Consul was supposed to be held for ten years, Bonaparte’s strength was
demonstrated when he changed his own constitution, first to give him the role
for life and then to become a hereditary monarch. All in all, no monarch of the
ancien régime had anything approaching the power which Bonaparte
had been permitted to take for himself…
“When a Royalist bomb plot was uncovered in December, 1800, Bonaparte
seized the opportunity to blame it on the Jacobins, and many were guillotined,
with over a hundred more being exiled or imprisoned. The regime of the Terror
had operated in similar ways to remove large numbers of potential or actual
opponents. Press censorship and the use of police spies ensured that
anti-government opinions were not publicly aired. The Declaration of the Rights
of Man had guaranteed freedom of expression; but this freedom had already been
eroded before Bonaparte’s coup. The Terror had seen both moral and political
censorship, and the Directory had on several occasions exercised its
constitutional right to censor the press. Bonaparte appears merely to have been
more efficient…
“Bonaparte certainly held power without consulting the French people; he
took away many of the freedoms they had been guaranteed in 1789; he taxed them
more heavily than they had been taxed before. [In 1803 he wrote:] ‘I haven’t
been able to understand yet what good there is in an opposition. Whatever it
may say, its only result is to diminish the prestige of authority in the eyes
of the people’.”[139]
In 1804, he even declared himself emperor with the name Napoleon, after
which Beethoven tore out the title-page of his Eroica symphony,
which had been dedicated to him, and said: “So he too is nothing but a man. Now
he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own
ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant…”[140] As
Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Absolute government found huge scope for its
rebirth [in] that man who was to be both the consummator and the nemesis of the
Revolution.”[141]
So Napoleon was undoubtedly a despot, but a despot who could claim many
precedents for his despotism in the behaviour of the Jacobins and Directory.
And if he was not faithful to the forms of the revolution in its early phase,
replacing democracy (of a despotic kind) with monarchy (of a populist kind), he
nevertheless remained faithful to its spirit.
And what was that spirit? On the one hand, the principle that nobody and
nothing should be independent of the State – in other words, the principle of
totalitarianism. And on the other, the principle that the Nation was the
supreme value, and serving and dying for the Nation the supreme glory.
And yet “at bottom,” as Johnson notes, “Bonaparte despised the French,
or perhaps it would be more exact to say the Parisians, the heart of the
‘political nation’. He thought of them, on the basis of his experience during
the various phases of the Revolution, as essentially frivolous.”[142] The
truth is, therefore, that it was neither the State nor the Nation that
Bonaparte exalted above all, – although he greatly increased the worship of
both State and Nation in subsequent European history, – but himself.
So the spirit that truly reigned in the Napoleonic era can most
accurately be described as the spirit of the man-god, of the Antichrist,
of whom Bonaparte himself, as the Russian Holy Synod quite rightly said, was
the incarnation and forerunner. This antichristian quality is most clearly
captured in Madame De Staël’s characterization: “I had the disturbing
feeling that no emotion of the heart could ever reach him. He regards a human
being like a fact or a thing, never as an equal person like himself. He neither
hates nor loves… The force of his will resides in the imperturbable
calculations of his egotism. He is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be
the rest of humanity… Neither pity nor attraction, nor religion nor attachment
would ever divert him from his ends… I felt in his soul cold steel, I felt in
his mind a deep irony against which nothing great or good, even his own
destiny, was proof; for he despised the nation which he intended to govern, and
no spark of enthusiasm was mingled with his desire to astound the human race.”[143]
Napoleon
and Catholicism
The Revolution had already swept away all the complex structures of
feudalism, thereby preparing the way for the totalitarian state. But Napoleon
went further. Thus in addition to the measures discussed above, he abolished
trade unions, introduced a standardised system of weights and measures, and a
standardised system of education and legislation, the famous Code
Napoléon. Everything, from religion and charity to economics and the
government of friendly sister-republics, such as Holland, had to be controlled
from the centre. And the centre was Napoleon.
Napoleon’s attitude towards religion was on the one hand respectful and
on the other hand manipulative and utilitarian. His respectfulness is revealed
in the following remark: “There are only two forces in the world: the sword and
the spirit; by spirit I mean the civil and religious institutions; in the long
run the sword is always defeated by the spirit.”[144] On the
other hand, his essentially unbelieving, utilitarian attitude is revealed in
the following: “I see in religion not the mystery of the Incarnation but the
mystery of order in society”.[145] “What
is it that makes the poor man take it for granted that ten chimneys smoke in my
palace while he dies of cold – that I have ten changes of raiment in my
wardrobe while he is naked – that on my table at each meal there is enough to
sustain a family for a week? It is
religion, which says to him that in another life I shall be his equal, indeed
that he has a better chance of being happy there than I have.”[146]
In other words, religion was powerful, and as such had to be respected.
But it was powerful not because it was true, but because it was a – perhaps the
– major means of establishing order in society. More particularly, it was the
major means of establishing obedience to his rule – which is why he
issued an Imperial Catechism whose purpose was to “bind by religious sanctions
the conscience of the people to the august person of the Emperor”[147]:
A: Because God… has made him the
agent of His power on earth. Thus it is that to honour and serve our Emperor is
to honour and serve God Himself.[148]
Napoleon, writes Doyle, “never made the mistake of underestimating
either the power of religion or the resilience of the Church. Under orders in
the spring of 1796 to march on Rome to avenge the murder by a Roman mob of a
French envoy, he was confronted by a Spanish emissary from the pontiff. ’I told
him [the Spaniard reported], if you people take it into your heads to make the
pope say the slightest thing against dogma or anything touching on it, you are
deceiving yourselves, for he will never do it. You might, in revenge, sack,
burn and destroy Rome, St. Peter’s etc. but religion will remain standing in
spite of your attacks. If all you wish is that the pope urge peace in general,
and obedience to legitimate power, he will willingly do it. He appeared to me
captivated by this reasoning…’ Certainly he continued while in Italy to treat
the Pope with more restraint than the Directory had ordered: and when, early
the next year, the Cispadane Republic was established in territories largely
taken from the Holy See, he advised its founders that: ‘Everything is to be
done by degrees and with gentleness. Religion is to be treated like property.’
Devoid of any personal faith, in Egypt he even made parade of following Islam
in the conviction that it would strengthen French rule. By the time he returned
to Europe, it was clear that Pope Pius VI would not after all be the last…
“This approach bore one important fruit: in his Christmas sermon for
1797 the new Pope, Pius VII, declared that Christianity was not incompatible
with democracy – a very major concession to the revolution that later Popes
would take back.
“On his second entry into Milan, in June 1800, he convoked the city’s
clergy to the great cathedral, and declared, even before Marengo was fought:
‘It is my firm intention that the Christian, Catholic and Roman religion shall
be preserved in its entirety, that it shall be publicly performed… No society
can exist without morality; there is no good morality without religion. It is
religion alone, therefore, that gives to the State a firm and durable support…’”[149]
Religious toleration was both in accordance with the ideals of democracy
and politically expedient. Thus to the same clergy convocation he said: “The
people is sovereign; if it wants religion, respect its will.” And to his own
Council of State he said: “My policy is to govern men as the majority wish.
That, I believe, is the way to recognize the sovereignty of the people. It was…
by turning Muslim that I gained a hold in Egypt, by turning ultramontane that I
won over people in Italy. If I were governing Jews, I should rebuild Solomon’s
temple.”[150].
It is in this astonishingly cynical attitude to religion that Napoleon
reveals his modernity. It is what made him perhaps the closest forerunner to
the Antichrist that had yet appeared on the stage of world history, and closer
even, in some ways, than Lenin or Stalin. For the Antichrist will not – at
first – persecute religion; he will rather try to be the champion of all
religions – in order to subdue them all to his will. He will very likely
be an ecumenist as Napoleon was. And he will rebuild Solomon’s temple…
Napoleon’s first task in the religious sphere was to heal the breach
between the Constitutional Church, which had accepted the revolution, and the
non-jurors, who had rejected it. Only the non-jurors were recognised by the
Pope, so an agreement had to be reached with Rome. Finally, on July 15, 1801, a
Concordat was signed.
“This document,” writes Cronin, “opens with a preamble describing Roman
Catholicism as ‘the religion of the great majority of the French people’ and
the religion professed by the consuls. Worship was to be free and public. The
Pope, in agreement with the Government, was to re-map dioceses in such a way as
to reduce their number by more than half to sixty. The holders of bishoprics
were to resign and if they declined to do so, were to be replaced by the Pope.
The First Consul was to appoint new bishops; the Pope was to invest them. The
Government was to place at the disposal of bishops all the un-nationalized
churches necessary for worship, and to pay bishops and curés a suitable
salary.
“The Concordat was an up-to-date version of the old Concordat, which had
regulated the Church in France for almost 300 years. But it was less Gallican,
that is, it gave the French hierarchy less autonomy. Napoleon conceded to the
Pope not only the power of investing bishops, which he had always enjoyed, but
the right, in certain circumstances, to depose them, which was something new.
Napoleon did this in order to be able to effect a clean sweep of bishops.
“Napoleon did not discuss the Concordat beforehand with his Council of
State. When he did show it to them they criticized it as insufficiently
Gallican. The assemblies, they predicted, would never make it law unless
certain riders were added. Finally seventy ‘organic articles’ were drawn up and
added to the Concordat. For example, all bulls from Rome were to be subject to
the Government’s placet, one of which asserted that the Pope must abide
by the decisions of an ecumenical council…”[151]
In April, 1802, Napoleon reopened the churches in France, which proved
to be one of his most popular measures, and it enabled him to enlist the Church
in support of his government – as did, of course, his coronation by the Pope.
Moreover, notes Johnson, “by making peace with the Church, he prepared the way
for a reconciliation with the old landowners and aristocrats who had been
driven into exile by the Revolution, and whom he wanted back to provide further
legitimacy to his regime.”[152]
“But even while seeking the Church’s support,” writes Cronin, “Napoleon
kept firmly to the principle that the temporal and spiritual are two separate
realms, and had to be kept separate in France. He might easily have used his
growing authority to subordinate the Church to the State, but although he was
occasionally tempted to do so, he quickly drew back… Equally, Napoleon
refrained from subordinating the State to the Church. When bishops urged him to
shut all shops and cabarets on Sundays so that the faithful should not be
enticed from Mass, Napoleon replied: ‘The curé’s power resides in
exhortations from the pulpit and in the confessional; police spies and prisons
are bad ways of trying to restore religious practices.’”[153]
However, while Napoleon wanted the Church to flourish, he was too
fundamentally irreligious to allow it to escape the general control of the
State. This was made abundantly clear at his coronation in 1804, when instead
of allowing the Pope to crown him, he took the crown from his hands and crowned
himself! “For the pope’s purposes,” he said to Cardinal Fesch, “I am
Charlemagne… I therefore expect the pope to accommodate his conduct to my
requirements. If he behaves well I shall make no outward changes; if not, I
shall reduce him to the status of bishop of Rome…”[154] Not
for nothing did Napoleon say: “If I were not me, I would like to be Gregory VII.” [155] Gregory
had secularised the papacy by making it into a secular kingdom. Napoleon had
done the same from the opposite direction…
Again, he appointed a Minister of Religions to solve the day-to-day
problems of the Church, and fixed the salary of curés at 500 francs.
Then, in 1809, he occupied Rome and the Papal States and removed Pius from his
position as ruler in exchange for a handsome salary. “Our Lord Jesus Christ,”
he said, “although a descendant of David, did not want an earthly kingdom…”
Pius then excommunicated Napoleon for his “blasphemy” and refused to invest his
nominees to vacant bishoprics. Napoleon had still not tamed the rebellious
priest by the time of his downfall…[156]
Monsieur Emery, the director of Saint-Sulpice, defended the Pope,
reminding Napoleon “that God had given the Pope spiritual power over all
Christians. ‘But not temporal power,’ objected Napoleon. ‘Charlemagne gave him
that, and I, as Charlemagne’s successor, intended to relieve him of it. What do
you think of that, Monsieur Emery?’ ‘Sire, exactly what Bossuet thought. In his
Declaration du clergé de France he says that he congratulates not
only the Roman Church but the Universal Church on the Pope’s temporal
sovereignty because, being independent, he can more easily exercise his
functions as father of all the faithful.’ Napoleon replied that what was true
for Bossuet’s day did not apply in 1811, when western Europe was ruled by one
man, not disputed by several”.[157]
Thus in France, as in England, the established Church survived the
Revolution. The restoration of the one-man-rule went hand-in-hand with the
restoration of the Church, if not to a position of independence, still less
“symphony” with the State, at any rate of greater influence. In the longer
term, however, the Catholic Church’s authority and influence continued to
decline…
With regard to the Nation, Napoleon managed to persuade his
fellow-countrymen that everything he did was for the glory and honour of
France, and that nothing was more important than the glory and honour of
France. And so while his despotism angered some Frenchmen, the tickling of
their pride was ample compensation, and enabled them reconcile themselves with
the loss of their freedom. “As Frenchmen accorded more and more weight to
Napoleon’s wishes, so the notion of honour came to the fore in the French
Republic: honour and its sister concept, glory, patriotism à outrance
and the chivalry that had made Napoleon crown Josephine…”[158]
If the nation was the new Church, and Napoleon its new Christ, the
revolution itself was the Holy Spirit. It blew where it wished, overthrowing
kings, liberating subject peoples and making them into “real” nations. This
liberation of nations was conceived as being a democratic, egalitarian process;
it by no means implied the superiority of any one nation over the others, which
would simply be a repetition, on the collective level, of the despotism that
the revolution had come to destroy. The religion of the French revolution was a
universalist religion based on equal rights for all men and all nations. It was
believed that once the kings had been removed, the general will of each nation
would reveal itself, spreading peace and harmony not only within, but also
between, nations. Thus “sooner or later,” said Mirabeau to the National
Assembly, “the influence of a nation that… has reduced the art of living to the
simple notions of liberty and equality – notions endowed with irresistible
charm for the human heart, and propagated in all the countries of the world –
the influence of such a nation will undoubtedly conquer the whole of Europe for
Truth, Moderation and Justice, not immediately perhaps, not in a single day…”[159]
But it was not long before such noble sentiments were being transformed
into a purely pagan pride. “’You are, among the nations, what Hercules was
amongst the heroes,’ Robespierre assured his countrymen. ‘Nature has made you
sturdy and powerful; your strength matches your virtue and your cause is that
of the gods.’ France was unique in her destiny, she was La Grande Nation,
and all interests were necessarily subordinate to hers. Her service was the highest
calling, since it naturally benefited mankind.”[160]
Soon it became evident to other nations, whether those bordering France
or her overseas colonies, that the French believed not so much in the Nation
(i.e. any and every nation) as the Nation (one particular nation, the
only truly Great Nation) – which could only be France. Thus in 1802
Napoleon himself said: “Never will the French Nation give chains to men whom it
has once recognized as free.”[161] And
yet in the very same year, when the former French colony of Haiti became the
first country to declare its freedom in the wake of the revolution, Napoleon
tried to reintroduce slavery there, and his troops were defeated by black
soldiers singing the Marseillaise...[162]
And that was only the beginning. In the next thirteen years Napoleon
created a swathe of suffering and destruction throughout Europe from Lisbon to
Moscow that had not been seen since the invasions of the Huns and the Goths. In
retrospect, the seemingly irrational and chaotic system of old Europe, whereby
kings could buy and sell territories to which they were quite unrelated by
birth or upbringing, turned out to have kept the peace far better than the
system of more clearly defined, homogeneous nation-states that emerged as a
result of the Napoleonic wars. This is not to say, of course, that there were
no wars under the old system. But they tended to be short in duration, with
relatively few casualties, which were mainly confined to the warrior class, and
they were very quickly patched up by some redistribution of territories among
the monarchs. By contrast, the revolutionary wars that began after 1792 were
more like the religious wars of pre-1648 vintage: much bloodier and crueller,
involving far greater casualties among the civilian populations.[163]
Moreover, they never came to a real end, since the losers felt bound to recover
the territories lost and avenge the wounds inflicted on their national or
regional pride. After all, if the people, and not the king, was now sovereign,
victory in war had to be won over the people (or rather, the “enemies” of “the
people”) as well as the king. Thus as Napoleon exported the ideals of Freedom,
Equality and Fraternity into neighbouring countries, their freedom was
destroyed, their equality with their “brothers” who had “liberated” them was
jettisoned, and the dream of universal brotherhood became the nightmare of
universal war. For “abroad, liberty simply meant French rule.”[164]
How did the internationalist dream turn into a nationalist nightmare?
The problem was partly a conceptual one: it turned out to be notoriously
difficult to define what “the nation” was, by what criteria it should be
defined (territory? religion? blood? language?). Revolutionary definitions of
who was a “patriot” – that is, the true member of the nation - invariably meant
defining large sections of the population who did not accept this definition or
did not come under it as being “aliens” or “traitors” or “enemies of the
people”.
But the problem went deeper: even when a certain degree of unanimity had
been achieved in the definition of the nation, - as Napoleon achieved it for
France, for example, in the period 1800-1813, - there were now no accepted
limits on the national will, no authority higher than the nation itself. This
inevitably resulted in nationalism in the evil sense of the word that has
become so tragically familiar to us in twentieth-century fascism – not a
natural pride in one’s own nation and its achievements, but the exaltation of
the nation to the level of divinity, and of faith in the nation to the level of
the true faith, the defence of which justified any and every sacrifice of self
and others. If in “Dark Age” (i.e. Orthodox) and Medieval (i.e. Catholic)
Europe, men had seen in the Church a higher, supranational authority which
arranged “Truces of God” and served, at least in principle, as a higher court
of appeal to which kings and nations submitted, this was now finally swept away
by article three of the Rights of Man, which pitted the “general wills” of an
ever-increasing number of sovereign nations against each other in apparently
endless and irreconcilable hostility.
Unless, that is, they all recognized France, the revolutionary nation par
excellence, as their true nation. And there were some who did this; Thomas
Jefferson, for example, American ambassador to Paris, said: “Every man has two
countries – his own, and France.” Others, while not recognizing France as their
own nation, nevertheless welcomed the conquering French armies into their own
land Thus as late as 1806 the German philosopher Hegel called Napoleon “that
world spirit” and hoped that he would defeat his opponents: “Everyone prays for
the success of the French army”. Such a substitution of loyalty to the
messianic revolutionary nation of the time rather than one’s own was to
manifest itself again in the twentieth century, when millions of people around
the world betrayed their own country for the sake of the greater glory of the
Soviet Union…
However, as captivation turned to captivity, pious internationalism (or
French messianism) turned into violent xenophobia, and enthusiasm into
disillusion. Among the nations that had been “forced to be free” by the French,
only the Poles (conveniently protected by Germany from French invasion, and
needing French support against Russia) remained faithful to the Napoleonic
vision.
Doyle writes: “An exuberant, uncompromising nationalism lay behind
France’s revolutionary expansion in the 1790s: but when the French found, after
this first impact of a nation in arms on its neighbours, was that the
neighbours responded in kind. They found that the doctrine of the sovereignty
of the nation, proclaimed by them at the outset of the Revolution in 1789,
could be turned against them by other peoples claiming their own national
sovereignty. In states long united by custom and language, such as the Dutch
Republic, all the French example did was to reinforce patriotic sentiments
already strong. In areas never before united, like Italy, it created a powerful
national sentiment for the first time by showing that archaic barriers and
divisions could be swept away. The first Italian nationalists placed their
hopes in French power to secure their ends, but from the start their attitude
was double-edged. ‘Italy,’ declared the winning entry for an essay competition
on the best form of Italian government, sponsored by the new French regime in
Milan in 1796, ‘has almost always been the patrimony of foreigners who, under
the pretext of protecting us, have consistently violated our rights, and, while
giving us flags and fine-sounding names, have made themselves masters of our
estate. France, Germany and Spain have held lordship over us in turn… it is
therefore best to provide… the sort of government capable of opposing the
maximum of resistance to invasion.’ The tragedy for nationalistic Italian
Jacobins was that, when popular revulsion against the French invaders swept the
peninsula in 1798 and 1799, they found themselves identified with the hated
foreigners. Elsewhere, peoples and intellectual nationalists found themselves
more at one; and not the least of the reasons why France’s most inveterate
enemies were able to resist her successfully was the strength of volunteering.
An Austrian call for volunteers against the French produced 150,000 men in
1809. Three years later the Russians were able to supplement their normal armed
forces with over 420,000 more or less willing recruits to drive out the alien
invader. Only nationalism could successfully fight nationalism: and when it
did, as Clausewitz… saw, it would be a fight to the death.”[165]
Again, as Hobsbawm notes, the Anglo-French conflict had “a persistence
and stubbornness unlike any other. Neither side was really – a rare thing in
those days, though a common one today – prepared to settle for less than total
victory”.[166]
The main legacy of the revolution, therefore, was total war. War between
classes, war between nations, war between religions. Such was the “fraternity” the revolution of
the revolution…
The
Jews and the Revolution
Of all the nationalisms stirred up by the
revolution, the most important was that of the Jews. In fact, it was the French
revolution that gave the Jews the opportunity to burst through into the
forefront of world politics for the first time since the fall of Jerusalem in
70 A.D. There were 39,000 of them in France in 1789; most (half according to
one estimate, nine-tenths according to another[167])
were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim living in Alsace and Lorraine, which France
had acquired under the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
“It is important,” writes Nesta Webster,
“to distinguish between these two races of Jews [the Ashkenazi and the
Sephardim] in discussing the question of Jewish emancipation at the time of the
Revolution. For whilst the Sephardim had shown themselves good citizens and
were therefore subject to no persecutions, the Ashkenazim by their extortionate
usury and oppressions had made themselves detested by the people, so that
rigorous laws were enforced to restrain their rapacity. The discussions that
raged in the National Assembly on the subject of the Jewish question related
therefore mainly to the Jews of Alsace.”[168]
The eighteenth century had already witnessed some important changes in
the relationship between the State and Jewry. In England, the Jews had achieved
emancipation de facto, if not de jure. This was helped by the
small number of Jews in Britain, and the non-ideological, approach of the
British government.
It was a different matter on the continent, where a more ideological
approach prevailed. In 1782 the Masonic Austrian Emperor Joseph II published
his Toleranzpatent, whose purpose was that “all Our subjects without
distinction of nationality and religion, once they have been admitted and
tolerated in our States, shall participate in common in public welfare,… shall
enjoy legal freedom, and encounter no obstacles to any honest way of gaining
their livelihood and of increasing general industriousness… Existing laws
pertaining to the Jewish nation… are not always compatible with these Our most
gracious intentions.” Most restrictions on the Jews were removed, but these new
freedoms applied only to the “privileged Jew” – that is, the Jew whom the State
found “useful” in some way – and not to the “foreign Jew”. Moreover, even
privileged Jews were not granted the right of full citizenship and craft
mastership.[169]
For Joseph wanted to grant tolerance to the Jews, but not full equality.
As for France, “already, in 1784, the Jews of Bordeaux had been accorded
further concessions by Louis XVI; in 1776 all Portuguese Jews had been given
religious liberty and the permission to inhabit all parts of the kingdom. The
decree of January 28, 1790, conferring on the Jews of Bordeaux the rights of
French citizens, put the finishing touch to this scheme of liberation. [The
Sephardic Jews of South-West France and papal Avignon, who were already more
assimilated than their Ashkenazi co-religionists in Alsace, were given full
citizenship in July, 1790.] But the
proposal to extend this privilege to the Jews of Alsace evoked a storm of
controversy in the Assembly and also violent insurrections amongst the Alsace
peasants.”[170]
In their first debate on the subject, on September 28, 1789, they made a
further important distinction between the nation and the individuals
constituting the nation. Thus Stanislas Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre argued that
“there cannot be a nation within a nation”, so “the Jews should be denied
everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.”[171] A
separate nation of the Jews could not be allowed to exist within France.
For “virtually all – moderates no less than radicals, Dantonists no less than
Robespierrists, Christians as well as deists, pantheists, and atheists – held
that equality of status in the state they were in their various ways intent on
establishing was bound up of necessity with the elimination of all groups,
classes, or corporations intermediate (and therefore mediating) between the
state itself and the citizen.”[172]
Vital writes: “The immediate issue before the Assembly was the admission
of certain semi-pariah classes – among them actors and public executioners – to
what came to be termed ‘active citizenship’. It was soon apparent, however,
that the issues presented by the Jews were very different. It was apparent,
too, that it would make no better sense to examine the Jews’ case in tandem
with that of the Protestants. The latter, like the Jews, were non-Catholics,
but their national identity was not in doubt, nor, therefore, their
right to the new liberties being decreed for all. Whatever else they were, they
were Frenchmen. No one in the National Assembly thought otherwise. But were the
Jews Frenchmen? If they were not, could they become citizens? The contention of
the lead speaker in the debate, Count Stanislaw de Clermont-Tonnerre, was that
the argument for granting them full rights of citizenship needed to be founded
on the most general principles. Religion was a private affair. The law of the
state need not and ought not to impinge upon it. So long as religious
obligations were compatible with the law of the state and contravened it in no
particular it was wrong to deprive a person, whose conscience required him to
assume such religious obligations, of those rights which it was the duty of all
citizens qua citizens to assume. One either imposed a national religion
by main force, so erasing the relevant clause of the Declaration of the Rights
of Man and the Citizen to which all now subscribed. Or else one allowed
everyone the freedom to profess the religious opinion of his choice. Mere tolerance
was unacceptable. ‘The system of tolerance, coupled.. to degrading
distinctions, is so vicious in itself, that he who is compelled to tolerate
remains as dissatisfied with the law as is he whom it has granted no more than
such a form of tolerance.’ There was no middle way. The enemies of the Jews
attacked them, and attacked him, Clermont-Tonnerre, on the grounds that they
were deficient morally. It was also held of the Jews that they were unsociable,
that their laws prescribed usury, that they were forbidden to mix with the
French by marriage or at table or join them in defence of the country or in any
other common enterprise. But these reproaches were either unjust or specious.
Usury was blameworthy beyond a doubt, but it was the laws of France that had
compelled the Jews to practise it. And so with most of the other charges. Once
the Jews had title to land and a country of their own the practice of usury
would cease. So would the unsociability that was held against them. So would
much of their religious eccentricity [ces travers religieux]. As for the
further argument, that they had judges and laws of their own, why so they did,
and on this matter he, Clermont-Tonnerre, would say to his critics (coming to
the passage in his address to the Assembly that would be quoted over and over
again in the course of the two centuries that followed), that that indeed was
impermissible.
“’As a nation the Jews must be denied everything, as individuals they
must be granted everything; their judges can no longer be recognized; their
recourse must be to our own exclusively; legal protection for the doubtful laws
by which Jewish corporate existence is maintained must end; they cannot be
allowed to create a political body or a separate order within the state; it is
necessary that they be citizens individually.’
“There remained the question, what if, as some argued, it was the case
that the Jews themselves had no interest in citizenship? Why in that case, he
went on, ‘if they do not want it, let them say so, in which case expel them [s’ils
veulent ne l’être pas, qu’ils le disent, et alors, qu’on les bannisse]’.
The idea of a society of non-citizens within the state and a nation within a
nation was repugnant to him. But in fact, the speaker concluded, that was not
at all what the Jews wanted. The evidence was to the contrary. They wished to
be incorporated into the nation of France.
“Clermont-Tonnerre was promptly contradicted on this last, vital point
by the abbé Maury. The term ‘Jew’, said the abbé did not denote a
religious sect, but a nation, one which had laws which it had always followed
and by which it wished to continue to abide. ‘To proclaim the Jews citizens would
be as if to say that, without letters of naturalization and without ceasing to
be English or Danish, Englishmen and Danes could become Frenchmen.’ But Maury’s
chief argument was of a moral and social order. The Jews were inherently
undesirable, socially as well as economically. They had been chased out of
France, and then recalled, no less than seven times – chased out by avarice, as
Voltaire had rightly put it, readmitted by avarice once more, but in
foolishness as well.
“’The Jews have passed seventeen centuries without mingling with the
other nations. They have never engaged in anything but trade in money; they
have been the plague of the agricultural provinces; not one of them has ever
dignified [su ennoblir] his hands by driving a plough. Their laws leave
them no time for agriculture; the Sabbath apart, they celebrate fifty-six more
festivals than the Christians in each year. In Poland they possess an entire
province. Well, then! While the sweat of Christian slaves waters the furrows in
which the Jews’ opulence germinates they themselves, as their fields are
cultivated, engage in weighing their ducats and calculating how much they can
shave off the coinage without exposing themselves to legal penalties.’
“They have never been labourers,
Maury continued, not even under David and Solomon. And even then they were
notorious for their laziness. Their sole concern was commerce. Would you make
soldiers of them, the abbé asked. If you did, you would derive small
benefit from them: they have a horror of celibacy and they marry young. He knew
of no general who would wish to command an army of Jews either on the Sabbath –
a day on which they never gave battle – or indeed at any other time. Or did the
Assembly imagine that they could make craftsmen of them when their many
festivals and sabbath days presented an insurmountable obstacle to such an
enterprise. The Jews held 12 million mortgages in Alsace alone, he informed his
colleagues. Within a month of their being granted citizenship they would own
half the province outright. In ten years’ time they would have ‘conquered’ all
of it, reducing it to nothing more than a Jewish colony – upon which the hatred
the people of Alsace already bore for the Jews would explode.[173]
“It was not that he, Maury, wished the Jews to be persecuted. ‘They are
men, they are our brothers; anathema on whoever speaks of intolerance!’ Nor
need their religious opinions disturb anyone [!!!]. He joined all others in
agreeing that they were to be protected. But that did not mean that they could
be citizens. It was as individuals that they were entitled to protection, not
as Frenchmen.
“Robespierre took the opposite line, supporting Clermont-Tonnerre. All who fulfilled the generally applicable conditions of eligibility to citizenship were entitled to the rights that derived from it, he argued, including the right to hold public office. And so far as the facts were concerned, much of what Maury had said about the Jews was ‘infinitely exaggerated’ and contrary to known history. Moreover, to charge the Jews themselves with responsibility for their own persecution at the hands of others, was absurd.
“’Vices are imputed to them… But to whom should these vices be imputed
if not to ourselves for our injustice?… Let us restore them to happiness, to
country [patrie], and to virtue by restoring them to the dignity of men
and citizens; let us reflect that it can never be politic, whatever anyone
might say, to condemn a multitude of men who live among us to degradation and
oppression.’”[174]
Thus spoke the man who was soon to lead the most degrading and
oppressive régime in European history to that date. Indeed, it is
striking how those who spoke most fervently for the Jews – apart from leaders
of the Jewish community such as the banker Cerfbeer and Isaac Beer – were
Freemasons or Illuminati.
Thus in the two years before the crucial debate on September 27, 1791,
writes General Nechvolodov, “fourteen attempts were made to give the Jews civic
equality and thirty-five major speeches were given by several orators, among
them Mirabeau, Robespierre, Abbé Grégoire, Abbé
Sièyes, Camille, Desmoulins, Vernier, Barnave, Lameth, Duport and
others.
“’Now there is a singular comparison to be made,’ says Abbé
Lemann, ‘- all the names which we have just cited and which figure in the Moniteur
as having voted for the Jews are also found on the list of Masons… Is this
coincidence not proof of the order given, in the lodges of Paris, to work in
favour of Jewish emancipation?’
“And yet, in spite of the revolutionary spirit, the National Assembly
was very little inclined to give equality of civil rights to the Jews. Against
this reform there rose up all the deputies from Alsace, since it was in Alsace
that the majority of the French Jews of that time lived….
“But this opposition in the National Assembly did not stop the Jews. To
attain their end, they employed absolutely every means.
“According to Abbé Lemann, these means were the following:
“First means: entreaty. A charm exercised over several presidents of the
Assembly. Second: the influence of gold. Third means: logic. After the National
Assembly had declared the ‘rights of man’, the Jews insisted that these rights
should logically be applied to them, and they set out their ideas on this
subject with an ‘implacable arrogance’.
“Fourth means: recourse to the suburbs and the Paris Commune, so as to
force the National Assembly under ‘threat of violence’ to give the Jews
equality.
“’One of their most thorough historians (Graetz),’ says Abbé
Lemann, ‘did not feel that he had to hide this manoeuvre. Exhausted, he says,
by the thousand useless efforts they had made to obtain civil rights, they
thought up a last means. Seeing that it was impossible to obtain by reason and
common sense what they called their rights, they resolved to force the National
Assembly to approve of their emancipation.
“’To this end, naturally, were expended vast sums, which served to
establish the ‘Christian Front’ which they wanted.
“’In the session of the National Assembly of January 18, 1791, the Duke de Broglie expressed himself completely openly on this subject: ‘Among them,’ he said, ‘there is one in particular who has acquired an immense fortune at the expense of the State, and who is spending in the town of Paris considerable sums to win supporters of his cause.’ He meant Cerfbeer.
“At the head of the Christian Front created on this occasion were the
lawyer Godard and three ecclesiastics: the Abbés Mulot, Bertoliot and
Fauchet.
“Abbé Fauchet was a well-known illuminatus, and
Abbé Mulot – the president of the all-powerful Paris Commune, with the
help of which the Jacobins exerted, at the time desired, the necessary pressure
on the National and Legislative Assemblies, and later on the Convention.
“What Gregory, curé of Embermeuil, was for the Jews in the heart
of the National Assembly, Abbé Mulot was in the heart of the Commune.
“However, although they were fanatical Jacobins, the members of the
Commune were far from agreeing to the propositions of their president that they
act in defence of Jewish rights in the National Assembly. It was necessary to
return constantly to the attack, naturally with the powerful help of Cerfbeer’s
gold and that of the Abbés Fauchet and Bertoliot. This latter declared
during a session of the Commune on this question: ‘It was necessary that such a
happy and unexpected event as the revolution should come and rejuvenate France…
Let us hasten to consign to oblivion the crimes of our fathers.’
“Then, during another session, the lawyer Godard bust into the chamber
with fifty armed ‘patriots’ dressed in costumes of the national guard with
three-coloured cockades. They were fifty Jews who, naturally provided with
money, had made the rounds of the sections of the Paris Commune and of the
wards of the town of Paris, talking about recruiting partisans of equality for
the Jews. This had its effect. Out of the sixty sections of Paris fifty-nine
declared themselves for equality (only the quartier des Halles abstained). Then
the Commune addressed the National Assembly with an appeal signed by the
Abbés Mulot, Bertoliot, Fauchet and other members, demanding that
equality be immediately given to the Jews.
“However, even after that, the National Assembly hesitated in declaring
itself in the manner provided. Then, on September 27, the day of the
penultimate session of the Assembly before its dissolution, the Jacobin deputy
Adrien Duport posed the question of equality for the Jews in a categorical
fashion. The Assembly knew Adrien Duport’s personality perfectly. It knew that
in a secret meeting of the chiefs of Freemasonry which preceded the revolution,
he had insisted on the necessity of resort to a system of terror. The Assembly
yielded. There followed a decree signed by Louis XVI granting French Jews full
and complete equality of rights…”[175]
The power of the Jewish minority was revealed especially during the
reign of terror under Robespierre. 2300 Catholic churches were converted into
“temples of Reason”. And at that point some voices were raised, writes
Tikhomirov, “demanding that the ban be spread onto the Jews also, and that
circumcision be forbidden. These demands were completely ignored, and were not
even put to the vote. In the local communes individual groups of especially
wild Jacobins, who had not been initiated into higher politics, sometimes broke
into synagogues, destroying the Torah and books, but it was only by 1794 that
the revolutionary-atheist logic finally forced even the bosses to pose the
question of the annihilation not only of Catholicism, but also of Jewry. At
this point, however, the Jews were delivered by 9 Thermidor, 1794. Robespierre
fell and was executed. The moderate elements triumphed. The question of the ban
of Jewry disappeared of itself, while the Constitution of Year III of the
Republic granted equal rights to the Jews.”[176]
But this was not the end of the matter. In the late 1790s a new wave of
Ashkenazis entered France from Germany, attracted by the superior status their
French brothers now enjoyed. This was to lead to further disturbances in
Alsace, which it was left to Napoleon to deal with…
“Nevertheless,” as Paul Johnson writes, “the deed was done. French Jews
were now free and the clock could never be turned back. Moreover, emancipation
in some form took place wherever the French were able to carry the
revolutionary spirit with their arms. The ghettos and Jewish closed quarters
were broken into in papal Avignon (1791), Nice (1792) and the Rhineland
(1792-3). The spread of the revolution to the Netherlands, and the founding of
the Batavian republic, led to Jews being granted full and formal rights by law
there (1796). In 1796-8 Napoleon Bonaparte liberated many of the Italian
ghettos, French troops, young Jews and local enthusiasts tearing down the
crumbling old walls.
“For the first time a new archetype, who had always existed in embryonic
form, began to emerge from the shadows: the revolutionary Jew. Clericalists in
Italy swore enmity to ‘Gauls, Jacobins and Jews’. In 1793-4 Jewish Jacobins set
up a revolutionary regime in Saint Esprit, the Jewish suburb of Bayonne. Once
again, as during the Reformation, traditionalists saw a sinister link between
the Torah and subversion.”[177]
However, the above picture of the Jewish struggle for emancipation in
Paris and, later, Bayonne should not obscure the fact that there was still very
strong opposition to the idea of emancipation from within Jewry itself led
especially by the rabbinic leaders of Ashkenazi Jewry in Poland.
Thus Zalkind Hourwitz was a Polish Jew who won a prize for an essay
advocating Jewish emancipation from the Royal Society for Arts and Sciences at
Metz in 1787. Nevertheless, as Vital writes, he “made no bones about his view of
the internal constraints to which Jews in all parts were subject through the
workings of the rabbinical-Talmudic system: of the limits it set upon their
worldly freedom, of the manner in which it effectively barred their entry into
society on a basis of equality. The social liberation of the Jews was
conditional, he believed, on the power that the rabbis and the parnassim
[chief synagogue officials] jointly exercised over ordinary people in their
daily lives being terminated – in great matters as in small. ‘Their rabbis and
syndics [i.e. parnassim] must be strictly forbidden to assume the least
authority over their fellows outside the synagogue, or refuse honours to those
who have shaved off their beards, or curled their hair, or who dress like
Christians, go to the theatre, or observe other customs that bear no actual
relation to their religion, but derive from superstition alone as a means of
distinguishing them from other peoples.’”[178]
In France, it had been the less typical, socially marginalized Jews who
had pressed for emancipation. Even the more acculturated Sephardic Jews of
Bourdeaux and Bayonne had been slow to ask for emancipation, first, because
they feared that they might have to pay for liberties which they already
enjoyed de facto, and secondly, because they wanted to be clearly
delineated from the Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace.
The latter, continues Vital, “had been slower still to ask for
liberation. There is no evidence of their authorized representatives pressing
for anything remotely of the kind before the Revolution; and when they made
their own first approach to the new National Assembly it was to ask for no more
than an end to the special taxes laid upon them and the abolition of the
residential, and travel restrictions to which they were subject. The greatest
anxiety of the Alsatians was to retain their own internal communal autonomy –
to which end, with only rare exceptions, they (at all events, their authorized
representatives) were prepared to forgo emancipation altogether. Only when they
learned that other branches of French Jewry, the small community in Paris among
them, were prepared to yield to the demand that they give up their ancient
corporate status did the Alsatians and Lorrainers fall, reluctantly, into
line.”[179]
The
question: to emancipate or not to emancipate? was to cause bitter divisions in
Jewry that have continued to the present day. It brought into sharp focus
another question: was it possible for the Jews, while remain Jewish,
ever to become an integral part of non-Jewish society? And if not, how were
they to live – as a separate nation with its own homeland and language as the
other Gentile nations, or in some other way?
The extreme revolutionary zeal of many of the champions of Jewish
emancipation, on the one hand, and the equally extreme bigotry and
ghetto-creating mentality of the opponents of emancipation, on the other,
suggested that there was no easy solution to this problem, even with the best
intentions of the Gentile rulers.
For, as Norman Stone points out, “Jewish emancipation was a double-edged
operation. It required a fundamental change in the conduct and the attitudes
both of the host societies and of the Jews themselves. It demanded the
dismantling not only of the constraints imposed on Jews from outside but also
of the ‘internal ghetto’ in Jewish minds. Modern concern with the roots of
anti-Semitism sometimes overlooks the severity of the Jews’ own laws of
segregation. Observant Jews could not hold to the 613 rules of dress, diet, hygience
and worship if they tried to live outside their own closed community; and
intermarriage was strictly forbidden. Since Judaic law taught that Jewishness
was biologically inherited in the maternal line, Jewish women were jealously
protected. A girl who dared to marry out could expect to be disowned by her
family, and ritually pronounced dead. Extreme determination was needed to
withstand such acute social pressures…”[180]
Napoleon
and the Jews
If the French revolution gave the Jews their first great political
victory, Napoleon gave them their second. On May 22, 1799, Napoleon’s Paris Moniteur
published the following report, penned from Constantinople on April 17:
“Buonaparte has published a proclamation in which he invites all the Jews of
Asia and Africa to come and place themselves under his flag in order to
re-establish ancient Jerusalem. He has already armed a great number and
their battalions are threatening Aleppo.”
This was not the first time that the Jews had persuaded a Gentile ruler
to restore them to Jerusalem. In the fourth century the Roman Emperor Julian
the Apostate allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and start rebuilding the
Temple. However, fire came out from the foundations and black crosses appeared
on the workers’ garments, forcing them to abandon the enterprise.[181]
And the Jews were to be thwarted again. For British sea-power prevented
Napoleon from reaching Jerusalem and making himself, as was reported to be his
intention, king of the Jews. The Jews would have to wait over a century before
another Gentile power – this time, the British – again offered them a return to
Zion.
Napoleon now learned what many rulers before and after had learned: that
kindness towards the Jews does not make them more tractable. Nechvolodov
writes: “Since the first years of the Empire, Napoleon I had become very
worried about the Jewish monopoly in France and the isolation in which they
lived in the midst of the other citizens, although they had received
citizenship. The reports of the departments showed the activity of the Jews in
a very bad light: ‘Everywhere there are false declarations to the civil
authorities; fathers declare the sons who are born to them to be daughters…
Again, there are Jews who have given an example of disobedience to the laws of
conscription; out of sixty-nine Jews who, in the course of six years, should
have formed part of the Moselle contingent, none has entered the army.’
“By contrast, behind the army, they give themselves up to frenzied
speculation.
“’Unfortunately,’ says Thiers describing the
entry of the French into Rome in his History of the Revolution, ‘the
excesses, not against persons but against property, marred the entry of the
French into the ancient capital of the world… Berthier had just left for Paris,
Massena had just succeeded him. This hero was accused of having given the first
example. He was soon imitated. They began to pillage the palaces, convents and
rich collections. Some Jews in the rear of the army bought for a paltry price the
magnificent objects which the looters were offering them.’
“It was in 1805, during Napoleon’s passage through Strasbourg, after the
victory of Austerlitz, that the complaints against the Jews assumed great
proportions. The principal accusations brought against them concerned the
terrible use they made of usury. As soon as he returned to Paris, Napoleon
judged it necessary to concentrate all his attention on the Jews. In the State
Council, during its session of April 30, he said, among other things, the
following on this subject:
“’The French government cannot look on with indifference as a vile,
degraded nation capable of every iniquity takes exclusive possession of two
beautiful departments of Alsace; one must consider the Jews as a nation and not
as a sect. It is a nation within a nation; I would deprive them, at least for a
certain time, of the right to take out mortgages, for it is too humiliating for
the French nation to find itself at the mercy of the vilest nation. Some entire
villages have been expropriated by the Jews; they have replaced feudalism… It
would be dangerous to let the keys of France, Strasbourg and Alsace, fall into
the hands of a population of spies who are not at all attached to the
country.’”[182]
Napoleon eventually decided on an extraordinary measure: to convene a
111-strong Assembly of Jewish Notables in order to receive clear and
unambiguous answers to the following questions: did the Jewish law permit mixed
marriages; did the Jews regard Frenchmen as foreigners or as brothers; did they
regard France as their native country, the laws of which they were bound to
obey; did the Judaic law draw any distinction between Jewish and Christian
debtors? At the same time, writes Johnson, Napoleon “supplemented this secular
body by convening a parallel meeting of rabbis and learned laymen, to advise
the Assembly on technical points of Torah and halakhah. The response of the
more traditional elements of Judaism was poor. They did not recognize
Napoleon’s right to invent such a tribunal, let alone summon it…”[183]
However, if some traditionalists did not welcome it, other Jews received
the news with unbounded joy. “According to Abbé Lemann,” writes
Nechvolodov, “they grovelled in front of him and were ready to recognize him as
the Messiah. The sessions of the Sanhedrin [composed of 46 rabbis and 25 laymen
from all parts of Western Europe] took place in February and March, 1807, and
the Decision of the Great Sanhedrin began with the words:
“’Blessed forever is the Lord, the God of Israel, Who has placed on the
throne of France and of the kingdom of Italy a prince according to His heart.
God has seen the humiliation of the descendants of ancient Jacob, and He has
chosen Napoleon the Great to be the instrument of His mercy… Reunited today
under his powerful protection in the good town of Paris, to the number of
seventy-one doctors of the law and notables of Israel, we constitute a Great
Sanhedrin, so as to find in us a means and power to create religious ordinances
in conformity with the principles of our holy laws, and which may serve as a
rule and example to all Israelites. These ordinances will teach the nations
that our dogmas are consistent with the civil laws under which we live, an do
not separate us at all from the society of men…’”[184]
“Love of country is in the heart of Jews a sentiment so natural, so
powerful, and so consonant with their religious opinions, that a French Jew
considers himself in England, as among strangers, although he may be among
Jews; and the case is the same with English Jews in France. To such a pitch is
this sentiment carried among them, that during the last war, French Jews were
fighting desperately against other Jews, the subject of countries then at war
with France.”[185]
“The Jewish delegates,” writes Platonov, “declared that state laws had
the same obligatory force for Jews, that every honourable study of Jewish
teaching was allowed, but usury was forbidden, etc. [However,] to the question
concerning mixed marriages of Jews and Christians they gave an evasive, if not
negative reply. ‘Although mixed marriages between Jews and Christians cannot be
clothed in a religious form, they nevertheless do not draw upon them any
anathema.”[186]
On the face of it, the Decision of the Sanhedrin was a great
triumph for Napoleon, who could now treat Jewry as just another religious
denomination, and not a separate nation.[187] And
indeed, as Douglas Reed says, “Orthodox Judaism, with the face of it turned
towards the West, denied any suggestion that the Jews would form a nation
within nations. Reform Judaism in time ‘eliminated every prayer expressing so
much as even the suspicion of a hope or desire for any form of Jewish national
resurrection’ (Rabbi Moses P. Jacobson).”[188]
However, the Jews did not restrain their money-lending and speculative
activities, as Napoleon had pleaded with them. On the contrary, only one year
after the convening of the Great Sanhedrin, Napoleon was forced to adopt
repressive measures against their financial excesses. Moreover, Napoleon
created rabbinic consistories in France having disciplinary powers over Jews
and granted rabbis the status of state officials – a measure that was
strengthen the powers of the rabbis over their people. In time Jewish
consistories were created all over Europe. They “began the stormy propaganda of
Judaism amidst Jews who had partially fallen away from the religion of their
ancestors, organised rabbinic schools and spiritual seminaries for the
education of youth in the spirit of Talmudic Judaism.”[189]
Moreover,
as Tikhomirov points out, “no laws could avert the international links of the
Jews. Sometimes they even appeared openly, as in Kol Ispoel Khaberim (Alliance
Israelite Universelle), although many legislatures forbid societies and
unions of their own citizens to have links with foreigners. The Jews gained a
position of exceptional privilege. For the first time in the history of the
diaspora they acquired greater rights than the local citizens of the countries
of the dispersion. One can understand that, whatever the further aims for the
resurrection of Israel might be, the countries of the new culture and statehood
became from that time a lever of support for Jewry.”[190]
Indeed, the main result of the Great Sanhedrin, writes Nechvolodov, “was
to unite Judaism still more. “’Let us not forget from where we draw our
origin,’ said Rabbi Salomon Lippmann Cerfbeer on July 26, 1808, in his speech
for the opening of the preparatory assembly of the Sanhedrin:- ‘Let it no
longer be a question of “German” or “Portuguese” Jews; although disseminated
over the surface of the globe, we everywhere form only one unique people.’”[191]
The emancipation of the Jews in France led to their emancipation in
other countries under French influence, as we have seen. Even after the fall of
Napoleon, on June 8, 1815, the Congress of Vienna decreed that “it was
incumbent on the members of the German Confederation to consider an
‘amelioration’ of the civil status of all those who ‘confessed the Jewish faith
in Germany.’”[192]
Gradually, though not without opposition, Jewish emancipation spread throughout
Europe.
Napoleon
and the Latin American Revolutions
Another kind of nationalism owed its origins to the impact of Napoleon,
not on whole societies, but directly on certain individuals, who then tried to
imitate Napoleon’s impact on society as a whole. Such individuals were
generally ambitious adventurers who managed by hook or by crook to impose
themselves on weakened government structures and then claim for themselves the
mandate of the people, as if their individual will represented the “general
will” of the people. Simple despotism, in other words, disguised as liberation
from despotism. Very often these “liberated” peoples had no idea that they had
been a distinct nation before, and would have been much happier without any
“liberator”. They were indeed “forced to be free”, in Rousseau’s phrase.
The most famous of the “liberators” was Simon Jose Antonio de la
Santissima Trinidad de Bolivar. Bolivar is a good example of the terrible
spiritual damage done to a whole generation of young men by the heroic image of
Napoleon. Just as Napoleon himself stood between the rationalism of the
Enlightenment and the passion of the Romantic age, uniting them in the image of
himself fighting for both the ideals of the Enlightenment and the death-defying
glory of the romantic hero, so did Bolivar and a host of similar adventurers in
Central and South America aspire to unite national “liberation” with personal
glory.
“Bolivar arrived in the French capital just in time for Napoleon’s
coronation as Emperor of the French, an event he watched with fascination. In
March 1805 ... he saw Napoleon crown himself king of Italy. ‘I centred my
attention on Napoleon and saw nothing but him out of that crowd of men,’ he
wrote. He travelled on to Rome under the spell of this vision and there, after
considering what he had seen, he ascended the Monte Sacro, where he fell on his
knees and swore an oath before Rodriguez to liberate South America.”[193]
Bolivar seized his chance after Napoleon
deposed King Ferdinand VII of Spain, which eventually unleashed a strong
nationalist backlash in Spain – but not before breaking the legal links between
Spain and its colonies in the Americas. Returning to Venezuela, Boliva
proceeded to win, lose and finally reconquer Caracas from the Spaniards in a
series of civil wars distinguished by appalling savagery on both sides.
Although the Venezuelan Republic had been proclaimed on a whites-only franchise
in 1811, thereby excluding all Indians and blacks from “the nation”, and
although Bolivar himself was a slave-owner and to all intents and purposes
Spanish, on reconquering Caracas in 1813 he immediately likened all royalist
Spaniards to wandering Jews, to be “cast out and persecuted”, and declared:
“Any Spaniard who does not work against tyranny in favour of the just cause, by
the most active and effective means, shall be considered an enemy and punished
as a traitor to the country and in consequence shall inevitably be shot.
Spaniards and Canarios, depend upon it, you will die, even if you are simply
neutral, unless you actively espouse the liberation of America.”[194]
Bolivar was as good as his word, and proceeded to slaughter the whole Spanish
population of Caracas – whereupon the people he had supposedly come to
liberate, the Indians and blacks, both free and slave, marched against him
under the slogan of “Long live Ferdinand VII”! After murdering a further 1200
Spaniards in retaliation, Bolivar then harangued the inhabitants of Caracas,
saying: “You may judge for yourselves, without partiality, whether I have not
sacrificed my life, my being, every minute of my time in order to make a nation
of you.”[195]
Like his idol Napoleon, and many Latin American strongmen since, Bolivar
did not like the people expressing its will in elections, which he called “the
greatest scourge of republics [which] produce only anarchy”. The liberator of
Mexico, Agustin de Iturbide, agreed, proclaiming himself Emperor in 1822. But
such unrepublican immodesty was nothing compared to Bolivar’s, who “hung in the
dining room of his villa outside Bogota a huge portrait of himself being
crowned by two genii, with the inscription: ‘Bolivar is the God of Colombia’.”[196]
Nor, in the end, did he have much time for the people he had liberated.
Shortly after the assassination of his right-hand man, General José
Antonio de Sucre, when he was in self-imposed exile in Europe, he admitted that
independence was the only benefit he had brought “at the cost of everything
else”, and declared: “America is ungovernable. He who serves the revolution ploughs the sea… This country will
inexorably fall into the hands of uncontrollable multitudes, thereafter to pass
under… tyrants of all colours and races. Those who have served the revolution have
ploughed the sea. The only thing to do in America is emigrate.”[197] And
again: “America can be ruled only by an able despotism.”[198]
Despotism also prevailed in another “liberated” country of the region,
Paraguay, where it became a “secular replacement” for the former “Jesuit
communist empire”.[199]
“After independence,” writes David Landes, “like other debris states of
the great Hispanic empire, Paraguay had fallen almost immediately under the
control of dictators. The laws said republic, but the practice was one-man rule
– a mix of benevolent despotism and populist tyranny. The first of these
dictators…, Dr. Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, was something special. A Jacobin
ideologue, and like many of the French variety, a lawyer by training, Francia
was committed to a republic of equals and him more equal than the rest. He was
he was the ‘organic leader’, the elitist embodying the popular will… Dr.
Francia and his successors, Lopez father and son, would turn the country into
an enlightened Sparta – egalitarian, literate, disciplined, and brave.”[200]
“It is generally accepted,” writes Zamoyski, “that the former Spanish
colonies never again achieved the wealth in which they had basked before 1810.
Some maintain that they were also better governed, more lawful and more
peaceful under Spanish rule than at any time since, and there is something to
be said for this view.
“Slavery was finally abolished in the former Spanish colonies in the
late 1850s, but economic slavery remained endemic throughout the region. The
manner in which independence and nationhood were forced upon these societies
gave rise to systemic instability. The various Liberators could not count on
devotion to a cause to animate their troops and supporters, as the cause was
imaginary. Nor could they mobilize one whole section of the population on
behalf of a specific interest for any length of time. And they certainly could
not depend on colleagues, who were bound, sooner or later, to contest their
authority. They therefore had to keep rearranging alliances and decapitating
any faction that grew too strong. In order to enlist the loyalty and sympathy
of the lower orders, they would make a point of drawing these into the army.
But as such recruits became professionals, they cut their links with the
classes they came from and grew into arrogant Praetorians who carried with them
an element of incipient mutiny.”[201]
There is a profound irony here. The cult of the nation introduced by
article three of the Rights of Man was meant to unite the peoples, not disunite
them. But in fact it divided and splintered the Americas, as it had divided and
splintered Europe.
Romanticism
and Nationalism
Reference has already been made to that broader movement, known as Romanticism,
which fed into the development of nationalism from the other side of the Rhine.
Romanticism was born as a reaction to the Enlightenment and, more generally, to
the whole classical concept of civilisation. If the English Enlightenment
dominated the cultural life of the early 18th century, and the French
Enlightenment - the later part of the century, then German Romanticism
dominated the intellectual and cultural life of the 19th century.
Hume had shown that the empirical, rationalist view of the world had,
paradoxically, no rational foundations, for it led to a denial of the objective
existence of God, the soul, morality and even of the external world. Kant
desperately attempted to rescue something from Hume’s withering criticism. But
ultimately he begat, not a rebirth of empiricism on rational foundations, but
the German philosophy of idealism, which turned everything on its head
by defining the world as spirit, the objective as the subjective.
Romanticism is the counterpart in art to idealism in philosophy. Jacques
Barzun attempts to define it thus: “In Romanticism thought and feeling are
fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error
or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a
reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be
reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on
which one must act; for one is embarked – engagé, as the 20C
Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair;
impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths,
which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more
complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never
fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as
great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the
people, whose own mind-and-heart provides the makings of high culture. The errors
of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life
itself being a heroic tragedy.”[202]
Sir Isaiah Berlin’s definition is also illuminating: “Since the Greeks,
and perhaps long before them, men have believed that to the central questions
about the nature and purpose of their lives, and of the world in which they
lived, true, objective, universal and eternal answers could be found. If the
answers could not be discovered by me, then perhaps by someone more expert or
wiser than I; if not in the circumstances in which I found myself, then in
others more propitious: in an innocent and happy past – a Garden of Eden from
which our ancestors had for their sins been expelled, or perhaps in a golden
age that still lay in the future, which posterity (perhaps after much labour
and suffering) would, or at any rate could, one day reach. It was assumed that
all the truly central problems were soluble in principle even if not in
practice. Somewhere true answers to all genuine questions must exist, if not in
the minds of men, then in the mind of an omniscient being – real or imaginary,
material or ideal, a personal deity, or the universe come to full consciousness
of itself.
“This presupposition, which underlies most classical and Christian thought,
orthodox and heretical, scientific and religious, was connected with the belief
that, whether men knew it or not, the whole of life on earth was in some sense
bound up with the search for answer to the great, tormenting questions of fact
and of conduct; of what there is, was, will be, can be; of what to do, what to
live by, what to seek, hope for, admire, fear, avoid; whether the end of life
was happiness or justice or virtue or self-fulfilment or grace and salvation.
Individuals, schools of thought, entire civilisations differed about what the
answers were, about the proper method of discovering them, about the nature and
place of moral or spiritual or scientific authority – that is to say, about how
to identify the experts who are qualified to discover and communicate the
answers. They argued about what constitutes such qualifications and justifies
such claims to authority. But there was no doubt that the truth lay somewhere;
that it could in principle be found. Conflicting beliefs were held about the
central questions: whether the truth was to be found in reason or in faith, in
the Church or the laboratory, in the insights of the uniquely privileged
individual – a prophet, a mystic, an alchemist, a metaphysician – or in the
collective consciousness of a body of men – the society of the faithful, the
traditions of a tribe, a race, a nation, a social class, an academy of experts,
an elite of uniquely endowed or trained beings – or, on the contrary, in the
mind or heart of any man, anywhere, at any time, provided that he remained
innocent and uncorrupted by false doctrines. What was common to all these views
– incompatible enough for wars of extermination to have been fought in their
name – was the assumption that there existed a reality, a structure of things,
a rerum natura, which the qualified enquirer could see, study and, in
principle, get right. Men were violently divided about the nature and identity
of the wise – those who understood the nature of things – but not about the
proposition that such wise men existed or could be conceived, and that they
would know that which would enable them to deduce correctly what men should
believe, how they should act, what they should live by and for.
“This was the great foundation of belief which romanticism attacked and
weakened. Whatever the differences between the leading romantic thinkers – the
early Schiller and the later Fichte, Schelling and Jacobi, Tieck and the
Schlegels when they were young, Chateaubriand and Byron, Coleridge and Carlyle,
Kierkegaard, Stirner, Nietzsche, Baudelaire – there runs through their writings
a common notion, held with varying degrees of consciousness and depth, that
truth is not an objective structure, independent of those who seek it, the
hidden treasure waiting to be found, but is itself in all its guises created by
the seeker. It is not to be brought into being necessarily by the finite
individual: according to some it is created by a greater power, a universal
spirit, personal or impersonal, in which the individual is an element, or of
which he is an aspect, an emanation, an imperfect reflection. But the common
assumption of the romantics that runs counter to the philosophia perennis
is that the answers to the great questions are not to be discovered so much as
to be invented. They are not something found, they are something literally
made. In its extreme Idealistic form it is a vision of the entire world. In its
more familiar form, it confines itself to the realm of values, ideals, rules of
conduct – aesthetic, religious, social, moral, political – a realm seen not as
a natural or supernatural order capable of being investigated, described and
explained by the appropriate method – rational examination or some more
mysterious procedure – but as something that man creates, as he creates works
of art; not by imitating, or even obtaining illumination from, pre-existent
models or truths, or by applying pre-existent truths or rules that are
objective, universal, eternal, unalterable but by an act of creation, the
introduction into the world of something literally novel – the activity,
natural or supernatural, human or in part divine, owing nothing to anything
outside it (in some versions because nothing can be conceived as being outside
it), self-subsistent, self-justified, self-fulfilling. Hence that new emphasis
on the subjective and ideal rather than the objective and the real, on the
process of creation rather than its effects, on motives rather than
consequences; and, as a necessary corollary of all this, on the quality of the
vision, the state of mind or soul of the acting agent – purity of heart,
innocence of intention, sincerity of purpose rather than getting the answer
right, that is, accurate correspondence to the ‘given’. Hence the emphasis on
activity, movement that cannot be reduced to static segments, the flow that
cannot be arrested, frozen, analysed without being thereby fatally distorted;
hence the constant protest against the reduction of ‘life’ to dead fragments,
of organism to ‘mere’ mechanical or uniform units; and the corresponding
tendency towards similes and metaphors drawn from ‘dynamic’ sciences – biology,
physiology, introspective psychology – and the worship of music, which, of all
the arts, appears to have the least relation to universally observable, uniform
natural order. Hence, too, the celebration of all forms of defiance directed
against the ‘given’ – the impersonal, the ‘brute fact’ in morals or in politics
– or against the static and the accepted, and the value placed on minorities
and martyrs as such, no matter what the ideal for which they suffered.
“This, too, is the source of the doctrine that work is sacred as such,
not because of its social function, but because it is the imposition of the
individual or collective personality, that is, activity, upon inert stuff. The
activity, the struggle is all, the victory nothing: in Fichte’s words, ‘Frei
sein ist nichts – frei werden ist der Himmel’ (‘To be free is nothing – to
become free is very heaven’). Failure is nobler than success. Self-immolation
for a cause is the thing, not the validity of the cause itself, for it is the
sacrifice undertaken for its sake that sanctifies the cause, not some intrinsic
property of it.
“These are the symptoms of the romantic attitude. Hence the worship of
the artist, whether in sound, or word, or colour, as the highest manifestation
of the ever-active spirit, and the popular image of the artist in his garret,
wild-eyed, wild-haired, poor, solitary, mocked-; but independent, free,
spiritually superior to his philistine tormentors. This attitude has a darker
side too: worship not merely of the painter or the composer or the poet, but of
that more sinister artists whose materials are men – the destroyer of old
societies, and the creator of new ones – no matter at what human cost: the
superhuman leader who tortures and destroys in order to build on new
foundations – Napoleon in his most revolutionary aspect. It is this embodiment
of the romantic ideal that took more and more hysterical forms and in its
extreme ended in violent irrationalism and Fascism. Yet this same outlook also
bred respect for individuality, for the creative impulse, for the unique, the
independent, for freedom to live and act in the light of personal, undictated
beliefs and principles, of undistorted emotional needs, for the value of
personal life, of personal relationships, of the individual conscience, of
human rights. The positive and negative heritage of romanticism – on the one
hand contempt for opportunism, regard for individual variety, scepticism of
oppressive general formulae and final solutions, and on the other
self-prostration before superior beings and the exaltation of arbitrary power,
passion and cruelty – these tendencies, at once reflected and promoted by
romantic doctrines, have done more to mould both the events of our century and
the concepts in terms in which they are viewed and explained than is commonly
recognised in most histories of our time.”[203]
Romanticism was an individualist attitude par excellence: but it
had its collectivist analogues, including nationalism, which may therefore be
said to have been nurtured from the streams both of the French Enlightenment
and of the German Romantic anti-Enlightenment. Thus “for Byronic romantics,”
writes Berlin, “’I’ is indeed an individual, the outsider, the adventurer, the
outlaw, he who defies society and accepted values, and follows his own – it may
be to his doom, but this is better than conformity, enslavement to mediocrity.
But for other thinkers ‘I’ becomes something much more metaphysical. It is a
collective – a nation, a Church, a Party, a class, an edifice in which I am
only a stone, an organism of which I am only a tiny living fragment. It
is the creator; I myself matter only in so far as I belong to the movement, the
race, the nation, the class, the Church; I do not signify as a true individual
within this super-person to whom my life is organically bound. Hence German
nationalism: I do this not because it is good or right or because I like it – I
do it because I am a German and this is the German way to live. So also modern
existentialism – I do it because I commit myself to this form of existence.
Nothing makes me; I do not do it because it is an objective order which I obey,
or because of universal rules to which I must adhere; I do it because I create
my own life as I do; being what I am, I give it direction and I am responsible
for it. Denial of universal values, this emphasis on being above all an element
in, and loyal to, a super-self, is a dangerous moment in European history, and
has led to a great deal that has been destructive and sinister in modern times;
this is where it begins, in the political ruminations and theories of the
earliest German romantics and their disciples in France and elsewhere.”[204]
German Nationalism
Thus modern European nationalism is the fruit of the union of two ideas
coming from two different directions: the French Enlightenment idea of the sovereignty
and rights of the Nation, and the German Romantic idea of the uniqueness
and self-justification of the Nation. However, if these were the
general ideological sources of modern nationalism, in the particular cases of
French and German nationalism the immediate causes were more mundane: in the
French case, pride, the pride of knowing that France was the first nation to
proclaim and realise the ideals of the revolution, and in the German case wounded
pride, “some form of collective humiliation"[205] as a
result of Napoleon’s victories.
In its early stages Kant, Hegel and Goethe had all praised the
Revolution; and Kant’s disciple, Fichte, had even declared that “henceforth the
French Republic alone can be the country of the Just”. “But,” writes Zamoyski,
“as the revolution progressed, the feeling grew in Germany that the French,
with their habitual shallowness, had got it all wrong. They had allowed the
pursuit of liberty to degenerate into mob rule and mass slaughter of innocent
people because they perceived liberty in mechanical terms. German thinkers were
more interested in ‘real liberty', and many believed that it was the ‘corrupt’
nature of the French that had doomed the revolution to failure. Such
conclusions allowed for a degree of smugness, suggesting as they did that the
French Enlightenment, for all its brilliance, had been flawed, while German
intellectual achievements had been more profound and more solid.
“Fichte identified Germany’s greatness as lying in her essentially
spiritual destiny. She would never stoop to conquer others, and while nations
such as the French, the English or the Spanish scrambled for wealth and
dominance, Germany’s role was to uphold the finest values of humanity.[206]
Similar claims to a moral mission for Germany were made by Herder,
Hölderlin, Schlegel and others…
“It had been central to Herder’s argument that each nation, by virtue of
its innate character, had a special role to play in the greater process of
history. One after another, nations ascended the world stage to fulfil their
ordained purpose. The French were crowding the proscenium, but there was a
growing conviction that Germany’s time was coming, and her destiny was about to
unfold. The Germans certainly seemed ready for it. The country was awash with
under-employed young men, and since the days of the proto-romantic movement of Sturm
und Drang the concept of action, both as a revolt against stultifying
rational forces and as a transcendent act of self-assertion, had become well
established. Fichte equated virtually any action, provided it was bold
unfettered, with liberation.
“The problem was that the nation was still not properly constituted.
Some defined it by language and culture, or, like Fichte, by a level of
consciousness. The Germans were, according to him, more innately creative than
other nations, being the only genuine people in Europe, an Urvolk,
speaking the only authentic language, Ursprache. Others saw the nation
as a kind of church, defined by the ‘mission’ of the German people. Adam
Müller affirmed that this mission was to serve humanity with charity, and
that any man who dedicated himself to this common purpose should be considered
a German. In his lectures of 1806, Fichte made the connection between committed
action and nationality. Those who stood up and demonstrated their vitality were
part of the Urvolk, those who did not were un-German. Hegel saw the
people as a spiritual organism, whose expression, the collective spirit or Volksgeist,
was its validating religion. The discussion mingled elements of theology,
science and metaphysics to produce uplifting and philosophically challenging
confusion.
“But in the absence of clear geographical or political parameters,
Germany’s national existence was ultimately dependent on some variant of the
racial concept. And this began to be stated with increasing assertiveness. ‘In
itself every nationality is a completely closed and rounded whole, a common tie
of blood relationship unites all its members; all… must be of one mind and must
stick together like one man’, according to Joseph Görres, who had once
been an enthusiastic internationalist. ‘This instinctive urge that binds all
members into a whole is a law of nature which takes preference over all
artificial contracts… The voice of nature in ourselves warns us and points to
the chasm between us and the alien’.
“The location and identification of this ‘closed and rounded whole’
involved not just defining German ethnicity, but also delving into the past in
search of a typically German and organic national unit to set against the old
rationalist French view of statehood based on natural law and the rights of
man. The bible of this tendency was Tacitus’s Germania. Placed in its
own time, this book is as much about Rome as about Germanic tribes. It imagines
the ultimate non-Rome, a place that had not been cleared and cultivated, and a
people innocent of the arts of industry and leisure. The forest life it
describes is the antithesis to the classical culture of Rome. It is also in
some ways the original noble savage myth, representing everything that decadent
Rome had lost; beneath Tacitus’s contempt for the savage denizens of the forest
lurks a vague fear that by gaining in civilization the Romans had forfeited
certain rugged virtues.
“The German nationalists picked up this theme, which mirrored their
relation to French culture. Roma and Germania, the city and the forest,
corruption and purity, could stand as paradigms for the present situation. The
ancient Teutonic hero Arminius (Hermann) had led the revolt of the German
tribes against Rome and defeated the legions in the Teutoburg Forest. His
descendants who aspired to throw off the ‘Roman’ universalism of France could
take heart.”[207]
Dostoyevsky developed the theme of Germany versus Rome: “Germany’s aim
is one; it existed before, always. It is her Protestantism – not that
single formula of Protestantism which was conceived in Luther’s time, but her
continual Protestantism, her continual protest against the Roman world, ever
since Arminius, - against everything that was Rome and Roman in aim, and
subsequently – against everything that was bequeathed by ancient Rome to the
new Rome and to all those peoples who inherited from Rome her idea, her formula
and element; against the heir of Rome and everything that constitutes this
legacy…
“Ancient Rome was the first to generate the idea of the universal unity
of men, and was the first to start thinking of (and firmly believing in)
putting it practically into effect in the form of universal empire. However,
this formula fell before Christianity – the formula but not the idea. For this
idea is that of European mankind; through this idea its civilization came into
being; for it alone mankind lives.
“Only the idea of the universal Roman empire succumbed, and it was
replaced by a new ideal, also universal, of a communion in Christ. This new
ideal bifurcated into the Eastern ideal of a purely spiritual communion of men,
and the Western European, Roman Catholic, papal ideal diametrically opposed to
the Eastern one.
“This Western Roman Catholic incarnation of the idea was achieved in its
own way, having lost, however, its Christian, spiritual foundation and having
replaced it with the ancient Roman legacy. [The] Roman papacy proclaimed that
Christianity and its idea, without the universal possession of lands and
peoples, are not spiritual but political. In other words, they cannot be
achieved without the realization on earth of a new universal Roman empire now
headed not by the Roman emperor but by the Pope. And thus it was sought to
establish a new universal empire in full accord with the spirit of the ancient
Roman world, only in a different form.
“Thus, we have in the Eastern ideal – first, the spiritual communion of
mankind in Christ, and thereafter, in consequence of the spiritual unity of all
men in Christ and as an unchallenged deduction therefrom – a just state and
social communion. In the Roman interpretation we have a reverse situation:
first it is necessary to achieve firm state unity in the form of a universal
empire, and only after that, perhaps, spiritual fellowship under the rule of
the Pope as the potentate of this world.
“Since that time, in the Roman world this scheme has been progressing
and changing uninterruptedly, and with its progress the most essential part of
the Christian element has been virtually lost. Finally, having rejected
Christianity spiritually, the heirs of the ancient Roman world likewise
renounced [the] papacy. The dreadful French revolution has thundered. In
substance, it was but the last modification and metamorphosis of the same
ancient Roman formula of universal unity. The new formula, however, proved
insufficient. The new idea failed to come true. There even was a moment when
all the nations which had inherited the ancient Roman tradition were almost in
despair. Oh, of course, that portion of society which in 1789 won political
leadership, i.e. the bourgeoisie, triumphed and declared that there was no
necessity of going any further. But all those minds which by virtue of the
eternal laws of nature are destined to dwell in a state of everlasting
universal fermentation seeking new formulae of some ideal and a new word
indispensable to the progress of the human organism, - they all rushed to the
humiliated and the defrauded, to all those who had not received their share in
the new formula of universal unity proclaimed by the French revolution of 1789.
These proclaimed a new word of their own, namely, the necessity of universal
fellowship not for the equal distribution of rights allotted to a quarter, or
so, of the human race, leaving the rest to serve as raw material and a means of
exploitation for the happiness of that quarter of mankind, but, on the contrary
– for universal equality, with each and every one sharing the blessings of this
world, whatever these may prove. It was decided to put this scheme into effect
by resorting to all means, i.e., not by the means of Christian
civilisation – without stopping at anything.
“Now, what has been Germany’s part in this, throughout these two
thousand years? The most characteristic and essential trait of this great,
proud and peculiar people – ever since their appearance on the historical
horizon – consisted of the fact that they never consented to assimilate their
destiny and their principles to those of the outermost Western world, i.e. the
heirs of the ancient Roman tradition. The Germans have been protesting
against the latter throughout these two thousand years. And even though they
did not (never did so far) utter ‘their word’, or set forth their strictly
formulated ideal in lieu of the ancient Roman idea, nevertheless, it seems
that, within themselves, they always were convinced that they were capable of
uttering this ‘new word’ and of leading mankind. They struggled against the
Roman world as early as the times of Arminius, and during the epoch of Roman
Christianity they, more than any other nation, struggled for the sovereign
power against the new Rome.
“Finally, the Germans protested most vehemently, deriving their formula
of protest from the innermost spiritual, elemental foundation of the Germanic
world: they proclaimed the freedom of inquiry, and raised Luther’s banner. This
was a terrible, universal break: the formula of protest had been found and
filled with a content; even so it still was a negative formula, and the new, positive
word was not yet uttered.
“And now, the Germanic spirit, having uttered this ‘new word’ of
protest, as it were, fainted for a while, quite parallel to an identical
weakening of the former strictly formulated unity of the forces of his adversary.
The outermost Western world, under the influence of the discovery of America,
of new sciences and new principles, sought to reincarnate itself in a new
truth, in a new phase.
“When, at the time of the French revolution, the first attempt at such a
reincarnation took place, the Germanic spirit became quite perplexed, and for a
time lost its identity and faith in itself. It proved impotent to say anything
against the new ideas of the outermost Western world. Luther’s Protestantism
had long outlived its time, while the idea of free inquiry had long been
accepted by universal science. Germany’s enormous organism more than ever began
to feel that it had no flesh, so to speak, and no form for self-expression. It
was then that the pressing urge to consolidate itself, at least outwardly, into
a harmonious organism was born in Germany in anticipation of the new future
aspects of her eternal struggle against the outermost Western world…”[208]
This “pressing urge” could only be satisfied by the creation of a
powerful state, the German Reich. For, wrote Fichte: “Though… the bones of our
national unity… may have bleached and died in the storms and rains and burning
suns of several centuries, yet the reanimating breath of the spirit world has
not ceased to inspire. It will yet raise the dead bones of our national body
and join them bone to bone so that they shall stand forth grandly with a new
life… No man, no god, nothing in the realm of possibility can help us, but we
alone must help ourselves, as long as we deserve it.”[209]
Striking here is the Biblical imagery on the one hand (the vision of the
dead bones from Ezekiel 37), and the explicit affirmation that “no man,
no god” can help the German nation in its quest for resurrection. How different
this quasi-Christian, but in fact pagan call was from the much more Christian
call to arms issued by the Russian Church and State to its people only five
years later! This shows that the revival of German nationalism owed less to the
resurrection of Christian faith than to the resurrection of paganism, and of
the myths of the pagan German gods; whose final burial would come over a
century later, in the ruins of Nazi Berlin…
“Fichte,” writes Paul Johnson, “was much impressed by Niccolò
Machiavelli and saw life as a continuing struggle for supremacy among the
nations. The nation-state most likely to survive and profit from this struggle
was the one which extended its influence over the lives of its people most
widely. And such a nation-state – Germany was the obvious example – would
naturally be expansive. ‘Every nation wants to disseminate as widely as
possible the good points which are peculiar to it. And, in so far as it can, it
wants to assimilate the entire human race to itself in accordance with an urge
planted in men by God, an urge on which the community of nations, the friction
between them, and their development towards perfection rest.’
“This was a momentous statement because it gave the authority of
Germany’s leading academic philosopher to the proposition that the power
impulse of the state was both natural and healthy, and it placed the impulse in
the context of a moral world view. Fichte’s state was totalitarian and
expansive, but it was not revolutionary. Its ‘prince” ruled by hereditary divine
right. But ‘the prince belongs to his nation just as wholly and completely as
it belongs to him. Its destiny under divine providence is laid in his hands,
and he is responsible for it.’ So the prince’s public acts must be moral, in
accordance with law and justice, and his private life must be above reproach.
In relations between states, however, ‘there is neither law nor justice, only
the law of strength. This relationship places the divine, sovereign fights of
fate and of world rule in the prince’s hands, and it raises him above the
commandments of personal morals and into a higher moral order whose essence is
contained in the words, Salus et decus populi suprema lex esto.’ This
was an extreme and menacing statement that justified any degree of ruthlessness
by the new, developing nation-state in its pursuit of self-determination and
self-preservation. The notion of a ‘higher moral order’, to be determined by
the state’s convenience, was to find expression, in the 20th
century, in what Lenin called ‘the Revolutionary Conscience’ and Hitler ‘the
Higher Law of the Party’. Moreover, there was no doubt what kind of state
Fichter had in mind. It was not only totalitarian but German. In his Addresses
to the German Nation (1807), he laid down as axiomatic that the state of
the future can only be the national state, in particular the German national
state, the German Reich.”[210]
It was the German Masons who first changed towards Napoleon. As
Tikhomirov writes, “having betrayed their fatherland at first, they raised
their voices against the French, by virtue of which the German national
movement arose.”[211] The
stimulus to this was undoubtedly, as Zamoyski writes, “Napoleon’s crushing
defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The humiliation of
seeing the prestigious army created by the great Frederick trounced by the
French led to painful self-appraisal and underlined the need for regeneration.
But it also stung German pride and dispelled the last shreds of sympathy for France
– and, with them, the universalist dreams of the previous decade.
“The French became villains, and Napoleon himself was even portrayed as
the Antichrist, a focus for the crusading struggle of deliverance that would
regenerated Germany. Poets composed patriotic verse and anti-Napoleonic songs…
“An analogous wave of renewal swept through society. In 1808 the
Tugenbund or League of Virtue, a society for the propagation of civic virtue,
was formed in Königsberg and quickly ramified through Prussia. In 1809
Ludwig Jahn founded the more middle-class Deutsche Bund, based in Berlin.
Joseph Görres demanded that all foreign elements be expunged from national
life, so that essential German characteristics might flourish, and declared
that no power could stand in the way of a nation intent on defending its soul.
‘That to which the Germans aspire will be granted to them, the day when, in
their interior, they will have become worthy of it.’ Even the archetypically
Enlightenment cosmopolitan Wilhelm von Humboldt was turning into a Prussian
patriot. He was reorganizing the state education system at the time, and manage
to transform it into a curiously spiritual one in which education and religion
of state are inextricably intertwined.
“But while the mood changed, reality had not. Germany was still divided
and cowered under French hegemony. To the deep shame of much of her officer
corps, Prussia was still an ally of France when Napoleon invaded Russia in
1812. Her forces, which did not take part in the march on Moscow, were to
support the French and secure their flank in East Prussia. And it was when the
frozen remnants were trudging back into Prussia and Poland that this support
would have been most welcome. But it was precisely then that the Prussian military
judged it safe to show their colours. General von Yorck, in command of 14,000
men in East Prussia, found himself in a pivotal position. With his support,
Marshal Macdonald would be able to hold the line of the River Niemen and keep
the Russians out of Poland; without it, he had no option but full retreat. The
Prussian general had been in touch with the Russians for some time, through the
intermediary of a young German officer in Russian service by the name of Carl
von Clausewitz. On Christmas Day 1812 Yorck met the commander of the Russian
advance guard and, by a convention he signed with them at Tauroggen, repudiated
Prussia’s alliance with France. It was an act of mutiny, the first in a series
of acts by the German army to ‘save’ the fatherland against the orders of its
political leaders. It was also the signal for all the nationalists to come out
into the open.
“The irascible Ernst Moritz Arndt was well to the fore. ‘Oh men of
Germany!’ he exhorted, ‘feel again your God, hear and fear the eternal, and you
heard and fear also your Volk; you feel again in God the honour and
dignity of your fathers, their glorious history rejuvenates itself again in
you, their firm and gallant virtue reblossoms in you, the whole German
Fatherland stands again before you in the august halo of past centuries… One
faith, one love, one courage, and one enthusiasm must gather again the whole
German Volk in brotherly community… Be Germans, be one, will to be one
by love and loyalty, and no devil will vanquish you.’
“The
king of Prussia did not feel quite brave enough to ‘be German’ yet. He ordered
the arrest of Yorck, and then moved to Breslau, where he was out of reach of
the French. In March 1813, when he saw that it was safe for him to jump on the
anti-Napoleon bandwagon, Frederick William announced the formation of citizens’
volunteer forces, the Landwehr and the Landsturm. On 17 March he issued a
proclamation to the effect that his soldiers would ‘fight for our independence
and the honour of the Volk’, and summoned every son of the fatherland to
participate. ‘My cause is the cause of my Volk,’ he concluded, less than
convincingly. But nobody was looking too closely at anyone’s motives in the
general excitement. The cause of the German fatherland justified everything.
‘Strike them dead!’ Heinrich von Kleist had urged the soldiers setting off to
war with the French. ‘At the last judgement you will not be asked for your
reasons!’
“The campaign of 1813, when the patched-up Napoleonic forces attempted
to stand up to the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria, and
finally succumbed at Leipzig, should, according to Chateaubriand, go down in
history as ‘the campaign of young Germany, of the poets’. That was certainly
the perception. The by no means young Fichte finished his lecture on the
subject of duty and announced to his students at Berlin that the course was
suspended until they gained liberty or death. He marched out of the hall amid
wild cheers, and led the students off to put their names down for the army…
“The War of Liberation, Freiheitskrieg, was, above all, a war of
purification and self-discovery. It did not stop with the expulsion of French
forces from Germany in 1813. If anything, it was in the course of 1814, when
Napoleon's forces were fighting for survival on French soil, that the War of
Liberation really got going in Germany…
“But the War of Liberation was being waged no less vehemently at the
cultural level. The poets were not squeamish when it came to singing of the
national crusade, while the painters rallied to the cause in a memorable way.
Caspar David Friedrich, who had already done so much to represent the symbolic
German landscape as an object of worship through a series of paintings in which
people are depicted contemplating its wonder like so many saints adoring the
nativity in a medieval triptych, now turned to glorifying the nation. He
painted several representations of an imaginary tomb of Hermann, evocatively
set among craggy boulders and fir trees. And he also produced various
set-pieces representing the war. Other painters depicted groups of patriotic
German volunteers going forth in their hats to free the fatherland. Joseph
Görres led a movement demanding the completion of Cologne Cathedral as a
sign of German regeneration. ‘Long shall Germany live in shame and humiliation,
a prey to inner conflict and alien arrogance, until her people return to the
ideals from which they were seduced by selfish ambition, and until true
religion and loyalty, unity of purpose and self-denial shall again render them
capable of erecting such a building as this,’ he wrote.”[212]
And yet the majority of the German people no longer believed either in
the Catholicism that had erected Cologne cathedral, nor in the Protestantism
that had first raised the word of protest against the Franco-Roman world
and civilisation. As so often happens with nationalistic movements, the attempt
to resurrect the past was actually a sign that the past was definitely dead.
Thus European nationalism, of which German nationalism was perhaps the most
characteristic example, was a new, degenerate religion taking up the
void in the European soul that was left by the death of Christianity.
“The nation,” writes Mosse, “was the intermediary between the individual
and a personal scheme of values and ethics; outside the nation no life or
creativity was possible.”[213]
Görres put it as follows: “Let the nation learn to trace itself to
its source, delve into its roots: it will find in its innermost being a fathomless
well-spring which rises from subterranean treasure; many minds have already
been enriched by drawing on the hoard of the Niebelungen; and still it lies
there inexhaustible, in the depths of its lair.”[214]
From now on, European man would only rarely be induced to die for God or
Church or Sovereign. But he could be induced to die for his country. And that
not simply because it is natural to die for hearth and home, but because the
nation was now seen to incarnate the highest value, whether that value was
defined as simply racial superiority (Germany), or cultural eminence (France),
or the rule of law in freedom (England).
However, Mosse argues, “it must never be forgotten that the vision of a
better life was a part of all nationalisms. In none of the [nationalist]
ideologies discussed was the worship of the nation something in and of itself;
it was always the necessary way to a better life, a new freedom… All believed
that once they had been united by a true national spirit greater happiness for
everybody would be the result.”[215]
“European politics in the nineteenth century,” writes Golo Mann, “fed on
the French Revolution. No idea, no dream, no fear, no conflict appeared which
had not been worked through in that fateful decade: democracy and socialism,
reaction, dictatorship, nationalism, imperialism, pacifism.”[216]
However, of these ideas the one that dominated immediately after the
defeat of Napoleon was reaction.
Napoleon’s escape from Elba in 1814, and the closeness of the struggle
that finally succeeded in overthrowing him in 1815, meant that, as Davies
writes, the Congress of Vienna that reconvened after Waterloo “met in chastened
mood. The representatives of the victorious powers could not be accused, as in
the previous year, of ‘dancing instead of making progress’. They were ready to
risk nothing. They were determined, above all, to restore the rights of
monarchy – the sacred institution considered most threatened by the Revolution.
In so doing they, with the partial exception of Tsar Alexander, as we shall see
in the next chapter, paid little attention to the claims either of democracy or
of nationality….
“The spirit of the settlement, therefore, was more than conservative: it
actually put the clock back. It was designed to prevent change in a world where
the forces of change had only been contained by a whisker. The Duke of
Wellington’s famous comment on Waterloo was: ‘a damned nice thing, the nearest
run thing you ever saw in your life’. Such was the feeling all over Europe. The
issue between change and no change was so close that the victors felt terrified
of the least concession. Even limited, gradual reform was viewed with
suspicion. ‘Beginning reform,’ wrote the Duke in 1830, ‘is beginning
revolution.’ What is more, France, the eternal source of revolutionary
disturbances, had not been tamed. Paris was to erupt repeatedly – in 1830,
1848, 1851, 1870. ‘When Paris sneezes,’ commented the Austrian Chancellor,
Metternich, ‘Europe catches cold.’ French-style democracy was a menace
threatening monarchy, Church, and property – the pillars of everything he stood
for. It was, he said, ‘the disease which must be cured, the volcano which must
be extinguished, the gangrene which must be burned out with a hot iron, the
hydra with jaws open to swallow up the social order’.
“In its extreme form, as embodied by Metternich, the reactionary spirit
of 1815 was opposed to any sort of change which did not obtain prior approval.
It found expression in the first instance in the Quadruple Alliance of Russia,
Prussia, Austria, and Britain, who agreed to organize future congresses
whenever need arose, and then in a wider ‘Holy Alliance’ organized by the Tsar.
The former produced the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), which readmitted
France to the concert of respectable nations. The latter produced the proposal
that the powers should guarantee existing frontiers and governments in
perpetuity.”[217]
France readmitted to the concert of nations because the victorious
powers judged that it was an ideology, Jacobinism, rather than a nation,
France, that was the real enemy, while former revolutionaries who no longer
practised revolution could be forgiven (the reverse judgement was made in
1919). For, as Eric Hobsbawn writes, “it was now known that revolution in a
single country could be a European phenomenon; that its doctrines could spread
across the frontiers and, what was worse, its crusading armies could blow away
the political systems of a continent. It was now known that social revolution
was possible; that nations existed as something independent of states, peoples
as something independent of their rulers, and even that the poor existed as
something independent of the ruling classes. ‘The French Revolution,’ De Bonald
had observed in 1796, ‘is a unique event in history.’ The phrase is misleading:
it was a universal event.[218] No
country was immune from it. The French soldiers who campaigned from Andalusia
to Moscow, from the Baltic to Syria – over a vaster area than any body of
conquerors since the Mongols, and certainly a vaster area than any previous
single military force in Europe except the Norsemen – pushed the universality
of their revolution home more effectively than anything else could have done. And
the doctrines and institutions they carried with them, even under Napoleon,
from Spain to Illyria, were universal doctrines, as the governments knew, and
as the peoples themselves were soon to know. A Greek bandit and patriot
expressed their feelings completely: “’According to my judgement,’ said
Koloktrones, ‘the French Revolution and the doings of Napoleon opened the eyes
of the world. The nations knew nothing before, and the people thought that
kings were gods upon the earth and that they were bound to say that whatever
they did was well done. Through this present change it is more difficult to
rule the people.’”[219]
The French revolution had another long-term effect: it justified all
kinds of crime in the name of politics.
As Paul Johnson writes: “Perhaps the most significant characteristic of
the dawning modern world, and in this respect it was a true child of Rousseau,
was the tendency to relate everything to politics. In Latin America, every
would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself a ‘liberator’;
murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people. In Spain, during
the 1820s, believers and nonbelievers, those who liked kings and those who
hated them, began to regard their faith, or lack of it, as a justification for
forming private armies which defied the lawful authorities. Organized crime now
took a party label and put forward a program and thereby became better
organized and a more formidable threat to society.
“Thus violence acquired moral standing and the public was terrorized for
its own good. Many years before, Samuel Johnson, in upholding the rights of
authority, had qualified his defense by pointing to a corresponding and
inherent human right to resist oppresssion: ‘Why all this childish jealousy of
the power of the Crown?… In no government can power be abused long. Mankind
will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they
will rise and cut off his head.’ The French Revolution had lowered the
threshold of abuse at which men rose. It proved that cutting off royal heads
was easier than had previously been thought and did not bring down the heavens.
That undoubted fact was now a permanent temptation to every enemy of society
who wished to acquire moral respectability for his crimes. It operated, in
particular, throughout the Mediterranean area, where every government oppressed
its subjects to some degree and there were usually no lawful forms of redress.
In the past, men with a grievance had suffered in silence or taken to the hills
and robbed. Now the hitherto resigned joined secret societies, and the bandits
called themselves politicians.”[220]
These secret societies continued the revolution on an international
scale. Johnson again: “Like the Comintern in the 1930s, they were a European
phenomenon and, to some extent, coordinated and centrally directed. But unlike
the Comintern, they did not have an ultimate national base, where they could be
trained and from which money and arms could flow.
“The most important figure, or so it was supposed, was Filipo Michele
Buonarrotti (1761-1837), a Pisan by birth, and proud of his descent from
Michelangelo. Becoming a naturalized French citizen, he took part in the French
Revolution and was imprisoned and deported for his part in the conspiracy
organized by François-Emile Babeuf, the proto-communist who tried to
overthrow the Directory. He came out of prison in 1809 and immediately resumed
underground work in northern Italy with Republican elements in the French
occupation and local malcontents and ‘patriots’. He founded a network called
the Adelphi, which migrated to Geneva when the Austrians took over Lombardy and
changed its name to the Sublime Perfect Masters.
“The Sublime Perfect Masters combined illuminism, freemasonry and radical
politics with a good deal of pretentious symbolism. Its structure was
hierarchical, only the most senior levels knowing its inner secrets, and
Buonarrotti came closer to the isolated cell system of modern terrorist groups,
which makes them so difficult to destroy, even if penetrated. The various
police forces never discovered much about his apparatus, which is the reason we
know so little about it. In theory it was formidable, since it had links with a
Directive Committee in Paris which coordinated Orléanist, Jacobin,
Bonapartist, and Republican subversion, with various German groups, such as the
Tugendbund and the Unbedingren; with Spanish Masons and communeros; and
even with a Russian group called the Union of Salvation, the whole supposedly
existing under a mysterious body, also in Geneva, called the Grand Firmament.
In Italy, the Sublime Perfect Masters had links with the Carbonari, which
operated in the center and the south. Contact was maintained by special
handshakes, secret codes, invisible ink and other devices… But it is a notable
fact that Buonarrotti, in particular, and the networks, in general, never once
succeeded in organizing a successful conspiracy or one which can fairly be said
to have got off the ground. Moreover when uprisings did take place and
governments were overthrown, as in Spain in 1820, Buonarrotti – like Marx, and
indeed Lenin, later – was taken completely by surprise…”[221]
The major powers had many problems in their struggle against the
revolution. One was that it required large resources and in particular a much
larger police (and secret police) apparatus than any state had hitherto
possessed. Secondly, the powers were not united amongst themselves. France was
still distrusted; Austria did not want Russian Cossacks settling problems on
her territory; Britain, which had played such an important role in defeating
Napoleon, was nevertheless not averse to helping this or that revolutionary
movement (particularly in the Iberian Peninsula[222] and
South America) if this suited her balance-of-power politics, and was opposed to
“interventionism on ideological grounds, as practiced by the Holy Alliance,
because its object was to impose or sustain a particular type of government,
which ran directly counter to the Zeitgeist”.[223]
The Zeitgeist was anti-monarchist; and even the absolutist rulers
felt they could not go completely against it. They made their first compromise
with it in the conditions they imposed on France in 1818. For, as Hobsbawm
writes, while “the Bourbons were restored,… it was understood that they had to
make concessions to the dangerous spirit of their subjects. The major changes
of the Revolution were accepted, and that inflammatory device, a constitution,
was granted to them – though of course in an extremely moderate form – under
the guise of a Charter ‘freely conceded’ by the returned absolute monarch,
Louis XVIII.”[224]
Another compromise was the granting of senior posts to former revolutionaries,
“reconciling”, if that were possible, the reactionary King Louis XVIII with
some of the men who had caused his brother Louis XVI’s death.[225]
Making concessions to the Zeitgeist was only a short-term
solution. For appeasement, as rulers from Ethelred the Unready to Joseph
Chamberlain have discovered, can never tame a really determined enemy, but
rather whets his appetite for more. As Friedrich von Gentz to the Laibach
Congress of the Holy Alliance, 1821: “Revolution must be fought with flesh and
blood. Moral weapons are manifestly powerless.”[226]
What was needed was another, more powerful spirit to oppose the corrupt
spirit of the times, a positive doctrine of religious and political authority
that was deeper and truer than the revolutionary doctrine. But none of the
great powers was able to provide a positive teaching to reinforce and justify
their alternately conciliatory and repressive measures, for the simple reason
that none of them – with the exception of Russia – was Orthodox, and very few,
even in Russia, were capable of communicating that positive message to those infected
with the revolutionary contagion. What the great powers did have was a negative
teaching, a teaching on the evil of the revolution that had some truth in it,
but, precisely because it was only negative, little effectiveness. The most
fervently anti-revolutionary power, as was to be expected, was the Vatican,
which was trying to make up for its lapse in the time of Napoleon. Thus in his
encylical Mirari vos (1832),
Pope Gregory XVI declared that anti-monarchism was a crime against the faith,
and that liberty of conscience flowed from “the most fetid fount of
indifferentism”.
But the most eloquent defenders of the old order were two French
aristocrats, Count Joseph de Maistre, a former envoy of Sardinia to Russia, and
Viscount Louis de Bonald. De Maistre wrote: “All grandeur, all power, all
subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and bond of human
association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that
moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears. God,
Who is the author of sovereignty, is the author also of punishment.”[227]
De Bonald wrote: “Today… who does not see the danger of granting anyone
and everyone… the terrible liberty to indoctrinate, in religion and in
politics, a public which everywhere is made up largely of mistaken, ignorant,
and violent men?… There is no true liberty of the press… except under the
guarantee of censorship to prevent licence of thought. There is no civil
liberty without laws to prevent actions that create disorder.”[228]
Berlin writes on these deeply conservative
authors: “What the entire Enlightenment has in common is denial of the central
Christian doctrine of original sin, believing instead that man is born either
innocent and good, or morally neutral and malleable by education or
environment, or, at worst, deeply defective but capable of radical and
indefinite improvement by rational education in favourable circumstances, or by
a revolutionary reorganisation of society as demanded, for example, by
Rousseau. It is this denial of original sin that the Church condemned most
severely in Rousseau’s Émile, despite its attack on materialism,
utilitarianism and atheism. It is the powerful reaffirmation of this Pauline
and Augustinian doctrine that is the sharpest single weapon in the
root-and-branch attack on the entire Enlightenment by the French
counter-revolutionary writers Maistre, Bonald and Chateaubriand, at the turn of
the century.
“… The doctrines of Joseph de Maistre and his followers and allies…
formed the spearhead of the counter-revolution in the early nineteenth century
in Europe. Maistre held the Enlightenment to be one of the most foolish, as
well as the most ruinous, forms of social thinking. The conception of man as
naturally disposed to benevolence, co-operation and peace, or, at any rate,
capable of being shaped in this direction by appropriate education or
legislation, is for him shallow and false. The benevolent Dame Nature of Hume,
Holbach and Helvétius is an absurd figment. History and zoology are the
most reliable guides to nature: they show her to be a field of unceasing
slaughter. Men are by nature aggressive and destructive; they rebel over
trifles – the change to the Gregorian calendar in the mid-eighteenth century,
or Peter the Great’s decision to shave the boyars’ beards, provoke violent
resistance, at times dangerous rebellions. But when men are sent to war, to
exterminate beings as innocent as themselves for no purpose that either army
can grasp, they go obediently to their deaths and scarcely ever mutiny. When
the destructive instinct is evoked men feel exalted and fulfilled. Men do not
come together, as the Enlightenment teaches, for mutual co-operation and
peaceful happiness; history makes it clear that they are never so united as
when given a common altar upon which to immolate themselves. This is so because
the desire to sacrifice themselves or others is at least as strong as any
pacific or constructive impulse.
“Maistre felt that men are by nature evil, self-destructive animals,
full of conflicting drives, who do not know what they want, want what they do
not want, do not want what they want, and it is only when they are kept under
constant control and rigorous discipline by some authoritarian elite – a
Church, a State, or some other body from whose decisions there is no appeal –
that they can hope to survive and be saved. Reasoning, analysis, criticism
shake the foundations and destroy the fabric of society. If the source of
authority is declared to be rational, it invites questioning and doubt; but if
it is questioned it may be argued away; its authority is undermined by able
sophists, and this accelerates the forces of chaos, as in France during the
reign of the weak and liberal Louis XVI. If the State is to survive and
frustrate the fools and knaves who will always seek to destroy it, the source
of its authority must be absolute, so terrifying, indeed, that the least
attempt to question it must entail immediate and terrible sanctions: only then
will men learn to obey it. Without a clear hierarchy of authority –
awe-inspiring power – men’s incurably destructive instincts will breed chaos
and mutual extermination. The supreme power – especially the Church – must
never seek to explain or justify itself in rational terms; for what one man can
demonstrate, another may be able to refute. Reason is the thinnest of walls
against the raging seas of violent emotion: on so insecure a basis no permanent
structure can ever be erected. Irrationality, so far from being an obstacle,
has historically led to peace, security and strength, and is indispensable to
society: it is rational institutions – republics, elective monarchies,
democracies, associations founded on the enlightened principles of free love –
that collapse soonest; authoritarian Churches, hereditary monarchies and
aristocracies, traditional forms of life, like the highly irrational
institutions of the family, founded on life-long marriage – it is they that
persist.
“The philosophes proposed to rationalise communications by
inventing a universal language free from the irrational survivals, the
idiosyncratic twists and turns, the capricious peculiarities of existing
tongues; if they were to succeed, this would be disastrous, for it is precisely
the individual historical development of a language belonging to a people that
absorbs, enshrines and encapsulates a vast wealth of half-conscious,
half-remembered collective experience. What men call superstition and prejudice
are but the crust of custom which by sheer survival has shown itself proof
against the ravages and vicissitudes of its long life; to lose it is to lose
the shield that protects men’s national existence, their spirit, the habits,
memories, faith that have made them what they are. The conception of human nature
which the radical critics have promulgated and on which their whole house of
cards rests is an infantile fantasy. Rousseau asks why it is that man, who was
born free, is nevertheless everywhere in chains; Maistre replies, ‘This mad
pronouncement, Man is born free, is the opposite of the truth.’ ‘It would be
equally reasonable,’ adds the eminent critic Émile Faguet in an essay on
Maistre, ‘to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere nibble grass.’
Men are not made for freedom, nor for peace. Such freedom and peace as they
have had were obtained only under wisely authoritarian governments that have
repressed the destructive critical intellect and its socially disintegrating
effects. Scientists, intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, democrats, Jansenists,
Protestants, Jews, atheists – these are the sleepless enemy that never ceases
to gnaw at the vitals of society. The best government the world has ever known
was that of the Romans: they were too wise to be scientists themselves; for
this purpose they hired the clever, volatile, politically incapable Greeks. Not
the luminous intellect, but dark instincts govern man and societies; only
elites which understand this, and keep the people from too much secular
education, which is bound to make them over-critical and discontented, can give
to men as much happiness and justice and freedom as, in this vale of tears, men
can expect to have. But at the back of everything must lurk the potentiality of
force, of coercive power.
“In a striking image Maistre says that all social order in the end rests
upon one man, the executioner. Nobody wishes to associate with this hideous
figure, yet on him, so long as men are weak, sinful, unable to control their
passions, constantly lured to their doom by evil temptations or foolish dreams,
rest all order, all peace, all society. The notion that reason is sufficient to
educate or control the passions is ridiculous. When there is a vacuum, power
rushes in; even the bloodstained monster Robespierre, a scourge sent by the
Lord to punish a country that had departed from the true faith, is more to be
admired – because he did hold France together and repelled her enemies, and
created armies that, drunk with blood and passion, preserved France – than
liberal fumbling and bungling. Louis XIV ignored the clever reasoners of his
time, suppressed heresy, and died full of glory in his own bed. Louis XVI
played amiably with subversive ideologists who had drunk at the poisoned well
of Voltaire, and died on the scaffold. Repression, censorship, absolute
sovereignty, judgements from which there is no appeal, these are the only
methods of governing creatures whom Maistre described as half men, half beasts,
monstrous centaurs at once seeking after God and fighting him, longing to love
and create, but in perpetual danger of falling victims to their own blindly
destructive drives, held in check by a combination of force and traditional
authority and, above all, a faith incarnated in historically hallowed
institutions that reason dare not touch.
“Nation and race are realities; the artificial creations of
constitution-mongers are bound to collapse. ‘Nations,’ said Maistre, ‘are born
and die like individuals’; they ‘have a common soul’, especially visible in
their language. And since they are individuals, they should endeavour to remain
of one race. So too Bonald, his closest intellectual ally, regrets that the
French nation has abandoned its racial purity, thus weakening itself. The
question of whether the French are descended from Franks or Gauls, whether
their institutions are Roman or German in origin, with the implication that
this could dictate a form of life in the present, although it has its roots in
political controversies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth
centuries, now takes the colour of mystical organicism, which transcends, and
is proof against, all forms of discursive reasoning. Natural growth alone is
real for Maistre. Only time, only history, can create authority that men can
worship and obey: mere military dictatorship, a work of individual human hands,
is brutal force without spiritual power; he calls it bâtonocratie,
and predicts the end of Napoleon.
“In similar strain Bonald denounce individualism whether as a social
doctrine or an intellectual method of analysing historical phenomena. The
inventions of man, he declared, are precarious aids compared to the divinely
ordained institutions that penetrate man’s very being – language, family, the
worship of God. By whom were they invented? Whenever a child is born there are
father, mother, family, language, God; this is the basis of all that is genuine
and lasting, not the arrangements of men drawn from the world of shopkeepers,
with their contracts, or promises, or utility, or material goods. Liberal individualism
inspired by the insolent self-confidence of mutinous intellectuals has led to
the inhuman competition of bourgeois society, in which the strongest and the
fastest win and the weak go to the wall. Only the Church can organise a society
in which the ablest are held back so that the whole of society can progress and
the weakest and least greedy also reach the goal.
“These gloomy doctrines became the inspiration of monarchist politics in
France, and together with the notion of romantic heroism and the sharp contrast
between creative and uncreative, historic and unhistoric, individuals and
nations, duly inspired nationalism, imperialism, and finally, in their most
violent and pathological form, Fascist and totalitarian doctrines in the
twentieth century.” [229]
And yet Berlin is wrong in attributing both fascism and communism to the
monarchical backlash against the French Revolution. Fascism, it is true, was
based on worship of the people, its historical tradition and its State.
However, the Russian and other communist revolutions were in every way the
descendants of the universalist and internationalist French Revolution, whose
catastrophic failure they failed to study properly (not considering it to be a
failure, but a glorious success!) and which they were therefore condemned to
repeat on a still vaster and bloodier scale.
But de Maistre was also wrong in thinking that the Catholic idea, the
idea that the evil passions can be tamed by blind obedience to an unquestioned,
absolute authority, could stop the revolution. The Catholic idea was now dead –
Napoleon killed it when he took the crown from the Pope and crowned himself.
Only the Orthodox idea, the idea brought to Paris by the Russian Tsar,
remained…
2.
THE EAST: THE MAN-GOD DEFEATED
Fear God, honour the king.
I Peter 2.17.
In the reign of Alexander I Masonry tried
finally to substitute for Orthodoxy a certain ‘true Church’, or ‘inner
Christianity’, in the system of State power, leaving the former religion only
for governing ‘the plebs’.
Valery Baidin.[230]
The not-born-in-the-purple emperor, who
wanted to be a not-yet-anointed prophet, did not foresee that, besides physical
and political forces, states are inspired and act through higher moral forces,
that violence elicits against itself those same forces which are in submission
to it, that cunning can be outwitted or destroyed by desperation, and that
right by its firmness and foresight is always more powerful than craftiness and
spite.
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow (1813).[231]
Napoleon never conquered two of his enemies: Britain and Russia; and it
is tempting to see in these nations two principles that the revolution failed
to subordinate to itself in the way that it had (at least temporarily)
subordinated Catholicism to itself. These were, first: the love of freedom -
not the ecstatic, collectivist, Rousseauist “freedom to” that the
revolution represented, but the more sober, individualist, Lockean “freedom from”
that was ingrained especially in the stubborn spirit of the island race. In the
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the revolution made
considerable inroads into English life, but never destroyed its restraining,
individualistic, anti-despotic influence completely. The second, and far
greater, principle was the love of God in Orthodoxy, which inspired Russia to
drive the Grande Armée all the way from burning Moscow to the
streets of Paris. Throughout the nineteenth century Russia remained the main
bulwark of civilisation against the revolution, but finally succumbed to it in
the catastrophe of 1917.
Tsar
Paul I of Russia
Beginning with Tsar Paul I, the son of Emperor Peter III and Empress
Catherine II, Russia began, slowly and hesitantly, to recover from the abyss of
westernism and absolutism initiated by Peter the Great.
St. John Maximovich writes: “The Tsarevich Paul Petrovich, who spent his
childhood at the court of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, - his mother could not
exercise an immediate influence on him, - was very different in his character
and convictions from the Empress Catherine. Catherine II preferred to remove
her son from the inheritance and make her eldest grandson, Alexander Pavlovich,
her heir… At the end of 1796 Catherine II finally decided to appoint Alexander
as her heir, passing Paul by, but she suddenly and unexpectedly died. The heir,
Tsarevich Paul Petrovich, ascended the throne…”[232]
Tsar Paul, who had been educated by Metropolitan Platon of Moscow, and
shared his teacher’s devotion to pre-Petrine Russia, witnessed to the terrible
condition the eighteenth-century tsars had brought Russia: “On ascending the
throne of All-Russia, and entering in accordance with duty into various parts
of the state administration, at the very beginning of the inspection We saw
that the state economy, in spite of the changes in income made at various
times, had been subjected to extreme discomforts from the continuation over
many years of unceasing warfar and other circumstances. Expenses exceeded
income. The deficit was increasing from year to year, multiplying the internal
and external debts; in order to make up a part of this deficit, large sums were
borrowed, which brought great harm and disorder with them…”[233]
The coronation took place in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow on April
5, 1797, the first day of Holy Pascha. The rite moved a significant step away
from the symbolism of the First Rome, which had been the model of the
eighteenth-century Tsars, and back to the symbolism of the New Rome of
Constantinople, the Mother-State of Holy Rus’. For before putting on the
purple, Paul ordered that he be vested in the dalmatic, one of the royal
vestments of the Byzantine emperors…
Then, writes Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “he himself read out a new law [Uchrezhdenie]
on the Imperial Family which he had composed together with [the
Tsaritsa] Maria Fyodorovna. By this law he abolished Peter I’s decree of 1722
on the right of the Russian Autocrat to appoint the Heir to the Thone according
to his will and revived the Basic Act of 1613. From now on and forever
(!) a strict order of succession was established according to which the
eldest son became his father’s heir, and in the case of childlessness – his
elder brother. The law also foresaw various other cases, determining the
principles of the succession to the Throne in accordance with the ancient,
pre-Petrine (!) Russian customs and certain important new rules (for
example, a Member of the Imperial Family wanting to preserve his rights to the
succession must enter only into an equal by blood marriage with a member
of a royal or ruling house, that is, who is not lower than himself by blood).
Paul I’s new law once and for all cut off the danger in Russia of those
‘revolution’-coups which had taken place in the eighteenth century. And it
meant that the power of the nobility over the Russian Tsars was ending; now
they could be independent of the nobility’s desires and sympathies. The
autocracy was restored in Russia! Deeply wounded and ‘offended’, the
nobility immediately, from the moment of the proclamation of the law ‘On
the Imperial Family’ entered into opposition to Paul I. The Tsar had to suffer
the first and most powerful blow of the opposition. This battle between the
Autocrat and the nobility was decisive, it determined the future destiny
of the whole state. It also revealed who was who in Great Russia. All
the historians who hate Paul I are not able to diminish the significance of the
Law of 1797, they recognise that it was exceptionally important and correct,
but they remark that it was the only outstanding act of this Emperor (there
were no others supposedly). But such an act would have been more than
sufficient for the whole reign! For this act signified a radical counter-coup –
or, following the expression of the time, counter-revolution - to that which
Catherine II had accomplished.
“However, the haters lie here, as in everything else! The law was not
the only important act of his Majesty. On the same day of 1797 Paul I
proclaimed a manifesto in which for the first time the serf-peasants
were obliged to make an oath of allegiance to the Tsars and were called,
not ‘slaves’, but ‘beloved subjects’, that is, they were recognised as citizens
of the State! There is more! Paul I issued a decree forbidding landowners
to force serfs to work corvée for more than three days in the
week: the other three days the peasants were to work for themselves, and on
Sundays – rest and celebrate ‘the day of the Lord’, like all Christians.[234] Under
the threat of severe penalties it was confirmed that masters were forbidden to
sell families of peasants one by one. It was forbidden to subject serfs
older than seventy to physical punishments. (And at the same time it was
permitted to apply physical punishments to noblemen who had been
condemned for criminal acts.) All this was nothing other than the beginning
of the liberation of the Russian peasants from serfdom! In noble circles of
the time it was called a ‘revolution from above’, and for the first time they
said of about their Emperor: ‘He is mad!’ Let us recall that this word was used
in relation to the ‘peasant’ politics of Paul I. He even received a special
‘Note’ from one assembly of nobles, in which it was said that ‘the Russian
people has not matured sufficiently for the removal of physical
punishments’.”[235]
“We know of a case when the Tsar came to the defence of some peasants
whose landowner was about to sell them severally, without their families and
land, so as to make use of the peasants’ property. The peasants refused to
obey, and the landowner informed the governor of the rebellion. But the
governor did not fail to carry out his duty and quickly worked out what was
happening. On receiving news about what was happening, Tsar Paul declared the
deal invalid, ordered that the peasants be left in their places, and that the
landowner be severely censured in his name. The landowner’s conscience began to
speak to him: he gathered the village commune and asked the peasants for
forgiveness. Later he set off for St. Petersburg and asked for an audience with
his Majesty. ‘Well, what did you sort out with your peasants, my lord? What did
they say?’ inquired the Emperor of the guilty man. ‘They said to me, your
Majesty: God will forgive…’ ‘Well, since God and they have forgiven you,
I also forgive you. But remember from now on that they are not your slaves, but
my subjects just as you are. You have just been entrusted with looking after
them, and you are responsible for them before me, as I am for Russia before
God…’ concluded the Sovereign.”[236]
The Tsar also acted to humble the pride of the Guards regiments which,
together with the nobility, had acted the role of king-makers in the eighteenth
century. “He forbade the assigning of noblemen’s children, babies, into the
guards (which had been done before him to increase ‘the number of years
served’). The officers of the guards were forbidden to drive in four- or
six-horse carriages, to hide their hands in winter in fur muffs, or to wear
civilian clothing in public. No exception was made for them by comparison with
other army officers. At lectures and inspections the Guards were asked about
rules and codes with all strictness. How much, then and later, did they speak
(and they still write now!) about the ‘cane discipline’ and the amazing
cruelties in the army under Paul I, the nightmarish punishments which were
simply means of mocking the military…. Even among the historians who hate Paul
I we find the admission that the strictnesses of the Emperor related only to
the officers (from the nobility), while with regard to the soldiers he
was most concerned about their food and upkeep, manifesting a truly paternal
attentiveness. By that time the ordinary members of the Guards had long been
not nobles, but peasants. And the soldierly mass of the Guards of Paul I very
much loved him and were devoted to him. Officers were severely punished
for excessive cruelty to soldiers… On the fateful night of the murder of Paul I
the Guards soldiers rushed to support him. The Preobrazhensky regiment
refused to shout ‘hurrah!’ to Alexander Pavlovich as to the new Emperor,
since they were not sure whether his Majesty Paul I was truly dead. Two soldiers
of the regiment demanded that their commanders give them exact proof of the
death of the former Emperor. These soldiers were not only not punished, but were
sent as an ‘embassy’ of the Preobrazhensky to the grave of Paul I. On their
return the regiment gave the oath of allegiance to Alexander I. That was the real
situation of the Russian soldier of Paul’s times, and not their fictitious
‘rightlessness’!”[237]
“The Emperor Paul’s love for justice and care for the simple people was
expressed also in the accessibility with which he made his subjects happy,
establishing the famous box in the Winter palace whose key was possessed by him
personally and into which the first courtier and the last member of the simple
people could cast their letters with petitions for the Tsar’s immediate defence
or mercy. The Tsar himself emptied the box every day and read the petitions,
leaving not a single one of them unanswered.
“There was probably no sphere in the State which did not feel the
influence of the industrious Monarch. Thus he ordered the minting of silver
rubles to struggle against he deflation in the value of money. The Sovereign
himself sacrificed a part of the court’s silver on this important work. He said
that he himself would eat on tin ‘until the ruble recovers its rate’. And the
regulation on medical institutions worked out by the Emperor Paul could be used
in Russia even in our day.”[238]
“Paul I gave hierarchs in the Synod the right themselves to choose a
candidate for the post of over-procurator, took great care for the material
situation of the clergy, and the widows and orphans of priests, and forbade
physical punishments for priests before they had been defrocked.”[239]
He also increased the lands of hierarchical houses and the pay of the
parish clergy, and freed the clergy from being pressed into army service. The
power of bishops was extended to all Church institutions and to all diocesan
servers.[240]
In general, as K.A. Papmehl writes, “Paul proved to be much more generous and
responsive to the Church’s financial needs than his mother. Although this may
to some – perhaps considerable – extent be attributed to his general tendency
to reverse her policies, it was probably due, in at least equal measure, to his
different attitude toward the Church based, as it undoubtedly was, on sincere
Christian belief…. One symptom of this different attitude was that, unlike his
predecessor – or, indeed, successor, Paul dealt with the Synod not through the Ober-Prokurator,
but through the senior ecclesiastical member: first Gavriil and later
Amvrosii.”[241]
“One of the Tsar’s contemporaries, N.A. Sablukov, who had the good
fortune, thanks to his service at the Royal Court, to know the Emperor
personally, remembered the Emperor Paul in his memoirs as ‘a deeply religious
man, filled with a true piety and the fear of God…. He was a magnanimous man,
ready to forgive offences and recognise his mistakes. He highly prized
righteousness, hated lies and deceit, cared for justice and was merciless in
his persecution of all kinds of abuses, in particular usury and bribery.’
“The well-known researcher of Paul, Shabelsky-Bork, writes: ‘While he
was Tsarevich and Heir, Paul would often spend the whole night in prayer. A
little carpet is preserved in Gatchina; on it he used to pray, and it is worn
through by his knees.’ The above-mentioned N.A. Sablukov recounts, in agreement
with this: ‘Right to the present day they show the places on which Paul was
accustomed to kneel, immersed in prayer and often drenched in tears. The
parquet is worn through in these places. The room of the officer sentry in
which I used to sit during my service in Gatchina was next to Paul’s private study,
and I often heard the Emperor’s sighs when he was standing at prayer.’
“The historical records of those years have preserved a description of
the following event: ‘A watchman had a strange and wonderful vision when he was
standing outside the summer palace… The Archangel Michael stood before the
watchman suddenly, in the light of heavenly glory, and the watchman was
stupefied and in trembling from this vision… And the Archangel ordered that a
cathedral should be raised in his honour there and that this command should be
passed on to the Emperor Paul immediately. The special event went up the chain
of command, of course, and Paul Petrovich was told about everything. But Paul
Petrovich replied: “I already know”: he had seen everything beforehand, and the
appearance to the watchman was a kind of repetition…’ From this story we can
draw the conclusion that Tsar Paul was counted worthy also of revelations from
the heavenly world…”[242]
The
Annexation of Georgia and the Edinoverie
Tsar Paul’s love for the Church found expression in two important events
in year 1800 that strengthened, respectively, the security of the Orthodox
world against the external foe, and its internal unity: the annexation of
Georgia and the reunion of some of the Old Believers with the Orthodox Church
on a “One Faith” (Edinoverie) basis.
Since the Georgians made their first appeal for Russian protection in
1587, they had suffered almost continual invasions from the Persians and the
Turks, leading to many martyrdoms, of which the most famous was that of Queen
Ketevan in 1624. One king, Rostom, even adopted Islam and persecuted Orthodoxy.
In fact, from 1634 until the ascent of the throne by King Wakhtang in 1701, all
the sovereigns of Georgia were Muslim. The eighteenth century saw only a small
improvement, and in 1762 King Teimuraz II travelled to Russian for help. In
1783 protection was formally offered to King Heraclius II of Kartli-Kakhetia,
and the Catholicos of Georgia became a member of the Russian Holy Synod while
retaining his title.
“The last most heavy trial for the Church of Iberia,” writes P.
Ioseliani, was the irruption of Mahomed-Khan into the weakened state of
Georgia, in the year 1795. In the month of September of that year the Persian
army took the city of Tiflis, seized almost all the valuable property of the
royal house, and reduced the palace and the whole of the city into a heap of
ashes and of ruins. The whole of Georgia, thus left at the mercy of the
ruthless enemies of the name of Christ, witnessed the profanation of everything
holy, and the most abominable deeds and practices carried on in the temples of
God. Neither youth nor old age could bring those cruel persecutors to pity; the
churches were filled with troops of murderers and children were killed at their
mothers’ breasts. They took the Archbishop of Tiflis, Dositheus, who had not
come out of the Synod of Sion, made him kneel down before an image of [the most
holy Mother of God], and, without mercy on his old age, threw him from a
balcony into the river Kur; then they plundered his house, and set fire to it.
The pastors of the Church, unable to hide the treasures and other valuable
property of the Church, fell a sacrifice to the ferocity of their foes. Many
images of saints renowned in those days perished for ever; as, for instance,
among others, the image of [the most holy Mother of God] of the Church of
Metekh, and that of the Synod of Sion. The enemy, having rifled churches,
destroyed images, and profaned the tombs of saints, revelled in the blood of
Christians; and the inhuman Mahomed-Khan put an end to these horrors only when
there remained not a living soul in Tiflis.
“King George XIII, who ascended the throne of Georgia (A.D. 1797-1800)
only to see his subjects overwhelmed and rendered powerless by their incessant
and hopeless struggles with unavoidable dangers from enemies of the faith and
of the people, found the resources of the kingdom exhausted by the constant
armaments necessary for its own protection; before his eyes lay the ruins of
the city, villages plundered and laid waste, churches, monasteries, and
hermitages demolished, troubles within the family, and without it the sword,
fire, and inevitable ruin, not only of the Church, but also of the people, yea,
even of the very name of the people. In the fear of God, and trusting to His
providence, he made over Orthodox Georgia in a decided manner to the Tzar of
Russia, his co-religionist; and thus obtained for her peace and quiet. It
pleased God, through this king, to heal the deep wounds of an Orthodox kingdom.
“Feeling that his end was drawing near, he, with the consent of all
ranks and of the people, requested the Emperor Paul I to take Georgia into his
subjection for ever (A.D. 1800). The Emperor Alexander I, when he mounted the
throne, promised to protect the Georgian people of the same faith with himself,
which had thus given itself over unreservedly and frankly to the protection of
Russia. In his manifesto to the people of Georgia (A.D. 1801) he proclaimed the
following:- ‘One and the same dignity, one and the same honour, and humanity
laid upon us the sacred duty, after hearing the prayers of sufferers, to grant
them justice and equity in exchange for their affliction, security for their
persons and for their property, and to give to all alike the protection of the
law.’”[243]
What we have called “Georgia” was in fact the kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti
in Eastern Georgia. But there was another independent Georgian kingdom in the
West, Imeretia. After the annexation of the eastern kingdom, “the Russian
government,” as we read in the Life of Hieroschemamonk Hilarion the
Georgian of Mount Athos, “initiated correspondence with the Imeretian king
concerning the uniting of his nation with Russia. King Solomon II sought the
counsel of his country’s foremost nobles, and in 1804, due to pressure from
Russia, he was left with little choice but to set forth the following: since
the kind did not have an heir to the throne, Imeretia would retain her
indepedence until his death, remaining in brotherly relations with Russia as
between two realms of the same faith. The Russian army had free passage across
Imeretian territory to the Turkish border, and the Imeretian army was required
to render them aid. The relations of the two countries were to be upheld in
those sacred terms which are proper to God’s anointed rulers and Christian
peoples united in an indivisible union of soul – eternally and unwaveringly.
But after the king’s death the legislation of the Russian Empire would be
introduced. The resolution was then sent to the Governor-General of the
Caucasus in Tbilisi for forwarding to Tsar Alexander I.
“Despite the general approval of the resolution by the king’s subjects,
one nobleman, Prince Zurab Tsereteli, began plotting how he could seize the
Imeretian throne for himself. He first attempted to erode the friendly
relations between the two monarchs by slandering each to the other. Unable to
sow discord, he began a communication with the Russian governor-general of the
Caucasus, Alexander Tormasov. Depicting the royal suite in the darkest colors
to the governor-general, after repeated intrigues he finally succeeded in his
designs. Eventually, the report reached the tsar. He, believing the slander,
ordered Tormasov to lure Solomon II to Tbilisi and escort him to Russia, where
he would remain a virtual prisoner.
“Not able to believe that others could be so base, treacherous and
ignoble, the king fell into the trap set by Tormasov and Prince Zurab. Fr. Ise
[the future Hieroschemamonk Hilarion] had initially warned the king of Prince
Zurab’s disloyalty. However, upon learning of his wife’s reposed he returned to
Kutaisi and was unable to furthr counsel the king.
“King Solomon II and his entire retinue were eventually coaxed all the
way to Tbilisi. There they were put under house arrest; the plan being to send
the king to live out his days in a palace in St. Petersburg. Preferring exile
to imprisonment, the king and his noblemen conceived a plan of escape and fled
across the border to Turkey. There, with Fr. Ise and his retinue, he lived out
the remainder of his life. After great deprivations and aborted attempts to
reclaim the Imeretian Kingdom from Russia, King Solomon II reposed at Trebizond
on February 19, 1815, in his forty-first year…
“After the king’s death, Fr. Ise intended to set out for Imeretia (then
annexed to Russia) no matter what the consequences. He informed all the
courtiers, who numbered about six hundred men, and suggested that they follow
his example. Many of them accepted his decision joyfully, but fear of the
tsar’s wrath hampered this plan. Fr. Ise reassured everyone, promising to take
upon himself the task of mediating before the tsar. He immediately wrote out a
petition in the name of all the princes and other members of the retinue, and
sent it to the tsar. The sovereign graciously received their petition, restored
them to their former ranks, and returned their estates…”[244]
The annexation of Georgia marked an important step forward in Russia’s
progress to becoming the Third Rome. In the eighteenth century the gathering of
the Russian lands had been completed, and the more or less continuous wars with
Turkey demonstrated Russia’s determination to liberate the Orthodox of the
Balkans and the Middle East. Georgia was the first non-Russian Orthodox nation
to enter the empire of the Third Rome on a voluntary basis…
At the same time, however, there was a large community of believers
within Russia, the Old Believers, that rejected the right of the Russian Church
and State to lead Orthodoxy. But a movement began among some Old Believer
communities towards union with the Orthodox on the basis of edinoverie,
or “One Faith” – that is, agreement on
dogmas and the authority of the Orthodox hierarchy, but with the former Old
Believers allowed to retain the pre-Niconian rites.
“Before 1800,” writes K.V. Glazkov, “almost all the Old Believer
communities had united with the Orthodox Church on their own conditions.
Besides, there were quite a few so-called crypto-Old Believers, who formally
belonged to the ruling Church, but who in their everyday life prayed and lived
according the Old Believer ways (there were particularly many of these amidst
the minor provincial nobility and merchant class). This state of affairs was
evidently not normal: it was necessary to work out definite rules, common for
all, for the union of the Old Believers with the Orthodox Church. As a result
of negotiations with the Muscovite Old Believers the latter in 1799 put forward
the conditions under which they would agree to accept a priesthood from the
Orthodox Church. These conditions, laid out in 16 points, partly represented
old rules figuring in the 1793 petition of the Starodub ‘agreers’, and partly
new ones relating to the mutual relations of the ‘one-faithers’ with the
Orthodox Church. These relations required the union of the ‘one-faithers’ with
the Orthodox Church, but allowed for their being to a certain degree isolated.
On their basis the Muscovite Old Believers submitted a petition to his Majesty
for their reunion with the Orthodox Church, and Emperor Paul I wrote at the
bottom of this document: ‘Let this be. October 27, 1800.’ This petition with
the royal signature was returned to the Muscovite Old Believers and was
accepted as complete confirmation of their suggested conditions for union, as
an eternal act of the recognition of the equal validity and honour of Old
Believerism and Orthodoxy.
“But on the same day, with the remarks (or so-called ‘opinions’) of
Metropolitan Plato of Moscow, conditions were confirmed that greatly limited
the petition of the Old Believers. These additions recognised reunited Old
Believerism as being only a transitional stage on the road to Orthodoxy, and
separated the ‘old-faith’ parishes as it were into a special semi-independent
ecclesiastical community. Wishing to aid a change in the views of those
entering into communion with the Church on the rites and books that they had
acquired in Old Believerism, and to show that the Old Believers were falsely
accusing the Church of heresies, Metropolitan Plato called the ‘agreers’
‘one-faithers’…
“The one-faithers petitioned the Holy Synod to remove the curses [of the
Moscow Council of 1666-1667] on holy antiquity, but Metropolitan Plato replied
in his additional remarks that they were imposed with justice. The Old
Believers petitioned for union with the Church while keeping the old rites, but
Metropolitan Plato left them their rites only for a time, only ‘in the hope’
that with time the reunited would abandon the old rites and accept the new…
“Amidst the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church the view became
more and more established that the ‘One Faith’ was a transitional step towards
Orthodoxy. But in fact the One Faith implies unity in dogmatic teaching and
the grace of the Holy Spirit with the use in the Divine services of various
Orthodox rites. But the old rite continued to be perceived as incorrect,
damaged and in no way blessed by the Church, but only ‘by condescension not
forbidden’ for a time.”[245]
In the last part of the reign of Catherine II, following the excesses of
Jacobinism in France, a reaction had set in against Masonry. Catherine backed
away from her Enlightenment ideas when she saw the effect they produced in the
revolution. “’Yesterday I remembered,” she wrote to Grimm in 1794, “that you
told me more than once: this century is the century of preparations. I will add
that these preparations consisted in preparing dirt and dirty people of various
kinds, who produce, have produced and will produce endless misfortunes and an
infinite number of unfortunate people.’
“The next year she categorically declared that the Encyclopédie
had only two aims: the one – to annihilate the Christian religion, and the
other – royal power. ‘I will calmly wait for the right moment when you will see
how right is my opinion concerning the philosophers and their hangers-on that
they participated in the revolution…, for Helvétius and D’Alambert both
admitted to the deceased Prussian king that this book had only two aims: the
first – to annihilate the Christian religion, and the second – to annihilate
royal power. They spoke about this already in 1777.”[246]
In his estimate of Masonry and French influence, if in little else, Tsar
Paul was in agreement with his mother. Well-known Masons were required to sign
that they would not open lodges (the rumour that Paul himself became a Mason in
the house of I.P. Elagin in 1778 is false), and the great General Suvorov was
sent to Vienna to join Austria and Britain in fighting the French.[247] But
the French continued to advance through Europe, and when, in 1797, Napoleon
threatened the island of Malta, the knights of the Order of the Maltese Cross,
who had ruled the island since the 16th century, appealed to the
protection of Tsar Paul. Paul accepted the responsibility, and in gratitude the
Maltese offered that he become their Grand Master. The Order was Catholic, but
anti-French and anti-revolutionary, so Paul accepted.[248]
In 1798 Napoleon seized Malta. Paul then entered into an alliance union
with Prussia, Austria and England against France. A Russian fleet entered the
Mediterranean, and in 1799 a Russian army under Suvorov entered Northern Italy,
liberating the territory from the French.
However, writes Lebedev, “in 1800 England seized the island of Malta,
taking it away from the French and not returning it to the Maltese Order. Paul
I sent Suvorov with his armies back to Russia and demanded that Prussia take
decisive measures against England (the seizure of Hanover), threatening to
break relations and take Hanover, the homeland of the English monarchs, with
Russian forces. But at the same time there began direct relations between Paul
and Napoleon. They began in an unusual manner. Paul challenged Napoleon to a
duel so as to decide State quarrels by means of a personal contest, without
shedding the innocent blood of soldiers. Bonaparte declined from the duel, but
had a high opinion of Paul I’s suggestion, and as a sign of respect released
his Russian prisoners without any conditions, providing them with all that they
needed at France’s expense. Paul I saw that with the establishment of Napoleon
in power, an end had been put to the revolution in France.[249]
Therefore he concluded a union with Napoleon against England (with the aim of
taking Malta away from her and punishing her for her cunning), and united
Russia to the ‘continental blockade’ that Napoleon had constructed against
England, undermining her mercantile-financial might.[250]
Moreover, in counsel with Napoleon, Paul I decided [on January 12, 1801] to
send a big Cossack corps to India – the most valuable colony of the English.[251] To
this day his Majesty’s order has been deemed ‘mad’ and ‘irrational’. But those
who say this conceal the fact that the plan for this Russian expedition against
India did not at all belong to Paul I: it arose under Catherine II and was
seriously considered by her (Paul I only put it into action).
“Russia’s break with England and the allies signified for them
catastrophe and in any case an irreparable blow to the British pocket,
and also to the pocket of the major Russian land-owners and traders
(English trade in Russia had been very strong for a long time!). From the
secret masonic centres of England and Germany an order was delivered to
the Russian Masons to remove the Empeor and as quickly as possible!
“Long disturbed by Paul I’s attitude, the Russian nobility were quick to
respond to the Masonic summons. Even before this,… in 1798 the Russian Masons
had succeeded in sowing dissension in the Royal Family. They slandered the
Tsaritsa Maria Fyodorovna of supposedly trying to rule her husband and instead
of him. At the same time he was ‘set up with’ the beauty Lopukhina, the
daughter of a very powerful Mason, and a faithful plotter. But the affair was
foiled through the nobility of the Emperor. Learning that Lopukhina loved
Prince Gagarin, Paul I arranged their marriage, since he was just good friends
with Lopukhina. The Masons had to save the situation in such a way that Prince
Gagarin himself began to help his own wife come closer to Paul I. She
settled in the Mikhailov palace and became a very valuable agent of the
plotters. From the autumn of 1800 the plot rapidly acquired a systematic character.
Count N.P. Panin (the college of foreign affairs) was drawn into it, as was
General Count Peter Alexeyevich von der Pahlen, the governor of Petersburg and
a very close advisor of the Tsar, General Bennigsen (also a German), Admiral
Ribas (a native of the island of Malta), the brothers Plato, Nicholas and
Valerian Zubov and their sister, in marriage Princes Zherbtsova, the senators
Orlov, Chicherin, Tatarinov, Tolstoy, Torschinsky, Generals Golitsyn,
Depreradovich, Obolyaninov, Talysin, Mansurov, Uvarov, Argamakov, the officers
Colonel Tolbanov, Skaryatin, a certain Prince Yashvil, Lieutenant Marin and
very many others (amongst them even General M.I. Kutuzov, one of the prominent
Masons of those years). At the head of the conspiracy stood the English consul
in Petersburg, Sir Charles Whitford. According to certain data, through him
England paid the plotters two million rubles in gold.
“The most important plotters were the Mason-Illuminati, who acted
according to the principle of their founder Weishaupt: ‘slander, slander –
something will stick!’ Floods of slanderous inventions poured onto the head of
the Emperor Paul I. Their aim was to ‘prove’ that he was mad, mentally ill and
therefore in the interests of the people (!) and dynasty (!) he could not
remain in power. The slander was strengthened by the fact that the Emperor’s
orders either were not carried out, or were distorted to an absurd degree, or
in his name instructions of a crazy character were given out. Von Pahlen was
especially successful in this. He began to insinuate to Paul I that his son
Alexander Pavlovich (and also Constantine), with the support of the Empress,
wanted to cast him from the throne. And when Paul I was upset by these
communications, it was insinuated to his sons and Alexander and Constantine
that the Emperor by virtue of a paranoid illness was intending to imprison them
together with their mother for good, while he was supposedly intending to place
the young Prince Eugene of Wurtemburg, who had then arrived in Russia, on the
throne. Noble society was frightened by the fact that Paul I in a fit of
madness [supposedly] wanted to execute some, imprison others and still others
send to Siberia. Pahlen was the person closest to the Tsar and they could
not not believe him! While he, as he later confessed, was trying to deceive
everyone, including Great Prince Alexander. At first the latter was told that
they were talking about removing his father the Emperor from power (because of
his ‘illness’), in order that Alexander should become regent-ruler. Count N.P.
Panin sincerely believed precisely in this outcome of the affair, as did many
other opponents of Paul I who had not lost the last trace of humanity. At first
Alexander did not at all agree with the plot, and prepared to suffer everything
from his father to the end. But Panin, and then Pahlen convinced him that the
coup was necessary for the salvation of the Fatherland! Alexander
several times demanded an oath from the plotters that they would not allow any
violence to his father and would preserve his life. These oaths were given, but
they lied intentionally, as Pahlen later boasted, only in order to ‘calm the
conscience’ of Alexander.[252] They
convinced Constantine Pavlovich in approximately the same way. The coup was
marked for the end of March, 1801. Before this Ribas died, and Panin landed up
in exile, from which he did not manage to return. The whole leadership of the
plot passed to Pahlen, who from the beginning wanted to kill the Emperor. Many
people faithful to his Majesty knew about this, and tried to warn him. Napoleon
also heard about all this through his own channels, and hastened to inform
Paul I in time…. On March 7, 1801 Paul I asked Pahlen directly about the plot.
He confirmed its existence and said that he himself was standing at the head
of the plotters, since only in this way could he know what was going on and
prevent it all at the necessary moment… This time, too, Pahlen succeeded in
deceiving the Tsar, but he felt that it would not do that for long, and that he
himself ‘was hanging by a thread’. He had to hurry, the more so in that many
officials, generals and especially all the soldiers were devoted to Paul I.
Besides, the Jesuits, who were at war with the Illuminati, knew
everything about the plot in advance. In the afternoon of March 11, in the
Tsar’s reception-room, Pater Gruber appeared with a full and accurate list of
the plotters and data on the details. But they managed not to admit the Jesuit
to an audience with Paul I. Palen told Alexander that his father had already
prepared a decree about his and the whole Royal Family’s incarceration in the
Schlisselburg fortress, and that for that reason it was necessary to act
without delay. Detachments of units loyal to Paul I were removed from the
Mikhailov castle, where he lived. On March 11, 1801 the father invited his sons
Alexander and Constantine and personally asked them whether they had any part
in the conspiracy, and, having received a negative reply, considered it
necessary that they should swear as it were for a second time to their
faithfulness to him as to their Tsar. The sons swore, deceptively… On
the night of the 11th to 12th of March, 1801, an English
ship entered the Neva with the aim of taking the conspirators on board in case
they failed. Before that Charles Whitford had been exiled from Russia.
Zherebtsova-Zubova was sent to him in England so as to prepare a place for the
conspirators there if it proved necessary to flee. On the night of the 12th
March up to 60 young officers who had been punished for misdemeanours were
assembled at Palen’s house and literally pumped with spirits. One of them
drunkenly remarked that it would be good for Russia if all the members of
the Royal Family were slaughtered at once! The rest rejected such an idea
with horror, but it spoke volumes! After much drinking they all moved by night
across Mars field to the Mikhailov castle. There the brave officers were scared
to death by some crows which suddenly took wing at night in an enormous flock
and raised a mighty cry. As became clear later, some of the young officers did
not even know where they were being led and why! But the majority knew. One
by one (and frightening each other), they managed to enter in two groups into
Paul I’s bedroom, having killed one faithful guard, a chamber-hussar at the
doors (the second ran for the sentry). Paul I, hearing the noise of a fight,
tried to run through a secret door, but a tapestry, ‘The School in Athens’, a
gift from the murdered king and queen of France, fell on top of him. The plotters
caught the Tsar. Bennigsen declared to him that they were arresting him and
that he had to abdicate from the throne, otherwise they could not vouch for the
consequences. The greatly disturbed Paul I did not reply. He rushed to a room
where a gun was kept, trying to break out of the ring of his murderers, but
they formed a solid wall around him, breathing in the face of the Emperor,
reeking of wine and spitefulness. Where had the courtier nobles disappeared!
‘What have I done to you?’ asked Paul I. ‘You have tormented us for four
years!’ was the reply. The drunken Nicholas Zubov took hold of the Emperor by
the hand, but the latter struck the scoundrel on the hand and repulsed him.
Zubov took a swing and hit the Tsar on the left temple with a golden snuff-box
given by Catherine II, wounding his temple-bone and eyes. Covered with blood,
Paul I fell to the ground. The brutalized plotters hurled themselves at him,
trampled on him, beat him, suffocated him. Special zeal was displayed by the
Zubovs, Skoriatin, Yashvil, Argamakov and, as people think, Pahlen (although
there are reasons for thinking that he took no personal part in the fight). At
this point the sentries made up of Semenovtsy soldiers faithful to Alexander
appeard (the soldiers had not been initiated into the plot). Bennigsen and
Pahlen came out to them and said that the Tsar had died from an attack of
apoplexy and now his son Alexander was on the throne. Pahlen rushed into
Alexander’s rooms. On hearing of the death of his father, Alexander sobbed. ‘Where
is your oath? You promised not to touch my father!’ he cried. ‘Enough of
crying! They’re going to lift all of us on their bayonets! Please go out to the
people!’ shouted Pahlen. Alexander, still weeping, went out and began to say
something to the effect that he would rule the state well… The sentries in
perplexity were silent. The soldiers could not act against the Heir-Tsarevich,
but they could also not understand what had happened. But the simple Russian
people, then and later and even now (!) understood well. To this day (since
1801) believing people who are being oppressed by the powerful of this world in
Petersburg (and recently also in Leningrad) order pannikhidas for ‘the murdered
Paul’, asking for his intercession. And they receive what they ask for!...
“And so the plot of the Russian nobles against the Emperor they did not
like succeeded. Paul I was killed with the clear connivance of his sons.
The eldest of them, Alexander, became the Tsar of Russia. In the first hours
and days nobody yet suspected how all this would influence the destiny of the
country in the future and the personal destiny and consciousness of Alexander I
himself. All the plotters had an evil end. Some were removed by Alexander I,
others were punished by the Lord Himself. The main regicide Pahlen was quickly
removed from all affairs and sent into exile on his estate. There he for a long
time went mad, becoming completely irresponsible. Nicholas Zubov and
Bennigsen also went mad (Zubov began to eat his own excreta). Having falsely
accused Paul I of being mentally ill, they themselves became truly mentally
ill! God is not mocked. ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay’, He said. The joy of
the Russian nobility was not especially long-lived. Alexander I and then
Nicholas I were nevertheless sons of their father! Both they and the
Emperors who followed them no longer allowed the nobility to rule them.
Immediately the Russian nobility understood this, that is, that they no
longer had any power over the Autocracy, they began to strive for the
annihilation of the Autocracy in Russia altogether, which they succeeded in
doing, finally, in February, 1917 – true, to their own destruction!..
Such was the zig-zag of Russian history, beginning with Catherine I and ending
with Nicholas II.
“The
reign of Emperor Paul Petrovich predetermined the following reigns in
the most important thing. As we have seen, this Tsar ‘turned his face’
towards the Russian Orthodox Church, strengthened the foundations of the
Autocracy and tried to make it truly of the people. Personally this cost him
his life. But thereby the later foundations were laid for the State life
of Russia in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th
centuries: ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality!’ Or, in its military
expression – ‘For the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland!’”[253]
“The prophecy of the clairvoyant monk Abel was completely fulfilled. He
personally foretold to the Emperor Paul: ‘Your reign will be short, and I, the
sinner, see your savage end. On the feast of St. Sophronius of Jerusalem you
will receive a martyric death from unfaithful servants. You will be suffocated
in your bedchamber by evildoers whom you warm on your royal breast… They will
bury you on Holy Saturday… But they, these evildoers, in trying to justify
their great sin of regicide, will proclaim that you are mad, and will blacken
your good memory.… But the Russian people with their sensitive soul will
understand and esteem you, and they will bring their sorrows to your grave,
asking for your intercession and the softening of the hears of the unrighteous
and cruel.’ This part of the prophecy of Abel was also fulfilled. When Paul was
killed, for many years the people came to his grave to pray, and he is
considered by many to be an uncanonised saint.”[254]
Monk Abel prophesied the following about Paul’s son and successor, Tsar
Alexander I: “Under him the French will burn down Moscow, but he will take
Paris from them and will be called the Blessed. But his tsar’s crown will be
heavy for him, and he will change the exploit of service as tsar for the
exploit of fasting and prayer, and he will be righteous in God’s eyes.”[255]
The reign of Tsar Alexander can be divided into three phases: a first
phase until 1812, when he was strongly influenced by the ideas of the
eighteenth-century French Enlightenment; a second phase from 1812 to about
1822, when the main influence on him was a kind of romantic mysticism; and a
third phase until his death, when he returned to True Orthodoxy. Tsar Alexander
faced, in a particularly acute form, the problems faced by all the “enlightened
despots” of the eighteenth century – that is, how to relieve the burdens of his
people without destroying the autocratic system that held the whole country
together. Like his fellow despots, Alexander was strongly influenced by the
ideals of the French revolution and by the masonic ferment that, as we have
seen, had penetrated the nobility of Russia no less than the élites of
Western Europe. So it is not surprising that he should have wavered between the
strictly autocratic views of his mother the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna,
the Holy Synod and the court historian Nicholas Karamzin, on the one hand, and
the liberalism of the Masons that surrounded him, on the other.
Only ten days after the death of his father, Alexander returned to the
Winter Palace one night to find an anonymous letter on his desk, full of
liberal, anti-autocratic sentiments of the kind that Alexander had espoused in
his youth. [256]
“Is it possible,” it asked, “to set aside the hope of nations in favour of the
sheer delight of self-rule?… No! He will at last open the book of fate which
Catherine merely perceived. He will give us immutable laws. He will establish
them for ever by an oath binding him to all his subjects. To Russia he will
say, ‘Here lie the bounds to my autocratic power and to the power of those who
will follow me, unalterable and everlasting.’”
The author turned out to be a member of the chancery staff, Karazin.
“There followed,” writes Palmer, “an episode which anywhere except Russia would
have seemed fantastic. When summoned to the Tsar’s presence, Karazin feared a
severe rebuke for his presumption. But Alexander was effusively magnanimous. He
embraced Karazin warmly and commended his sense of patriotic duty. Karazin, for
his part, knelt in tears at Alexander’s feet, pledging his personal loyalty.
Then the two men talked at length about the problems facing the Empire, of the
need to safeguard the people from acts of arbitrary tyranny and to educate them
so that they could assume in time the responsibilities of government…”[257]
Alexander was further hindered in breaking with his liberal past by the
guilt he felt at not stopping his father’s murder, and by the fact that in the
early part of his reign he was still surrounded by many of those Masons who had
murdered his father. The result was a continual increase in the power of
Masonry. “The movement was encouraged,” writes Hartley, “by the rumours, which
cannot be substantiated, that Alexander I became a mason (he certainly visited
lodges in Russia and Germany)[258]; his
younger brother Constantine certainly was a mason. Regional lodges continued to
flourish and young army officers who accompanied Russian forces through Europe
in 1813 and 1814 also attended, and were influenced by, lodges in the territory
through which they passed. The constitutions of secret societies which were
formed by army officers in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, like the Order of
the Russian Knights and the Union of Salvation and Welfare, copied some of
their rules and hierarchical organization from masonic lodges. In 1815, the
higher orders of masonry in Russia were subordinated to the Astrea grand
lodge.”[259]
In January, 1800 A.F. Labzin opened the “Dying Sphinx” lodge in
Petersburg. The members of the order were sworn to sacrifice themselves and all
they had to the aims of the lodge, whose existence remained a closely guarded
secret. In 1806 Labzin founded The Messenger of Zion as the vehicle of
his ideas. Suppressed at first by the Church hierarchy, it was allowed to
appear by the synodal over-procurator Prince Golitsyn in 1817.
“The
Messenger of Zion,” writes Walicki, “preached the notion of ‘inner
Christianity’ and the need for a moral awakening. It promised its readers that
once they were morally reborn and vitalized by faith, they would gain
suprarational powers of cognition and be able to penetrate the mysteries of
nature, finding in them a key to a superior revelation beyond the reach of the
Church.
“Labzin’s religion was thus a nondenominational and antiecclesiastical
Christianity. Men’s hearts, he maintained, had been imbued with belief in
Christ on the first day of creation; primitive pagan peoples were therefore
closer to true Christianity than nations that had been baptized but were
blinded by the false values of civilization. The official Church was only an
assembly of lower-category Christians, and the Bible a ‘silent mentor who gives
symbolic indications to the living teacher residing in the heart’. All dogmas,
according to Labzin, were merely human inventions: Jesus had not desired men to
think alike, but only to act justly. His words ‘Come unto Me all ye that labor
and are heavy laden’ showed that he did not mean to set up any intermediate
hierarchy between the believers and God.”[260]
In 1802 A.A. Zherebtsov opened the “United Friends” lodge in Petersburg.
Its aim was “to remove between men the distinctions of races, classes, beliefs
and views, and to destroy fanaticism and superstition, and annihilate hatred
and war, uniting the whole of humanity through the bonds of love and
knowledge.”[261]
Then there was the society of Count Grabianka, “The People of God”. “The aim of
the society was ‘to announce at the command of God the imminent Coming of the
Lord Jesus Christ and his glorious reign upon earth’ and to prepare the humble
and faithful souls for the approaching Kingdom of God. ‘As in the Rosecrucian
lodges,’ writes Sokolskaia, ‘in the lodge of Count Grabianka people indulged,
besides theosophy, in alchemy and magic. But while asserting that the brothers
of the “Golden Rose Cross” had as their object of study ‘white, Divine magic’,
the leaders of the Rosecrucians accused the followers of Count Grabianka of
indulging in reading books of black magic and consorting with evil spirits. In
sorrow at the lack of firmness of these brothers, who had become enmeshed in a
new teaching, the leaders wrote: ‘Those who are known to us are wavering on
their path and do not know what to join. And – God have mercy on them! – they
are falling into the hands of evil magicians or Illuminati…’”[262]
Finally, in 1810 an Illuminati lodge, “Polar Star”, was opened by
the German Lutheran and pantheist mystic Professor I.A. Fessler. Fessler
included among its adepts no less a person than M.M. Speransky, the Minister of
Finance.
“’Speransky,’ writes Professor Shiman, ‘was a Freemason who accepted the
strange thought of using the organization of the lodge for the reform of the
Russian clergy, which was dear to his heart. His plan consisted in founding a
masonic lodge that would have branch-lodges throughout the Russian State and
would accept the most capable clergy as brothers.
“’Speransky openly hated Orthodoxy. With the help of Fessler he wanted
to begin a war against the Orthodox Church. The Austrian chargé
d’affaires Saint-Julien, wrote in a report to his government on the fall of
Speransky that the higher clergy, shocked by the protection he gave to Fessler,
whom he had sent for from Germany, and who had the rashness to express Deist,
antichristian views, were strongly instrumental in his fall (letter of April 1,
1812). However, our ‘liberators’ were in raptures with Speransky’s
activities….’”[263]
This Masonic ferment was not without its effect on the conduct of
government. Thus within a few weeks of ascending the throne Alexander formed a neglassny
komitet (secret committee) composed of three or four people of liberal
views, who with the emperor plotted the transformation of Russia on liberal
lines.
“On June 24, 1801,” writes V.F. Ivanov,
“the secret committee opened its proceedings. Alexander called it, on the model
of the revolution of 1789, ‘the Committee of public safety’, and its opponents
from the conservative camp – ‘the Jacobin gang’.
“There began criticism of the existing order
and of the whole government system, which was recognised to be ‘ugly’. The firm
and definite conclusion was reached that ‘only a constitution can muzzle the
despotic government’”.[264]
However, Alexander’s coronation in September, 1801, in Moscow, the heart
of Old Russia with its autocratic traditions, pulled him in the opposite
direction to the liberal ideas of St. Petersburg. “After being anointed with
Holy Oil by the Metropolitan, Alexander swore a solemn oath to preserve the
integrity of the Russian lands and the sacred concept of autocracy; and he was
then permitted, as one blessed by God, to pass through the Royal Doors into the
Sanctuary where the Tsars had, on this one occasion in their lives, the privilege
of administering to themselves the Holy Sacrament. But Alexander felt unworthy
to exercise the priestly office in this way; and, as [Metropolitan] Platon
offered him the chalice, he knelt to receive communion as a member of the
laity. Although only the higher clergy and their acolytes witnessed this
gesture of humility, it was soon known in the city at large and created a deep
impression of the new Tsar’s sense of spiritual discipline.”[265]
St. Petersburg and Moscow, liberal “ecumenism” and Orthodoxy autocracy, the True Church of Orthodoxy and the false “inner church” of Masonry, divided Alexander’s heart between them, making his reign a crossroads in Russian history.
Alexander, Napoleon and Speransky
Alexander was finally forced to make his choice for Orthodoxy by the appearance on the frontiers of Russia of that supreme representative of the despotic essence of liberalism – Napoleon.
Tsar Paul had been murdered with the connivance of the British. Knowing
this, Alexander “did not trust the British…, and much that Consul Bonaparte was
achieving in France appealed to his own political instincts. Provided Napoleon
had no territorial ambitions in the Balkans or the eastern Mediterranean,
Alexander could see no reason for a clash of interests between France and
Russia. The Emperor’s ‘young friends’ on the Secret Committee agreed in general
with him rather than with [the Anglophile] Panin, and when Alexander discussed
foreign affairs with them during the late summer of 1801, they received the
impression that he favoured settling differences with France as a preliminary
to a policy of passive isolation. As St. Helens wrote to Hawksbury shortly
before Alexander’s departure for Moscow, ‘The members of the Emperor’s Council,
with whom he is particularly connected… been… zealous in promoting the intended
peace with France, it being their professed System to endeavour to disengage
the Emperor from all foreign Concerns… and induce him to direct his principal
attention to the affairs of the Interior.’”[266]
However, the influence of Napoleon on Alexander began to wane after the
Russian Emperor’s meeting with the Prussian king Frederick William and his
consort Queen Louise in June, 1802. The closeness of the two monarchs
threatened to undermine the Tsar’s policy of splendid isolation from the
affairs of Europe, and alarmed his foreign minister Kochubey, as well as
annoying the French. But isolation was no longer a practical policy as Napoleon
continued to encroach on the rights of the German principalities, and so
Alexander replaced his foreign minister and, in May, 1803, summoned General
Arakcheev to strengthen the Russian army in preparation for possible conflicts
in the future…
In 1804 the Duc d’Enghien was kidnapped in Baden by French agents, put
on trial and executed as a traitor. “Alexander was enraged by the crime. The
Duc d’Enghien was a member of the French royal house. By conniving at his
kidnapping and execution the First Consul became, in Alexander’s eyes, a
regicide. Nor was this the only cause of the Tsar’s indignation. He regarded
the abduction of the Duke from Baden as a particular insult to Russia, for
Napoleon had been repeatedly reminded that Alexander expected the French
authorities to respect the lands of his wife’s family. His response was swift
and dramatic. A meeting of the Council of State was convened in mid-April at
which it was resolved, with only one dissentient voice, to break off all
diplomatic contact with France. The Russian Court went into official mourning
and a solemn note of protest was despatched to Paris.
“But the French paid little regard to Russian susceptibilities. Napoleon
interpreted Alexander’s complaint as unjustified interference with the domestic
affairs and internal security of France. He entrusted the reply to Talleyrand,
his Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a bland statement appeared in the official
Moniteur: ‘If, when England prepared the assassination of Paul I, the
Russian Government had discovered that the organizers of the plot were no more
than a league away from the frontier, would it not have seized them at once?’
No allusion could have been better calculated to wound the Tsar than this
deliberate reference to the circumstances of his own accession. It was a
rhetorical question which he found hard to forgive or forget. A month later
news came from Paris that the First Consul had accepted from the French Senate
the title of Emperor. Now, to all his other transgressions, Napoleon had added
contempt for the dynastic principle. Resolutely the successor of Peter the
Great refused to acknowledge the newest of empires.”[267]
Alexander now set about forming a defensive alliance with Austria and
Prussia against France (there were extensive negotiations with Britain, too,
but no final agreement was reached). The Tsar and his new foreign minister, the
Pole Czartoryski, added an interesting ideological element to the alliance. “No
attempt would be made to impose discredited regimes from the past on lands
liberated from French military rule. The French themselves were to be told that
the Coalition was fighting, not against their natural rights, but against a
government which was ‘no less a tyranny for France than the rest of Europe’.
The new map of the continent must rest on principles of justice: frontiers
would be so drawn that they coincided with natural geographical boundaries,
provided outlets for industries, and associated in one political unit
‘homogeneous peoples able to agree among themselves’.”[268]
Appealing to peoples over the heads of their rulers, and declaring that
states should be made up of homogeneous ethnic units were, of course,
innovative steps, derived from the French revolution, which presented
considerable dangers for multi-ethnic empires such as the Russian and the
Austrian. Similarly new and dangerous was the idea that the nation was defined
by blood alone. None of these ideological innovations appealed to the other
nations, and the Coalition (including Britain) that was eventually patched up
in the summer of 1805 was motivated more by Napoleon’s further advances in
Italy than by a common ideology.
However, although the British defeated Napoleon at sea at Trafalgar, it
was a different story on land. At Austerlitz the Allies lost between 25,000 and
30,000 men killed, wounded or captured. And this was only the beginning. In
1806 Napoleon routed the Prussians at Jena and Auerstadt, and in 1807, after an
indecisive conflict at Eylau, he defeated the Russians at Friedstadt. Almost
the whole of Europe up to the borders of the Russian empire was in French
hands…
Two religious events of the year 1806 gave a deeper and darker hue to
the political and military conflict. In France Napoleon re-established the
Jewish Sanhedrin, which then proclaimed him the Messiah. Partly in response to
this, the Holy Synod of the Russian Church called Napoleon the antichrist,
declaring that he was threatening “to shake the Orthodox Greco-Russian Church,
and is trying by a diabolic invasion to draw the Orthodox into temptation and
destruction”. It said that during the revolution Napoleon had bowed down to
idols, to human creatures and whores. Finally, ‘to the greater disgrace of the
Church of Christ he has thought up the idea of restoring the Sanhedrin,
declaring himself the Messiah, gathering together the Jews and leading them to
the final uprooting of all Christian faith”.[269]
In view of this unprecedented anathema, and the solemn pledges he had
made to the King of Prussia, it would have seemed unthinkable for Alexander to
enter into alliance with Napoleon at this time. And yet this is precisely what
he did at the famous treaty of Tilsit, on the river Niemen, in July, 1807. It
came as a terrible shock to many that he should invite Napoleon to the meeting,
saying: “Alliance between France and Russia has always been a particular wish
of mine and I am convinced that this alone can guarantee the welfare and peace
of the world”. Queen Louise of Prussia, who was very close to Alexander, wrote
to him: “You have cruelly deceived me”. And it is hard not to agree with her
since, with Alexander’s acquiescence, Napoleon took most of the Prussian lands
and imposed a heavy indemnity on the Prussians, while Alexander took a part of
what had been Prussian territory in Poland, the province of Bialystok. The only
concession Alexander was able to wring from the Corsican was that King
Frederick should be restored to the heart of his greatly reduced kingdom “from
consideration of the wishes of His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias”.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has argued that the peace of Tilsit was in
Russia’s interests and should have been maintained, since it would have averted
the war of 1812 and the huge loss of life that involved. And he points to
little-known facts, such as the burning alive in the fire of Moscow of 15,000
Russian soldiers who were recovering from wounds suffered at Borodino in the
military hospitals of the city.[270]
However, he fails to take into account the long-term destructive power of the
ideology of the French revolution, of which Napoleon was the carrier. If
Napoleon had not invaded Russia in 1812, and been defeated there, that ideology
would have been firmly established throughout Europe up to the borders of
Russia, and would have had an intensified influence inside Russia. As it was, the
defeat of Napoleon gave the counter-revolution a chance to halt, if not finally
stamp out, the virus of revolution.
“As the days went by with no clear news from Tilsit, the cities of the
Empire were again filled with alarming rumours, as they had been after
Austerlitz: was Holy Russia to be sold to the Antichrist? For, whatever the
fashion on the Niemen, in St. Petersburg and Moscow the Church still thundered
on Sundays against Bonaparte, that ‘worshipper of idols and whores’. The Holy
Synod was unaccustomed to diplomatic revolution…”[271]
Metropolitan Platon of Moscow wrote to the Tsar warning him not to trust
Napoleon, whose ultimate aim was to subjugate the whole of Europe.[272] In
other letters, Platon compared Napoleon to Goliath and to “the Pharaoh, who
will founder will all his hosts, just as the other did in the Red Sea”.[273]
Of course, in view of his crushing military defeats, Alexander was in a
weak position at Tilsit. Nevertheless, if he could not defeat his enemy, he did
not have to enter into alliance with him or legitimise his conquests,
especially since Napoleon did not (at that time) plan to invade Russia. To
explain Alexander’s behaviour, which went against the Church, his Allies and
most of public opinion at home, it is not sufficient to point to the liberal
ideas of his youth, although those undoubtedly played a part. It is necessary
to point also to a personal factor, the romantically seductive powers of
that truly antichristian figure, Napoleon Bonaparte. As we have seen in the last
chapter, Napoleon had seduced a whole generation of young people in Europe and
America; so it is hardly surprising that the Tsar should also have come under
his spell.
As Tsaritsa Elizabeth perceptively wrote to her mother: “You know,
Mamma, this man [Napoleon] seems to me like an irresistible seducer who by
temptation or force succeeds in stealing the hearts of his victims. Russia, the
most virtuous of them, has defended herself for a long time; but she has ended
up no better than the others. And, in the person of her Emperor [Alexander],
she has yielded as much to charm as to force. He feels a secret attraction to
his enticer which is apparent in all he does. I should indeed like to know what
magic it is that he [Napoleon] employs to change people’s opinions so suddenly
and so completely…”[274]
In any case, “the peace of Tilsit,” writes Ivanov, ”did not bring pacification. A year after Tilsit a meeting took place at Erfurt between Napoleon and Alexander, to which Alexander brought Speransky. At this last meeting Napoleon made a huge impression and convinced him of the need of reforming Russia on the model of France.
“The historian Professor Shiman in his work, Alexander I, writes:
“’And so he (Alexander) took with him to Erfurt the most capable of his
officials, the privy councillor Michael Mikhailovich Speransky, and put him in
direct contact with Napoleon, who did not miss the opportunity to discuss with
him in detailed conversations various questions of administration. The result
of these conversations was a whole series of outstanding projects of reform, of
which the most important was the project of a constitution for Russia.’[275]
“Alexander returned to Petersburg enchanted with Napoleon, while his
State-Secretary Speransky was enchanted both with Napoleon and with everything
French.
“The plan for a transformation of the State was created by Speransky
with amazing speed, and in October, 1809 the whole plan was on Alexander’s
desk. This plan reflected the dominant ideas of the time, which were close to
what is usually called ‘the principles of 1789’.
“1) The source of power is the State, the country.
“2) Only that phenomenon which expresses the will of the people can be
considered lawful.
“3) If the government ceases to carry out the conditions on which it was
summoned to power, its acts lose legality. The centralised administration of
Napoleon’s empire influenced Alexander’s ideas about how he should reform his
own administration.
“4) So as to protect the country from arbitrariness, and put a bound to
absolute power, it is necessary that it and its organs – the government
institutions – should be led in their acts by basic laws, unalterable decrees,
which exactly define the desires and needs of the people.
“5) As a conclusion from what has been said: the basic laws must be the
work and creation of the nation itself.
“Proceeding from the proposition expressed by Montesquieu that ‘three
powers move and rule the state: the legislative power, the executive power and
the judicial power’, Speransky constructed the whole of his plan on the
principle of the division of powers – the legislative, the executive and the
judicial. Another masonic truth was introduced, that the executive power in the
hands of the ministers must be subject to the legislative, which was
concentrated in the State Duma.
“The plot proceeded, led by Speransky, who was supported by Napoleon.
“After 1809 stubborn rumours circulated in society that Speransky and
Count N.P. Rumyantsev were more attached to the interests of France than of
Russia.
“Karamzin [the historian] in his notes and conversations tried to
convince Alexander to stop the carrying out of Speransky’s reforms, which were
useless and would bring only harm to the motherland.
“Joseph de Maistre saw in the person of Speransky a most harmful
revolutionary, who was undermining the foundations of all state principles and
was striving by all means to discredit the power of the Tsar.
“For two years his Majesty refused to believe these rumours and
warnings. Towards the beginning of 1812 the enemies of Speransky in the persons
of Arakcheev, Shishkov, Armfeldt and Great Princess Catherine Pavlovna
convinced his Majesty of the correctness of the general conviction of
Speransky’s treachery.
“The following accusations were brought against Speransky: the
incitement of the masses of the people through taxes, the destruction of the
finances and unfavourable comments about the government.
“A whole plot to keep Napoleon informed was also uncovered. Speransky
had been entrusted with conducting a correspondence with Nesselrod, in which
the main French actors were indicated under pseudonyms. But Speransky did not
limit himself to giving this information: on his own, without authorisation
from above, he demanded that all secret papers and reports from the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs should be handed over to him. Several officials were found who
without objections carried out his desire….
“Then from many honourable people there came warnings about the
traitrous activities of Speransky.
“At the beginning of 1812 the Swedish hereditary prince Bernadotte, who
was in opposition to Napoleon, informed Petersburg that ‘the sacred person of
the Emperor is in danger’ and that Napoleon was ready with the help of a big
bribe to establish his influence in Russia again.
“A letter was intercepted in which Speransky told a friend about the
departure of his Majesty with the aim of inspecting the fortifications that had
been raised on the western border, and he used the expression ‘our Boban’. ‘Our
Boban’ was a humorous nickname inspired by Voltaire’s story, ‘White Bull’.
“Speransky was completely justly accused of belonging to the most
harmful sect of Masonry, the Illuminati. Moreover, it was pointed out
that Speransky was not only a member of it, but was ‘the regent of the Illuminati’.
“Speransky’s relations with the Martinists and Illuminati were
reported by Count Rastopchin, who in his ‘Note on the Martinists’, presented in
1811 to Great Princess Catherine Pavlovna, said that ‘they (the Martinists)
were all more or less devoted to Speransky, who, without belonging in his heart
to any sect, or perhaps any religion, was using their services to direct
affairs and keep them dependent on himself.’
“Finally, in the note of Colonel Polev, found in Alexander I’s study
after his death, the names of Speransky, Fessler, Magnitsky, Zlobin and others
were mentioned as being members of the Illuminati lodge…
“On March 11, 1812 Sangley was summoned to his Majesty, who informed him that Speransky ‘had the boldness to describe all Napoleon’s military talents and advised him to convene the State Duma and ask it to conduct the war while he absented himself’. ‘Who am I then? Nothing?’, continued his Majesty. ‘From this I see that he is undermining the autocracy, which I am obliged to transfer whole to my heirs.’
“On March 16 Professor Parrot of Derpt university was summoned to the
Winter Palace. ‘The Emperor,’ he wrote in a later letter to Emperor Nicholas I,
‘angrily described to me the ingratitude of Speransky, whom I had never seen,
expressing himself with feeling that drew tears from him. Having expounded the
proof of his treachery that had been presented to him, he said to me: ‘I have
decided to shoot him tomorrow, and have invited you here because I wish to know
your opinion on this.’
“Unfortunately, his Majesty did not carry out his decision: Speransky
had too many friends and protectors. They saved him, but for his betrayal he
was exiled to Nizhni Novgorod, and then – in view of the fact that the Nizhni
Novgorod nobility were stirred up against him – to Perm…. At a patriotic
banquet in the house of the Provincial Governor Prince Gruzinsky in Nizhni
Novgorod, the nobles’ patriotism almost cost Speransky his life. ‘Hang him,
execute him, burn Speransky on the pyre’ suggested the Nizhni Novgorod nobles.
“Through the efforts of his friends, Speransky was returned from exile
and continued his treachery against his kind Tsar. He took part in the
organisation of the uprising of the Decembrists, who after the coup appointed
him first candidate for the provisional government.”[276]
1812
However, it was Napoleon’s invasion rather than any internal factors
that swung the scales in favour of the status quo, thereby paradoxically saving
Russia from a 1789-style revolution. Napoleon decided on this fatal step after
a gradual cooling in relations between the two countries, ending with Alexander’s
withdrawal, in December, 1810, from the economically disastrous Continental
System that Napoleon had established against England. By May, Tsar Alexander
was showing a much firmer, and more realistic, attitude to the political and
military situation: “Should the Emperor Napoleon make war on me, it is
possible, even probable, that we shall be defeated. But this will not give him
peace… We shall enter into no compromise agreements; we have plenty of open
spaces in our rear, and we shall preserve a well-organized army… I shall not be
the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheathe it… I should
sooner retire to Kamchatka than yield provinces or put my signature to a treaty
in my conquered capital which was no more than a truce…”[277]
The invasion also probably saved Russia from a union with Catholicism,
which by now had made its Concordat with Napoleon and was acting, very
probably, on Napoleon’s orders. For in 1810 Metropolitan Platon of Moscow, as
K.A. Papmehl writes, “became the recipient of ecumenical overtures by the
French senator Grégoire (formerly Bishop of Blois), presumably on
Napoleon’s initiative. In a letter dated in Paris in May of that year,
Grégoire referred to the discussions held in 1717, at the Sorbonne,
between Peter I and some French bishops, with a view of exploring the prospects
of re-unification. Peter apparently passed the matter on to the synod of
Russian bishops who, in their turn, indicated that they could not commit
themselves on a matter of such importance without consulting the Eastern
Patriarchs. Nothing had been heard from the Russian side since then.
Grégoire nevertheless assumed that the consultation must have taken
place and asked for copies of the Patriarchs’ written opinions. He concluded
his letter by assuring Platon that he was hoping and praying for reunification
of the Churches…
“Platon passed the letter to the Synod in St. Petersburg. In 1811 [it]
replied to Grégoire, with Emperor Alexander’s approval, to the effect
that a search of Russian archives failed to reveal any of the relevant
documents. The idea of a union, Platon added, was, in any case ‘contrary to the
mood of the Russian people’ who were deeply attached to their faith and
concerned with its preservation in a pure and unadulterated form.”[278]
Only a few years before, at Tilsit in 1807, the Tsar had said to
Napoleon: “In Russia I am both Emperor and Pope – it’s much more convenient.”[279] But
this was not true: if Napoleon was effectively both Emperor and Pope in France,
this could never be said of the tsars in Russia, damaged though the Orthodox
symphony of powers had been by a century of absolutism and anti-Orthodox
acculturation. And the restraint on Alexander’s power constituted by what
remained of that symphony of powers evidently led him to think again about
imitating the West too closely, whether politically or ecclesiastically.
That the symphony of powers was still intact was witnessed at the
consecration of the Kazan cathedral in St. Petersburg on September 27, 1811,
the tenth anniversary of Alexander’s coronation. “There was an ‘immense crowd’
of worshippes and onlookers. Not for many years had the people of St.
Petersburg witnessed so solemn a ceremony symbolizing the inter-dependence of
Church and State, for this essential bond of Tsardom was customarily emphasized
in Moscow rather than in the newer capital. To some it seemed, both at the time
and later, that the act of consecration served Alexander as a moment of
re-dedication and renewal, linking the pledges he had given at his crowning in
Moscow with the mounting challenge from across the frontier. For the rest of
the century, the Kazan Cathedral remained associated in people’s minds with the
high drama of its early years, so that it became in time a shrine for the
heroes of the Napoleonic wars.”[280]
It was from the Kazan Cathedral that Alexander set out at the start of
the campaign, on April 21, 1812. As Tsaritsa Elizabeth wrote to her mother in
Baden: “The Emperor left yesterday at two o’clock, to the accompaniment of cheers
and blessings from an immense crowd of people who were tightly packed from the
Kazan Church to the gate of the city. As these folk had not been hustled into
position by the police and as the cheering was not led by planted agents, he
was – quite rightly – moved deeply by such signs of affection from our splendid
people!… ‘For God and their Sovereign’ – that was the cry! They make no
distinction between them in their hearts and scarcely at all in their worship.
Woe to him who profanes the one or the other. These old-world attitudes are
certainly not found more intensively anywhere than at the extremes of Europe.
Forgive me, dear Mamma, for regaling you with commonplaces familiar to everyone
who has a true knowledge of Russia, but one is carried away when speaking of
something you love; and you know my passionate devotion to this country.”[281]
A
century later, at the beginning of a still greater war against a western enemy,
another German-born Tsaritsa would express almost exactly similar sentiments on
seeing her husband and Tsar go to battle…
And so Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 acquired a significance
that the other Napoleonic wars in continental Europe did not have: it became a
struggle, not simply between two not-so-different political systems, but
between two radically opposed faiths: the faith in the Revolution and
the faith in Orthodoxy. 1812 produced an explosion of Russian patriotism and
religious feeling. More religious feeling than patriotism, which was not
immediately evident in some parts of the population at the beginning of the
invasion. For, as K.N. Leontiev writes: “It was ecclesiastical feeling and
obedience to the authorities (the Byzantine influence) that saved us in 1812.
It is well-known that many of our peasants (not all, of course, but those who
were taken unawares by the invasion) found little purely national feeling in
themselves in the first minute. They robbed the landowners’ estates, rebelled
against the nobility, and took money from the French. The clergy, the nobility
and the merchants behaved differently. But immediately they saw that the French
were stealing the icons and putting horses in our churches, the people became
harder and everything took a different turn…”[282]
God’s evident support for the heroic Russian armies, at the head of
which was the “Reigning” icon of the Mother of God[283],
reanimated a fervent pride and belief in Holy Russia. Of particular
significance was the fact that it had been Moscow, the old capital associated
with Orthodoxy and the Muscovite tsars, rather than the new and westernized
capital of St. Petersburg, which had borne the brunt of the suffering. For it
was not so much the indecisive battle of Borodino, a contest in which,
according to Napoleon, “the French showed themselves worthy of victory and the
Russians of being invincible”[284], as
the burning of Moscow, which destroyed 80% of dwellings in the city, and
Alexander’s refusal to surrender even after that, which proved the decisive
turning-point, convincing Napoleon that he could not win…
The terrible sufferings of the French on their return march are
well-known. There was even cannibalism, - a sure sign of apocalyptic times, -
as the soldiers of the Great Army began to put their fellow-soldiers in the
stew pots. Out of the vast army that set out for Russia, only 120,000 returned,
35,000 of them French.[285]
However, the victory of the Orthodox was almost prevented by the
intrigues of the Masons. Prominent among them was the commander-in-chief of the
army Kutuzov, who, according to Sokolskaia, was initiated into Masonry at the
“Three Keys” lodge in Regensburg, and was later received into lodges in
Frankfurt, Berlin, Petersburg and Moscow, penetrating into the secrets of the
higher degrees.[286] The
Tsar was against Kutuzov’s appointment, but said: “The public wanted his
appointment, I appointed him: as regards myself personally, I wash my hands of
him.”
He was soon proved right in his premonition. The Russian position at the
battle of Borodino was poorly prepared by Kutuzov, and he himself took no part
in it. The previous commander-in-chief, Barclay, took the lead and acted
heroically. Then he followed the agreed plan by retreating and evacuating
Moscow. But Kutuzov put all the blame for this on Barclay. De Maistre, writing to
his master, the King of Sardinia, was horrified: “There are few crimes to
compare with openly attributing all the horror and destruction of Moscow to
General Barclay, who is not Russian and has nobody to defend him.”[287]
In Moscow, the patriotic Count Rastopchin, well aware of the
pro-Napoleonic sentiments of the nobility, had them evacuated, while Kutuzov
slept. As the Martinist Runich said: “Rastopchin, acting through fear, threw
the nobility, the merchants and the non-gentry intellectuals out of Moscow in
order that they should not give in to the enticements and influence of
Napoleon’s tactics. He stirred up the hatred of the people by the horrors [of
the fire, which was lit on Rastopchin’s orders] that he ascribed to the
foreigners, whom he mocked at the same time. He saved Russia from the yoke of
Napoleon.”[288]
“The fire of Moscow started the people’s war. Napoleon’s situation
deteriorated from day to day. His army was demoralised. The hungry French
soldiers wandered round the outskirts of Moscow searching for bread and
provisions. Lootings and murders began. Discipline in the army declined
sharply. Napoleon was faced with a threatening dilemma: either peace, or
destruction.
“Peace negotiations began. On September 23 at Tarutino camp Kutuzov met
Napoleon’s truce-envoy Lauriston. Kutuzov willingly accepted this suggestion
and decided to keep the meeting a complete secret. He told Lauriston to meet
him outside the camp, beyond the line of our advance posts, on the road to
Moscow. Everything was to be done in private and the profect for a truce was to
be put forward very quickly. This plan for a secret agreement between Napoleon
and the masonic commander-in-chief fell through. Some Russian generals and
especially the English agent attached to the Russian army, [General] Wilson,
protested against the unofficial secret negotiations with Napoleon. On
September 23 Wilson made a scene in front of Kutuzov; he came to him as the
representative of the general staff and army generals and declared that the army
would refuse to obey him. Wilson was supported by the Duke of Wurtemburg, the
Emperor’s uncle, his son-in-law the Duke of Oldenburg and Prince Volkonsky,
general-adjutant, who had arrived not long before with a report from
Petersburg. Kutuzov gave way, and the meeting with Lauriston took place in the
camp headquarters.
“Kutuzov’s failure in securing peace did not stop him from giving
fraternal help to Napoleon in the future.
“After insistent urgings from those close to him and at the insistence
of his Majesty, Kutuzov agreed to attack near Tarutino.
“The battle of Tarutino revealed the open betrayal of the
commander-in-chief.
“’When in the end the third and fourth corps came out of the wood and
the cavalry of the main army was drawn up for the attack, the French began a
general retreat. When the French retreat was already an accomplished fact and
the French columns were already beyond Chernishina, Bennigsen moved his armies
forward.
“The main forces at the moment of the French retreat had been drawn up
for battle. In spite of this, and the persuasions of Ermolov and Miloradovich,
Kutuzov decisively refused to move the armies forward, and only a part of the
light cavalry was set aside for pursuing the enemy, the rest of the army
returned to the Tarutino camp.
“Bennigsen was so enraged by the actions of the field-marshal that after
the battle he did not even consider it necessary to display military etiquette
in front of him and, on receiving his congratulations on the victory, did not
even get off his horse.
“In private conversations he accused Kutuzov not only of not supporting
him with the main army for personal reasons, but also of deliberately holding
back Osterman’s corps.
“For many this story will seem monstrous; but from the Masonic point of
view it was necessary: the Mason Kutuzov was only carrying out his obligations
in relation to his brother (Murat), who had been beaten and fallen into
misfortune.
“In pursuing the retreating army of Napoleon Kutuzov did not have enough
strength or decisiveness to finish once and for all with the disordered French
army. During the retreat Kutuzov clearly displayed criminal slowness.
“’The behaviour of the field-marshall drives me mad,’ wrote the English
agent General Wilson about this.” For “the Masonic oath was always held to be
higher than the military oath.”[289]
The
Aftermath of Victory
The victory over Napoleon elicited an explosion of religious feeling,
not least in the Tsar himself, who said: “The burning of Moscow enlightened my
soul, and the judgement of God on the icy fields filled my heart with a warmth
of faith such as I had not felt before. Then I came to know God as He is
depicted in the Holy Scriptures. I am obliged to the redemption of Europe from
destruction for my own redemption”. All the crosses and medallions minted in
memory of 1812, he said, were to bear the inscription: “Not to us, not to us,
but to Thy name give the glory”.[290]
God was teaching the Russians a most important lesson: that those
western, and especially French, influences which had so inundated Russia in the
century up to 1812, were unequivocally evil and threatened to destroy all that
was good in Russia. As Bishop Theophan the Recluse wrote generations later: “We
are attracted by enlightened Europe… Yes, there for the first time the pagan
abominations that had been driven out of the world were restored; then they
passed and are passing to us, too. Inhaling into ourselves these poisonous
fumes, we whirl around like madmen, not remembering who we are. But let us
recall 1812: Why did the French come to us? God sent them to exterminate that
evil which we had taken over from them. Russia repented at that time, and God
had mercy on her.”[291]
Tragically, however, that lesson was only partially and superficially
learned. Although the Masonic plans to overthrow both Church and State had been
foiled, both Masonry and other unhealthy religious influences continued to
flourish. And discontent with the existing order was evident in both the upper
and the lower classes.
Thus the question arose of the emancipation of the peasants, who had
played such a great part in the victory, voluntarily destroying their own homes
and crops in order to deny them to the French. They hoped for more in return
than they actually received, especially those who had marched in the armies
that marched to Paris, observing, as Zamoyski notes, “that peasants in France
and Germany lived in proper houses and ate well, and that even Prussian
soldiers were treated in more human fashion than they were themselves”[292].
“There was great bitterness,” writes Hosking, “among peasants who
returned from their militia service to find that there was no emancipation.
Alexander, in his manifesto of 30 August 1814, thanking and rewarding all his
subjects for their heroic deeds, said of the peasants simply that they would
‘receive their reward from God’…. Some nobles tried to persuade the authorities
not to allow them back, but to leave them in the regular army as ordinary
soldiers. The poet Gavriil Derzhavin was informed by his returnees that they
had been ‘temporarily released’ and were now state peasants and not obliged to
serve him. Rumours circulated that Alexander had intended to free them all, but
had been invited to a special meeting of indignant nobles at night in the
Senate, from which he had allegedly been rescued, pleading for his life, by his
brother Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich…”[293]
Here we have the theme, familiar throughout later Russian history, of
the people laying the blame for their woes, not on the tsar, but on the nobles.
Some peasants may have wanted emancipation and a share in the nobles’ wealth.
But they wanted it with the Tsar and through the Tsar, not
as the expression of some egalitarian and anti-monarchist ideology. Tsarism and
Orthodoxy were the great strengths of Russia, which her enemies always
underestimated. The French revolution in this, its imperialist, expansionist
phase, overthrew many kingdoms and laid the seeds for the overthrow of still
more; but it broke against the rock of the Russian people’s faith in their God
and their Tsar…
However, if the masses of the people were still Orthodox and loyal to
the Tsar, this was becoming more and more difficult to say of the nobility. We
have seen the extent to which Masonry penetrated the bureaucracy in the early
part of Alexander’s reign. Unfortunately, the triumphant progress of the
Russian army into the heart of Masonry, Paris, did not destroy this influence,
but only served to strengthen it. For, as Zamoyski writes, “if nobles at home
wanted to keep their serfs, the nobles who served as officers in the armies
that occupied Paris were exposed to other, liberal influences. They had been
brought up speaking French and reading the same literature as educated people
in other countries. They could converse effortlessly with German and English
allies as well as with French prisoners and civilians. Ostensibly, they were
just like any of the Frenchmen, Britons and Germans they met, yet at every step
they were made aware of profound differences. The experience left them with a
sense of being somehow outside, almost unfit for participation in European
civilisation. And that feeling would have dire consequences…”[294]
Not only Masonry and liberalism, but all kinds of pseudo-religious
mysticism flooded into Russia from the West. There was, writes N. Elagin, “a
veritable inundation of ‘mystical’ and pseudo-Christian ideas… together with
the ‘enlightened’ philosophy that had produced the French Revolution. Masonic
lodges and other secret societies abounded; books containing the Gnostic and
millenarian fantasies of Jacob Boehme, Jung-Stilling, Eckhartshausen and other
Western ‘mystics’ were freely translated into Russian and printed for distribution
in all the major cities of the realm; ‘ecumenical’ salons spread a vague
teaching of an ‘inner Christianity’ to the highest levels of Russian society;
the press censorship was under the direction of the powerful Minister of
Spiritual Affairs, Count Golitsyn, who patronized every ‘mystical’ current and
stifled the voice of traditional Orthodoxy by his dominance of the Holy Synod
as Procurator; the Tsar Alexander himself, fresh from his victory over Napoleon
and the formation of a vaguely religious ‘Holy Alliance’ of Western powers,
favored the new religious currents and consulted with ‘prophetesses’ and other
religious enthusiasts; and the bishops and other clergy who saw what was going
on were reduced to helpless silence in the face of the prevailing current of
the times and the Government’s support of it, which promised exile and disgrace
for anyone who opposed it. Many even of those who regarded themselves as
sincere Orthodox Christians were swept up in the spiritual ‘enthusiasm’ of the
times, and, trusting their religious feelings more than the Church’s authority
and tradition, were developing a new spirituality, foreign to Orthodoxy, in the
midst of the Church itself. Thus, one lady of high birth, Ekaterina P.
Tatarinova, claimed to have received the gift of ‘prophecy’ on the very day she
was received into the Orthodox Church (from Protestantism), and subsequently
she occupied the position of a ‘charismatic’ leader of religious meetings which
included the singing of Masonic and sectarian hymns (while holding hands in a
circle), a peculiar kind of dancing and spinning when the ‘Holy Spirit’ would
come upon them, and actual ‘prophecy’ – sometimes for hours at a time. The
members of such groups fancied that they drew closer to the traditions of
Orthodoxy by such meetings, which they regarded as a kind of restoration of the
New Testament Church for ‘inward’ believers, the ‘Brotherhood in Christ’, as
opposed to the ‘outward’ Christians who were satisfied with the Divine services
of the Orthodox Church… The revival of the perennial ‘charismatic’ temptation
in the Church, together with a vague ‘revolutionary’ spirit imported from the
West, presented a danger not merely to the preservation of true Christianity in
Russia, but to the very survival of the whole order of Church and State…”[295]
V.N. Zhmakin writes: “From 1812 there began with us in Russia a time of
the domination of extreme mysticism and pietism… The Emperor Alexander became a
devotee of many people simultaneously, from whatever quarter they declared their
religious enthusiasm… He protected the preachers of western mysticism, the
Catholic paters… Among the first of his friends and counsellors was Prince A.N.
Golitsyn, who was ober-procurator of the Synod from 1803… He had the right to
affirm the Synodal decisions… Prince Golitsyn was the complete master of the
Russian Orthodox Church in the reign of Alexander I… Having received no serious
religious education, like the majority of aristocrats of that time, he was a
complete babe in religious matters and almost an ignoramus in Orthodoxy…
Golitsyn, who understood Orthodoxy poorly, took his understanding of it only
from its external manifestations… His mystical imagination inclined in favour
of secrecy, fancifulness, originality… He became simultaneously the devotee of
all the representatives of contemporary mysticism, such as Mrs. Krunder, the
society of Quakers, Jung Schtilling, the pastors… etc. Moreover, he became the
pitiful plaything of all the contemporary sectarians, all the religious
utopians, the representatives of all the religious theories, beginning with the
Masons and ending with the … eunuch Selivanov and the half-mad Tatarinova. In
truth, Prince Golitsyn at the same time protected the mystics and the pietists,
and gave access into Russia to the English missionaries, and presented a broad
field of activity to the Jesuits, who, thanks to the protection of the Minister
of Religious Affairs, sowed a large part of Russia with their missions… He
himself personally took part in the prayer-meetings of the Quakers and waited,
together with them, for the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, he himself took
part in the religious gatherings of Tatarinova, which were orgies reminiscent
of the Shamans and khysts…. Thanks to Prince Golitsyn, mystical literature received
all rights of citizenship in Russia – works shot through with mystical ravings
were distributed en masse… By the direct order of Prince Golitsyn all the more
significant mystical works and translations were distributed to all the
dioceses to the diocesan bishops. In some dioceses two thousand copies of one
and the same work were sent to some dioceses… Prince Golitsyn… acted… in the
name of the Holy Synod… and in this way contradicted himself;… the Synod as it
were in its own name distributed works which actually went right against
Orthodoxy…. He strictly persecuted the appearance of such works as were
negatively oriented towards mysticism… Many of the simple people, on reading
the mystical works that came into their hands, … were confused and perplexed.”[296]
Something of the atmosphere of St. Petersburg at that time can be
gathered from the recollections of the future Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov),
when he went there for service in the newly reformed ecclesiastical schools in
1809. “The Synod greeted him with the advice to read ‘Swedenborg’s Miracles’
and learn French. He was taken to court to view the fireworks and attend a
masquerade party in order to meet Prince Golitsyn…, quite literally ‘amidst the
noise of a ball’… This was Philaret’s first masquerade ball, and he had never
before seen a domino. ‘At the time I was an object of amusement in the Synod,’
Philaret recalled, ‘and I have remained a fool’.”[297]
As Alexander pursued the remnants of Napoleon’s Great Army into Poland
in the bitterly cold winter of 1812-13, he was “in a state bordering on
religious ecstasy. More and more he turned to the eleventh chapter of the Book
of Daniel with the apocalyptic vision of how the all-conquering King of the
South is cast down by the King of the North. It seemed to him as if the
prophecies, which had sustained him during the dark days of autumn and early
winter, were now to be fulfilled: Easter this year would come with a new
spiritual significance of hope for all Europe. ‘Placing myself firmly in the hands
of God I submit blindly to His will,’ he informed his friend Golitsyn from
Radzonow, on the Wrkra. ‘My faith is sincere and warm with passion. Every day
it grows firmer and I experience joys I had never know before… It is difficult
to express in words the benefits I gain from reading the Scriptures, which
previously I knew only superficially… All my glory I dedicate to the
advancement of the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ’… At Kalisch (Kalisz) on the
border of the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw and Prussia the Tsar concluded a convention
with Frederick William: the agreement provided for a close military alliance
between Russia and Prussia, stipulating the size of their respective
contingents and promising Prussia territory as extensive as in 1806; but the
final clauses went beyond the normal language of diplomacy to echo Alexander’s
religious inspiration. ‘Let all Germany join us in our mission of liberation,’
the Kalisch Treaty said. ‘The hour has come for obligations to be observed with
that religious faith, that sacred inviolability which holds together the power
and permanence of nations.’”[298]
Of course, there were difficult battles still to be fought, and alarms
to be endured. Not the least of them was Napoleon’s escape from Elba, which he
had been unwisely given (as many others had foreseen, Elba was much too close
to the mainland) at the insistence of the ever-chivalrous Alexander, after
which he was only with great difficulty finally defeated at Waterloo in June,
1815. Nevertheless, the Tsar showed great tenacity of purpose, in contrast to
his weakness at Tilsit, in pushing all the way to Paris and the complete
overthrow of the antichrist-emperor, and must take the main credit for finally
seeing a legitimate Bourbon king placed on the throne of France.
Perhaps the best measure of his victory was
the Orthodox Divine Liturgy celebrated on Alexander’s namesday, September 12,
on seven altars on the Plain of Vertus, eighty miles east of Paris, in the
presence of the Russian army and all the leading political and military leaders
of Europe. Neither before nor since in the modern history of Europe has there
been such a universal witness, by all the leaders of the Great Powers, to the
true King of kings and Lord of lords.
And if this was just a diplomatic concession on the part of the
non-Orthodox powers, it was much more than that for Alexander. His truly
Orthodox spirit, so puzzling to the other leaders of Europe, was manifested in
a letter he wrote that same evening: “This day has been the most beautiful in
all my life. My heart was filled with love for my enemies. In tears at the foot
of the Cross, I prayed with fervour that France might be saved…”[299]
A
few days later Alexander presented his fellow sovereigns with a sacred treaty
which he urged them to sign and publish. The treaty was designed to bind the
rulers of Europe to a union in virtue, requiring them “to take as their sole
guide the precepts of the Christian religion”. The Tsar insisted on proclaiming
the treaty dedicated “to the Holy and Indivisible Trinity” in Paris because it
was the most irreligious of all Europe’s capital cities.[300]
Only the King of Prussia welcomed the idea. The Emperor of Austria was
embarrassed; and in private agreed with his chancellor, Metternich, that
Alexander was mad. On the British side, the Duke of Wellington confessed that
he could hardly keep a straight face. He and Castlereagh mocked it in private.
Why such irreverence when all agreed that they had come together to
defend religion and legitimate government against the atheist Jacobinism?
First, because it was not religion, but legitimate government, - more
precisely, their own positions, - that most of the statesmen were really interested
in, little understanding that the foundation of legitimate government is religion.
And secondly, because there had been no agreement in Europe about what “the
Christian religion” was for nearly 800 years…
Nevertheless, Tsar Alexander was now the most powerful man in Europe,
and the others could not afford to reject his project out of hand. So, led by
Metternich, they set about discreetly editing the treaty of its more mystical
elements until it was signed by the monarchs of Russia, Austria and Prussia
(the British and the Turks opted out, as did the Pope of Rome) on September 26. [301]
“Conformably to the word of the Holy Scriptures,” declared the
signatories, “the three contracting Monarchs will remain united by the bonds of
a true and indissoluble fraternity, and considering each other as fellow
countrymen, they will on all occasions, and in all places led each other aid
and assistance; and regarding themselves towards their subjects and armies as
fathers of families, they will lead them, in the same fraternity with which
they are animated to protect religion, peace and justice.”[302] They
pledged themselves to stand together as “members of a single Christian nation”
– a remarkable idea in view of the fact that of the three members of the
Alliance, one, Russia, was Orthodox, another, Austria, was Catholic, and the
third, Prussia, was Protestant.
Golitsyn wrote about the Sacred Alliance in positively chiliastic terms:
“This act cannot be recognized as anything other than a preparation for that
promised kingdom of the Lord which will be upon the earth as in the heavens.”[303] And
the future Metropolitan Philaret wrote: “Finally the kingdoms of this world
have begun to belong to our Lord and His Christ”.[304]
But if the Russians’ vision was apocalyptic, that of the Germans was
backward-looking in accordance with that romantic medievalism that was sweeping
the Germanic lands. For, as Bamber Gascoigne writes: “The Middle Ages were the
period when Europe had seemed to be a single Christian nation, and the medieval
yearnings of the Romanic Movement played a large part in the political dreams
of the right. In 1799 Novalis had anticipated the mood in an essay called Christendom
or Europe. He advocated returning to a rather vaguely defined medieval
structure of society, in which the virtues were ‘respect for antiquity,
attachment to spiritual institutions, a love for the monuments of our
ancestors, and the old glorious state families, and the joy of obedience.’ Of
all these merits, the joy of obedience was undoubtedly the most attractive to
the Christian rulers signing the Holy Alliance. The only prince to abstain was
the English prince regent, who was advised by Castlereagh that the alliance was
‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’ (the strictly utilitarian Jeremy
Bentham had an even more pungent phrase for such matters, ‘nonsense on
stilts’). The Christian princes wasted no time in reviving certain ancient
institutions which had been abolished under the Enlightenment or by Napoleon.
The Index of Prohibited Books and the Inquisition were restored; and the
Jesuits, who for two centuries had been a symbol of papal influence throughout
Europe, were re-established.”[305]
Even some renowned churchmen seem to have been temporarily influenced by
the ecumenist spirit of this project.[306]
Fortunately, however, later tsars, while retaining the politics of alliances
with monarchical states against the revolution (Nicholas I even helped the
Sultan of Turkey against the Pasha of Egypt in 1833), did not attach to it that
ecumenist religious significance given to it by Tsar Alexander. A dangerous
temptation had been narrowly averted…
The
Polish Question
One of the most important issues faced by the Great Powers in 1815 was
the settlement of Poland. As was to be expected, the Poles welcomed Napoleon
after he defeated the Prussians at Jena in 1806, even if his claims to be a
liberator were well and truly tarnished by then (Polish soldiers had suffered
particularly in helping the French tyrant’s attempts to crush Dominican
independence). But Napoleon was the means, they felt, to their own
independence.[307]
They were doomed to be disappointed, however. In 1807 Napoleon created the
Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and by 1812 controlled almost all the lands of the
former Republic – but did not restore it to full independence. And then the
Russian armies came back… Nevertheless, Polish soldiers faithfully followed
Napoleon both to Elba and to St. Helena, and the cult of Napoleon remained
alive in Polish hearts for a long time. Thus the poet Mickiewicz signed himself
“Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz”[308].
But in fact Tsar Alexander offered the Poles more than Napoleon had ever
given them – one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe, affording the
Poles more rights than even the Russians![309] As
Lebedev writes: “Great was the joy of Emperor Alexander I in connection with
the fact that in 1815 he succeeded in creating a Polish Kingdom that was free
both from Prussia and from Austria and almost completely – from Russia! For he
gave this Kingdom a Constitution! An unparalleled situation was created. While
remaining a part of the Russian Empire, Poland was at the same time a state
within a state, and distinct from Russia precisely because it had rights and
freedoms which did not exist in Russia! But this seemed little to the proud
(and therefore the blind) Poles! They were dreaming of recreating, then
and there, the [Polish State] in that ‘greatness’ which, as they thought, it
had had before the ‘division of Poland. A revolutionary ‘patriotic’ movement
began in which even the friend of Alexander I’s youth, A. Chartoryskij, took
part. Like other Polish ‘pans’ [nobles], he looked with haughty coldness on the
actions of the Emperor in relation to Poland. The Polish gentry did not
value them…”[310]
A
complicating factor in the Polish question was Freemasonry. The Masonic
historian Jasper Ridley writes: “Alexander I’s attitude to Freemasonry in
Russia was affected by the position in Poland. The first Freemasons’ lodge in
Poland was formed in 1735; but the Freemasons were immediately attacked by the
Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church, which was influential in Poland, and in
1738 King Augustus II issued a decree suppressing them. His successor, King
Stanislaus Augustus Poniatovsky, was sympathetic to the Freemasons. He allowed
the first Polish Grand Lodge to be formed in 1767, and ten years later he
himself became a Freemason.
“The partition of Poland between Catherine the Great, Frederick the
Great and Maria Theresa in 1772, was followed by the further partitions of 1793
and 1796, which eliminated Poland as a country. It was a black day for the
Polish Freemasons. Only Frederick the Great and his successors in Prussia
tolerated them; they were suppressed in Austrian Poland in 1795 and in Russian
Poland in 1797. Some of the leaders of the Polish resistance… were Freemasons;
but the most famous of all the heroes of Polish independence, Tadeusz
Kosciuszko, was not a Freemason, though he was a personal friend of La Fayette.
“When Napoleon defeated the Russians at Eylau and Friedland, and
established the Grand Duchy of Warsaw under French protection in 1807, he
permitted and encouraged the Freemasons, and in March 1810 the Grand Orient of
Poland was established. After the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I did not ban
the Freemasons in that part of Poland which again came under Russia. When he
visited Warsaw in November 1815 he was entertained at a banquet by the Polish
Freemasons, and was made a member of the Polish Grand Orient. In 1816 General
Alexander Rojnezky became Deputy Grand Master of the Polish Grand Orient, and
he drafted a new constitution for the Freemasons which brought the organization
to a considerable extent under the control of the Russian government. This
aroused the resentment of patriotic Poles who did not like the Russians. In
1819 Major Victor Lukacinsky formed a rival masonic organization. It was free
from Russian control and only Poles were admitted.
“The development in Poland was probably one of the factors which
persuaded Tsar Alexander to change his attitude towards Freemasonry [and the
Polish Kingdom]; though another was his general shift towards a reactionary [sic]
policy which followed the formation of the Holy Alliance against revolution
between Russia, Austria and Prussia. He asked Lieutenant General Egor Alexandrovich
Kushelev, who was a senator and himself a prominent Freemason, to report to him
on the masonic lodges in Russia.
“Kushelev’s report, in June 1821, stated that although true Freemasons
were loyal subjects and their ideals and activities were praiseworthy, masonic
lodges could be used as a cover for revolutionary activities, as they had been
in the Kingdom of Naples; and the same was happening in Russia, especially in
three of the St. Petersburg lodges.
“’This is the state, Most Gracious Sovereign, in which Masonic lodges
now exist in Petersburg. Instead of the Spirit of Christian mildness and of
true Masonic rules and meekness, the spirit of self-will, turbulence and real
anarchy acts through them.’
“Within a month of receiving Kushelev’s report, Alexander I banned the
publication of masonic songs and all other masonic documents. On 1 August 1822
he issued a decree suppressing the Freemasons throughout Russia. In November he
issued a similar decree banning the Freemasons and all other secret societies
in Russian Poland. These decrees were re-enacted by his more reactionary
brother, Tsar Nicholas I, when Nicholas succeeded Alexander…”[311]
If the Polish problem was difficult to solve, the Jewish problem was
even more intractable. The two nations had much in common: both were nations
without states, distrustful of each other but united in their craving for
national autonomy, both were motivated by a fiercely anti-Orthodox faith, and
both occupied approximately the same territories in what was now Western
Russia, the subjects of that people, the Russians, whom they had both exploited
in the not-so-distant past. The future of Europe, and Christian civilization in
general, would to a large extent depend on how well Orthodox Russia would
succeed in assimilating and neutralising this breeding-ground of the
Revolution…
Now for a century or so before the French revolution, all the major
countries of Europe, with the partial exception of Britain and her colonies,
had been absolutist in their political structure. In each the monarch supported
an official religion which was in decline but still powerful, and in each there
were large religious minorities that were sometimes tolerated and sometimes
persecuted – the Huguenots in France, the Orthodox in Austro-Hungary, the
Orthodox and Armenians in Turkey, the Old Believers and Catholics in Russia,
the Orthodox and Protestants in Poland, the Jews everywhere…
The universal principles proclaimed by the Enlightenment, together with
the idea of the holiness of the Nation proclaimed by the French revolution, led
to the emancipation of the Jews, first in France, and then in most of the
countries of Europe. The process was slow and accompanied by many reverses and
difficulties, but inexorable. The only great power which firmly and
consistently resisted this trend was Russia….
It was not that the Russians did not want to emancipate their
Jewish population if that had been possible without harm to the Christians. The
record of the Russian empire in giving full rights to natives of various
subject populations was in fact very good – we only have to look at the large
number of Baltic German names among the senior officials of the empire, the
large measure of autonomy given to the Finns, and the way in which Tatar khans
and Georgian princes were fully assimilated. But the Jews presented certain
intractable problems not presented by the other peoples of the empire.
The first was the sheer number of Jews who suddenly found
themselves within the boundaries of the Russian empire. Thus Hartley writes:
“The empire acquired a further c. 250,000 Jews after the establishment
of the Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1815. There was a substantial Jewish
population in Bessarabia (11.3 per cent in 1863). In 1854, the Jewish
population of the whole empire was estimated as 1,062,132.”[312] These
numbers grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. And by the
beginning of the twentieth century, according to Lebedev, about half the
number of the Jews in the whole world were to be found in the Russian
empire.
Still more important than the sheer numbers of Russian Jews was their
social structure and their attitude to Christians in general and Russians in
particular. We have seen how important the internal Jewish authority of the kahal
was considered by the enlightened Polish Jew Hourwitz. The Tsar’s servants were
soon to make this discovery for themselves. Tsar Paul I appointed the poet and
state official Gavriil Romanovish Derzhavin to make a special investigation of
the Jewish question. After visiting Belorussia twice, writes Platonov,
Derzhavin “noted the ominous role of the kahals – the organs of Jewish
self-rule on the basis of the bigoted laws of the Talmud, which ‘a well-constructed
political body must not tolerate’, as being a state within the state. Derzhavin
discovered that the Jews, who considered themselves oppressed, established in
the Pale of Settlement a secret Israelite kingdom divided into kahal
districts with kahal administrations endowed with despotic power over
the Jews which inhumanly exploited the Christians and their property on the
basis of the Talmud. …[313]
“Derzhavin also uncovered the concept of ‘herem’ – a curse which the kahal
issued against all those who did not submit to the laws of the Talmud. This,
according to the just evaluation of the Russian poet, was ‘an impenetrable
sacrilegious cover for the most terrible crimes’.
“In his note Derzhavin ‘was the first to delineate a harmonious, integral
programme for the resolution of the Jewish question in the spirit of Russian
statehood, having in mind the unification of all Russian subjects on common
ground’.
“Paul I, after reading the note, agreed with many of its positions and
decorated the author. However, the tragic death of the Tsar as the result of an
international Masonic conspiracy destroyed the possibility of resolving the
Jewish question in a spirit favourable for the Russian people. The new Emperor,
Alexander I, being under the influence of a Masonic environment, adopted a
liberal position. In 1802 he created a special Committee for the improvement of
the Jews, whose soul was the Mason Speransky, who was closely linked with the
Jewish world through the well-known tax-farmer Perets, whom he considered his
friend and with whom he lived.
“Another member of the committee was G.R. Derzhavin. As
general-governor, he prepared a note ‘On the removal of the deficit of bread in
Belorussia, the collaring of the avaricious plans of the Jews, on their
transformation, and other things’. Derzhavin’s new note, in the opinion of
specialists, was ‘in the highest degree a remarkable document, not only as the
work of an honourable, penetrating statesman, but also as a faithful exposition
of all the essential sides of Jewish life, which hinder the merging of this
race with the rest of the population.’
“In the report of the official commission on the Jewish question which
worked in the 1870s in the Ministry of the Interior, it was noted that at the
beginning of the reign of Alexander I the government ‘stood already on the
ground of the detailed study of Jewry and the preparation that had begun had
already at that time exposed such sides of the public institutions of this
nationality which would hardly be tolerable in any state structure. But however
often reforms were undertaken in the higher administrative spheres, every time
some magical brake held up the completion of the matter.’ This magical brake
stopped Derzhavin’s proposed reform of Jewry, which suggested the annihilation
of the kahals in all the provinces populated by Jews, the removal of all
kahal collections and the limitation of the influx of Jews to a certain
percentage in relation to the Christian population, while the remaining masses
were to be given lands in Astrakhan and New Russia provinces, assigning the
poorest to re-settlement. Finally, he proposed allowing the Jews who did not
want to submit to these restrictions freedom to go abroad. However, these
measures were not confirmed by the government.
“Derzhavin’s note and the formation of the committee elicited great fear
in the Jewish world. From the published kahal documents of the Minsk
Jewish society it becomes clear that the kahals and the ‘leaders of the
cities’ gathered in an extraordinary meeting three days later and decided to
sent a deputation to St. Petersburg with the aim of petitioning Alexander I to
make no innovations in Jewish everyday life. But since this matter ‘required
great resources’, a very significant sum was laid upon the whole Jewish
population as a tax, refusal from which brought with it ‘excommunication from
the people’ (herem). From a private note given to Derzhavin by one Belorussian
landowner, it became known that the Jews imposed their herem also on the
general procurator, uniting with it a curse through all the kahals ‘as
on a persecutor’. Besides, they collected ‘as gifts’ for this matter, the huge
sum for that time of a million rubles and sent it to Petersburg, asking that
‘efforts be made to remove him, Derzhavin, from his post, and if that was not
possible, at any rate to make an attempt on his life’.”[314]
Not surprisingly, Tsar Alexander’s Statute for the Jews of December 9,
1804 turned out to be fairly liberal – much more liberal than the laws of
Frederick Augustus in Napoleon’s Duchy of Warsaw. Its strictest provisions
related to a ban on Jews’ participation in the distilling and retailing of
spirits.
Also, writes Vital, “there was to be no relaxation of the ancient rule
that Jews (negligible exceptions apart[315]) were
to be prevented from penetrating into ‘inner Russia’. Provision was made for an
eventual, but determined, attack on the rabbinate’s ancient – but in the
government’s view presumptuous and unacceptable – practice of adjudicating
cases that went beyond the strict limits of the religious (as opposed to the
civil and criminal domain), but also on rabbinical independence and authority
generally….[316]
“But the Jews themselves could take some comfort in it being expressly
stated that there was to be no question of forcible conversion to Christianity;
that they were not to be oppressed or harassed in the observance of their faith
and in their general social activities; that the private property of the Jews
remained inviolable; and that Jews were not to be exploited or enserfed. They
were, on the contrary, to enjoy the same, presumably full protection of the law
that was accorded other subjects of the realm. They were not to be subject to
the legal jurisdiction of the landowners on whose estates they might happen to
be resident. And they were encouraged in every way the Committee could imagine
– by fiscal and other economic incentives, for example, by the grant of land
and loans to develop it, by permission to move to the New Russian Territories
in the south – to undergo decisive and (so it was presumed) irreversible change
in the two central respects which both Friezel and Derzhavin had indeed, and
perfectly reasonably, regarded as vital: education and employment. In this they
were to be encouraged very strongly; but they were not to be forced…”[317]
However, the liberal Statute of 1804 was never fully implemented, and
was succeeded by stricter measures towards the end of Alexander’s reign and in
the reign of his successor, Nicholas I. There were many reasons for this. Among
them, of course, was Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, which, if it had
been successful, would have united the Western Sephardic Jews with the Eastern
Ashkenazi Jews in a single State, free, emancipated, and under their own
legally convened Sanhedrin. But not only did Napoleon not succeed: the invasion
of Russia was the graveyard of his empire. In 1813, and again in 1815, the
Russian armies entered Paris. From now on, the chief target of the Jews’ hatred
would be the Russian Empire…
But the main reason for the tightening of Russian policy was “the Jews’
abhorrence of Christianity, the intensely negative light in which non-Jewish
society had always been regarded, and the deeply ingrained suspicion and fear
in which all forms of non-Jewish authority were commonly held.”[318] If the
French delegates who emancipated the French Jews could ignore this fact, the
Russian Tsars could not. For, as the prosemitic and anti-Russian author, David
Vital writes, “there were differences between Russian and the other European
states not only in the political relationship between state and Church, but in
respect of the place of religion generally… It was not merely that in principle
Russia continued to be held by its Autocrat and his minions to be a Christian
state with a particular duty to uphold its own Orthodox Church. It was that,
far from the matter of the state’s specifically Christian duty slowly wasting
away, as in the west, it continued actively to exercise the minds of Russia’s
rulers as one of the central criteria by which questions of public policy were
to be judged and decided. The continuous search for an effective definition of
the role, quality, and ultimate purposes of the Autocracy itself was an
enterprise which, considering the energy and seriousness with which it was
pursued, sufficed in itself to distinguish Russia from its contemporaries. The
programmes to which the state was committed and all its structures were under
obligation to promote varied somewhat over time. But in no instance was there
serious deviation from the rule that Russian Orthodoxy was and needed to remain
a central and indispensable component of the ruling ethos. Nineteenth-century
Russia was… an ideological state in a manner and to a degree that had become so
rare as to be virtually unknown in Europe and would not be familiar again for
at least a century…”[319]
The Tsars’ gradual tightening of policy in relation to the Jews had
little or no effect on the basic problem of religious and social antagonism. As
Platonov writes: “The statute of the Jews worked out in 1804, which took
practically no account of Derzhavin’s suggestion, continued to develop the
isolation of the Jewish communities on Russian soil, that is, it strengthened
the kahals together with their fiscal, judicial, police and educational
independence. However, the thought of re-settling the Jews out of the western
region continued to occupy the government after the issuing of the statute in
1804. A consequence of this was the building in the New Russian area (from
1808) of Jewish colonies in which the government vainly hoped to ‘re-educate’
the Jews, and, having taught them to carry out productive agricultural labour,
to change in this way the whole structure of their life. Nevertheless, even in
these model colonies the kahal-rabbinic administration retained its former
significance and new settlements isolated themselves from the Christian
communities; they did not intend to merge with them either in a national or in
a cultural sense. The government not only did not resist the isolation of the
Jews, but even founded for them the so-called Israelite Christians (that is,
Talmudists who had converted to Orthodoxy). A special committee existed from
1817 to 1833.”[320]
Church-State relations were greatly strained in Alexander’s reign by the
Bible Society. “Founded in 1804 in England by Methodists and Masons, the Bible
Society extended its wide activity also in Russia. The Society had large
financial resources. In 1810 the monetary contributions of the Bible Society
attained 150,000 rubles, and at the end of 1823 there were already 300 such
societies in Russia. Under the mask of love for one’s neighbour and the
spreading of the word of God, the bible societies began to conduct oral
propaganda and publish books directed against [the Orthodox Christian] religion
and the State order. These books were published under the management of the
censor, which was attached to the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Popular Enlightenment,
which was headed by the Emperor Alexander’s close friend, Prince A.N. Golitsyn.
The main leaders of the Bible societies were members of the Masonic lodges, who
preached the rejection of Orthodoxy, the Church and the rites of the Church. In
1819 there was published Stankevich’s book, ‘A conversation in the coffin of a
child’, which was hostile to the institution of the Orthodox Church. Then
Yastrebov published a work entitled ‘An appeal to men to follow the inner
promptings of the Spirit of Christ’. This work was recognised to be a sermon
‘of seditious elements against the Christian religion’ and the good order of
the State. In 1824 there appeared ‘a blasphemous interpretation of the Gospel’
published by the director of the Russian Bible Society. This work openly
pursued the aim of stirring up people against the Church and the Throne.
Besides the publication of books directed against Orthodoxy, foreign religious
propaganda was conducted. Two Catholic priests from Southern Germany, Gosner
and Lindl, preached Protestantism, a sect beloved by the Masons. The Methodists
and other sectarians sowed their tares and introduced heresies amidst the
Orthodox. At the invitation of the Mason Speransky, the very pope of Masonry,
Fessler, came and took charge of the work of destroying the Orthodox Church.
“The Orthodox clergy were silent. They could not speak against the evil
that was being poured out everywhere. All the powerful men of the world were
obedient instruments of Masonry. The Tsar, who was falsely informed about the
aims and tasks of the Bible Society by Prince Golitsyn, gave the latter his
protection from on high.”[321]
“Golitsyn,” writes Oleg Platonov, “invited to the leadership of the
Bible Society only certain hierarchs of the Russian Church that were close to
him. He de facto removed the Holy Synod from participation in this
matter. At the same time he introduced into it secular and clerical persons of
other confessions, as if underlining that ‘the aim of the Society is higher
than the interests of one, that is the Russian Church, and that it develops its
activities in the interests of the whole of Christianity and the whole of the
Christian world’.[322]
“As the investigator of the Bible Society I.A. Chistovich wrote in 1873,
‘this indifferent cosmopolitanism in relation to the Church, however pure its
preachers might be in their ideal simplicity of heart, was, however, was an
absurdity at that, as at any other time. Orthodoxy is, factually speaking, the
existing form of the Christian faith of the Greco-Russian Church, and is
completely in accord with the teaching and statutes of the Ancient Universal
Church. Therefore Christianity in its correct ecclesiastical form only exists
in the Orthodox Church and cannot have over or above it any other idea… But the
Bible Society was directed precisely against such an ideal, and they sought it
out or presupposed it.’
“In an official document of the Bible Society the ideas of Masonic
ecumenism were openly declared. ‘The heavenly union of faith and love,’ it says
in a report of the Russian Bible Society in 1818, ‘founded by means of Bible
Societies in the great Christian family, reveal the beautiful dawn of the
wedding day of Christians and that time when there will be one pastor and one
flock, that is, when there will be one Divine Christian religion in all the
various formations of Christian confessions.’
“The well-known Russian public figure, the academic A.S. Shishkov wrote
on this score: ‘Let us look at the acts of the Bible Societies, let us see what
they consist of. It consists in the intention to construct out of the whole
human race one general republic or other and one religion – a dreamy and
undiscriminating opinion, born in the minds either of deceivers or of the
vainly wise… If the Bible Societies are trying only to spread piety, as they
say, then why do they not unite with our Church, but deliberately act separate
from her and not in agreement with her? If their intention consists in teaching
Christian doctrines, does not our Church teach them to us? Can it be that we
were not Christians before the appearance of the Bible Societies? And just how
do they teach us this? They recruit heterodox teachers and publish books
contrary to Christianity!… Is it not strange – even, dare I say it, funny – to
see our metropolitans and hierarchs in the Bible Societies sitting, contrary to
the apostolic rules, together with Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists and Quakers
– in a word, with all the heterodox? They with their grey hairs, and in their
cassocks and klobuks, sit with laymen of all nations, and a man in a frock suit
preaches to them the Word of God (of God as they call it, but not in fact)!
Where is the decency, where the dignity of the church server? Where is the
Church? They gather in homes where there often hang on the walls pictures of
pagan gods or lascivious depictions of lovers, and these gatherings of theirs –
which are without any Divine services, with the reading of prayers or the
Gospel, sitting as it were in the theatre, without the least reverence – are
equated with Church services, and a house without an altar, unconsecrated,
where on other days they feast and dance, they call the temple of God! Is this
not similar to Sodom and Gomorrah?’”[323]
At this critical moment for Russian Orthodoxy, God raised up righteous
defenders of the faith, such as Archimandrite, later Bishop Innocent (Smirnov)
and then Metropolitan Michael (Desnitsky) and the superior of the Novgorod
Yuriev monastery, Archimandrite Photius (Spassky).
Metropolitan Michael protested at Golitsyn’s removal of the censorship
of spiritual books from the Holy Synod into the hands of laymen, which meant
giving free expression to the pseudo-mystical sects. There were stormy scenes
between the prince and the metropolitan even in the Synod.
“The holy hierarch Philaret [at that time archbishop of Yaroslavl], as a
Member of the Synod was witness to the heated speeches of Metropolitan Michael
in defence of the Church and undoubtedly approved of his actions. In his eyes the
first-ranking hierarch was rightly considered to be a pillar of the Orthodox
Church, restraining the onslaught of false mysticism. And when this pillar
collapsed (he died[324]), and
the storms did not die down, Philaret, like many others, was seized by fear for
the destiny of the Church. Under the influence of a vision seen by someone
concerning Metropolitan Michael, a sorrowful picture of Church life, full of
misery and darkness, was revealed. He believed that in such a situation only a
person possessing the spirit and power of the Prophet Elijah could work with
benefit for the Church. However, the holy hierarch was profoundly convinced
that the Church was supported, not by people, but by the Lord. And since he saw
that it was impossible to save the Church only by human efforts, without the
help of God, he decided that it was better for him to withdraw himself from
everything as far as he could. Evidently, Philaret preferred a different method
of warfare with various kinds of heterodox preachers and sectarian societies
from that employed by Metropolitan Michael. And these methods were: a correct
organization of the spiritual schools throughout Russia and the spiritual
enlightenment of the Russian people through the distribution of Orthodox
spiritual literature…”[325]
However, while Philaret withdrew to concentrate on spiritual education,
a man with the spirit and strength of the Prophet Elijah was found. Fr. Photius
(Spassky), later superior of Yuriev monastery near Novgorod, began his open
defence of Orthodoxy in 1817. “Bureaucratic and military Petersburg were angry
with the bold reprover. His first speech was unsuccessful. Photius’ struggle…
against the apostates from Orthodoxy, the followers of the so-called inner
Church, ended with his expulsion from Petersburg.
“After the expulsion of Photius the Masons celebrated their victory. But
the joy of the conquerors turned out to be short-lived. The exile was found to
have followers. Photius received special support at a difficult time of his
life from the great righteous woman, Countess Anna Alexeevna
Orlova-Chesmenskaia, who presented a model of piety. She not only protected
him, but chose him as her leader and confessor. The firmness and courage with
which Photius fought against the enemies of Orthodoxy attracted the mind and
heart of Countess Orlova, a woman of Christian humility and virtue. After the
death of her instructor, Countess Orlova explained why it was Photius whom she
chose as her spiritual director. ‘He attracted my attention,’ wrote Countess
Orlova, ‘by the boldness and fearlessness with which he, being a teacher of the
law of God at the cadet corps and a young monk, began to attack the dominant
errors in faith. Everybody was against him, beginning with the Court. He did
not fear this. I wanted to get to know him and entered into correspondence with
him. His letters seemed to me to be some kind of apostolic epistles. After
getting to know him better, I became convinced that he personally sought
nothing for himself.’”[326]
However, the struggle against Masonry was helped by other events. As we
have seen, Kushelev reported to the Tsar on the revolutionary activity in the
Polish and Russian lodges. And then there was the Congress of the Sacred
Alliance in Verona in 1822. Lebedev writes that at this Congress “Metternich
unexpectedly, on the basis of masonic documents that had unexpectedly fallen
into his possession, demonstrated that the secret societies of all
countried, being in constant communication with each other, constituted one
common plot, which was subject only to the secret leaders, and only
for form’s sake accepted different programmes in different countries, depending
on circumstances and conditions. He was supported by the Prussian minister,
Count Haugwitz, who himself had formerly been a Mason. He made a detailed
report in which he showed that the ‘enmity’ of various unions of Masonry was
only for show, to divert attention. In actual fact Masonry in its depths was
one and its aim was the subjection of the world, and in the first place
the subjection of the monarchs, so that they become weapons in the hands of the
Masons. Haugwitz added that since 1777 personally ruled not only a part
of the Prussian lodges, but also Masonry in Poland and Russia! We can imagine
how shocked his Majesty Alexander I was as he sat in the hall. He had been born
in the same year of 1777 and had entered Masonry in 1803. Everybody was
stunned. The Austrian Emperor Frantz and the Russian Emperor Alexander I
decided to attack this great evil. In 1822 Masonry was forbidden in Russia by
a decree of the Tsar. The lodges were disbanded, the ‘brothers’’ correspondence
with abroad was strictly forbidden. At the same time this was the third
powerful blow that shook the soul of Alexander I with the collapse of his faith
in the nobility of the Masonic ideas and strivings. Strict censorship was
introduced, especially in the publication of books of a spiritual nature. Now
his Majesty began to pay attention to the rebukes of Masonry and mysticism
issuing from Archimandrite Innocent, who had suffered earlier for this, of the
metropolitan of the capital Michael, Metropolitan Seraphim who succeeded him,
and also of the zealous defender of Orthodoxy Archimandrite Photius (Spassky)…
Seraphim and Photius, joining forces, were able to to show Alexander the danger
for Orthodoxy of ‘fashionable’ tendencies in though, the harmfulness of the
activity of Prince Golitsyn, and return the heart of the Tsar to Holy
Orthodoxy. A visit to Valaam monastery, conversations with Vladyka
Seraphim, with Elder Alexis of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra made a great
impression on Alexander and showed him that what his exalted soul had sought
throughout his life was contained in the experience, rules and methods of
Orthodox asceticism, which was just then experiencing an unusual ascent, being
armed with such books as The Philokalia and others, especially on the
doing of the Jesus prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a
sinner!’). This was Alexander’s fourth powerful spiritual shock. It had two
kinds of consequences. When, in April, 1924, after many fruitless exhortation,
Archimandrite Photius publicly (in a private house) pronounced ‘anathema’ on
Prince Golitsyn and the latter retired[327], his
Majesty accepted his retirement.”[328]
Archimandrite Photius wrote: “the Masonic faith is of Antichrist, and
its whole teaching and writings are of the devil”[329], and
“in the spring of 1824 [he] wrote two epistles to his Majesty. In one of them
he said that ‘in our time many books, and many societies and private people are
talking about some kind of new religion, which is supposedly
pre-established for the last times. This new religion, which is preached in
various forms, sometimes under the form of a new world…, sometimes of a new
teaching, sometimes of the coming of Christ in the Spirit, sometimes of the
union of the churches, sometimes under the form of some renewal and of Christ’s
supposed thousand-year reign, sometimes insinuated under the form of a
so-called new religion – is apostasy from the faith of God, the faith of the
apostles and the fathers. It is faith in the coming Antichrist, it is
propelling the revolution, it is thirsting for blood, it is filled with the
spirit of Satan. Its false-prophets and apostles are Jung-Stilling,
Eckartshausen, Thion, Bohme, Labzin, Fessler and the Methodists…’
“His Majesty was favourably disposed to the epistle of Archimandrite
Photius in spite of the fact that it contained criticism of all his recent
friends and of the people who had enjoyed his protection. Almost at the same
time there appeared the book of Gosner, about whose harmful line Archimandrite
Photius had reported to his Majesty on April 17, 1824.
“On April 20, 1824, Emperor Alexander received Photius, who was ordered:
‘Come by the secret entrance and staircase into his Majesty’s study so that
nobody should know about this’. Their conversation lasted for three hours, and
on May 7 Photius sent his second epistle with the title: ‘Thoroughly correct
the work of God. The plan for the revolution published secretly, or the secret
iniquities practised by secret society in Russia and everywhere.’
“On April 29 Photius gave his Majesty another note: ‘To your question
how to stop the revolution, we are praying to the Lord God, and look what has
been revealed. Only act immediately. The way of destroying the whole plan
quietly and successfully is as follows: 1) to abolish the Ministry of Spiritual
Affairs and remove two others from a well-known person; 2) to abolish the Bible
Society under the pretext that there are already many printed Bibles, and they
are now not needed; 3) the Synod is, as before, to supervise education, to see
if there is anything against the authorities and the faith anywhere; 4) to
remove Koshelev, exile Gosner, exile Fessler and exile the Methodists, albeit
the leading ones. The Providence of God is now to do nothing more openly.’
“This flaming defence of Orthodoxy [by Photius] together with
Metropolitan Seraphim was crowned with success: on May 15, 1824 the Ministry of
Spiritual Affairs was abolished.”[330]
The Synod was now freer; it had a new over-procurator in the place of
Golitsyn, and was purged of those members that had been linked with him. The
Tsar had paid heed to Photius’ appeal. “God conquered the visible Napoleon who
invaded Russia,” he said to him. “May He conquer the spiritual Napoleon through
you!”
However, not everyone saw only good in the struggle against the Bible
Society and the false mystics. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, who had been
Archimandrite Photius’ early sponsor, had declined to enter into open warfare
against the mystics, partly because of his personal friendship with Golitsyn[331],
and partly because he had another approach to mysticism.
“At the same time as the negative actions which Golitsyn had permitted
against the Church, the Moscovite archpastor saw in him much that was positive
and recognized him to be one of the zealots of the spiritual side of the
ecclesiastical organism. One way or the other, with the support of Prince Golitsyn
it had been possible to publish many useful ecclesiastical books of a mystical
character, but in an Orthodox spirit. Of course, Philaret was Orthodox in his
views on mysticism. He clearly understood that in mysticism the most important
question is its relation to the Church and the institutions of the Church.
Every form of isolation could bring only harm, not good. Philaret recognized
the usefulness of mystical teaching in the spirit of Orthodoxy and was far from
sympathizing with a superficial approach to the latter. In the actions of the
opponents of mysticism he found excesses, while the very method of the struggle
against the latter he considered to be open to criticism and of little use.
What, for example, did the party of Arakcheev and Photius gain by their
victory? Absolutely nothing…. First of all, mystical literature was subjected
to terrible attacks, and that which was formerly considered useful was now
recognized to be harmful, demonic and heretical. All books of a mystical
character were ordered to be removed from the libraries of educational
institutions and a veto placed on them. Terrible difficulties were placed in
the way of the publication of patristic literature. Publishers were frightened,
as it were, to publish, for example, the writings of St. Macarius, they were
frightened to appear thereby to be supporters of mysticism. The opponents of
the Bible Society did great harm also to the translation of the Holy Scriptures
into Russian…”[332]
Philaret had been taking an active part in this translation because he
saw in it the best means of diverting the often misdirected religious
aspirations of Russian society in the direction of Orthodoxy. “’Let the bread
not be taken away from the child’… - Metropolitan Philaret firmly believed in
the renovatory power of the Word of God. He uninterruptedly bound his destiny
with the work on the Bible, with the translation of the Holy Scriptures. And it
is difficulty properly to value his Biblical exploit. For him personally it was
bound up with great trials and sorrow.”[333]
For the work of translation was vigorously opposed by Metropolitan
Seraphim, Archimandrite Photius and Admiral Shishkov, the new minister of
education.
Thus Shishkov “denied the very existence of the Russian language – ‘as
if he saw in it a certain person’, he saw in it only baseness and meanness,
‘the simple people’s’ dialect of the single Slavic-Russian language. He saw in
[Philaret’s] determination to translate the Word of God an ill-intentioned
undertaking, ‘a weapon of revolutionary plots’, ‘how can one dare to change the
words which are venerated as having come from the mouth of God?’… And translate
it into what? Who would read these translations, would they not pile up
everywhere in torn-up copies?… From the translation of the Bible Shishkov
turned to the Catechism of Philaret and to his Notes on the Book of
Genesis, where the Biblical and New Testament texts were translated in a
Russian ‘reworking’. He was particularly disturbed by the fact that the Catechism
was printed in a large print-run (18,000!) – he saw in this the clear
manifestation of some criminal intention. Archimandrite Photius, on his part,…
reproached the ‘unhealthy and harmful’ work of the Biblical translation – ‘the
power of the translation was such that it clearly overthrew the dogmas of
Church teaching or cast doubt on the truth of the Church’s teaching and
traditions’. And Photius directly attacked Philaret, who, in his words, ‘was
struggling on behalf of a God-fighting assembly’ and was supposedly ‘influencing
the translation of the Bible in order rather to give a new appearance to the
Word of God, thereby assisting faithlessness, innovation and all kinds of
ecclesiastical temptations’. He directly called Philaret’s Catechism ‘gutter
water’. As Philaret was told by his disciple Gregory, who was then rector of
the Petersburg Academy and many years later Metropolitan of Novgorod and
Petersburg, they were saying about the Bible Society that ‘it was founded in
order to introduce a reformation’. They feared the translation of the Old
Testament, and in particular the five books of Moses, lest it somehow seduced
people to return to the Old Testament ritual law, or fall into Molokanism and
Judaism (this thought was Magnitsky’s). They began ‘to say unpleasant things’
about Philaret in Petersburg, and it was suggested that he be removed to the
Caucasus as exarch of Georgia… In these years Philaret was in Moscow and took
no notice of the Petersburg rumours and ‘Alexandrine politics’. As before, he
directly and openly defended the work on the Bible and attempted to show that
‘the very desire to read the Holy Scriptures is already an earnest of moral
improvement’. To the question, what was the purpose of this new undertaking in
a subject so ancient and not subject to change as Christianity and the Bible,
Philaret replied: ‘What is the purpose of this new undertaking? But what is new
here? Dogmas? Rules of life? But the Bible Society preaches none of these
things, and gives into the hands of those who desire it the book from which the
Orthodox dogmas and pure rules of life were always drawn by the true Church in
the past and to the present day. A new society? But it introduces no novelty
into Christianity, and produces not the slightest change in the Church’… They
asked: ‘Why is this undertaking of foreign origin?’ But, replied Philaret, so
much with us ‘is not only of foreign origin, but also completely foreign’…
“The supposed zealots succeeded in obtaining the banning of Philaret’s Catechism
on the excuse that there were ‘prayers’ in it – the Symbol of faith and the
Commandments – in Russian. The Russian translation of the New Testament was not
banned, but the translation of the Bible was stopped. And as Metropolitan
Philaret of Kiev remembered later ‘with great sorrow and horror’, from fear of
conversions to Judaism, ‘they found it necessary to commit to the flames of
brick factories several thousand copies of the five books of the Prophet Moses
translated into Russian in the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and printed
by the Bible Society’. M. Philaret reacted sharply and sorrowfully to these
actions, which were carried out bypassing the Holy Synod. ‘I don’t know what it
was all about, but I cannot see that it was about anything else than Orthodoxy.
I cannot understand by whom and how and why doubt can be cast on a work as pure
and approved by all, as sacred as anything on earth. It would be no small
matter if the doubt threatened only the one man who was the instrument of this
work; but does it not threaten the Hierarchy? Does it not threaten the Church?
If the Orthodoxy of a Catechism that was triumphantly approved by the
Most Holy Synod is in doubt, then will not the Orthodoxy of the Most Holy Synod
itself not be in doubt? Will not allowing this shake the Hierarchy to its
foundations, will it not disturb the peace of the Church? Will it not produce a
serious temptation for the Church?’ Metropolitan Seraphim calmed Philaret,
saying that Orthodoxy was not in question here, that everything came down to
the language, but he refused ‘to reply in a satisfactory manner’ ‘why the
Russian language must have no place in the Catechism, which was,
moreover, short, and intended for small children who had no knowledge
whatsoever of the Slavonic language, and for that reason were not able to
understand the truths of the faith which were expounded to them in that
language’… The ban on the Catechism (1828) was removed only when all the
texts had been put into Slavonic and the Russian translation of the Symbol, the
Lord’s Prayer and the Commandments had been left out. M. Philaret was deeply
shaken by these events. ‘Smoke is eating into their eyes’, he wrote to his
vicar, ‘and they are saying: how corrosive is the light of the sun! They can
hardly breathe from the smoke and with difficulty decree: how harmful is the
water from the source of life! Blessed is he who can not only raise his eyes to
the mountains, but run there for the clean air, the living water!… Blessed is
he who can sit in his corner and weep for his sins and pray for the Sovereign
and the Church, and has no need to take part in public affairs, becoming
tainted with the sins of others and multiplying his own sins!’ Above all
Philaret was alarmed by the un-thought-through hastiness and interference of
secular people, ‘people who have been called neither by God, nor by their
superiors’, and who rise up in bold self-opiniated fashion against the
appointed teachers.”[334]
The destruction of the Holy Scriptures simply because they were in a
Russian translation, and of the official Catechism of the Russian Church
simply because it quoted the Scriptures in Russian rather than Slavonic, was a
phenomenon which, in another age, would have led to a schism. But Philaret
refrained from open protest because he did not want to create a schism. Nor,
since Metropolitan Seraphim of St. Petersburg had threatened to retire if
Philaret insisted on continuing his translation, did he want a rupture between
the two senior sees in the Church.[335]
However, with heresy overwhelming so many from the left, and blind prejudice
parading as traditionalism from the right, the Russian Church was in a
precarious position…
The
Serbian Revolution
In Greece and the Balkans the ideas of the French revolution found
expression in national liberation movements, which succeeded in liberating a
large part of the Orthodox lands in Europe from the Turkish yoke. The vital
question for these lands as they gradually liberated themselves in the course
of the 19th century was: would freedom allow them to re-establish
the genuinely Orthodox “symphonic” model of Church-State relations which had
prevailed throughout the region before the fall of Constantinople?
Unfortunately, the answer in the case of each newly emergent state – Serbia,
Greece and Bulgaria – was: no.
The first condition of “symphony” is the existence of a genuinely
independent Orthodox Church able to exert a strong moral influence on the
powers that be. After the Turkish conquest, the influence of the Serbian Church
even increased, and thanks to the collaborative policies of the Serb leaders
after Kosovo, the Turks even allowed the re-establishment of the Serbian
Patriarchate at Peć in 1557.
As Branimir Anzulovic writes, “it no longer served the Serbian state
because that state had ceased to exist; but it served the Ottoman state, and as
the only surviving national institution, it became the main carrier of Serbian
national identity. Its nonreligious functions were even expanded under the
Turkish system of millets – ethnoreligious communities of non-Islamic peoples,
which enjoyed a considerable degree of religious and cultural autonomy and were
in charge of administrative duties such as the collection of taxes… [One]
scholar described the Serbian Orthodox Church, at the time of the Peć
patriarchate, as “a sort of a vassal clerocratic state within the framework of
the power military-feudal empire”’”.[336]
The Serbian Church was in general loyal to its Turkish masters (the
first patriarch of the Peć patriarchate was a close relative of the Grand
Vizier Mehmet Pasha Sokollu).[337]
However, when, in 1690, King Leopold I of Hungary invited them to cross over to
his land, 40,000 Serbs (according to another source, 37,000 families) took up
his invitation with the blessing of Patriarch Arsenije III. This led to the
foundation of the Serbian metropolitanate of Karlovcy in Slavonia in 1713.
Towards the end of the 19th century, there were six dioceses under
Karlovcy with about a million faithful.[338] In
1766 the Peć patriarchate was abolished, as was the autocephalous
archbishopric of Ochrid in the following year. From that time the role of the
Church decreased, without ever ceasing to be important, and non-Orthodox
political models and theories began to infiltrate Serbian society, not least
the nationalist ideas of the French revolution, which played a significant part
in the Serbs’ own revolution in the first half of the 19th century.
The Serbian revolution began as a rebellion against the Dahis, the four
top Janissary commanders, who were terrorising both the Serbs and the Muslims
in the province and effectively annulling the autonomy that the sultan had
given them.
Tim Judah writes: “Local leaders, including Kardjordje, a swine dealer
who had fought both in the Austrian Freikorps and in the Turkish-organised
Serbian army, began to plot their removal. But the Dahis struck first. In early
1804 they executed up to 150 of the Serbian knezes or local leaders in an
operation they called ‘The Cutting Down of the Chiefs’. It was this that
provoked the rebellion. At first the Serbs did not claim to be fighting to rid
themselves of Ottoman domination but rather claimed to be rebelling in the name
of the sultan against the repressive Dahis. Karadjordje was elected as leader
of the uprising on 14 February 1804. He soon succeeded in liberating almost all
of the pashalik, especially after the sultan ordered forces from Bosnia to
intervene to finish off the Dahis.
“At this early stage, the Serbs were joined by at least part of the
pashalik’s Muslim population, whom the Serbs called the ‘Good Turks’, and who
were also keen to rid themselves of the rapacious Dahis. However, as the Serb
aim soon changed to a demand for complete independence, co-operation rapidly turned
to confrontation and massacre.
“In the negotiations that followed the defeat of the Dahis, the Serbs
demanded the restoration of their autonomy, but the Turks became alarmed. The
rebels were making contact with Serbs in other parts of the Ottoman Empire and
with semi-independent Montenegro. Karadjordje had also sent a delegation to
Russia to appeal for help, and he was talking ‘of throwing off the yoke that
the Serb has borne since Kosovo’. Another Ottoman army was sent to crush the
rebels, but it was soundly beaten at Ivankovac on 18 August 1805. Meeting in
Smederovo in 1805, the insurgents decided not only to repudiate the pashalik’s
annual tribute to the sultan but to take the struggle beyond the borders of the
province. In reply a jihad or holy war was declared against them.
“At the end of 1806, Russia went to war with the Ottomans, and the Serbs
were encouraged to keep fighting. A modest Russian force was sent to fight
alongside the Serbs. Within weeks, though, the Russians and the Turks signed
the Treaty of Slobozia, in which neither side bothered to mention the Serbs…
“In 1809, fighting between the Serbs and Turks resumed, with some
Russian help. Russia soon needed to muster all its strength to counter
Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, so a peace treaty was concluded in Bucharest with
the Turks. It specified that Serbia would revert to Ottoman rule, with the
proviso that there would be a general amnesty for participants in the
insurrection.[339]
The Serbs rejected this, but their defences collapsed in the ensuing Turkish
onslaught. Karadjordje fled, along with thousands of refugees, who sought
protection in the Habsburg provinces, Wallachia and Russia. The Turkish
vengeance was terrible. Villages were burned and thousand were sent into slavery.
On 17 October 1813 alone, 1,800 women and children were sold as slaves in
Belgrade. Soon afterwards a halt was called to the reprisals, and many of the
refugees began returning. Some of the former insurgent leaders, such as
Miloš Obrenović from the Rudnik district (who had not fled), now made
their peace with the Turks, who confirmed them in their local positions of
power. It was an untenable situation. In 1814, one of Karadjordje’s former
commanders started a new rebellion, but it did not catch on. In the wake of the
fresh reprisals following its defeat, however, preparations were made for yet
another uprising. Led by Obrenović, the rebels had by mid-July 1815
succeeded in freeing a large part of the pashalik.
“Just as before, it was the international situation which helped shape
developments. With Napoleon defeated at Waterloo in 1815, the Turks were wary
of the Russians in case they intervened again on behalf of the Serbs. So, after
much negotiation, a deal was struck with Obrenović. The Belgrade pashalik
was to become an autonomous province. Serbian chiefs were granted the right to
collect taxes, but the Turks could remain only in the towns and forts of the
province.
“Obrenović was born in 1783 into a poor family which had originally
come to Serbia from Hercegovina. As a child he tended cattle for his neighbours
and later joined his brother, who had his own livestock business. He was a
brave commander in the first uprising and after the second he proved himself a
shrewd but brutal and murderous politician. He constantly sought increased
concessions from the Turks while he gradually undermined their residual power
in Serbia. In 1817, influence by the Philike Hetairia, a Greek
revolutionary secret society, Karadjordje slipped back into Serbia. Sensing
danger for both himself and his plans, Obrenović sent his agents who
murdered Karadjordje with an axe. His skinned head was stuffed and sent to the
sultan. This act was to spark off a feud between the families which was
periodically to convulse Serbian politics until 1903. Then the last Obrenović
and his wife were murdered by being thrown out of the palace windows in
Belgrade. The hapless King Aleksandar allegedly grabbed the parapet, but he
fell to his death after one of the conspirators used his sword to chop off his
fingers.
“Miloš Obrenović was as rapacious as any Turk had been in
collecting taxes. As his rule became ever more oppressive, there were seven
rebellions against him including three major uprisings between 1815 and 1830.
In 1830 the sultan nevertheless formally accepted Miloš’s hereditary
princeship.”[340]
It was hardly to be expected that such a ruler would restore the
glorious traditions of St. Sabbas and the Nemanja dynasty. And Serbian history
from now on was dominated by two sharply contrasting, but equally unOrthodox
ideologies: the westernizing, secular tradition deriving from the
Enlightenment, and the bloodthirsty, tribal-heroic and nationalist tradition
represented by the Montenegrin bishop-prince and poet Petar Petrović
Njegoš (d. 1851).
Montenegro united Church and State in the only completely independent
Orthodox land in the Balkans. Fortescue writes: “In 1516, Prince George,
fearing lest quarrels should weaken his people (it was an elective princedom),
made them swear always to elect the bishop as their civil ruler as well. These
prince-bishops were called Vladikas… In the 18th century the Vladika
Daniel I (1697-1737) succeeded in securing the succession for his own family.
As Orthodox bishops have to be celibate, the line passed (by an election whose
conclusion was foregone) from uncle to nephew, or from cousin to cousin. At
last, in 1852, Danilo, who succeeded his uncle as Vladika, wanted to marry, so
he refused to be ordained bishop and turned the prince-bishopric into an
ordinary secular princedom. Since then, another person has been elected
Metropolitan of Cetinje, according to the normal Orthodox custom.”[341]
In view of the Serbian wars of the 1990s, it is important to note the
long-term influence of the Montenegrim Prince-Bishop Njegoš’ famous poem, The
Mountain Wreath, which glorifies the mass slaughter of Muslims who refuse
to convert to Christianity on a certain Christmas Eve. The principal character,
Vladyka Danilo, says:
We will baptize with water or with blood!
We’ll drive the plague out of the pen!
Let the son of horror ring forth,
A true altar on a blood-stained rock!
And in another poem Njegoš writes that
“God’s dearest sacrifice is a boiling stream of tyrant’s blood”.[342]
An armed struggle against the infidel for the sake of Christ and His
glory could indeed serve as the subject of a worthy and truly Christian
glorification. But there is little that is Christian in this bishop’s poem.
Even Bishop Nikolai Velimirović, an admirer of Njegoš, had to admit:
“Njegoš’s Christology is almost rudimentary. No Christian priest has ever
said less about Christ than this metropolitan from Cetinje.”[343]
This bloodthirsty, nationalist and only superficially Christian
tradition, which was continued by such figures as the poet Vuk
Karadžić, who called the Serbs “the greatest people on the planet”
and boosted the nation’s self-esteem “by describing a culture 5,000 years old
and claiming that Jesus Christ and His apostles had been Serbs”[344], was
to have profound effects on the future of Serbia, and through Serbia, on
European history as a whole.
The Greek Revolution
In Greece, as in Serbia, the ideas of the French revolution caused great
excitement and nationalist bombast. Thus Benjamin of Lesbos wrote: “Nature has
set limits to the aspirations of other men, but not to those of the Greeks. The
Greeks were not in the past and are not now subject to the laws of nature.”[345]
The dreams of the Greeks were excited by a number of causes. First,
there were the political factors: the rebellion of the Muslim warlord Ali Pasha
against the Sultan in 1820 and the inexorable gradual southward expansion of
the Russian Empire, which drew Greek minds to the prophecies about the
liberation of “the City”, Constantinople, by to xanthon genos, “the
yellow-haired race” – whom the Greeks identified with the Russians. Secondly,
the wealthier merchants chafed at the restrictions on the accumulation of
capital in the Ottoman empire, and longed for the more business-friendly kind
of regime that their travels acquainted them with in Western Europe. And
thirdly, and most importantly, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century
and the first quarter of the nineteenth, these merchants subsidised an
explosion in the publication of Greek books and in the provision of educational
opportunities for young Greeks.
Such an emphasis on education had been made by the holy new Hieromartyr
Cosmas of Aitolia (+1779), who built schools in over two hundred towns and
villages. But he emphasised education in Orthodoxy in order to escape the
snares of western culture.[346] These
merchants, however, sent young Greeks to the universities of Western Europe,
especially Germany, where they were infected by western ideas. For “here,”
writes Clogg, “they came into contact not only with the heady ideas of the
Enlightenment, of the French Revolution and of romantic nationalism but they
were made aware of the extraordinary hold which the language and civilisation
of ancient Greece had over the minds of their educated European contemporaries.[347]
“During the centuries of the Tourkokratia knowledge of the
ancient Greek world had all but died out, but, under the stimulus of western
classical scholarship, the budding intelligentsia developed an awareness that
they were the heirs to an heritage that was universally revered throughout the
civilised world. By the eve of the war in independence this progonoplexia
(ancestor obsession) and arkhaiolatreia (worship of antiquity), to use
the expressive Greek terms, had reached almost obsessive proportions. It was
precisely during the first decade of the nineteenth century that nationalists,
much to the consternation of the Church authorities, began to baptise their
children with the names of (and to call their ships after) the worthies of
ancient Greece rather than the Christian saints….”[348]
The Church’s concern was understandable; for the ideas inflaming the
minds of young Greeks were far from Orthodox. Especially dangerous was the
western revolutionary ideology of freedom – not spiritual freedom, but the
freedom of the individual and the nation from all external bonds. The Greeks
already had experience of the bitter fruits of revolution; for in 1770 “the
ill-fated Orlov expedition to the Peloponessos, launched by Catherine the
Great, and the combined Russian-Greek attempt to free the Peloponnesos from the
tyranny of the Ottoman Muslims, ended in disaster. In addition to destroying
the Greek military forces and many of the Russians, the Albanian Muslim
mercenaries, who were called in by the Ottoman Muslims, wreaked havoc on the
local population…”[349] But
this tragedy did not prevent many Greeks, and even some prominent churchmen,
from being influenced by the French revolution of 1789.
The Church’s attitude to the revolution was expressed in a work called Paternal
Teaching, which appeared in the revolutionary year of 1789, and which,
according to Charles Frazee, "was signed by Anthimus of Jerusalem but was
probably the work of the later Patriarch Gregory V. The document is a polemic
against revolutionary ideas, calling on the Christians 'to note how brilliantly
our Lord, infinite in mercy and all-wise, protects intact the holy and Orthodox
Faith of the devout, and preserves all things'. It warns that the devil is
constantly at work raising up evil plans; among them is the idea of liberty,
which appears to be so good, but is only there to deceive the people. The
document points out that [the struggle for] political freedom is contrary to
the Scriptural command to obey authority, that it results in the impoverishment
of the people, in murder and robbery. The sultan is the protector of Christian
life in the Ottoman Empire; to oppose him is to oppose God."[350]
Patriarch Gregory was also a determined opponent of the religious ecumenism
that was the other side of the coin of Masonry’s call to revolutionary
violence: “Let us neither say nor think that [they who teach erroneous
doctrines] also believe in one Lord, have one Baptism, and confess the one
Faith. If their opinions are correct, then by necessity our own must be
incorrect. But if our own doctrines are upheld and believed and given credence
and confessed by all as being good, true, correct, and unadulterated,
manifestly then, the so-called sacraments of all heretics are evil, bereft of
divine grace, abominable, and loathsome, and the grace of ordination and the
priesthood by which these sacraments are performed has vanished and departed
from them. And when there is no priesthood, all the rest are dead and bereft of
spiritual grace. We say these things, beloved, lest anyone – either man or
woman – be misled by the heterodox regarding their apparent sacraments and
their so-called Christianity. Rather, let each one stand firmly in the
blameless and true Faith of Christ, especially that we may draw to ourselves
those who have been led astray and, as though they were own members, unite them
to the one Head, Christ, to Whom be glory and dominion unto the ages of ages.
Amen.”[351]
However, Patriarch Gregory’s negative attitude towards the political and
religious revolution was not shared by another famous hierarch of the time who
came from the same village of Dhimitsana in the Peloponnese: Metropolitan
Germanus of Old Patras. And so when the Phanariot Greek Alexander Ypsilantis
crossed from Russia into Turkish-occupied Romania with a small band of Greeks
in 1821, a simultaneous rebellion took place in the Peloponnese under the
leadership of Metropolitan Germanus and eight other bishops. Ypsilantis' force
was soon crushed, for it was repudiated by both the Russian Tsar and the
Romanian peasants.[352] But
Germanos' campaign prospered, in spite of the deaths of five of the bishops in
prison. And soon the south of Greece and the islands of Hydra, Spetsae and
Poros were in Greek hands.
At this point the frightened Turks put pressure on Patriarch Gregory and
his Synod to anathematize Ypsilantes and all those who cooperated with him.
They obeyed. Some have argued that the patriarch secretly repudiated this
anathema and sympathised with the insurgents; which is why the Turks,
suspecting him of treachery, hanged him on April 10. “In any case,” writes Fr.
Anthony Gavalas, “the anathema was ignored, as were all the other letters
unfavourable to the plans of the revolutionaries, as having been issued under
duress. There is an opinion that the patriarch knew that the anathema would be
so considered and issued it, hoping to placate the Turks on the one hand, and
on the other, to gain time for the revolution to gain strength.”[353]
However, the patriarch’s righteousness of character precludes the possibility
that he could have been plotting against a government to which he had sworn
allegiance and for which he prayed in the Divine Liturgy. Moreover, he had
always refused to join the philiki hetairia, the secret, masonic-style
society to which most of the insurgents (including Ypsilantis and Metropolitan
Germanus) belonged.
This society, founded among the Greek diaspora in Odessa in 1814, was
created with the aim of liberating the Motherland from the Ottoman empire. Its
essentially pagan inspiration is indicated by its initiation rituals, which
carried the penalty of death for those who betrayed the secret and commended
the initiate “to the protection of the Great Priests of the Eleusinian
Mysteries”.[354]
By 1821 almost a thousand members had been initiated into the society.
Significantly, the patriarch’s body was picked up by a Russian ship and taken
to Odessa, mutely pointing to where the organisation that had truly caused his
death was centred.
The essentially western ideology of the Greek revolution explains why so
many young westerners, among whom the most famous was the poet Byron, to join
the Greek freedom-fighters. But they were fighting, not for Orthodox Greece,
but for their romantic vision of ancient, pagan Greece. Significantly, there
were no volunteers from Orthodox Russia, whose tsars correctly saw in the
revolutionary spirit a greater threat to the well-being of the Orthodox peoples
than Turkish rule.
Certainly, the Greeks had to pay a heavy price for the political freedom
they gained. After the martyrdom of Patriarch Gregory, the Turks ran amok in
Constantinople; and there were further pogroms in Smyrna, Adrianople, Crete and
especially Chios, which had been occupied by the revolutionaries and where in
reprisal tens of thousands were killed or sold into slavery. When the new
patriarch, Eugenius, again anathematised the insurgents, twenty-eight bishops
and almost a thousand priests in free Greece in turn anathematised the
patriarch, calling him a Judas and a wolf in sheep's clothing, and ceasing to
commemorate him in the Liturgy.
And what was it all for? When Byron was dying in Greece in 1824, the Duc
d’Orléans commented “that he was dying so that one day people would be
able to eat sauerkraut at the foot of the Acropolis”. He was not far from the
truth; for after Greece was declared independent in 1830, in 1833 Otto I, son
of the king of Bavaria, became king. As Zamoyski sardonically comments:
“Sauerkraut indeed…”[355]
Inevitably, therefore, as Charles Frazee writes, the new State of
Greece, "looked to the west, the west of the American and French
Revolutions, rather than to the old idea of an Orthodox community as it had
functioned under the Ottomans. The emotions of the times did not let men see
it; Orthodoxy and Greek nationality were still identified, but the winds were
blowing against the dominant position of the Church in the life of the
individual and the nation..."[356]
Thus, forgetting the lessons of the council of Florence four hundred
years earlier, the new State and Church entered into negotiations with the Pope
for help against the Turks. Metropolitan Germanus was even empowered to speak
concerning the possibility of a reunion of the Churches. However, it was the Pope
who drew back at this point, pressurized by the other western States which
considered the sultan to be a legitimate monarch.
The western powers helped Greece again when, in 1827, an Allied fleet
under a British admiral destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian fleet at Navarino. But
after the assassination of the president of Greece, Count Kapodistrias, in
1832, the country descended further into poverty and near civil war.
Then, in 1833, the western powers appointed a Catholic prince, Otto of
Bavaria, as king of Greece, with three regents until he came of age, the most
important being the Protestant George von Maurer. Maurer proceeded to work out
a constitution for the country, which proposed autocephaly for the Church under
a Synod of bishops, and the subordination of the Synod to the State on the
model of the Bavarian and Russian constitutions, to the extent that "no
decision of the Synod could be published or carried into execution without the
permission of the government having been obtained". In spite of the
protests of the patriarch of Constantinople and the tsar of Russia, and the
walk-out of the archbishops of Rethymnon and Adrianople, this constitution was
ratified by the signatures of thirty-six bishops on July 26, 1833.
In 1844 the Church reiterated her new canonical position: “The Orthodox
Church of Greece acknowledges our Lord Jesus Christ as her Head. She is
inseparably united in faith with the Church of Constantinople and with every
other Christian Church of the same profession, but is autocephalous, exercises
her sovereign rights independently of every other Church and is governed by the
members of the Holy Synod.” The Ecumenical Patriarch refused to acknowledge the
new Synod. And many Greeks were also unhappy.[357]
The Greek Church therefore exchanged the admittedly uncanonical position
of the patriarchate of Constantinople under Turkish rule for the even less
canonical position of a Synod unauthorized by the patriarch and under the
control of a Catholic king and a Protestant constitution! In addition to this,
all monasteries with fewer than six monks were dissolved, and heavy taxes
imposed on the remaining monasteries. And very little money was given to a
Church which had lost six to seven thousand clergy in the war, and whose remaining
clergy had an abysmally low standard of education.
In spite of this, Divine grace worked to transform the situation from
within, as it had in Russia. Thus in 1839 the Synod forbade marriages between
Orthodox and heterodox; and gradually, within the Synod and outside, support
for reunion with the patriarchate grew stronger. Then, in 1843, a bloodless
coup forced the king to dismiss his Bavarian aides and summon a National
Assembly to draw up a constitution in which the indissoluble unity of the Greek
Church with Constantinople was declared.
In 1849 the Greek government sent the Patriarch the Order of St.
Saviour; but he was still not mollified. However, under Russian pressure, he
and his Synod finally, on June 29, 1851, issued a Tomos which recognized the
autocephaly of the Greek Church, but with conditions: that the State should not
interfere in the affairs of the Church (as if it never interfered in the
affairs of the Patriarchate!), that the name of the Patriarch should be
commemorated at every Liturgy in Greece, that the Holy Chrism should be sent
from Constantinople, and that the Greek Holy Synod should submit all important
questions to the Patriarch. Although there were some protests against these
conditions, the quarrel now died down…[358]
The Kollyvades Movement
During the Greek War of Independence there
came to a head a long-running dispute over the canonicity of two liturgical
practices: (1) the performing of services commemorating the dead on Sundays,
and (2) the practice of receiving Divine Communion no more than two or three
times a year.
The so-called “Kollyvades” Fathers[359]
– so called after the kollyva, or boiled wheat, which is traditionally
given out at memorial services in the Greek Church – rose up against these practices,
saying that memorial services for the dead should be held, according to
Apostolic Tradition, on Saturdays, not Sundays, and that Communion should be
received as often as possible consistent with proper preparation for the
sacrament. There was much opposition to the teaching of Kollyvades, and
successive patriarchs adopted a compromise position based on the principle of
“economy” or condescension. Thus in 1772 Patriarch Theodosius II decreed in a
letter: “Those who perform memorial services for the dead of Saturday do well,
as they keep the ancient Tradition of the Church, while those who perform them
on Sunday do not sin.” Again, in 1819 Patriarch Gregory V decreed that memorial
services “be performed without distinction on Sundays and Saturdays, as well as
on other days of the week, in order to terminate completely that dispute which
arose long ago.” [360]
As for the receiving of Communion, “in
1775, Ecumenical Patriarch Theodosios sought to reconcile the two factions. He
wrote to the monks of Athos saying that the early Christians received Holy
Communion every Sunday, while those of the subsequent period received it every
forty days, after penance; he advised that whoever felt himself prepared should
follow the former, whereas if he did not he should follow the latter. But this
did not bring an end to the dispute. Like the contention about memorial
services, it continued until the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1819,
Patriarch Gregory V wrote to the monks of the Holy Mountain that Communion
should not be received at certain set times, but whenever one felt oneself read
for it, following confession and other necessary preparation.”[361]
Constantine Cavarnos points out that the
Kollyvades controversy witnesses to the revival of Greek Orthodox spirituality
in the period. And he continues: “There is another very important side to the
Kollyvades movement: its revival of Eastern Orthodox mysticism. Together with
the Kollyvades’ fervor for a stricter adherence to Sacred Tradition went an
endeavour to revive and cultivate this mysticism, known as hesychasm.
After the vindication of hesychasm by the Synod of Hagia Sophia in 1351
and the canonization of the great defender of hesychasm, Gregory Palamas,
hesychasm gradually fell into relative oblivion. It was revived by the
Kollyvades, particularly Macarios and Nicodemos. The Philokalia, a
monumental anthology of ascetic-mystical writings by some thirty Greek Fathers
which played a role of first rate importance in the revival of hesychasm in
Greece, the other Balkan countries and Russia, owed its publication to these
two saints….”[362]
The Philokalia was
translated into Slavonic by the Russian Athonite monk St. Paisius Velichkovsky,
who thereby brought the neo-hesychast movement to Romania and Russia. Here it
was destined to bring forth much fruit, notably among the famous Elders of
Optina monastery…
Even the opposition aroused by the
Kollyvades, especially on Mount Athos, was turned to the good by Divine
Providence. “Contrary to all the anticipations of the Anti-Kollyvades, this
persecution served to spread the ideas of the Kollyvades throughout Greece.
Many of the Kollyvades left Mount Athos and scattered all over Greece,
especially the Aegean islands, becoming spiritual awakeners and reformers through
their sermons, personal counsels, the establishment of monasteries that
developed into luminous centers of spiritual life, and their exemplary
Christian character and way of life.”[363]
The
Decembrist Rebellion
The wave of revolutionary violence reached Russia after the supposed
death of Tsar Alexander I on November 19, 1825. During the interregnum, on
December 14, a group of army officers attempted to seize power in St.
Petersburg. The Decembrist conspirators were divided into a Northern Society based
in St. Petersburg and a Southern society based in Tulchin, headquarters of the
Second Army in the Ukraine.
“In the ideology of the Northern Society especially,” writes Walicki,
“there were certain elements reminiscent of the views of the aristocratic
opposition of the reign of Catherine II. Many of the members in this branch of
the Decembrist movement were descendants of once powerful and now impoverished
boyar families… Nikita Muraviev claimed that the movement was rooted in the
traditions of Novgorod and Pskov, of the twelfth-century Boyar Duma, of the
constitutional demands presented to Anne by the Moscow nobility in 1730, and of
the eighteenth-century aristocratic opposition. The poet Kondraty Ryleev
painted an idealized portrait of Prince Andrei Kurbsky (the leader of the boyar
revolt against Ivan the Terrible) and even devoted one of his ‘elegies’ to
him…In his evidence before the Investigating Commission after the suppression
of the revolt, Petr Kakhovsky stated that the movement was primarily a response
to the high-handedness of the bureaucracy, the lack of respect for ancient
gentry freedom, and the favoritism shown to foreigners. Another Northern
Decembrist, the writer and literary critic Aleksandr Bestuzhev… wrote that his
aim was ‘monarchy tempered by aristocracy’. These and similar facts explain
Pushkin’s view, expressed in the 1830’s, that the Decembrist revolt had been
the last episode in the age-old struggle between autocracy and boyars…
“The Decembrists used the term ‘republic’ loosely, without appearing to
be fully aware that there were essential differences between, for instance, the
Roman republic, the Polish gentry republic, the old Russian city states, and
modern bourgeois republics… Muraviev modeled his plan for a political system on
the United States… The theorists of the Northern Society made no distinction
between criticism of absolutism from the standpoint of the gentry and similar
criticism from a bourgeois point of view. Hence they saw no difficulty in
reconciling liberal notions taken largely from the works of Bentham, Benjamin
Constant and Adam Smith with an idealization of former feudal liberties and a
belief in the role of the aristocracy as a ‘curb on despotism’. The theoretical
premise here was the ‘juridical world view’ of the Enlightenment, according to
which legal and political forms determined the revolution of society.”[364]
The Northern Decembrists were in favour of the emancipation of the
serfs. However, they insisted that the land should remain with the gentry,
thereby ensuring the continued dependence of the serfs on the gentry. “The
conviction that the peasants ought to be overjoyed merely at the abolition of
serfdom was shared by many Decembrists. Yakushkin, for instance, could not
conceal his exasperation at his peasants’ demand for land when he offered to
free them. When they were told that the land would remain the property of the
landlord, their answer was: ‘Then things had better stay as they were. We
belong to the master, but the land belongs to us.’”[365]
The Northern Decembrists worked out a new interpretation of Russian
history conceived “as an antithesis to Karamzin’s theory of the beneficial role
of autocracy. “An innate Russian
characteristic, the Decembrists maintained – one that later developments had
blunted but not destroyed – was a deep-rooted love of liberty. Autocracy had
been unknown in Kievan Russia: the powers of the princes had been strictly
circumscribed there and decisions on important affairs of state were taken by
the popular assemblies. The Decembrists were especially ardent admirers of the
republican city-states of Novgorod and Pskov. This enthusiasm was of practical
significance, since they were convinced that the ‘spirit of liberty’ that had
once imbued their forbears was still alive; let us but strike the bell, and the
people of Novgorod, who have remained unchanged throughout the centuries, will
assemble by the bell tower, Ryleev declared. Kakhovsky described the peasant
communes with their self-governing mir as ‘tiny republics’, a living
survival of Russian liberty. In keeping with this conception, the Decembrists
thought of themselves as restoring liberty and bringing back a form of
government that had sound historical precedents.”[366]
This reinterpretation of Russian history was false. Russia was imbued
from the beginning with the spirit of Orthodox autocracy and patriarchy: the
“republics” of Pskov and Novgorod were exceptions to the historical rule. And
if Kievan autocracy was less powerful than the Muscovite or Petersburg
autocracies, this was not necessarily to its advantage. Russia succumbed to the
Mongols because the dividedness of her princes precluded a united defence. And
there can be little doubt that she would not have survived into the nineteenth
century as an independent Orthodox nation if she had not been an autocracy.
The leader of the Southern Society, Colonel Pavel Pestel, had more
radical ideas in his draft for a constitution, Russian Justice, which
was based on two assumptions: “that every man has a natural right to exist and
thus to a piece of land large enough to allow him to make a basic living; and
that only those who create surplus wealth have a right to enjoy it. After the
overthrow of tsarism, therefore, Pestel proposed to divide land into two equal
sectors: the first would be public property (or, more accurately, the property
of the communes); the second would be in private hands. The first would be used
to ensure everyone a minimum living, whereas the second would be used to create
surplus wealth. Every citizen was entitled to ask his commune for an allotment
large enough to support a family; if the commune had more land available, he
would even be able to demand several such allotments. The other sector would
remain in private hands. Pestel felt that his program ensured every individual
a form of social welfare in the shape of a communal land allotment but also
left scope for unlimited initiative and the opportunity of making a fortune in
the private sector.
“Pestel believed that his program had every chance of success since land
ownership in Russia had traditionally been both communal and private. Here he
obviously had in mind the Russian village commune; it should be emphasized,
however, that Pestel’s commune differed essentially from the feudal obshchina
in that it did not restrict its members’ movement or personal freedom and did
not impose collective responsibility for individual members’ tax liabilities.”[367]
The Decembrist rebellion was not as important for what it represented in
itself as for the halo of martyrdom which its exiles acquired, inspiring Herzen
and other sons of the gentry in their much more radical ideas and plans. The
Decembrists were romantic dreamers rather than hardened revolutionaries – one
of their leaders, the poet Ryleyev, mounted the scaffold with a volume of
Byron’s works in his hands.[368] But
this did not diminish the evil effect their words and deeds had on the minds of
succeeding generations. And the saints of Russia were severe in their
condemnation.
“They say,” writes Platonov, “that in 1825, not long before the
Decembrist rebellion, a Mason, apparently Pestel, asked St. Seraphim for a
blessing. But he shouted angrily at him, as at the greatest criminal and
apostate from Christ: ‘Go where you came from,’ – and threw him out.”[369]
579 people arrested and brought to trial. 40 were given the death
sentence and the rest – hard labour. In the end only five were executed. The
soldiers were flogged.[370] On
August 21, 1826 Tsar Nicholas confirmed his predecessor’s ban on the Masonic
lodges…
“And so for the first time in Russian history,” writes Lebedev,
“a rebellion of the nobility had as its aim not the removal of one sovereign by
another, but the annihilation of tsarist power altogether… It became clear that
[the Decembrists’] links in ‘society’ were so significant and deep, and the
sympathy for them so broad, that one could speak of a betrayal of the Throne
and Church – or, at any rate, of the unreliability – of the noble class as a
whole.”[371]
V.F. Ivanov writes: “As an eyewitness put it,
the rebellion in Petersburg shocked the general mass of the population of
Russia profoundly. In his words, ‘the attempt to limit the Tsar’s power and
change the form of government seemed to us not only sacrilege, but an
historical anomaly; while the people, seeing that the plotters belonged
exclusively to the upper class, considered the nobility to be traitors, and
this added one more sharp feature to that secret hatred which it nourished
towards the landowners. Only the progressives and the intelligentsia of the
capital sympathised with the unfortunate madmen’ (Schilder).
“The best people turned away from the affair in disgust and branded the
work of the Mason-Decembrists that of Cain. In the words of Karamzin: ‘Look at
the stupid story of our mad liberalists! Pray God that not so many real rogues
are found among them. The soldiers were only victims of a deception. Sometimes
a fine day begins with a storm: may it be thus in the new reign… God saved us
from a great disaster on December 14…’”[372]
St.
Seraphim of Sarov
In 1844 Nicholas Alexandrovich Motovilov, a nobleman of Simbirsk
province and a close friend of the greatest saint of the age, Seraphim of Sarov
(+1833), made notes of his conversations with the saint, which provide the best
spiritual commentary on the age. At the beginning of the twentieth century
Sergius Alexandrovich Nilus found these notes and published them as follows:
“… As a demonstration of true zeal for God Batyushka Seraphim cited the
holy Prophet Elijah and Gideon, and for hours at a time he talked in an
inspired manner about them. Every judgement that he made about them was
concluded by its application to life, precisely our own life, and with an
indication of how we… can draw soul-saving instructions from their lives. He
often spoke to me about the holy King, Prophet and Ancestor of God David, at
which point he went into an extraordinary spiritual rapture. How one had to see
him during those unearthly minutes! His face, inspired by the grace of the Holy
Spirit, shone like the sun, and I – I speak the truth – on looking at him felt
in my eyes as if I was looking at the sun. I involuntarily recalled the face of
Moses when he had just come down from Sinai. My soul, pacified, entered such a
quiet, and was filled with such great joy, that my heart was ready to embrace
within itself not only the whole human race, but also the whole creation of
God, pouring out in love towards everything that is of God…
“’So, your Godbelovedness, so,’ Batyushka used to say, leaping from joy
(those who still remember this holy elder will relate how he would sometimes be
seen leaping from joy), ‘”I have chosen David my servant, a man after My own
heart, who will do all My will”’…
“In explaining how good it was to serve the Tsar and how much his life
should be held dear, he gave as an example Abishai, David’s war-commander.
“’Once,’ said Batyushka Seraphim, ‘to satisfy the thirst of David, he
stole in to a spring in view of the enemy camp and got water, and, in spite of
a cloud of arrows released at him from the enemy camp, returned to him
completely unharmed, bringing the water in his helmet. He had been saved from
the cloud of arrows only because of his zeal towards the King. But when David
gave an order, Abishai replied: “Only command, O King, and everything will be
done in accordance with your will.” But when the King expressed the desire to
take part himself in some bloody deed to encourage his warriors, Abishai
besought him to preserve his health and, stopping him from participating in the
battle, said: “There are many of us, your Majesty, but you are one among us.
Even if all of us were killed, as long as you were alive, Israel would be whole
and unconquered. But if you are gone, then what will become of Israel?”…’
“Baytushka Fr. Seraphim loved to explain himself at length, praising the
zeal and ardour of faithful subjects to the Tsar, and desiring to explain more
clearly how these two Christian virtues are pleasing to God, he said:
“’After Orthodoxy, these are our first Russian duty and the chief
foundation of true Christian piety.’
“Often from David he changed the subject to our great Emperor [Nicholas
I] and for hours at a time talked to me about him and about the Russian
kingdom, bewailing those who plotted evil against his August Person. Clearly
revealing to me what they wanted to do, he led me into a state of horror; while
speaking about the punishment prepared for them from the Lord, and in
confirmation of his words, he added:
“’This will happen without fail: the Lord, seeing the impenitent spite
of their hearts, will permit their undertakings to come to pass for a short
period, but their illness will turn upon their heads, and the unrighteousness
of their destructive plots will descend upon them. The Russian land will be
reddened with streams of blood, and many noblemen will be killed for his great
Majesty and the integrity of his Autocracy: but the Lord will not be wrath to
the end, and will not allow the Russian land to be destroyed to the end,
because in it alone will Orthodoxy and the remnants of Christian piety be
especially preserved.
“Once,” as Motovilov continued in his notes, “I was in great sorrow,
thinking what would happened in the future with our Orthodox Church if the evil
contemporary to us would be multiplied more and more. And being convinced that
our Church was in an extremely pitiful state both from the great amount of
carnal debauchery and… from the spiritual impiety of godless opinions sown
everywhere by the most recent false teachers, I very much wanted to know what
Batyushka Seraphim would tell me about this.
“Discussing the holy Prophet Elijah in detail, he said in reply to my
question, among other things, the following:
“’Elijah the Thesbite
complained to the Lord about Israel as if it had wholly bowed the knee to Baal,
and said in prayer that only he, Elijah, had remained faithful to Lord, but now
they were seeking his soul, too, to take it… So what, batyushka, did the Lord
reply to this? “I have left seven thousand men in Israel who have not bowed the
knee to Baal.” So if in the kingdom of Israel, which had fallen away from the
kingdom of Judah that was faithful to God, and had come to a state of complete
corruption, there still remained seven thousand men faithful to the Lord, then
what shall we say about Russia? I think that at that time there were no more
than three million in the kingdom of Israel at that time. And how many do we
have in Russia now, batyushka?’
“I replied: ‘About sixty
million.’
“And he continued: ‘Twenty times more. Judge for yourself how many more
of those faithful to God that brings!… So, batyushka, those whom He foreknew,
He also predestined; and those whom He predestined, He also called; and those
whom He called, He guards, and those He also glorifies… So what is there for us
to be despondent about!… God is with us! He who hopes in the Lord is as Mount
Sion, and the Lord is round about His people… The Lord will keep you, the Lord
will protect you on your right hand, the Lord will preserve your coming in and
your going out now and to the ages; by day the sun will not burn you, nor the
moon by night.’
“And when I asked him what this meant, and to what end he was talking to
me about it:
“’To the end,’ replied Batyushka Fr. Seraphim, ‘that you should know
that in this way the Lord guards His people as the apple of His eye, that is,
the Orthodox Christians, who love Him and with all their heart, and all their
mind, in word and deed, day and night serve Him. And such are those who
completely observe all the commandments, dogmas and traditions of our Eastern
Universal Church, and confess the piety handed down by it with their lips, and
really, in all the circumstances of life, act according to the holy
commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ.’
“In confirmation
of the fact that there were still many in the Russian land who remained
faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ, who lived in Orthodoxy and piety, batyushka
Fr. Seraphim once said to one acquaintance of mine – either Fr. Gury, the
former guest-master of Sarov, or Fr. Simeon, the owner of Maslinshensky court,
- that once, when he was in the Spirit, he saw the whole land of Russia, and it
was filled and as it were covered with the smoke of the prayers of believers
praying to the Lord…”[373]
St. Seraphim not only clearly condemned the Decembrists for their attack
on the Tsardom: he prophetically saw that this evil would continue to grow and
would lead in the end to the Russian revolution of 1917: "More than half a
century will pass. Then evildoers will raise their heads high. This will happen
without fail: the Lord, seeing the impenitent evil of their hearts, will allow
their enterprises for a short time. But their sickness will rebound upon their
own heads, and the unrighteousness of their destructive plots will fall upon
them. The Russian land will become red with rivers of blood... Before the birth
of the Antichrist there will be a great, protracted war and a terrible
revolution in Russia passing all bounds of human imagination, for the
bloodletting will be most terrible: the rebellions of Ryazan, Pugachev and the
French revolution will be nothing in comparison with what will take place in
Russia. Many people who are faithful to the fatherland will perish, church
property and the monasteries will be robbed; the Lord's churches will be
desecrated; good rich people will be robbed and killed, rivers of Russian blood
will flow..."[374]
Part II. LIBERALISM AND AUTOCRACY
(1830-1871)
3. THE WEST: THE DUAL REVOLUTION
The King reigns,
but does not govern.
Adolphe Thiers, Le
National, 4 February, 1830.
The system worked, throughout Europe, with an extraordinary success and facilitated the growth of wealth on an unprecedented scale. To save and to invest became at once the duty and the delight of a large class. The savings were seldom drawn on, and accumulating at compound interest, made possible the material triumphs which we now all take for granted. The morals, the politics, the literature and the religion of the age joined in a grand conspiracy for the promotion of saving. God and Mammon were reconciled. Peace on earth to men of good means. A rich man could, after all, enter into the Kingdom of Heaven – if only he saved.
John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary
Reform (1923).
We intend to dethrone the King of heaven
as well as the monarchs of the earth.
The Paris Commune.
The short period of reaction in France under the absolutist monarchy of
Charles X came to an end with the “July Days” revolution of 1830, which
introduced a constitutional monarchy headed by another Bourbon, Louis-Philippe,
the Duke of Orléans. At almost the same time, in 1832, the British
parliament passed the Reform Act, which rationalized and extended the
franchise, consolidating the role of the middle class in government. With
liberalism triumphant in these two countries (as also, of course, in the United
States), the revolution acquired a second wind throughout Europe. Everybody
could see that reaction was over and liberalism was here to stay. Its progress
might be checked temporarily; it might be appeased for a time with concessions
that fell short of the full liberal programme. But even emperors, such as
Napoleon III, would have to seek a popular mandate and pay at least nominal
deference to constitutional ideals.
And then there was the industrial revolution, which was to transform
every State in Western Europe, and from there – the whole world.
The origins of the industrial revolution are to be found in the agrarian
revolution of the eighteenth century. Its essential features were the
“privatisation” of the common land (in England, the pioneer in both the
agrarian and industrial revolutions, through the Enclosure Acts of 1760 to
1830), its more efficient capitalist exploitation by a new breed of capitalist
landowners, creating a new surplus in food and market in agricultural produce,
and the destruction of the feudal bonds that bound the peasant to the land that
he worked and the landowner for whom he worked. This led to the creation of a
large number of landless agricultural labourers who, in the absence of work in
the countryside, sought it in the new industrial enterprises that were being
created in the towns to exploit a series of important technological
innovations.
Liberalism’s triumph was aided by an offshoot of the industrial
revolution, the revolution in communications. “The most famous demonstration,”
writes Norman Stone, “of the value of superior communication was staged on 19
June 1815, when Nathan Rothschild made a record killing on the London stock
market, having used a special yacht to bring news of Waterloo many hours in
advance of his rivals.”[375]
But yachts were as nothing compared to the new, machine-produced means
of communication, such as the electric telegraph (1835). The impact of the
explosion in newspaper reading was so great that the Austrian Chancellor
Metternich wondered “whether society can exist along with the liberty of the
press.”[376]
Thus in the revolution of 1848, writes Eric Hobsbawm, “even the most
arch-reactionary Prussian junkers discovered… that they required a newspaper
capable of influencing ‘public opinion’ – in itself a concept linked with
liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy.”[377]
As the poet Robert Southey wrote: “The steam engine and the spinning
engines, the mail coach and the free publication of the debates in parliament…
Hence follow in natural and necessary consequences increased activity,
enterprise, wealth and power; but on the other hand, greediness of gain,
looseness of principle, wretchedness, disaffection and political insecurity…”[378]
The world as we know it today is largely the product of this dual
revolution – the political revolution in France and the industrial revolution
in Britain - that took place in the central decades of the nineteenth century.
But first let us examine that union of revolutionary sentiment and
romanticism noted in the first chapter. The Enlightenment had undermined faith
and religion, substituting for them reason and science.
The Counter-Enlightenment, convinced of the narrowness and superficiality of
these, put forward imagination and art instead. The artist was
now prophet and priest; and since artistic imagination was the path to all
truth, it was the path to political truth also. And political action, too; for
the Romantics insisted on the unity of mind and heart, feeling and action. For,
as William Blake put it as early as 1793, “Energy is the only life, and is from
the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.”[379]
And so Romantic art became identified with the revolution.[380] We see
the tendency for art to become the mouthpiece of the revolution as early as
that paragon of classicism – Mozart. In his opera The Marriage of Figaro, which
avoided the censorship that had banned Beaumarchais’ play of the same name, a
distinct strand of anti-aristocratic rebelliousness is given vigorous
expression – although masters and servants are touchingly united in the final
chorus. Again, in Don Giovanni, while the Don’s words Viva la
liberta! celebrated sexual rather than political revolution (the two
invariably go together), the censors, fearing that word liberta!, still
demanded that he sing Viva la societa! instead.[381]
Finally, The Magic Flute, composed in 1791, celebrated that Masonic
society that was the heart of the revolution.
The French revolution was almost unanimously acclaimed by poets and
philosophers. Wordsworth exclaimed what bliss it was to be alive at the dawn of
the revolution, and Byron and Shelley considered it their duty as poets to
join the revolution. Painters such as David chose revolutionaries as their
subjects, and invariably portrayed the object of their revolutionary desires,
liberty, as a half-naked young woman (the link between political rebellion and
sexual lust has always been close).
It was the same with instrumental music. In 1803, Beethoven devoted the
first great work of romantic music, the Eroica symphony, to the god of
the early revolution, Napoleon, only to scratch out the dedication when he
found that his idol had feet of clay. Somewhat later, Berlioz, Liszt and Chopin
were all close to the revolutionary movement…
The artist who most clearly represented
the link between art and the revolution in the early nineteenth century was
Lord Byron. It was not simply that Byron died, as we have seen, in the cause of
the Greek revolution: his poetry expressed a cynical, disillusioned,
anti-establishment and anti-Christian, and yet still vaguely idealistic mood
that swept Europe in the wake of the failure of the first French revolution.
Indeed, “Byronism” represented a whole phase in European sensibility.
Dostoyevsky had a highly questionable, but, as always, illuminating point of view on Byronism. “First of all,” he wrote, “one shouldn’t use the word ‘Byronist’ as an invective. Byronism, though a momentary phenomenon, was a great, sacred and necessary one in the life of European mankind and, perhaps, in that of the entire human race. Byronism appeared at a moment of dreadful anguish, disillusionment and almost despair among men. Following the ecstatic transports of the new creed in the new ideals proclaimed at the end of the last century in France, then the most progressive nation of European mankind, the outcome was very different from what had been expected; this so deceived the faith of man that there has never perhaps been a sadder moment in the history of Western Europe. The new idols – raised for one moment only – fell not only as a result of external (political) causes, but because of their intrinsic bankruptcy – which was clearly perceived by the sagacious hearts and the progressive minds. The new outcome was not yet in sight; the new valve was not yet revealed, and everybody was suffocating under the weight of a former world, which drew and narrowed itself down over mankind in a most dreadful manner. The old idols lay shattered.
“It was at this very moment that a great and mighty genius, a passionate poet appeared. In his melodies there sounded mankind’s anguish of those days, its gloomy disillusionment in its mission and in the ideals which had deceived it. It was a novel, then unheard-of muse of vengeance and sorrow, malediction and despair. The spirit of Byronism, as it were, swept mankind as a whole, and everything responded to it. It was precisely as if a valve had been opened: at least, amidst the universal and dull groans – mostly unconscious – this was a mighty outcry in which all the cries and moans of mankind combined and merged in one chord. How could it not have been felt in Russia and particularly by so great, ingenious and leading a mind as that of Pushkin? – In those days also, in Russia no strong mind, no magnanimous heart could have evaded Byronism. And not only because of compassion from afar for Europe and European mankind, but because precisely at that time in Russia, too, there arose a great many unsolved and tormenting questions, a great many old disillusionments…”[382]
While agreeing with Dostoyevsky’s account of the origins of Byronism and its significance, we may doubt whether it was “great, sacred and necessary”; nor was every magnanimous heart in Europe touched by Byron’s demonic genius. For demonic is certainly what it was. His unfettered will defied both the impediment of his deformed foot, which he saw “as the mark of satanic connection”[383], 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!
Art
and Revolution: (2) The July Days
Let us look more closely at the link between Romantic art and the
revolution. Artistic imagination in the Romantic sense was much more than the
ability to fantasise. Jacques Barzun writes: “Out of the known or knowable, Imagination
connects the remote, interprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities.
Being a means of discovery, it must be called ‘Imagination of the real’.
Scientific hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of
imagination.
“This view of the matter explains why to the Romanticists the arts no
longer figured as a refined pleasure of the senses, an ornament of civilized
existence, but as one form of the deepest possible reflection on life. Shelley,
defending his art, declares poets to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the
world’. The arts convey truths; they are imagination crystallized; and as they
transport the soul they reshape the perceptions and possibly the life of the
beholder. To perform this feat requires genius, because it is not a mechanical
act. To be sure, all art makes use of conventions, but to obey traditional
rules and follow set patterns will not achieve that fusion of idea and form
which is properly creation. It was Romanticist discussion that made the word creation
regularly apply to works of art…
“Those Romanticist words, recharged with meaning, helped to establish
the religion of art. That faith served those who could and those could not
partake of the revived creeds. To call the passion for art a religion is not a
figure of speech or a way of praise. Since the beginning of the 19C, art has
been defined again and again by its devotees as ‘the highest spiritual
expression of man’. The dictum leaves no room for anything higher and this
highest level is that which, for other human beings, is occupied by religion.
To 19C worshippers the arts form a treasury of revelations, a body of
scriptures, the makers of this spiritual testament are prophets and seers. And
to this day the fortunate among them are treated as demigods…”[384]
The word “creation” was understood by the Romantics in almost a literal
sense, as the activity of the Word of God creating something out of nothing.
This meant, however, that Romantic art was not only a path to truth: it created
its own truth. But since truth is not created by man, but revealed to him
by God, this can only mean that Romantic “creationism” was demonic in origin.
Thus, as Sir Isaiah Berlin writes, “whatever the differences between the
leading romantic thinkers – the early Schiller and the later Fichte, Schelling
and Jacobi, Tieck and the Schlegels when they were young, Chateaubriand and
Byron, Coleridge and Carlyle, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Nietzsche, Baudelaire –
there runs through their writings a common notion, held with varying degrees of
consciousness and depth, that truth is not an objective structure, independent
of those who seek it, the hidden treasure waiting to be found, but is itself in
all its guises created by the seeker. It is not to be brought into being necessarily
by the finite individual: according to some it is created by a greater power, a
universal spirit, personal or impersonal, in which the individual is an
element, or of which he is an aspect, an emanation, an imperfect reflection.
But the common assumption of the romantics runs counter to the philosophia
perennis is that the answers to the great questions are not to be
discovered so much as to be invented. They are not something found, they are
something literally made. In its extreme Idealistic form it is a vision of the
entire world. In its more familiar conduct – aesthetics, religious, social,
moral, political – a realm seen not as a natural or supernatural order capable
of being investigated, described and explained by the appropriate method – rational
examination or some more mysterious procedure – but as something that man
creates, as he creates works of art; not by imitating, or even obtaining
illumination from, pre-existent models or truths, or by applying pre-existent
truths that are objective universal, eternal unalterabl; but by an act of
creation, the introduction into the world of something literally novel – the
unique expression of an individual and therefore unique creative activity,
natural or supernatural, human or in part divine, owing nothing to anything
outside it (in some versions because nothing can be conceived as being outside
it), self-subsistent, self-justified, self-fulfilling. Hence that new emphasis
on the subjective and ideal rather than the objective and the real, on the process
of creation rather than its effects, on motives rather than consequences; and,
as a necessary corollary of this, on the quality of the vision, the state of
mind or soul of the acting agent – purity of heart, innocence of intention,
sincerity of purpose rather than getting the answer right, that is, accurate
correspondence to the ‘given’. Hence the emphasis on activity, movement that
cannot be reduced to static segments, the flow that cannot be arrested, frozen,
analysed without being thereby fatally distorted; hence the constant protest
against the reduction of ‘life’ to dead fragments, of organism to ‘mere’
mechanical or uniform units; and the corresponding tendency towards similes and
metaphors drawn from ‘dynamic’ sciences – biology, physiology, introspective
psychology – and the worship of music, which, of all the arts, appears to have
the least relation to universally observable, uniform natural order. Hence,
too, celebration of all forms of defiance directed against the ‘given’ – the
impersonal, the ‘brute fact’ in morals or in politics – or against the static
and the accepted, and the value placed on minorities and martyrs as such, no
matter what the ideal for which they suffer.”[385]
By virtue of this common desire to defy the “given”, the identification
of the revolution with romantic art, as Adam Zamoyski notes, was almost
complete. “’People and poets are marching together,’ wrote the French critic
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1830. ‘Art is henceforth on a popular footing,
in the arena with the masses.’ There was something in this. Never before or
since had poetry been so widely and so urgently read, so taken to heart and so
closely studied for hidden meaning. And it was not only in search of aesthetic
or emotional uplift that people did so, for the poet had assumed a new role
over the past two decades. Art was no longer an amenity but a great truth that
had to be revealed to mankind, and the artist was one who had been called to
interpret this truth, a kind of seer. In Russia, Pushkin solemnly declared the
poet’s status as a prophet uttering the burning words of truth. The American
Ralph Waldo Emerson saw poets as ‘liberating gods’ because they had achieved
freedom themselves, and could therefore free others. The pianist and composer
Franz Liszt wanted to rcapture the ‘political, philosophical and religious
power’ that he believed music had in ancient times. William Blake claimed that
Jesus and his disciples were all artists, and that he himself was following
Jesus through his art. ‘God was, perhaps only the first poet of the universe,’
Théophile Gauthier reflected.[386] By the
1820s artists regularly referred to their craft as a religion, and Victor Hugo
represented himself alternately as Zoroaster, Moses and Christ, somewhere
between prophet and God.”[387]
Of all the art-forms the one having the most direct revolutionary
impact, combining as it did poetry, theatre, visual art and music, was opera.
Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici, had a revolutionary subject, a
tenor playing the part of the revolutionary dressed in open shirt, tricolor
pantaloons and a red Phrygian cap and singing a refrain ‘Amour sacré
de la Patrie’ which contained a phrase out of the Marseillaise. It
brought the house down, becoming, in spite of the censors’ best efforts, a
symbol of subversion and a sign pointing to what was to come in the
revolutionary year of 1830.[388]
“The first night of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, on 25 February
1830, set the tone for the new year. The play, which is about an outlaw
struggling for love and liberation against fate and the Habsburg establishment,
nicely encapsulated all the most fashionable themes. Its form also broke all
the artistic conventions, and in the preface Hugo declared that the Romantic
style was no more or less than liberalism in the arts. The theatre was the
scene of a pitched battle between classicists and Romantics, an artistic dress
rehearsal for what was to come in the political sphere.
“The ineptitude of the opposition under the Restoration had given the
Bourbons the impression that they were firmly in the saddle. Louis XVIII died
peacefully in 1824 and was uneventfully succeeded by his brother, the Comte
d’Artois, as Charles X. He began turning back the clock as soon as he ascended
the throne, insisting on having himself crowned at Rheims in May 1825 with the
full ceremonial of tradition. Meaning to strengthen the throne’s position
further, Charles X strove to undermine the principles of the Charte that
had been the foundation of the Restoration. An economic depression in the years
1826-7 provoked unrest in various parts, and in November 1827 there was a
rising in Paris. But the feelings that led to it were diffuse and vague. Among
the young men on the barricades was Auguste Blanqui, who confessed to not knowing
exactly what he was fighting for, even though this was to be the beginning of a
long life dedicated to revolt. The rising was quickly quashed, but the emotions
that underlay it were not so easily dealt with.
“These had no leader to coalesce around, aside from the largely symbolic
figure of Lafayette. He had been associated with every conspiracy since 1815,
but did not lead any of them. Although he took pride in his revolutionary
credentials and could not resist young enthusiasts, he had grown more practical
with age and was now keener on constitutional reform. He nevertheless remained
the most respected figure in French public life. His American trip of 1824 had
enhanced his standing, and his agitation for the Greek cause had given him an
opportunity to fly the flag of liberty. He was recognized as representing all
that was finest in French political culture.
“Frustrated by the Chamber of Deputies, Charles X decided to dissolve it
and call an election in March 1830. This yielded an increased opposition. The
king set his mind on a show of strength and on 26 July announced a set of
emergency ordonnances, abrogating press freedom, dissolving the
newly-elected Chamber and limiting the franchise for the next election. The
following day barricades began to go up and people started looting gunsmiths’
shops. The situation was serious but not critical, as the protesters had no
leaders, no plan, and no particular idea of what they wanted. Nor were they
representatives of the population at large. The former Napoleonic marshal
Marmont was in command of the 10,000 troops in the capital, and he should have
been able to prevent the rising from gaining ground, but he received
conflicting orders. The king intended to ride the stron but then changed his
mind, by which time it was too late. After two days of confused fighting,
Marmont’s troops began to go over to the other side. By 29 July most of Paris
was controlled by the insurgents, and the municipal committee in the
Hôtel de Ville was behaving like a provisional government. Charles X fled
abroad, as he had done on 16 July 1789.
“The rising, unplanned and undirected, was motivated by a spectrum of
grievances and desires, but frustration of one sort or another was probably the
dominant motor during its three-day duration, which came to be called ‘Les
Trois Glorieuses’. Some of the insurgents wer poor and hungry, but poverty
and hunger were noticeably absent from the slogans and banners. The most
commonly heard shout was ‘Vive la liberté!’, but its meaning
depended very much on who was doing the shouting. There were those who wanted
constitutional change, but most would have been hard put to it to define their
demands. The cry of ‘Smash the Romantics!’ was more in evidence than any calls
for bread or better working conditions.
“The Romantics were out in force. Alexandre Dumas manned a barricade
with the painter Paul Huet, a former Carbonaro. Franz Liszt was caught
up in the excitement and roamed the streets encouraging the insurgents and
meditating a Revolutionary Symphony. Stendhal stayed at home during the three
days, engrossed in Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène,
that bible of the cult of Napoleon. Dumas, who was helping to build a barricade
on the Place de l’Odéon on the second day of the revolt, witnessed a scene
that fully justified Stendhal’s studies. As he and his companions toiled away,
tearing up paving-stones and heaving furniture on to the barricade, the owner
of a nearby riding-school rode up on a white horse, in a tightly buttoned coat
and a black tricorn hat, and came to a halt, with one hand held behind his
back. The resemblance to Napoleon was so striking that the whole crowd began to
shout: ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ An old woman fell to her knees, made the sign
of the cross, and cried out: ‘Oh! Jesus! that I should have been allowed to see
him before I die!…’
“In the moral confusion, it was symbols and shibboleths that carried the
day. Foremost among these was the Marseillaise. It was on the lips of
the first confused crowds as they began to build their barricades, and the
sound electrified the capital. When the tenor Nourrit sang it on the stage of
the Opéra, a religious silence fell, and some went down on their knees.
By popular demand, Nourrit would mount the stage in full National Guard uniform
every evening for the next three months to sin the sacred hymn, holding a
tricolor flag. For the composer Hector Berlioz, the hymn provided one of the
great musical experiences of his life. He had been writing an orchestral
cantata for the competition of the Institut de France when the revolution
began. All through 28 July he worked feverishly at the score in the Palais
Mazarin, while bullets and cannon-balls thudded against the walls and pattered
over the roof. The following day, having finished the piece, he got hold of a
pistol and joined ‘the holly rabble’ on the streets. At one point he came
across a group of young men singing rousing battle-songs. A crowd gathered, and
when Berlioz and the singers wanted to leave, they were pursued by thousands of
frantic admirers. They were finally cornered in a cul-de-sac, and had no option
but to continue singing. They ascended to a first-floor room and opened the
windows so that they could be seen and heard by the crowd. They intoned the Marseillaise.
‘Almost at once the seething mass at our feet grew quiet and a holy stillness
fell upon them,’ recalls Berlioz. When it came to the chorus of ‘Aux armes,
citoyens!’ the multitude of men, women and children, ‘hot from the
barricades, their pulses still throbbing with the excitement of the recent
struggle’, gave voice, and Berlioz sank to the floor, overcome with emotion.
“The other defining symbol of Les Trois Glorieuses was the
tricolor, also banned in 1814. Dumas was crossing a bridge on 28 July when he
suddenly saw it flying over Notre Dame. ‘I leaned over the parapet, my arms
outstretched, my eyes fixed and bathed in tears.’ And it was the tricolor that
was to decide the outcome of the revolution. The instincts driving the
insurgents on to the barricades, and those that made the royal troops waver and
then go over to the other side, were emotional and spiritual rather than
political. Those July days were not born of any deep sense of injustice and
they wer not about bringing in a new social order. They were a rejection of the
Bourbon restoration and an attempt to regain the spirit of 1789. They were a
reaffirmation of the primacy of the nation, which had been ignored and insulted
by the Bourbons.
“On 29 July, when the fighting was pretty well over, Lafayette set out
for the Hôtel de Ville, cheered by the population. He was the one man
everyone could fall in behind. But he was not the man who could wield power. No
one understood this better than the only member of the French royal family
still in Paris, the Duc d’Orléans. Louis Philippe
d’Orléans had been crafting his image carefully, gradually manoeuvring
himself into the position of being both the acceptable face of royalty and the
representative of the spirit of 1792. He cultivated artists and heaped
patronage and flattery on popular writers, who served him well. In 1824 he
sponsored a great exhibition of contemporary French painting at the
Palais-Royal, which, incidentally, featured two great canvases by Vernet
depicting him at Valmy and Jemappes.
“The duke kept out of sight during the
July Days, using Béranger and Ary Scheffer to put forward his name and
sound out opinion on his behalf. He had the support of many constitutional
liberals, and of what might be described as the business interest. As soon as
it became apparent that the cause of Charles X was dead, people opposed to a
republic began to look to Orléans as the lesser of two evils. It was
only than that he sidled into the limelight. On 20 July a delegation from the
moderates to the Chamber of Deputies invited Orléans to become
‘Lieutenant of the Kingdom’ and the following day he went to the Hôtel de
Ville, where Lafayetter was doing his best to contain the more radical
elements.
“As Orléans stood on the balcony of
the Hôtel de Ville with Lafayetter, facing a sullen crowd, he had the
brilliant idea of seizing a huge tricolor flag and brandishing it while he
embraced the general. Its folds framed the figures of Lafayette and the duke,
brushing their faces, and the crowd erupted into a frenzy of enthusiastic
applause. Orléans was the hero of the hour, and a couple of days later
he had been acclaimed Louis Philippe, King of the French. It was his reward for
intelligent observation. He knew the power of the tricolor and its importance
for ordinary Frenchmen. When an officer serving with the French forces in
Algeria gave his soldiers the news of Les Trois Glorieuses, explaining
that the hated Bourbons had fallen, and that their new king was a
constitutional monarch who had fought at Valmy, they were unmoved. ‘It was only
when they learned that the tricolor had replaced the white standard that these
good men gave vent to their joy,’ he writes.
“Joy was the prevalent emotion in France
at the end of July 1830. ‘As soon as the heat of combat had died down,’ noted
the legitimist Comtess de Boigne on 29 July, ‘it became a city of brothers.’
The poor were still poor, the hungry still hungry, but they had been given back
their dreams…
“This joy at the new dawn was not confined
to France. Just as in 1789, a shudder of excitement ran through the Western
world. ‘It roused my utmost enthusiasm, and gave me, as it were, a new
existence,’ wrote John Stuart Mill, then twenty-four, who hastened to Paris,
where he gazed rapt on Lafayette and other heroes of the July days. Heinrich
Heine, though older, reacted with lyricism to ‘the thick packet of newspapers
with the warm, glowing-hot news’. ‘Each item was a sunbeam, wrapped in printed
paper, and together they enkindled my soul with a wild glow… Lafayette, the
tricolor, the Marseillaise – it intoxicates me. Bold, ardent hopes spring up,
like trees with gold fruit and branches that shoot up wildly till their leaves
touch the clouds.’
“And there was the same quasi-religious
reverence surrounding what had happened. A Belgian radical who was in Germany
at the end of July recorded a scene in a Karlsruhe inn. ‘We saw a group of
Baden officers, sitting together at the table d’hôte, rise up suddenly in
a respectful silence when one of them, opening a letter sent to him from
Strasbourg let a tricolor cockade drop out of the envelope. In an attempt to
stop the spread of the infection, several German governments prohibited
performances of operas such as La Muette de Portici and Guilleaume
Tell. They knew what they were doing: a performance of one of them was
responsible for launching an insurrection that created a nation where people
had least expected it – in Belgium…”[389]
Inspired though they were by the poets, the revolutions of 1830 soon
settled down into prosaic mediocrity. The difference between the revolutions of
1789 and 1830 consisted in the latter’s concentration on broadening electoral
suffrage and in its more openly commercial flavour, in keeping with the new
spirit of commercial enterprise. “Master of everything,” wrote Alexis de
Tocqueville of France in the 1840s, “as no aristocracy had ever been or perhaps
will never be, the middle class, which one has to call the governing class,
having entrenched itself in power and soon afterwards in its self-interest,
seemed like a private industry. Each of its members scarcely gave a thought to
public affairs except to make them function to profit his own private business,
and had no difficulty in forgetting the lower orders in his little cocoon of
affluence. Posterity… will possibly never realize how far the government of the
day had in the end taken on the appearance of an industrial company, where all
operations are carried out with a view to the benefit the shareholders can draw
from them.”[390]
The
Polish Question
Encouraged by the Tsar’s non-intervention
in the French and Belgian revolutions, the Poles rose against Tsarist authority
in November, 1830. But this time the Tsar did act. As he wrote to his brother,
who ruled the Polish Kingdom: “It is our duty to think of our security. When I
say ours, I mean the tranquillity of Europe.”[391]
And so the rebellion was crushed. Europe was saved again – and was again
uncomprehending and ungrateful.
Although it failed, the Polish rebellion
gave further support to the idea of a close, symbiotic link between the
revolution and art, as well as bringing to birth perhaps the most
idiosyncratic, powerful and long-lasting variety of the cult of the nation. The
55,000 Polish
troops and 6,000 civilians who made a great exodus to the West and Paris kept
this cult alive, not in Polish hearts only, but throughout Europe. Only the
Russians were not seduced by its masochistic charm.
Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes: “The revolutions of
1830 in France and Belgium gave an impulse to the Masonic movement in Poland.
It had two basic tendencies – an extreme republican one (headed by the
historian Lelevel) and a more moderate aristocratic one (headed by A.
Chartoysky). At the end of 1830 there began a rebellion in Warsaw. Great Prince
Constantine Pavlovich with a detachment of Russian soldiers was forced to
abandon Poland. In 1831 there came there the armies of General Dibich, which
had no significant success, in particular by reason of a very strong outbreak
of cholear, from which both Dibich and Great Prince Constantine died. Meanwhile
the revolutionaries in Warsaw created first a ‘Provisional government’ with a
‘dictator’ at its head, and then convened the Sejm. The rebels demanded first
the complete independence of Poland with the addition to it of Lithuania and
western Rus’, and then declared the ‘deposition’ of the Romanov dynasty from
the throne of the Kingdom of Poland. Count Paskevich of Erevan was sent to
Poland. He took Warsaw by storm and completely destroyed the Masonic revolutionary
armies, forcing their remnants abroad [where they played a significant role in
the revolutionary movement in Western Europe]. Poland was divided into
provinces and completely included into the composition of the Russian Empire.
The language of business was declared to be Russian. Russian landowners
received land in Poland. A Deputy was now placed at the head of the Kingdom of
Poland. He became Paskevich with the new title of Prince of Warsaw. In
connection with all this it became clear that the Polish magnates and
landowners who had kept their land-holdings in Belorussia and Ukraine had
already for some time been persecuting the Orthodox Russians and Little
Russians and also the uniates, and had been occupied in polonizing education in
general the whole cultural life in these lands. Tsar Nicholas I was forced to
take severe measures to restore Russian enlightenment and education in the West
Russian and Ukrainian land. In particular, a Russian university was opened in
Kiev. The part of the Belorussian and Ukrainian population headed by Bishop
Joseph Semashko which had been in a forcible unia with the Catholic Church
since the end of the 16th century desired reunion with Orthodoxy.
Nicholas I decided to satisfy this desire and in 1839 all the uniates (besides
the inhabitants of Kholm diocese) were united to ‘to the ancestral Orthodox
All-Russian Church’, as they put it. This was a great feast of Orthodoxy!
Masses of uniates were united voluntarily, without any compulsion. All
this showed that Russia had subdued and humbled Poland not because she wished
to lord it over her, and resist her independence, but only because Poland wanted
to lord it (both politically and spiritually) over the ages-old Russian
population, depriving it of its own life and ‘ancestral’ faith! With such a
Poland as she was then striving to be, there was nothing to be done but
completely subdue her and force her to respect the rights of other
peoples! But to the Polish Catholics Russia provided, as usual, every
opportunity of living in accordance with their faith and customs.”[392]
Unfortunately, the Poles and the West did not see it like that. The
composer Frederick Chopin wrote: “The suburbs [of Warsaw] are destroyed,
burned… Moscow rules the world! O God, do You exist? You’re there and You don’t
avenge it. How many more Russian crimes do You want – or – are You a Russian
too!!?”[393]
Another artist who gave expression to the new Polish faith was the poet
Mickiewicz. “Poland will arise,” he wrote, “and free nations of Europe from bondage.
Ibi patria, ubi male; wherever in Europe liberty is
suppressed and is fought for, there is the battle for your country.”[394] Adam
Zamoyski writes that Mickiewicz turned “the spiritual fantasies of a handful of
soldiers and intellectuals into the articles of faith that built a modern
nation.
“Mickiewicz had established his reputation as Poland’s foremost lyric
poet in the 1820s, and enhanced his political credentials by his exile in
Russia, where he met several prominent Decembrists and grew close to Pushkin
[who, however, did not sympathize with his views on Poland]. In 1829 Mickiewicz
received permission to go to Germany to take the waters. He met Mendelssohn and
Hegel in Berlin, Metternich in Marienbad, and August Schlegel in Bonn, and
attended Goethe’s eightieth birthday party in Weimar. Goethe kissed him on the
forehead, gave him the quill with which he had worked on Faust, and
commissioned a portrait of him for his collection. Mickiewicz then went to
Italy where, apart from a de rigueur trip to Switzerland (Chillon and Altdorf,
with Byron and Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in his hand), he spent the next
year-and-half. It was in Rome that news of the November Rising [in Warsaw]
reached him. He set off for Poland, but his attempts to cross the border were
foiled by Cossack patrols, and he was obliged to watch the debacle from
Dresden.
“In this tranquil Saxon city he was gripped by inspiration and wrote
frantically in fits lasting up to three days, without pausing to eat or sleep.
The fruit was the third part of a long poetic drama entitled Forefathers’
Eve, which can only be described as a national passion play. Mickiewicz had
also seen the significance of the holy night [of November 29, 1830], and he
likened all monarchs, and Nicholas in particular, to Herod – their sense of
guilty foreboding led them to massacre the youth of nations. The drama
describes the transformation through suffering of the young poet and lover,
Konrad, into a warrior-poet. He is a parable for Poland as a whole, but he is also
something more. ‘My soul has now entered the motherland, and with my body I
have taken her soul: I and the motherland are one,’ he declares after having
endured torture. ‘My name is Million, because I love and suffer for millions… I
feel the sufferings of the whole nation as a mother feels the pain of the fruit
within her womb.’
“In Paris in 1832 Mickiewicz published a short work entitled Books of
the Polish Nation and of the Pilgrimage of Poland. It was quickly
translated into several languages and caused a sensation. It is a bizarre work,
couched in biblical prose, giving a moral account of Polish history. After an
Edenic period, lovingly described, comes the eighteenth century, a time when
‘nations were spoiled, so much so that among them there was left only one man,
both citizen and soldier’ – a reference to Lafayetter. The ‘Satanic Trinity’ of
Catherine of Russia, Frederick of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria decided
to murder Poland, because Poland was Liberty. They crucified the innocent nation
while degenerate France played the role of Pilate.[395] But
that was not to be the end of it. ‘For the Polish nation did not die; its body
lies in the tomb, while its soul has left the earth, that is public life, and
visited the abyss, that is the private life of peoples suffering slavery at
home and in exile, in order to witness their suffering. And on the third day
the soul will re-enter the body, and the nation will rise from the dead and
will liberate all the peoples of Europe from slavery.’[396] In a
paraphrase of the Christian Creed, Liberty will then ascend the throne in the
capital of the world, and judge the nations, ushering in the age of peace.
“So the Polish nation was now in Limbo, and all it had to do in order to
bring about its own resurrection and that of all grieving peoples was to
cleanse and redeem itself through a process of expiation which Mickiewicz saw
as its ‘pilgrimage’. This was to be a kind of forty days in the wilderness. The
pilgrims must fast and pray on the anniversaries of the battles of Wawer and
Grochow, reciting litanies to the 30,000 dead of the Confederation of Bar and
the 20,000 martyrs of Praga; they must observe their ancient customs and wear
national dress. One is reminded of Rousseau’s admonitions in his Considérations
sur le Gouvernement de Pologne.
“Rousseau would have been proud of this generation. As one freedom
fighter writes in his memoirs: ‘Only he loves Poland with his heart and his
soul, only he is a true son of his Motherland who has cast aside all lures and
desires, all bad habits, prejudice and passions, and been reborn in the pure
faith, he who, having recognized the reasons for our defeats and failures
through his own judgement and conviction, brings his whole love, his whole –
not just partial, but whole – conviction, his courage and his endurance, and
lays them on the altar of the purely national future. He had taken part in the
November Rising and a conspiratorial fiasco in 1833, for which he was rewarded
with fifteen years in the Spielberg and Küfstein prisons. Yet decades
later he still believed that the November Rising had ‘called Poland to a new
life’ and brought her ‘salvation’ closer by a hundred years. Such feelings were
shared by tens of thousands, given expression by countless poets and artists,
and understood by all the literate classes.
“Most of Mickiewicz’s countrymen read his
works and wept over them. They identified with them and learned them by heart.
They did not follow the precepts laid down in them, nor did they really believe
in this gospel in any literal sense. These works were a let-out, an excuse
even, rather than a guiding rule. But they did provide an underlying ethical
explanation of a state of affairs that was otherwise intolerable to the
defeated patriots. It was an explanation that made moral sense and was accepted
at the subconscious level. It was a spiritual and psychological lifeline that
kept them from sinking into a Slough of Despond. It made misfortune not only
bearable, but desirable.
“And it was by no means an expression of
uniquely Polish sensibility. The cast of mind that underlay it was common to
most of Europe…”[397]
When Alexander II became Tsar and was
crowned King of Poland, he granted a general amnesty to Polish prisoners in
Russia, and about 9000 exiles returned to their homes from Siberia between 1857
and 1860. However, they brought back with them the virus of nationalism. Thus
on the day after the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, was made viceroy
of Poland, he was shot in the shoulder.
Nor did a programme of “re-Polonization” –
more liberal state administration and local government, regulations governing
the use of the Polish language, and Polish educational institutions – appease
the nationalists. Even when all the other nations of Europe had settled down
after the abortive revolutions of 1848, the Poles rose again.
“In January 1863,” writes John van de
Kiste, “they slaughtered Russian soldiers asleep in their Warsaw barracks, and
national resistance turned to general uprising. This spread through the kingdom
into the nine formerly Polish provinces known as Russia’s Western region, where
powerful landlords and Catholic clergy were ready to give vent to their hatred
of Russian domination. For a while it looked as if England, France and Austria
might join in on the side of Warsaw after giving their tacit blessing to the
rebels, but Russia put down the unrest at no little cost to the Poles…. While
the Poles butchered scores of Russian peasants including women and children, the
Russians erected gibbets in the streets where rebels and civilians were hanged
in their hundreds, with thousands more sent to Siberia. The insurrection was
finally quelled in May 1864, when the more conservative Count Theodore Berg was
sent to replace Constantine as viceroy.”[398]
The French revolution was essentially liberal in character; the
Polish revolution – nationalist. Both directions were latent in the
original revolutionary project, in the logic of the struggle for “freedom”.
Which direction triumphed depended largely on the circumstances in which the
struggle for freedom took place – that of oppressed individuals or classes
within a sovereign nation or oppressed nations within a multi-ethnic empire. As
yet the potential conflicts between the two – the fact that the liberation of
the nation might mean putting off the liberation of the individual for the time
being, and vice-versa – were only dimly perceived.
Still less clearly perceived was the fact that the revolution could not
be used to make limited reforms, and then stopped in its tracks before it
became “dangerous”. The path that the first French revolution took after 1792
should have made that obvious. But many conservative liberals who took part in
the revolution of 1830 deluded themselves into thinking that the further
development of the revolutionary idea and passions could now be arrested. They
thought they could sow the wind without reaping the whirlwind, as if the genie
could be let out of the bottle to do some necessary “cleaning”, and then put
back again before the cleaning breeze became a hurricane. They failed to see
that the revolution was not a rational human desire for limited, reasonable
reform but an irrational, elemental, satanic force whose ultimate aim,
whether those who purported to lead and manipulate it understood this or not,
was simply total destruction.
One of the most typical of these conservative liberals was
François Guizot, Prime Minister of France in the 1840s. In 1820, when
Louis XVIII’s Charter conceded legal equality, religious toleration and the
necessity for parliamentary consent to new laws on taxation, he declared: “I
consider the revolution of 1789 to be over. All its interests and legitimate
wishes are guaranteed by the Charter…. What France needs now is to do away with
the revolutionary spirit which still torments her.”[399] Guizot
wanted to believe that the “freedom” aimed at by the revolutionaries of 1789
and 1830 was quite different from the “freedom” aimed at by the revolutionaries
of 1793, and therefore that the revolution could conveniently stop in 1830,
when the middle classes were put back in the saddle after the period of
reaction under Charles X, and not go on to anything really radical and
unpleasant. But is there really such a radical opposition between the “freedom
from” of the liberals and the “freedom to” of the sans-culottes? How can one
and not the other be called “the spirit of insurrection”[400] when
both attained their ends by means of bloody insurrection against the
established order?
But Guizot’s real ideal was not the French revolution, but the
“Glorious” English one of 1688, a relatively bloodless affair which put the men
of property firmly in power. Guizot thought that “moderate” revolutions such as
1688 and 1789 could somehow avert “radical” ones such as 1793. That is why he
supported the overthrow of Charles X in 1830, hoping that Louis Philippe could
play the role of William of Orange to Charles X’s James II: “We did not choose
the king but negotiated with a prince [Orléans] we found next to the
throne and who alone could by mounting it guarantee our public law and save us
from revolutions… Our minds were guided by the English Revolution of 1688, by
the fine and free government it founded, and the wonderful prosperity it
brought to the British nation.”[401] And
since the English Revolution had put the middle classes into power (although
only after the Reform Act of 1832 did they really begin to acquire power at the
ballot box), he wanted the same for France. “I want,” he said, “to secure the
political preponderance of the middle classes in France, the final and complete
organization of the great victory that the middle classes have won over
privilege and absolute power from 1789 to 1830.”[402]
But
Louis Philippe, though more liberal than his predecessor, was not liberal
enough for the Zeitgeist. As one who was both of royal blood and had
been a Jacobin himself, he sought to establish a “golden mean” between
absolutism and Jacobinism.[403] But
such a “golden mean” was attained only by the English in the nineteenth century
for any long period of time; and his reign was cut off by a more radical
revolution, that of 1848, which was succeeded by the still more radical
revolution of the Paris Commune in 1870. For why should the spirit of liberty
favour only the men of property and not also the proletariat, the Third Estate
and not also the Fourth Estate? Guizot and Louis Philippe are clear examples of
the inconsistency and ultimate ineffectiveness of those who oppose revolution,
not root and branch, but only in its more obviously unpleasant and
radical manifestations.
The vanity of the liberal hope of “limited revolution” was demonstrated
by Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose): “In the Christian order, “politics… was founded
upon absolute truth… The principal providential form government took in union
with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was
vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a
hierarchical social structure… On the other hand… a politics that rejects
Christian Truth must acknowledge ‘the people’ as sovereign and understand
authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally ‘egalitarian’
society. It is clear that one is the perfect inversion of the other; for they
are opposed in their conceptions both of the source and of the end of
government. Orthodox Christian Monarchy is government divinely established, and
directed, ultimately, to the other world, government with the teaching of Christian
Truth and the salvation of souls as its profoundest purpose; Nihilist rule - whose most fitting name… is Anarchy – is
government established by men, and directed solely to this world, government
which has no higher aim than earthly happiness.
“The Liberal view of government, as one
might suspect, is an attempt at compromise between these two irreconcilable
ideas. In the 19th century this compromise took the form of
‘constitutional monarchies’, an attempt – again – to wed an old form to a new
content; today the chief representatives of the Liberal idea are the
‘republics’ and ‘democracies’ of Western Europe and America, most of which
preserve a rather precarious balance between the forces of authority and
Revolution, while professing to believe in both.
“It is of course impossible to believe in both with equal sincerity and
fervor, and in fact no one has ever done so. Constitutional monarchs like Louis
Philippe thought to do so by professing to rule ‘by the Grace of God and the
will of the people’ – a formula whose two terms annul each other, a fact as
evident to the Anarchist [Bakunin] as to the Monarchist.
“Now a government is secure insofar as it has God for its foundation and
His Will for its guide; but this, surely, is not a description of Liberal
government. It is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God; God
Himself is a ‘constitutional monarch’ Whose authority has been totally
delegated to the people, and Whose function is entirely ceremonial. The Liberal
believes in God with the same rhetorical fervor with which he believes in
Heaven. The government erected upon such a faith is very little different, in
principle, from a government erected upon total disbelief; and whatever its
present residue of stability, it is clearly pointed in the direction of
Anarchy.
“A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the
people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these
issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The
Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied it, cannot be
stopped halfway; it is a force that, once awakened, will not rest until it ends
in a totalitarian Kingdom of this world.
The history of the last two centuries has proved nothing if not this. To
appease the Revolution and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done,
thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose it, is perhaps to
postpone, but not to prevent, the attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical
Revolution with a Revolution of one’s own, whether it be ‘conservative’,
‘non-violent’, or ‘spiritual’, is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full
scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the
first principle of the Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a
new truth must take its place.”[404]
Liberalism and Free Trade
“Liberalism,” writes Norman Davies, “developed along two parallel
tracks, the political and the economic. Political liberalism focused on the
essential concept of government by consent. It took its name from the liberales
of Spain, who drew up their Constitution of 1812 in opposition to the arbitrary
powers of the Spanish monarchy; but it had its roots much further back, in the
political theories of the Enlightenment and beyond. Indeed, for much of its
early history it was indistinguishable from the growth of limited government.
Its first lasting success may be seen in the American Revolution, though it
drew heavily on the experiences of British parliamentarianism and on the first,
constitutional phase of the Revolution in France. In its most thoroughgoing
form it embraced republicanism, though most liberals welcomed a popular,
limited, and fair-minded monarch as a factor encouraging stability. Its
advocates stressed above all the rule of law, individual liberty,
constitutional procedures, religious toleration and the universal rights of
man. They opposed the inbuilt prerogatives, wherever they survived, of Crown,
Church, or aristocracy. Nineteenth-century liberals also gave great weight to
property, which they saw as the principal source of responsible judgement and
solid citizenship. As a result, whilst taking the lead in clipping the wings of
absolutism and in laying the foundations of modern democracy, they were not
prepared to envisage radical schemes for universal suffrage or for
egalitarianism.
“Economic liberalism focused on the concept of free trade, and on the
associated doctrine of laissez-faire, which opposed the habit of governments
to regular economic life through protectionist tariffs. It stressed the right
of men of property to engage in commercial and industrial activities without
undue restraint. Its energies were directed on the one hand to dismantling the
economic barriers which had proliferated both within and between countries and
on the other to battling against all forms of collectivist organization, from
the ancient guild to the new trade unions.”[405]
Liberalism was an individualist creed in that its aim, in line with the
main stream of intellectual development since the Renaissance, was the maximum
development and happiness of individual men. It was concerned to protect
individual freedoms from the encroachment of all collectives, including the
State. However, trends towards individualism have always gone hand in hand
historically with trends in the opposite, collectivist direction; and the
horrors caused by liberal individualism elicited the growth of socialist
collectivism...
Economic liberalism was based on egoism in theory and practice. Thus in
Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations
(1776) we read: “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…
[The individual] is in this as in any other cases, led by an invisible hand to
promote an end which was no part of his intention… I have neve known much good
done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation,
indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need to be employed
in dissuading them from it.”[406]
It is a paradoxical theory, to say the least: that the public interest
is best served by everyone pursuing his self-interest as freely as possible!
Nor did the theory find much immediate confirmation in practice, at least
before the second half of the nineteenth century. Certainly, there were some
who got rich quick – mainly those with initial capital and entrepreneurial
skills. But for the great majority of Englishmen economic liberalism meant the
horror and squalor of William Blake’s “satanic mills”. If “freedom” in liberal
theory means “freedom from”, it certainly did not mean freedom from poverty,
disease or death for the workers crowded together in filthy slums in
Manchester, where there could be very little “freedom to” do anything at all
except work oneself to the bone. It is hardly surprising that not only the
poor, but also many of the better-off who pitied them, came to see look upon
these liberal “freedoms” with jaundiced eyes… Later, of course, largely under
the pressure of humanitarian ideas and the labour movement, capitalism did
begin to restrain itself, thereby disproving Marx’s prophecy of its imminent
collapse. But the rise of collectivism was not checked by these concessions,
but was rather strengthened, as we see throughout Europe as the nineteenth
century progresses.
Free trade, the main principle of economic liberalism, was a very
important concept, first in England, and then in other countries that followed
the English way.
“True,” writes J.M. Roberts, “it is almost impossible to find economic
theorists and publicists of the early industrial period who advocated absolute
non-interference with the economy. Yet there was a broad, sustaining current
which favoured the view that much good would result if the market economy was
left to operate without the help or hindrance of politicians and civil servants.
One force working this way was the teaching often summed up in a phrase made
famous by a group of Frenchmen: laissez-faire. Broadly speaking,
economists after Adam Smith had said with growing consensus that the production
of wealth would be accelerated, and therefore the general well-being would
increase, if the use of economic resources followed the ‘natural’ demands of
the market. Another reinforcing trend was individualism, embodied in both the
assumption that individuals knew their own business best and the increasing
organization of society around the rights and interests of the individual.
“These were the sources of the long-enduring association between
industrialism and liberalism; they were deplored by conservatives who regretted
a hierarchical, agricultural order of mutual obligations and duties, settled
ideas, and religious values. Yet liberals who welcomed the new age were by no
means taking their stand on a simply negative and selfish base. The creed of
‘Manchester’, as it was called because of the symbolic importance of that city
in English industrial and commercial development, was for its leaders much more
than a matter of mere self-enrichment. A great political battle which for years
preoccupied Englishmen in the early nineteenth century made this clear. Its
focus was a campaign for the repeal of what were called the ‘Corn Laws’, a
tariff system originally imposed to provide protection for the British farmer
from imports of cheaper foreign grain. The ‘repealers’, whose ideological and
political leader was a none-too-successful businessman, Richard Cobden, argued
that much was at stake. To begin with, retention of the duties on grain
demonstrated the grip upon the legislative machinery of the agricultural
interest, the traditional ruling class, who ought not to be allowed a monopoly
of power. Opposed to it were the dynamic forces of the future which sought to
liberate the national economy from such distortions in the interest of
particular groups. Back came the reply of the anti-repealers: the manufacturers
were themselves a particular interest who only wanted cheap food imports in
order to be able to pay lower wages; if they wanted to help the poor, what
about some regulation of the conditions under which they employed women and
children in factories? There, the inhumanity of the production process showed a
callous disregard for the obligations of privilege which would never have been
tolerated in rural England. To this, the repealers responded that cheap food
would mean cheaper goods for export. And in this, for someone like Cobden, much
more than profit was involved. A worldwide expansion of Free Trade untrammelled
by the interference of mercantilist governments would lead to international
progress both material and spiritual, he thought; trade brought peoples
together, exchanged and multiplied the blessings of civilization and increased
the power in each country of its progressive forces. On one occasion he
committed himself to the view that Free Trade was the expression of the Divine Will
(though even this did not go as far as the British consul at Canton who had
proclaimed that ‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ’)…
“Only in England was the issue fought out so explicitly and to so
clear-cut a conclusion. In other countries, paradoxically, the protectionists
soon turned out to have the best of it. Only in the middle of the century, a
period of expansion and prosperity, especially for the British economy, did
Free Trade ideals get much support outside the United Kingdom, whose prosperity
was regarded by believers as evidence of the correctness of their views and
even mollified their opponents; Free Trade became a British political dogma,
untouchable until well into the twentieth century. The prestige of British
economic leadership helped to give it a brief popularity elsewhere, too. The
prosperity of the era in fact owed as much to other influences as to this
ideological triumph, but the belief added to the optimism of economic liberals.
Their creed was the culmination of the progressive view of Man’s potential as
an individual, whose roots lay in Enlightenment ideas.”[407]
The difference between the old patriarchal attitude towards social and
economic relations and the new attitude promulgated by the economic liberals is
seen in the contrast between Lord Ashley and Richard Cobden: “Lord Ashley, the
Christian Tory philanthropist who did so much to campaign for the improvement
of working conditions for the poor, hated the competitive atmosphere of
factories. Visiting his ancestral seat, St. Giles in the county of Dorset, he
noted in his diary on 29 June 1841, ‘What a picture contrasted with a factory
district, a people known and cared for, a people born and trained on the
estate, exhibiting towards its hereditary possessors both deference and
sympathy, affectionate respect and a species of allegiance demanding protection
and repaying it in duty.’ To the Northern factory-owners such patronizing
attitudes led only to stultification. There was no movement, no struggle, in
Ashley’s view of society. Cobden, the Corn Law reformer par excellence,
hated Ashley’s attempts to set limits to an employer’s powers – the length of
hours he could make factory hands work, or the limiting of the age of his
employees. ‘Mine is that masculine species of charity which would lead me to
inculcate in the minds of the labouring classes the love of independence, the
privilege of self respect, the disdain of being patronised or petted, the
desire to accumulate and the ambition to rise.’”[408]
Cobden’s “masculine species of charity” was
imitated by other industrial employers and landlords, who felt much less bound
by custom and morality to protect their employees than had the feudal landlords
of previous ages. Trevelyan writes: “Throughout the ‘forties nothing was done
to control the slum landlords and jerrybuilders, who, according to the
prevalent laissez-faire philosophy, were engaged from motives of
self-interest in forwarding the general happiness. These pioneers of ‘progress’
saved space by crowding families into single rooms or thrusting them
underground into cellars, and saved money by the use of cheap and insufficient
building materials, and by providing no drains – or, worse still, by providing
drains that oozed into the water supply. In London, Lord Shaftesbury discovered
a room with a family in each of its four corners, and a room with a cesspool
immediately below its boarded floor. We may even regard it as fortunate that
cholera ensured, first in the years of the Reform Bill and then in 1848,
because the sensational character of this novel visitation scared society into
the tardy beginnings of sanitary self-defence.”[409]
What legislation there was in this period of what Sir Karl Popper aptly
called “unrestrained capitalism” only exacerbated the plight of the poor. This
was particularly true of the Poor Law Act of 1834, which prescribed the
building of workhouses that were designed to be as unattractive as possible.
Thus the Reverend H.H. Milman wrote to Edwin Chadwick: “The workhouses should
be a place of hardship, of coarse fare, of degradation and humility; it should
be administered with strictness – with severity; it should be as repulsive as
is consistent with humanity.”[410]
The Poor Law, as John Gray writes, “set the level of subsistence lower
than the lowest wage set by the market. It stigmatised the recipient by
attaching the harshest and most demeaning conditions to relief. It weakened the
institution of the family. It established a laissez-faire regime in which
individuals were solely responsible for their own welfare, rather than sharing
that responsibility with their communities.
“Eric Hobsbawm captures the background,
character and effects of the welfare reforms of the 1830s when he writes: ‘The
traditional view, which still survived in a distorted way in all classes of
rural society and in the internal relations of working-class groups, was that a
man had a right to earn a living, and, if unable to do so, a right to be kept
alive by the community. The view of middle-class liberal economists was that
men should take such jobs as the market offered, wherever and at whatever rate
it offered, and the rational man would, by individual or voluntary collective
saving and insurance make provision for accident, illness and old age. The
residuum of paupers could not, admittedly, be left actually to starve, but they
ought not to be given more than the absolute minimum – provided it was less
than the lowest wages offered in the market, and in the most discouraging
conditions. The Poor Law was not so much intended to help the unfortunate as to
stigmatize the self-confessed failures of society… There have been few more
inhuman statutes than the Poor Law Act of 1834, which made all relief ‘less
eligible’ than the lowest wage outside, confined it to the jail-like
work-house, forcibly separating husbands, wives and children in order to punish
the poor for their destitution.’
“This system applied to at least 10 per
cent of the English population in the mid-Victorian period. It remained in
force until the outbreak of the First World War.
“The central thrust of the Poor Law
reforms was to transfer responsibility for protection against insecurity and
misfortune from communities to individuals and to compel people to accept work
at whatever rate the market set. The same principle has informed many of the
welfare reforms that have underpinned the re-engineering of the free market in
the late twentieth century…
“No less important than Poor Law reform in
the mid-nineteenth century was legislation designed to remove obstacles to the
determination of wages by the market. David Ricardo stated the orthodox view of
the classical economists when he wrote, ‘Wages should be left to fair and free
competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference
of the legislature.’
“It was by appeal to such canonical
statements of laissez-faire that the Statute of Apprentices (enacted
after the Black Death in the fourteenth century) was repealed and all other
controls on wages ended in the period leading up to the 1830s. Even the Factory
Acts of 1833, 1844 and 1847 avoided any head-on collision with laissez-faire
orthodoxies. ‘The principle that there should be no interference in the freedom
of contract between master and man was honoured to the extent that no direct
legislative interference was made in the relationship between employers and
adult males… it was still possible to argue for a further half-century, though
with diminishing plausibility, that the principle of non-interference remained
inviolate.’
“The removal of agricultural protection
and the establishment of free trade, the reform of the poor laws with the aim
of constraining the poor to take work, and the removal of any remaining
controls on wages were the three decisive steps in the construction of the free
market in mid-nineteenth century Britain. These key measures created out of the
market economy of the 1830s the unregulated free market of mid-Victorian times
that is the model for all subsequent neo-liberal policies.”[411]
The industrial bourgeoisie who formed the core of the new “middle class”
were, as Eric Hobsbawm writes,
“self-made men, or at least men of modest origins who owed little to
birth, family or formal higher education. (Like Mr. Bounderly in Dickens’ Hard
Times, they were not reluctant to advertise the fact.) They were rich and
getting richer by the year. They were above all imbued with the ferocious and
dynamic self-confidence of those whose own careers prove to them that divine providence,
science and history have combined to present the earth to them on a platter.
”’Political economy’, translated into a few simple dogmatic propositions
by self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism… gave
them intellectual certainty. Protestant dissent of the hard Independent,
Utilitarian, Baptist and Quaker rather than the emotional Methodist type gave
them spiritual certainty and a contempt for useless aristocrats. Neither fear,
anger, nor even pity moved the employer who told his workers:
“’The God of Nature has established a just and equitable law which man
has no right to disturb; when he ventures to do so it is always certain that
he, sooner or later, meets with corresponding punishment… Thus when masters audaciously
combine that by an union of power they may more effectually oppress their
servants; by such an act, they insult the majesty of Heaven, and bring down the
curse of God upon themselves, while on the other hand, when servants unite to
extort from their employers that share of the profit which of right belongs to
the master, they equally violate the laws of equity.’
“There was an order in the universe, but it was no longer the order of
the past. There was only one God, whose name was steam and spoke in the voice
of Malthus, McCulloch, and anyone who employed machinery…
“A pietistic Protestantism, rigid, self-righteous, unintellectual,
obsessed with puritan morality to the point where hypocrisy was its automatic
companion, dominated this desolate epoch. ‘Virtue’, as G.M. Young said,
‘advanced on a broad invincible front’; and it trod the unvirtuous, the weak,
the sinful (i.e. those who neither made money nor controlled their emotional or
financial expenditures) into the mud where they so plainly belonged, deserving
at best only of their betters’ charity. There was some capitalist economic
sense in this. Small entrepreneurs had to plough back much of their profits
into the business if they were to become big entrepreneurs. The masses of new proletarians
had to be broken into the industrial rhythm of labour by the most draconian
labour discipline, or left to rot if they would not accept it. And yet even
today the heart contracts at the sight of the landscape constructed by that
generation.
“‘You saw nothing in Coketown but what was
severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there
– as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done – they made it a
pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly
ornamented examples) a bell in a bird-cage on the top of it… All the public
inscriptions in the town were pained alike, in severe characters of black and
white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the town-hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary
in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the
material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial…
Everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what
you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest
market and saleable in the dearest, was not and never should be, world without
end, Amen.’
“This gaunt devotion to bourgeois utilitarianism, which the evangelicals
and puritans shared with the agnostic eighteenth-century ‘philosophic radicals’
who put it into logical words for them, produced its own functional beauty in
railway lines, bridges and warehouses, and its romantic horror in the
smoke-drenched endless grey-black or reddish files of small houses overlooked
by the fortresses of the mills. Outside it the new bourgeoisie lived (if it had
accumulated enough money to move), dispensing command, moral education and
assistance to missionary endeavour among the black heathen abroad. Its men
personified the money which proved their right to rule the world; its women,
deprived by their husbands’ money even of the satisfaction of actually doing
household work, personified the virtue of their class: stupid (‘be good, sweet
maid, and let who will be clever’), uneducated, impractical, theoretically
unisexual, propertyless and protected. They were the only luxury which the age
of thrift and self-help allowed itself.
“The British manufacturing bourgeoisie was the most extreme example of
its class, but all over the continent there were smaller groups of the same
kind: Catholic in the textile districts of the French North or Catalonia,
Calvinist in Alsace, Lutheran pietist in the Rhineland, Jewish all over central
and eastern Europe. They were rarely quite as hard as in Britain, for they were
rarely quite as divorced from the older traditions of urban life and
paternalism. Leon Faucher was painfully struck, in spite of his doctrinaire
liberalism, by the sight of Manchester in the 1840s, as which continental
observer was not? But they shared with the English the confidence which came
from steady enrichment…”[412]
Even the Anglican Church, which hardly penetrated into the new
industrial slums, seemed to be on the side of the exploiters. “A typical
representative of this kind of Christianity was the High Church priest J.
Townsend, author of A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Wellwisher of
Mankind, an extremely crude apologist for exploitation whom Marx exposed.
‘Hunger,’ Townsend begins his eulogy, ‘is not only a peaceable, silent,
unremitted pressure but, as the most natural motive of industry and labour, it
calls forth the most powerful exertions.’ In Townsend’s ‘Christian’ world
order, everything depends (as Marx observes) upon making hunger permanent among
the working class; and Townsend believes that this is indeed the divine purpose
of the principle of the growth of population; for he goes on: ‘It seems to be a
law of nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, so that
there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, the most
ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much
increased, whilst the more delicate… are left at liberty without interruption
to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions.’ And
the ‘delicate priestly sychophant’, as Marx called him for this remark, adds
that the Poor Law, by helping the hungry, ‘tends to destroy the harmony and
beauty, the symmetry and order, of that system which God and nature have
established in the world.’”[413]
With the official Church effectively on the side of the exploiters, it
was left to “Christian socialists”, individual preachers and philanthropists,
and, above all, novelists to elicit the milk of human kindness from the hard
breasts of the rich. The realistic novel in the hands of great writers such as
Dickens and Balzac acquired an importance it had not had in earlier ages,
teaching morality without moralising. Thus Mrs. Elisabeth Gaskell’s North
and South not only brought home to readers in the rural south the
sufferings of the industrial north: it also showed how the philosophy of Free
Trade tended to drive out even the Christian practice of almsgiving. For the
novel describes how the industrialist Thornton, though not a cruel man at
heart, is against helping the starving families of his striking workers on the
grounds that helping them would help prolong the strike, which, if successful,
would force him out of business, which would mean unemployment and starvation
for those same workers. But in the end he is led by the woman he loves to see
how a thriving business and kindness to the workers can be combined.
The Irish Famine
The doctrine of economic liberalism, or
Free Trade, gained its decisive victory in 1846, when the Tory Prime Minister,
Lord Peel, made a dramatic volte-face and voted for the repeal of the
Corn Laws, thereby creating civil war in his party and condemning it to the
political wilderness for a generation. But before he left office, the terrible
fruits of the doctrine he had just espoused were making themselves felt in one
of the greatest tragedies of modern history: the Irish famine. Thus it was not
only the workers and peasants of England who suffered from Free Trade: it
devastated also the earliest colony of the British Empire.
True, the immediate cause of the
famine was not Free Trade, but a blight of the potato crop on which the eight
million Irish depended for their survival. However, it was the callousness of
the English governing class – whose callousness was in no small part caused by
the political and economic doctrines it espoused – that made the eventual
death-toll (1.1 million between 1845 and 1850) as large as it was. As Niall Ferguson writes: “It may
have been phytophthora infestans that ruined the potatoes; but it was
the dogmatic laissez-faire policies of Ireland’s British rulers that
turned harvest failure into outright famine.”[414]
John
Mitchel put the same point as follows in his The Last Conquest of Ireland
(Perhaps) 1860: “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the
English created the Famine.”
“These words,” writes A.N. Wilson, “very
understandably became the unshakeable conviction of the Irish, particularly
those forced into exile by hunder. The tendency of modern historians is not so
much to single out individuals for blame, such as Charles Edward Trevelyan,
permanent head of the Treasury, as to point to the whole attitude of mind of
the governing class and the, by modern standards, gross inequalities which were
taken for granted. Almost any member of the governing class would have shared some
of Trevelyan’s attitudes.
“But there is more to John Mitchel’s
famous statement (one could almost call it a declaration of war) than mere
rhetoric. Deeply ingrained with the immediate horrors of the famine was the
overall structure of Irish agrarian society, which placed Irish land and wealth
in the hands of English (or in effect English) aristocrats. It was the belief
of a Liberal laissez-faire economist such as Lord John Russell that the hunger
of Irish peasants was not the responsibility of government but of landowners.
No more callous example of a political doctrine being pursued to the death –
quite literally – exists in the annals of British history. But Lord John
Russell’s government, when considering the Irish problem, were not envisaging
some faraway island in which they had no personal concern. A quarter of the
peers in the House of Lords had Irish interests…”[415]
Another factor contributing to English
callousness was “No Popery”. “There were plenty who saw [the famine] as ‘a
special “mercy”, calling sinners both to evangelical truth and the Dismantling
of all artifical obstacles to divinely-inspired spiritual and economic order’,
as one pamphlet put it.”[416]
In spite of such attitudes, there were
English men and women who felt their consciences and contributed to the relief
of the famine – Queen Victoria and Baron Rothschild among them. “Yet these
overtures from the English side,” continues Wilson, “were undoubtedly made
against a tide of prejudice and bitterness. The hordes of Irish poor crowding
into English slums did not evoke pity – rather, fear and contempt. The Whiggish
Liberal Manchester Guardian blamed the famine quite largely on the
feckless Irish attitudes to agriculture, family, life in general. Small English
farmers, said this self-righteous newspaper, don’t divide farms into four which
are only sufficient to feed one family. (The economic necessities which forced
the Irish to do this were conveniently overlooked by the Manchester Guardian:
indeed economic weakness, in the Darwinian jungle, is the equivalent of sin.)
Why weren’t the English starving? Because ‘they bring up their children in
habits of frugality, which qualify them for earning their own living, and then
send them forth into the world to look for employment’.
“We are decades away from any organized
Irish Republican Movement. Nevertheless, in the midst of the famine unrest, we
find innumerable ripe examples of British double standards where violence is in
question. An Englishman protecting his grossly selfish way of life with a huge
apparatus of police and military, prepared to gun down the starving, is
maintaining law and order. An Irishman retaliating is a terrorist. John Bright,
the Liberal Free Trader, hero of the campaign against the Corn Laws, blamed
Irish idleness for their hunger – ‘I believe it would be found on inquiry, that
the population of Ireland, as compared with that of England, do not work more
than two days a week.’ The marked increase in homicides during the years 1846
and 1847 filled these English liberals with terror. There were 68 reported
homicides in Ireland in 1846, 96 in 1847, 126 shootings in the latter year
compared with 55 the year before. Rather than putting these in the contexts of
hundreds of thousands of deaths annually by starvation, the textile
manufacturer from Rochdale blames all the violence of these starving Celts on
their innate idleness. ‘Wherever a people are not industrious and not employed,
there is the greatest danger of crime and outrage. Ireland is idle, and
therefore she starves; Ireland starves, and therefore she rebels.’
“Both halves of this sentence are
factually wrong. Ireland most astonishingly did not rebel in, or
immediately after, the famine years; and we have said enough to show that
though there was poverty, extreme poverty, before 1845, many Irish families
survived heroically on potatoes alone. The economic structure of a society in
which they could afford a quarter or a half an acre of land on which to grow a
spud while the Duke of Devonshire owned Lismore, Bolton (and half Yorkshire),
Chatsworth (and ditto Derbyshire), the whole of Eastbourne and a huge palace in
London was not of the Irish peasant’s making.
“By 1848/9 the attitude of Lord John
Russell’s government had become Malthusian, not to say Darwinian, in the
extreme. As always happens when famine takes hold, it was followed by disease.
Cholera swept through Belfast and Co. Mayo in 1848, spreading to other
districts. In the workhouses, crowded to capacity, dysentery, fevers and
ophthalmia were endemic – 13,812 case of ophthalmia in 1849 rose to 27,200 in
1850. Clarendon and Trevelyan now used the euphemism of ‘natural causes’ to
describe death by starvation. The gentle Platonist-Hegelian philosopher
Benjamin Jowett once said, ‘I have always felt a certain horror of political
economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in
Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be
enough to do much good.’ As so often Sydney Smith was right: ‘The moment the
very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling,
common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and
the fatuity of idiots.’”[417]
The British Empire
The tragedy of the Irish famine, and the
callousness of the English ruling class’s response to it, brings us to the question:
how could a country whose ideology was liberalism, and which had fought, and
would continue to fight, under the banner of freedom from tyranny for all
peoples, then set about creating the largest empire the world had ever seen,
enslaving hundreds of millions of peoples to itself?
Of course, there are many very different
kinds and qualities of empire. The principal argument of this series of books
is that one kind in particular – the Orthodox Christian Empire, based on the
symphony of powers between the Orthodox Autocrat and the Orthodox Church – is
in fact the best form of government yet devised for the attainment of the
supreme end of man: the salvation of his immortal soul. The British Empire was
not of this type, although it also claimed to be bringing the salvation of
Christ to heathen peoples.
But could it be argued that the British
Empire, as the first exemplar of what Ferguson calls “the liberal Empire”, did
more good than evil? Ferguson summarises his case for the British Empire as
follows: “For much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history,
the British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of
law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a
quarter of the world. The Empire also did a good deal to encourage those things
in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its
economic influence through the ‘imperialism of free trade’. Prima facie,
there therefore seems a plausible case that empire enhanced global welfare – in
other words, was a Good Thing.
“Many charges can of course be leveled
against the British Empire; they will not be dropped in what follows. I do not
claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was ‘not only the
purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to
mankind’; nor, as Lord Curzon did, that ‘the British Empire is under Providence
the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen’; nor, as General
Smuts claimed, that it was ‘the widest system of organized human freedom which
has ever existed in human history’. The Empire was never so altruistic. In the
eighteenth century the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and
exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp
slavery out; and for much longer they practiced forms of racial discrimination
and segregation that we today consider abhorrent. When imperial authority was
challenged – in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in
1899 – the British response was brutal. When famine struck (in Ireland in the
1840s, in India in the 1870s) their response was negligent, in some measure
positively culpable. Even when they took a scholarly interest in oriental
cultures, perhaps they did subtly denigrate them in the process.
“Yet the fact remains that no organization
in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and
labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and
governance around the world. To characterize all this as ‘gentlemanly
capitalism’ risks underselling the scale – and modernity – of the achievement
in the sphere of economics; just as criticism of the ‘ornamental’ (meaning
hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal
virtues of what were remarkable non-venal administrations.”[418]
Of course, this begs the question whether
“the free movement of goods, capital and labour” is such an indubitable good.
In England for generations it was an indubitable evil, in that it plunged the
vast majority of the population – the rural as well as the urban poor – into
terrible, soul-destroying poverty, while increasing the pride, cruelty and
hypocrisy of the governing class to a proverbial degree (“Victorian hypocrisy”
is still a byword). Nor does the fact that liberal England gradually, very
gradually corrected these ills – significantly, by abandoning the strict theory
of Free Trade and the non-interference of government through the enactment of
various social reforms and the beginning of the Welfare State – alter this
judgement, unless we are to believe, with the Jesuits, that “the end justifies
the means”, and that the cruelty of Victorian England is justified by the
relatively more just and humane England of the later twentieth and twenty-first
centuries.
If “the free movement of goods, capital
and labour” was such a disaster for the British themselves as weighed on the
scale of that utilitarian principle of Jeremy Bentham, “the greatest happiness
of the greatest number”, it is difficult to see how it could have been a boon
for anyone else. Thus the destruction of the indigenous Indian textile industry
by competition with the factories of Northern England doomed millions of Indian
peasants to even greater poverty. And if the British administration was indeed
less venal than the Mughal one that it replaced, this was a relatively small
benefit to place in the scale against the five million dead in the Bengal
famine of 1873-74 and the famines that periodically recurred thereafter. Of
course, if it is argued that such suffering was justified in that it was a
necessary stage “on the path to modernity” and the modern, democratic India,
then we are back with the Jesuit principle again and the idea that the
sufferings of one generation, undertaken unwillingly and imposed for less than
altruistic motives, can compensate for the relatively greater prosperity of
another, much later one.
Ferguson continues: “Even if we allow for
the possibility that trade, capital flows and migration could have been
‘naturally occurring’ in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture
and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily
discernible and less easy to expunge.
“When the British governed a country –
even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and
financial muscles – there were certain distinctive features of their own
society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the most important of these
would run:
“The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the
most distinctive feature of the Empire, the thing that sets it apart from its
continental rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were
liberals: some were very far from it. But what is striking about the history of
the Empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was
almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society.
Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain’s
imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British Empire
something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had
sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it
became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which
they attached so much significance for themselves.”[419]
This is a fair point, but a highly paradoxical one. For it presupposes
that the “liberal Empire” of Britain could only introduce the benefits of
liberalism by illiberal means, by coercion, and that these benefits were
perceived not immediately, but only after several generations had passed, when
the formerly uncivilised tribes had matured to the extent of being capable of
parliamentary self-government. Moreover, as history was to show, even when a
colony had attained a certain maturity, the Empire was rarely willing to hand
over self-government voluntarily, as its liberal principles implied that it
should.
This was because, as Ferguson admits, the spreading of liberalism was
not the real motivation for the creation of the Empire, but rather commercial
gain from the import of sugar, spices, cotton, etc., and the export of manufactures,
financial services, etc. When that commercial gain was threatened for one
reason or another, the British response was to send in the gunboats or the
redcoats, and annex the territory in question. And so “the rise of the British
Empire, it might be said, had less to do with the Protestant work ethic, or
English individualism than with the British sweet tooth.”[420]
And when the end of the Empire came, after the Second World War, it came
not so much as result of the British at length deciding that the natives were
now mature enough to govern themselves, nor even because the natives’ demand
for self-government acquired an unstoppable momentum, but simply because the
Empire was now broke and could no longer afford its colonies…[421]
De Tocqueville on America
Although liberal democracy was the accepted panacea among all
Anglo-Saxon intellectuals except those on the extreme right and left, the
system had its critics, even among democrats, and one of the best of them was
Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America was published in 1835.
An important fault of American democracy was what de Tocqueville called
“the tyranny of the majority”, whose power, he considered, threatened to become
not only predominant (which was only to be expected in a democracy), but
irresistible.
“The moral authority of the majority is partly based on the notion that
there is more enlightenment and wisdom in a numerous assembly than in a single
man, and the number of the legislators is more important than how they are
chosen. It is the theory of equality applied to brains. This doctrine attacks
the last asylum of human pride; for that reason the minority is reluctant in
admitting it and takes a long time to get used to it…
“The idea that the majority has a right based on enlightenment to govern
society was brought to the United States by its first inhabitants; and this
idea, which would of itself be enough to create a free nation, has by now
passed into mores and affects even the smallest habits of life…”[422]
One effect, paradoxically, of this extreme freedom was an extreme
intolerance of the dissident opinion. “I know of no country in which there is
so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.
The majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within
these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes
beyond them.”[423]
This contributed to a general “dumbing down” of culture generally,
although this cultivated Frenchman admitted it also prevented complete
brutalization. “Few pleasures are either very refined or very coarse, and
highly polished manners are as uncommon as great brutality of tastes. Neither
men of great learning nor extremely ignorant communities are to be met with;
genius becomes more rare, information more diffused. There is less perfection,
but more abundance in all the productions of the arts.”[424]
This state of affairs was facilitated by the fact that there was no
native American aristocracy, and few minority interests (except those of the
Indians and Negroes) which were directly and permanently antagonistic to the
interests of the majority. “Hence the majority in the United States has immense
actual power and a power of opinion which is almost as great. When once its
mind is made up on any question, there are, so to say, no obstacles which can
retard, much less halt, its progress and give it time to hear the wails of
those it crushes as it passes.
“The consequences of this state of affairs are fate-laden and dangerous
for the future…”[425]
One of the consequences was legislative instability, “an ill inherent in
democratic government because it is the nature of democracies to bring new men
to power…. Thus American laws have a shorter duration than those of any other
country in the world today. Almost all American constitutions have been amended
within the last thirty years, and so there is no American state which has not
modified the basis of its laws within that period…
“As the majority is the only power whom it is important to please, all
its projects are taken up with great ardour; but as soon as its attention is
turned elsewhere, all these efforts cease; whereas in free European states,
where the administrative authority has an independent existence and an assured
position, the legislator’s wishes continue to be executed even when he is
occupied by other matters.”[426]
But, continues de Tocqueville, “I regard it as an impious and detestable
maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to
do everything, and nevertheless I place the origin of all powers in the will of
the majority. Am I in contradiction with myself?
“There is one law which has been made, or at least adopted, not by the
majority of this or that people, but by the majority of all men. That law is
justice.
“Justice therefore forms the boundary to each people’s right.
“A nation is like a jury entrusted to represent universal society and to
apply the justice which is its law. Should the jury representing society have
greater power than that very society whose laws it applies?
“Consequently, when I refuse to obey an unjust law, I be no means deny
the majority’s right to give orders; I only appeal from the sovereignty of the
people to the sovereignty of the human race.”[427]
In a believing age, instead of “the sovereignty of the human race”, the
phrase would have been: “the sovereignty of God” or “the authority of the
Church as the representative of God”. But after this obeisance to the atheist
and democratic temper of his age, de Tocqueville does in fact invoke the
sovereignty of God. For the essential fact is that the majority – even the
majority of the human race – can be wrong, and that only God is infallible.
“Omnipotence in itself seems a bad and dangerous thing. I think that its
exercise is beyond man’s strength, whoever he be, and that only God can be
omnipotent without danger because His wisdom and justice are always equal to
His power. So there is no power on earth in itself so worthy of respect or
vested with such a sacred right that I would wish to let it act without control
and dominate without obstacles. So when I see the right and capacity to do all
given to any authority whatsoever, whether it be called people or king, democracy
or aristocracy, and whether the scene of action is a monarchy or a republic, I
say: the germ of tyranny is there, and I will go look for other laws under
which to live.
“My greatest complaint against democratic government as organised in the
United States is not, as many Europeans make out, its weakness, but rather its
irresistible strength. What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme
freedom reigning there, but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.
“When a man or a party suffers an injustice in the United States, to
whom can he turn? To public opinion? That is what forms the majority. To the
legislative body? It represents the majority and obeys it blindly. To the
executive power? It is appointed by the majority and serves as its passive
instrument. To the police? They are nothing but the majority under arms. A
jury? The jury is the majority vested with the right to pronounce judgement;
even the judges in certain states are elected by the majority. So, however,
iniquitous or unreasonable the measure which hurts you, you must submit.
“But suppose you were to have a legislative body so composed that it
represented the majority without being necessarily the slave of its passions,
an executive power having a strength of its own, and a judicial power
independent of the other two authorities; then you would still have a
democratic government, but there would be hardly any remaining risk of
tyranny.”[428]
The democratic government de Tocqueville had in mind here as preventing the tyranny of the majority was probably that of England, with its rule by “the king in parliament”, its respect for custom and strong aristocratic element. And it is to a closer consideration of English political liberalism that we now turn.
Mill on Liberty
Foreigners were impressed by England’s political system because it
appeared able to combine freedom with stability, individualism with solidarity,
power with prosperity (for the few), gradual extension of rights with
traditional deference to title and rank, science and progress with morality and
religion. And yet, as we have seen, the objective reasons for a revolution from
below were, if anything, stronger in England than elsewhere; the poverty of the
majority was worse; the contempt in which they were held by the rich minority
greater. So why was England able to avoid the continual upheavals that we see
in contemporary France and on the continent?
One reason was undoubtedly that the rich minority were able to use the
improved methods of communication, especially the railways, to concentrate the
power of a greatly increased police force against troublemakers more quickly
than on the continent. A second was the unprecedentedly large emigration to
America and the White Dominions (in the case of Australia, of course, this
“emigration” was compulsory), which served a safety-valve for the desperately
poor. A third was that the rapidly increasing lower middle classes, though
poor, already had more than their chains to lose, and so tended to support the
existing system. They needed the patronage of the rich, and looked down on the
proletarians below them, whose desperation they feared. The rich took this into
account, and so were able to proceed more slowly than they might otherwise have
done in the work of helping the poor.
But they did introduce just enough reforms to maintain stability. As
Barzun writes: “This knack of judging when and how things must change without
upsetting the apple cart was painfully acquired by the English over the
centuries. They were long reputed the ungovernable people. But fatigue caught
up at last and a well-rooted anti-intellectualism helped to keep changes
unsystematic and under wraps. Forms, titles, décor remain while
different actions occur beneath them; visual stability maintains confidence. It
was the knack of rising above principle, the reward of shrewd inconsistency.”[429]
This “knack” paid dividends (literally and metaphorically). The 1850s
saw England at her peak from an external point of view. Her navies ruled the
seas; her trade and industry was far greater than any other country’s (though
America and Germany were catching up fast). And while liberalism failed on the
continent after 1848 as monarchy revived and the proletariat raged, in England it
remained remarkably stable. It was to give a theoretical underpinning to this
English variety of liberalism, that John Stuart Mill wrote his famous On
Liberty, which remains to this day the most elegant and influential defence
of English liberalism.
Mill admired de Tocqueville, and was a
passionate opponent of “the tyranny of the majority”. To protect society
against this tyranny he proposed a single “very simple” principle which would
place a limit on the ability of the state to interfere in the life of the
individual: “The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle,
as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in
the way of compulsion and control, whether the means to be used by physical
force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion.
That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted,
individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any
of their number is self-protection. That the only purpse for which power can be
rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his
will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is
not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear
because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier,
because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These
are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or
persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him
with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which
it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else.
The only part of the conduct of anyone or which it is amenable to society is
that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his
independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind,
the individual is sovereign.”[430]
Mill asserted that this “Liberty Principle” or “Harm Principle” applied
only to people in “the maturity of their faculties”, not to children or to
“those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as
in its nonage.”[431] For
“Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to
the time when mankind have become capable of being improved through free and
equal discussion”.[432]
This qualification provided a neat justification for the spread of the
British Empire among the pagan nations; and in general, in spite of the fact
that Mill was concerned above all to protect the liberty of the individual
against the tyranny of the majority and popular morality, his theory fitted in
remarkably well with the prejudices of the majority in the England of his time.
Thus the English prided themselves on their freedom of speech, and their giving
refuge to political exiles of every kind, from Louis XVIII and Louis Napoleon
to Herzen and Bakunin, Kossuth and Marx.[433] No
tyranny of the majority here!
Mill provided a passionate defence of the widest possible possible
freedom of thought and speech. “First,” he argued, ‘the opinion which it is
attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to
suppress it, of course, deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have
no authority to decide the question for all mankind and exclude every other
person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion because
they are sure that it is false is to assume that their certainty is the
same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an
assumption of infallibility.”[434]
No: there is a difference between certainty and the assumption of
infallibility. A man may consider himself to be a wretched sinner and prone to
all kinds of errors, and yet be completely certain of some things. All true
religious belief is of this kind – and much false religious belief also. Faith,
according to the definition of the Apostle, is certainty in the existence of
invisible realities (Hebrews 11.1); it is incompatible with the least
doubt. But even if one is not completely certain about something, one may be
sufficiently sure to act to censor what one considers a false opinion. Thus a
government may not be completely certain that a certain drug has no serious
side effects. But it may still act to ban it, and ban any propaganda in its
favour, in the belief that the risks are sufficiently great to warrant such
action. Now Mill may be able to accommodate this example with his “Harm
Principle”, but not on the grounds that to exclude a certain opinion on the
grounds that it is likely to be false amounts to a belief in one’s
infallibility.
Mill anticipates this objection: “Men and governments must act to the
best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there
is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life. We may, and must assume
our opinions to be true for the guidance of our own conduct; and it is assuming
no more when we forbid bad men to pervert society by the propagation of
opinions which we regard as false and pernicious.”[435]
But Mill will have none of this; it is only by allowing our opinion to
be contested by those who think otherwise, he argues, that we come to know
whether it is really deserving of confidence, and hence whether the opposite
opinion should be censored. “The most intolerant of churches, the Roman
Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint admits, and listens
patiently to, a ‘devil’s advocate’. The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be
admitted to posthumous honours until all that the devil could say against him
is known and weighed.”[436]
In practice, this means that no opinion should ever be censored; “the
lists have to be kept open” in case someone appears who will expose the flaw in
the accepted “truth”. And this applies even if the dissenting opinion goes
against one’s most treasured and vital convictions concerning God or morality.
For “however positive anyone’s persuasion may be, not only of the falsity but
of the pernicious consequences – not only of the pernicious consequences, but
(to adopt expressions which I altogether condemn) the immorality and impiety of
an opinion – yet if, in pursuance of that private judgement, though backed by
the public judgement of his country or his contemporaries, he prevents the
opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility. And so far
from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the
opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case of all others in which
it is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one
generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and
horror of posterity.”[437] And
then Mill cites the examples of Socrates and Jesus Christ, who, though the most
admirable of men, became the victims of the censoriousness of their generation.
Mill’s most powerful argument in favour of complete liberty of speech –
an argument expressed before him in More’s Utopia and Milton’s Areopagitica
- is that it is only in an atmosphere of complete intellectual freedom that
truth can be truly understood and become well rooted. “Truth gains more even by
the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself than
by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer
themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers
that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even
more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature
which they are capable of. There have been, and may again be, great individual
thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been,
nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people.”[438] And he
cites the Reformation in Europe, the late eighteenth-century in France and the
early nineteenth-century in Germany as admirable periods of intellectual
freedom. “In each, an old mental despotism had been thrown off, and no new one
had yet taken its place. The impulse given at these three periods has made
Europe what it now is. Every single improvement which has taken place either in
the human mind or in institutions may be traced distinctly to one or other of
them.”[439]
However, the citing of these three periods exposes the false assumptions
of Mill’s argument. The Reformation was indeed an intellectually exciting
period, when many of the abuses and falsehoods of the medieval period were
exposed. But did it lead to a greater understanding of positive truth?
By no means. Similarly, the late eighteenth century was the period in which the
foundations of Church and State were so effectively undermined as to lead to
the bloodiest and most mendacious revolution in history to that date, a
revolution which most English liberals abhorred. As to the early nineteenth
century in Germany, its most dominant thinker was Hegel, who, as we shall see,
constructed probably the most inflatedly pompous and contradictory – indeed,
strictly nonsensical - of all philosophical systems, which is
considered, with some justice, to be an ancestor of both communism and fascism.
Moreover, in the one-and-a-half centuries since Mill’s time, although
the Anglo-Saxon world has attained a still greater degree of freedom of thought
and speech than prevailed in those three epochs, it has been at the expense of
the almost complete decay of traditional Christian belief and morality, that
belief which Mill and the present author agree – albeit, probably, with different
degrees of conviction - in considering to be the truth.
Evidently, freedom does not necessarily lead to truth. Nor did
the Truth incarnate ever claim that it would, declaring rather the reverse
relationship, namely, that “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make
you free” (John 8.32). And part of the truth consists in the sober
recognition that men’s minds are fallen, and for much of the time do not even want
the truth, so that if given complete freedom to say what they like, the
result will be the falling away of society from truth into the abyss of
destruction. As Timothy Snyder writes, interpreting the lessons of George
Orwell’s 1984 for today’s mass democracies: “The core texts of liberal
toleration, such as Milton’s Areopagitica and Mill’s On Liberty, take
for granted that individuals will wish to know the truth. They contend that in
the absence of censorship, truth will eventually emerge and be recognised as
such. But even in democracies this may not always be true.”[440]
Mill’s arguments in favour of
complete freedom of expression rest on the assumption, as he freely admitted,
that the men who are given this freedom are not children or barbarians. And yet
the corruption of mind and heart we associate with the word “barbarian” is present
in every single man; this is what we mean by the term “original sin”. And if
men were not very often children in mind, the Apostle Paul would not have been
forced to say: “Brethren, be not children in your thinking; be babes in evil,
but in thinking be mature” (I Corinthians 14.20).
James Fitzjames Stephen, in his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity
(1873) pointed to further important flaws in Mill’s argument. Liberty was like
fire, he said; it could be used for good and ill; to assume otherwise was
naïve and dangerous. It was by no means certain that full freedom from
interference by others would lead to greater searching for truth; it could just
as easily lead to idleness and lack of interest in social affairs. Moreover,
writes Gertrude Himmelfarth, “what disturbed him about Mill’s doctrine was the
possibility that its adoption would leave society impotent in those situations
where there was a genuine need for social action. Implicit too was the
possibility that the withdrawal of social sanctions against any particular
belief or act would be interpreted as a sanctioning of that belief or act, a
licence to do that which society could not prohibit.”[441]
Stephen’s line of argument has been developed in our time by Lord Devlin
in his essay entitled The Enforcement of Morals (1968). “The occasion
for Devlin’s essay,” writes Himmelfarth, “was the Report of the Wolfenden
Commission recommending the legalization of homosexuality between consenting
adults. Against the Commission’s claim that private morality and immorality
were ‘not the law’s business’, Devlin argued that ‘the suppression of vice is
as much the law’s business as the suppression of subversive activities; it is
not more possible to define a sphere of private morality than it is to define
private subversive activity.”[442]
As we know, the Wolfenden Commission’s recommendation with regard to
homosexuality was accepted by the English parliament, which demonstrates the
power – the highly destructive power – that the application of Mill’s Principle
has acquired in our times, a power that Mill himself would probably have
deplored. Indeed, a completely consistent application of the Principle would
probably lead to the sweeping away of prohibitions against such activities as
euthanasia, incest and prostitution on the grounds that these are within the
sphere of private morality or immorality and so of no concern to the State. But
then, asks Devlin, “if prostitution is… not the law’s business, what concern
has the law with the ponce or the brotherl-keeper…? The Report recommends that
the laws which make these activities criminal offences should be maintained…
and brings them… under the heading of exploitation…. But in general a ponce
exploits a prostitute no more than an impresario exploits an actress.”[443]
Mill justifies the prohibition of certain acts, such as public decency,
on the grounds that they “are a violation of good manners, … coming thus within
the category of offences against others”. And yet, as Jonathan Wolff points
out, it is difficult to see how such a prohibition can be justified on the
basis of the Harm Principle alone. For “what harm does ‘public indecency’ do?
After all, Mill insists that mere offence is no harm. Here Mill, without being
explicit, seems to allow customary morality to override his adherence to the
Liberty Principle. Few, perhaps, would criticize his choice of policy. But it
is hard to see how he can render this consistent with his other views: indeed,
he appears to make no serious attempt to do so.
“Once we begin to consider examples of this kind we begin to understand
that following Mill’s ‘once simple principle’ would lead to a society of a kind
never seen before, and, perhaps, one which we would never wish to see…”[444]
And so, while English liberalism of the Mills variety carefully sought
to protect society both from absolutist tyranny of the continental variety, and
from the American-style tyranny of the majority, it ended up delivering society
into a series of tyrannies of the minorities, which is best exemplified by the
European Human Rights Act that is devastating Christian faith and morality in
the contemporary Britain. This should not surprise us; for liberalism is in
essence a pagan doctrine, owing its origin more to fifth-century Athens than to
any period of Christian history. Mills extolled the Liberty or Harm Principle
not simply because it supposedly guaranteed freedom from tyranny and the
triumph of truth, but because it fostered that ideal of the human being,
vigorous, independent, unafraid of being different, even eccentric, which he
found in Classical Greece. Indeed, he openly rejected the ascetic, Calvinist
(that is to say, the Anglican) ideal in favour of the pagan Greek: “There is a
different type of human excellence from the Calvinistic: a conception of
humanity as having its nature bestowed on it for other purposes than merely to
be abnegated. ‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as
well as ‘Christian self-denial’. There is a Greek ideal of self-development,
which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-government blends with, but does
not supersede. It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is
better to be a Pericles than either; nor would a Pericles, if we had one in
these days, be without anything good which belonged to John Knox.”[445]
Victorian Religion
Since the English were so devoted to material gain, so callous towards
the poor both of their own and other races (while priding themselves on their
abolition of the slave trade), and so devoted to a purely pagan understanding
of liberty, one might have expected that there would be no room for religion in
their life. And yet the paradox is that the English were extremely religious.
Neither the German “God is dead” movement, nor the atheistic anarchism of
Blanqui or Bakunin, nor (somewhat later) the dialectical materialism of Marx
and Engels found much response in English hearts. And if some surprising
blasphemies did escape the lips of senior public servants – such as the British
consul in Canton’s remark: “Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus
Christ”[446]
– this was not common. True, Free Trade was probably the real faith of
the English governing classes; but officially England was a “most Christian”
nation, and Anglicanism the only religion a man aspiring to high office could
confess.
“Doubts there were aplenty”, writes A.N. Wilson, about various
questions. “But we who live in a fragmented society have become like an
individual addicted to psychoanalysis, struggle with our uncertainties, pick at
our virtues and vices as if they were scabs. The Victorian capacity not to
do this, to live, very often, with double standards, is what makes so many of
them – individually and collectively – seem to be humbugs and hypocrites.”[447]
One of the questions that troubled the Victorians was the question of
the relationship between religion and science, doubts that would become more
acute after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859
(see below). Another was the impact of industrialisation on the spiritual life
in a more general sense. Thus Thomas Carlyle wrote: “Now the Genius of
Mechanism smothers [man] worse than any Nightmare did. In Earth and Heaven he
can see nothing but Mechanism; he has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing
else… To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of
Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its
dead indifference, to gring me limb from limb.”[448]
But whatever their doubts, and however great the apparent
inconsistencies between their beliefs and actions, the Victorians were prepared
to go to great pains to export their religion to other lands, as the efforts of
Livingstone in Africa and Lord Redstock in Russia demonstrate. As late as 1904
the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus pointed to this religiosity
of the British Empire by comparison with the other empires “with a cartoon
contrasting the different colonial powers. In the German colony even the
giraffes and crocodiles are taught to goose-step. In the French, relations
between the races are intimate to the point of indecency. In the Congo the
natives are simply roasted over an open fire and eaten by King Leopold. But
British colonies are conspicuously more complex than the rest. There, the
native is force-fed whisky by a businessman, squeezed in a press for every last
penny by a soldier and compelled to listen to a sermon by a missionary…”[449]
The Russian theologian Alexis Khomiakov was amazed at how silent the
streets of London were on a Sunday, as everyone went to church. And he wrote:
“Germany has in reality no religion at all but the idolatry of science; France
has no serious longings for truth, and little sincerity; England with its
modest science and its serious love of religious truth might [seem] to give
some hopes…”[450]
Of course, England did not have the true faith, which is only in
the East, in the Orthodox Church. And yet the Oxford movement excited Khomiakov
with hopes of a genuine rapprochement between Anglicans and Orthodox (see
next chapter). In the midst of her “Babylonian” materialism, as exemplified
above all by the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London, England
seemed to have “higher thoughts”: “England, in my opinion, has never been more
worthy of admiration than this year. The Babylonian enterprise of the
Exhibition and its Crystal Palace, which shows London to be the true and
recognised capital of Universal Industry, would have been sufficient to engross
the attention and intellectual powers of any other country; but England stands
evidently above its own commercial wonders. Deeper interests agitate her,
higher thoughts direct her mental energy…”[451]
In the end, as the Oxford movement petered out (Khomiakov’s friend,
William Palmer, joined Catholicism, not Orthodoxy), and England joined with
“insincere” France and infidel Turkey in the Crimean War against Holy Russia,
Khomiakov’s admiration turned to disillusion and anger. In his last years he
may well have felt closer in his estimate of England to that of a famous
compatriot of his, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was appalled by his visit to London
in 1862. “On the streets he saw people wearing beautiful clothes in expensive
carriages, side by side with others in filth and rags. The Thames was poisoned,
the air polluted; the city seemed marked by joyless drinking and wife abuse.
The writer was particularly horrified by child prostitution:
“’Here in the Haymarket, I saw mothers who brought along their young
daughters and taught them their occupation. And these twelve-year-old girls
took you by the hand and asked to be accompanied. One evening, in the swarm of
people I saw a little girl dressed in rags, dirty, barefoot, emaciated and
battered. Through her rags I could see that her body was covered with bloody
stripes. She wandered senseless in the crowd… perhaps she was hungry. No one
paid her any attention. But what struck me most was her sad expression and the
hopelessness of her misery. It was rather unreal and terribly painful to look
at the despair and cursed existence of this small creature.’
“When he visited the London World’s Fair with ‘civilization’s shining
triumphs’, Dostoyevsky again found himself possessed by feelings of fear and
dejection. Appalled, he recoiled from the hubris that had created the Crystal
Palace’s ‘colossal decorations’. Here was something taken to its absolute
limit, he maintained, here man’s prideful spirit had erected a temple to an
idol of technology:
“’This is a Biblical illustration, this speaks of Babylon, in this a
prophet of the Apocalypse is come to life. You feel that it would take
unbelievable spiritual strength not to succumb to this impression, not to bow
before this consummate fact, not to acknowledge this reality as our ideal and
mistake Baal for God.’”[452]
Dostoyevsky agreed with Khomiakov that the English were sincerely
religious. But he saw through their religiosity, and had no hesitation in
calling it “atheism”, because he saw in it ultimately the worship of man
wrapped in the trappings of the worship of God. It was Auguste Comte who had
introduced the idea of a “Religion of Humanity”, and English thinkers such as
Mill were impressed by it, seeing in it no contradiction with their own
Anglicanism. Dostoyevsky noted this, and much later, in 1876, he wrote: “In
their overwhelming majority, the English are extremely religious people; they
are thirsting for faith and are continually seeking it. However, instead of
religion – notwithstanding the state ‘Anglican’ religion – they are divided
into hundreds of sects…. Here, for instance, is what an observer who keeps a
keen eye on these things in Europe, told me about the character of certain
altogether atheistic doctrines and sects in England: ‘You enter into a church:
the service is magnificent, the vestments are expensive; censers; solemnity;
silence; reverence among those praying. The Bible is read; everybody comes
forth and kisses the Holy Book with tears in his eyes, and with affection. And
what do you think this is? This is the church of atheists. Why, then, do they
kiss the Bible, reverently listening to the reading from it and shedding tears
over it? – This is because, having rejected God, they began to worship
‘Humanity’. Now they believe in Humanity; they deify and adore it. And what,
over long centuries, has been more sacred to mankind than this Holy Book? – Now
they worship it because of its love of mankind and for the love of it on the
part of mankind; it has benefited mankind during so many centuries – just like
the sun, it has illuminated it; it has poured out on mankind its force, its
life. And “even though its sense is now lost”, yet loving and adoring mankind,
they deem it impossible to be ungrateful and to forget the favours bestowed by
it upon humanity…’
“In this there is much that is touching and also much enthusiasm. Here
there is actual deification of humankind and a passionate urge to reveal their
love. Still, what a thirst for prayer, for worship; what a craving for God and
faith among these atheists, and how much despair and sorrow; what a funeral
procession in lieu of a live, serene life, with its gushing spring of youth,
force and hope! But whether it is a funeral or a new and coming force – to many
people this is a question.”[453]
Dostoyevsky then quotes from his novel, A Raw Youth, from the
“dream of a Russian of our times – the Forties – a former landowner, a
progressive, a passionate and noble dreamer, side by side with our Great
Russian breadth of life in practice. This landowner also has no faith and he,
too, adores humanity ‘as it befits a Russian progressive individual.’ He
reveals his dream about future mankind when there will vanish from it every
conception of God, which, in his judgement, will inevitably happen on earth.
“’I picture to myself, my dear,’ he began, with a pensive smile, ‘that
the battle is over and that the strife has calmed down. After maledictions,
lumps of mud and whistles, lull has descended and men have found themselves alone,
as they wished it; the former great idea has abandoned them; the great
wellspring of energy, that has thus far nourished them, has begun to recede as
a lofty, receding Sun, but this, as it were, was mankind’s last day. And
suddenly men grasped that they had been left all alone, and forthwith they were
seized with a feeling of great orphanhood. My dear boy, never was I able to
picture people as having grown ungrateful and stupid. Orphaned men would at
once begin to draw themselves together closer and with more affection; they
would grasp each other’s hands, realizing that now they alone constituted
everything to one another. The grand idea of immortality would also vanish, and
it would become necessary to replace it, and all the immense over-abundance of
love for Him who, indeed, had been Immortality, would in every man be focussed
on nature, on the universe, on men, on every particle of matter. They would
start loving the earth and life irresistibly, in the measure of the gradual
realization of their transiency and fluency, and theirs would now be a different
love – not like the one in days gone by. They would discern and discover in
nature such phenomena and mysteries as had never heretofore been suspected,
since they would behold nature with new eyes, with the look of a lover gazing
upon his inamorata. They would be waking up and hastening to embrace one
another, hastening to love, comprehending that days are short and that this is
all that is left to them…’
“Isn’t there here, in this fantasy, something akin to that actually
existent ‘Atheists’ Church’?”[454]
The
Collectivist Reaction: (1) English Self-Help
The result of worsening economic conditions for the great majority in
the 1840s, writes Hobsbawm, “was social revolution in the form of spontaneous
risings of the urban and industrial poor”, which “made the revolution of 1848
on the continent, the vast Chartist movement in Britain. Nor was discontent
confined to the labouring poor. Small and inadaptable businessmen,
petty-bourgeois, special sections of the economy, were also the victims of the
Industrial Revolution and of its ramifications. Simple-minded labourers reacted
to the new system by smashing the machines which they thought responsible for
their troubles; but a surprisingly large body of local businessmen and farmers
sympathized profoundly with these Luddite activities of their labourers,
because they too saw themselves as victims of a diabolical minority of selfish
innovators. The exploitation of labour which kept its incomes at subsistence
level, thus enabling the rich to accumulate the profits which financed
industrialization (and their own ample comforts), antagonized the proletarian.
However, another aspect of this diversion of national income from the poor to
the rich, from consumption to investment, also antagonized the small entrepreneur.
The great financiers, the tight community of home and foreign ‘fund-holders’
who received what all paid in taxes… - something like 8 per cent of the entire
national income – were perhaps even more unpopular among small businessmen,
farmers and the like than among labourers, for these knew enough about money
and credit to feel a personal rage at their disadvantage. It was all very well
for the rich, who could raise all the credit they needed, to clamp rigid
deflation and monetary orthodoxy on the economy after the Napoleonic Wars; it
was the little man who suffered, and who, in all countries and at all times in
the nineteenth century demanded easy credit and financial unorthodoxy. Labour
and the disgruntled petty-bourgeois on the verge of toppling over into the
unpropertied abyss, therefore shared common discontents. These in turn united
them in the mass movements of ‘radicalism’, ‘democracy’ or ‘republicanism’ of
which the British Radicals, the French Republicans and the American Jacksonian
Democrats were the most formidable between 1815 and 1848.”[455]
Although violent collectivist reaction to the excesses of liberal
individualism seemed inevitable, there were still some who believed in the path
of peaceful reform and the importance of individuals. Foremost among these was
the Welsh manufacturer Robert Owen.
“His creed,” writes Sir Isaiah Berlin, “was summarised in the sentence
inscribed at the head of his journal, The New Moral World: ‘Any general
character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most
enlightened, may be given to any community, even the world at large, by the
application of proper means, which means are to a great extent at the command
and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.’ He
had triumphantly demonstrated the truth of his theory by establishing model
conditions in his own cotton mills in New Lanark, limiting working hours, and
creating provision for health and a savings fund. By this means he increased
the productivity of his factory and raised immediately the standard of living
of his workers, and, what was even more impressive to the outside world,
trebled his own fortune. New Lanark became a centre of pilgrimage for kings and
statesmen, and, as the first successful experiment in peaceful co-operation
between labour and capital, had a considerable influence on the history both of
socialism and of the working class. His later attempts at practical reform were
less successful. Owen, who died in deep old age in the middle of the nineteenth
century, was the last survivor of the classical period of rationalism, and, his
faith unshaken by repeated failures, believed until the end of his life in the
omnipotence of education and the perfectibility of man.”[456]
However, Owen’s later schemes failed, and kind-hearted entrepreneurs
remained few and far between. Therefore only state action could solve the
problem, thought John Stuart Mill – a writer more renowned, as we have seen,
for his development of the theory of liberalism. But it was while revising “his
Principles of Political Economy,” writes Barzun, “that Mill broke with
the liberal school by asserting that the distribution of the national product
could be redirected at will and that it should be so ordered for the general welfare.
That final phrase, perpetually redefined, was a forecast…. It was [its]
underlying idea – essential socialism – that ultimately triumphed, taking the
twin form of Communism and the Welfare State, either under the dictatorship of
a party and its leader or under the rule of a democratic parliament and
democracy.”[457]
However, the English solutions of self-help and education (Owen) and
state redistribution of wealth (Mill) were rejected by the more radical
thinkers on the continent. Thus Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class
in England (1844) was the first major exposé of the terrible plight
of the proletariat. Marx built on his data to argue that the workers would not
better their lot through helping themselves, and still less through receiving
help from governments or employers, but only through the inevitable March of
History from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.
The
Collectivist Reaction: (2) French Socialism
Another kind of reaction to the horrors of industrial society came from
the French thinker, the Comte de Saint-Simon.
Talmon writes: “Saint-Simon’s
earliest pamphlet, A Letter from a Citizen of Geneva, contains the
bizarre scheme of a Council of Newton. The finest savants of Europe were to
assemble in a mausoleum erected in honour of the great scientist, and
deliberate on the problems of society. The author thereby gave picturesque
expression to his view that in the French Revolution popular sovereignty had
proved itself as fumbling, erratic and wrong as the divine right of kings, and
that the tenets of rationalism about the rights of man, liberty and equality,
had shown themselves just as irrelevant to man’s problems as theological
doctrine. Not being rooted in any certainty comparable to that of science, old
and new political ideas alike became only a pretext for the will of one set of
men to dominate all others – which was all, in fact, that politics had ever
been.
“What had made men yield to such palpable error for so long and then
caused Saint-Simon to see through them at precisely that moment? Unlike
eighteenth-century philosophers – such as his masters Turgot and Condorcet –
Saint-Simon does not invoke the march of progress, the victory of
enlightenment, or the sudden resolve of men. He points to the importance
assumed by scientific advance, technological development and problems of
industrial production, all based upon scientific precision, verifiable facts
and quantitative measurements which left no room for human arbitrariness.
“In the past, mythological and theological modes of thought, medieval
notions of chivalry, metaphysical preoccupations and so on were the
accompaniment – or, as Saint-Simon more often seems to suggest, the matrix – of
the economic conditions and the social-political order of the day. In brief,
frames of mind, modes of production and social political systems hang together,
and develop together, and the stages of such overall development cannot be
skipped. The industrial system which the nineteenth century was ushering in had
its beginnings in the Middle Ages. Within the womb of a civilization dominated
by priests and warriors, shaped by values and expectations not of this world,
geared for war and inspired by theatrical sentiments of chivalry, there began a
mighty collective effort to fashion things, instruments and values designed to
enhance men’s lives here and now: industrial production, economic exchange and
scientific endeavour. The communes had at first no thought of subverting the
feudal-theological order, within which they made their earliest steps – firstly
because they were as yet too weak for such a revolt, and secondly because they
did not value the external accoutrements of power. They believed only in
positive tangible goods and solid achievements in the social-economic and
scientific domain.
“This was the cause of a divorce between content and form. While in
external appearance warriors and priests still held the reins of authority,
real power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the productive
classes. These classes, whose position, indeed whose very existence, lacked
acknowledged legitimacy in the official scheme of things, developed a special
ethos. Knowing the ruling classes to be incompetent to deal with matters of
decisive importance to them, the bourgeoisie resored to a theory of laissez-faire
which condemned all government interference and glorified individual initiative
and the interplay of economic interests. In order to clothe this class interest
in theoretical garb, bourgeois spokesmen evolved the doctrine of the natural
rights of man and the theory of checks and balances and division of power.
These designed to curb the power-drives of the feudal forces, and indeed
succeeded in undermining the self-assurance of the aristocratic order.
“In Saint-Simon’s view, the French Revolution signified not so much the
triumph of rationalist-democratic ideas as the total victory of the productive
classes and the final swamping of feudal-theological values by positive forces.
But this fundamental fact was distorted and obscured by those metaphysicians
and lawyers who, having played an important part in helping the industrial
classes to win, mistook their secondary role for a mission to impose their
ideas and their rule upon society. Instead of stepping aside and letting the
imperatives of industrial endeavour shape new institutions, they set out to
impose their conjectural ideas upon society, side-tracking the real issues and
befogging them with rhetoric and sophistry. In effect their intention was not to
abolish the old system which divided society into rulers and ruled, but to
continue it, only substituting themselves for the feudal lords; in other words,
to rule by force. For where the relationship between rulers and ruled is not
grounded in the nature of things as is that, for example, between doctor and
patient, teacher and pupil – that is, on division of functions – the only
reality is the rule of man over man based on force. This form of relationship
dated from the days when man was considered to need protection by superiors
because he was weak, lowly and ignorant, or had to be kept from mischief
because he was riotous and savage. It was no longer justified since the
Revolution had proved that man had come of age. It was time for government, in
other words the state, to make room for an administration of things, and
conscious, sustained planning of the national economy. The need to keep law and
order, allegedly always so pressing and relentless, would be reduced to a
minimum when social relations were derived from objective necessities. The
whole problem was thus reduced to the discovery of the ‘force of things’, the
requirements of the mechanism of production. Once these had become the measure
of all things, there would be no room for the distinction between rulers in the
traditional political sense. The nexus of all human relationships would be the
bodn between expert knowledge and experience on the one hand, and discipleship,
fulfilment of necessary tasks, on the other. The whole question of liberty and
equality would then assume a quite different significance.
“In fact men would no longer experience the old acute craving for
liberty and equality. A scientific apportioning of functions would ensure
perfect cohesion of the totality, and the high degree of integration would draw
the maximum potential fomr every participant in the collective effort. Smooth,
well-adjusted participation heightens energy and stills any sense of discomfort
or malaise. There is no yearning for freedom and no wish to break away in an
orchestra, a choir, a rowing boat. Where parts do not fit and abilities go to
waste, there is a sense of frustration and consequently oppression, and man
longs to get away. The question of equality would not arise once inequality was
the outcome of a necessary and therefore just division of tasks. There is no
inequality where there is no domination for the sake of domination.
“Such a perfect integration remained to be discovered. Pursuing his
quest, Saint-Simon stumbled upon socialism, and then found himself driven to
religion. Waste, frustration, deprivation, oppression were the denial of both
cohesion of the whole and the self-expression of the individual. Those scourges
were epitomized in the existence of the poorest and most numerous class – the
workers. And so what started with Saint-Simon as a quest for positive certainty
and efficiency gradually assumed the character of a crusade on behalf of the
disinherited, the underprivileged and frustrated. The integrated industrial
productive effort began to appear as conditioned upon the abolition of poverty,
and dialectically the abolition of poverty now seemed the real goal of a fully
integrated collective endeavour.
“But was the removal of friction and waste
enough to ensure the smooth working of the whole? And would rational
understanding suffice to ensure wholehearted participation in the collective
effort? Saint-Simon was led to face at a very early stage of socialism the
question of incentives. He felt that mechanical, clever contrivances,
intellectual comprehension and enlightened self-interest were in themselves
insufficient as incentives and motives. And so the positivist, despising
mythical, theological and metaphysical modes of thought, by degrees evolved
into a mystical Romantic. He became acutely aware of the need for incentives
stronger, more impelling and compelling than reason and utility. In a sense he
had already come to grips with the problem in the famous distinction between
organic and critical epochs in history, a distinction which was destined to
become to important in the theory of his disciple, Auguste Comte.
“These two types of epoch alternate in
history. There is a time of harmony and concord, like the pre-Socratic age in
Greece and the Christian Middle Ages, and there are times of disharmony and
discord, like post-Socratic Greece and the modern age, which began with the
Reformation, evolved into rationalism, and came to a climax in the French
Revolution. The organic ages are period of a strong and general faith, when the
basic assumptions comprise a harmonious pattern and are unquestioningly taken
for granted. There are no dichotomies of any kind, and classes live in harmony.
In the critical ages there is no longer any consensus about basic assumptions;
beliefs clash, traditions are undermined, there is no accepted image of the
world. Society is torn by class war and selfishness is rampant.
“The crying need of the new industrial age
was for a new religion. There must be a central principle to ensure integration
of all the particular truths and a single impulse for all the diverse spiritual
endeavours. The sense of unity of life must be restored, and every person must
be filled with such an intense propelling and life-giving sense of belonging to
that unity, that he would be drawn to the centre by the chains of love, and
stimulated by a joyous irresistible urge to exert himself on behalf of all.
“Saint-Simon called this new religion of
his ‘Nouveau Christianisme’. It was to be a real fulfillment of the original
promise of Christianity, and was to restore that unity of life which
traditional Christianity – decayed and distorted – had done its best to deny
and destroy. The concept of original sin had led to a pernicious separation of
mankind into a hierarchy of the perfect and the mass of simple believers. This
carried with it the distinction between theory and practice, the perfect bliss
above and the vale of tears below; the result was compromise and reconciliation
with – in effect, approval of – evil here and now.” [458]
Saint-Simon reduced Christianity to the
application of Christ’s words: “Love thy neighbour”. “Applied to modern
society,” writes Edmund Wilson, this principle “compels us to recognize that
the majority of our neighbours are destitute and wretched. The emphasis has now
been shifted from the master mind at the top of the hierarchy to the
‘unpropertied man’ at the bottom; but the hierarchy still stands as it was,
since Saint-Simon’s whole message is still his own peculiar version of the principle
of noblesse oblige. The propertied classes must be made to
understand that an improvement in the condition of the poor will mean an
improvement in their condition, too; the savants must be shown that
their interests are identical with those of the masses. Why not go straight to
the people? he makes the interlocutor ask in his dialogue. Because we must try
to prevent them from resorting to violence against their governments; we must
try to persuade the other classes first.
“And he ends – the last words he ever
wrote – with an apostrophe to the Holy Alliance, the combination of Russia,
Prussia and Austria which had been established upon the suppression of
Napoleon. It was right, says Saint-Simon, to get rid of Napoleon, but what have
they themselves but the sword? They have increased taxes, protected the rich;
their church and their courts, and their very attempts at progress, depend on
nothing but force; they keep two million men under arms.
“’Princess!’ he concludes, ‘hear the voice
of God, which speaks to you through my mouth: Become good Christians again,
throw off the belief that the hired armies, the nobility, the heretical clergy,
the corrupt judges, constitute your principal supporters; unite in the name of
Christianity and learn to accomplish the duties which Christianity imposes on
the powerful; remember that Christianity command them to devote their energies
to bettering as rapidly as possible the lot of the very poor!’”[459]
Saint-Simon is an important transitional
figure, a link between the Masonic visionaries of the French revolution and the
“scientific” vision of the Marxists. The importance he attached to economic
factors and means of production formed one of the most important strands in
Marxism – although Marx himself dismissed him as a “Utopian socialist”. That he
could still think in terms of a “New Christianity” shows his attachment to the
religious modes of thought of earlier ages, although, of course, his
Christianity is a very distorted form of the faith (he actually took
Freemasonry as his ideal).
Marx would purge the religious element and
make the economic element the foundation of his theory, while restoring the
idea of Original Sin in a very secularized form. As for the incentives which
Saint-Simon thought so necessary and which he thought to supply with his “New
Christianity”, Marx found those through his adoption of the idea of a
scientifically established progress to a secular Paradise, whose joyous
inevitability he borrowed from the dialectical historicism of one of the most
corrupting thinkers in the history of thought – Hegel.
One of Saint-Simon’s disciples was Auguste Comte
(1798-1857). “Comte,” writes Norman Stone, “held that all knowledge passed
through three successive stages of development, where it is systematized
according to (respectively) theological, metaphysical, and ‘positive’ or
scientific principles. The theological and metaphysical states had to be
discarded in order to arrive at the state of true knowledge, which is science.
Comte placed the sciences in a kind of hierarchy with a new “science of
society”, or sociology, at the summit. The social scientists’ task was “to know
in order to foresee, and to foresee in order to know”.[460]
Another Utopian Socialist figure was
Charles Fourier. He believed in the old chiliastic dream of Paradise on earth,
in which men would live to be 144 years old.[461] He had
other dreams, too: “he believed that the world would last precisely 80,000
years and that by the end of that time every soul would have traveled 810 times
between the earth and certain other planets which he regarded as certainly
inhabited, and would have experienced a succession of existences to the precise
number of 1626![462]
“His starting point,” according to Talmon,
“was very much that of Rousseau. Man, he believed, had come out of the hands of
nature a good and noble being. The institutions of civilization had brought
about his undoing. Greed and avarice were the root of all evil. They had
created the existing dichotomies between private morality and commercial and
political codes of behaviour, between things preached and ways practiced.
Morose, ascetical teachings about the evil character of the natural urges were
motivated by the avarice and ambition of the greed and strong, who wished to
instill into their victims a sense of sin, and with it humility and readiness
to bear privations, perform the dirtiest jobs, and receive the whip. The
attempt to stifle natural impulses had the effect of turning the energy
contained in them into channels of perversion and aggressiveness.
“Such impulses were inflamed by the
spectacle of avarice rampant and all-pervasive, in spite of the official
ascetic teachings. Fourier may have moralized, may have dreamed of the waters
of the oceans turning into lemonade and of lions changed into modern aeroplanes
and carrying men over vast distance; but his homilies and dreams are buttressed
by a very acute analysis and critique of commercial, if not quite capitalist,
civilization. He also analysed history into a succession of social economic
stages, and sketched a historical dialectic from which Marx and Engels could –
and it seems did – learn something.
“Here, however, we are concerned with
Fourier’s contribution to the problem of organization and freedom. In his view,
the state and its laws were instruments of exploitation, and any large
centralized state was bound to develop into an engine of tyranny. Fourier
therefore held that the state ought to be replaced by a network of small direct
democracies. Each should enjoy full autonomy and be at once a wholly integrated
economic unit and a closely-knit political community. In these
‘phalanstères’ all would be co-partners, everybody would know all the
other members (Fourier laid down a maximum of 1800), and decisions would be
reached by common consent. By these means men would never be subjected to some
anonymous, abstract power above and outside them.
“Fourier also tackled the problem of
reconciling integration with self-expression. He argued that it was absured to
expect to eliminate the love of property, desire to excel, penchant for
intrigue or craving for change, let alone sex and gluttony. Such an attempt was
sure to engender frustration and anti-social phenomena. And there was no escape
from the fact that people had different characteristics and urges of different
intensity. Happily, benevolent nature had taken care of that by creating
different sorts of characteristics and passions, like symphonic compositions in
which the most discordant elements are united into a meaningful totality. The
task was therefore reduced to the art of composing the right groups of
characteristics – perfectly integrated partnerships based on the adjustment of
human diversities. It followed that the other task was to manipulate the human
passions so cleverly that they would become levers of co-operative effort and
increased production instead of impediments to collaboration. (This implies an
ardent faith in education and environmental influence comparable to Robert
Owen’s. [463]) To take
first the love of property: it would not be abolished or made equal. There
would be a secured minimum of private property, but beyond that it would depend
on investment, contribution, type of work, degree of fatige and boredom, and so
on, with progressively decreasing dividends. Persons of diverse characteristics
joined into one group would stimulate each other, and competition between
groups would be strongly encouraged. The paramount aim was to turn labour into
a pleasure instead of a curse. In order to obviate the danger of boredom,
spells of work would be short and changes in the type of labour frequent. Gangs
of children would be set the task of doing the dirty jobs in a spirit of joyous
emulation. Finally, industry would be combined with an Arcadian type of
agriculture.
“This is Fourier’s solution to the
dilemmas which have plagued our common sense for so long: who will do the
disagreeable jobs in a perfectly harmonious society, and what will be the
relationship between superiors and inferiors in it?”[464]
Another important influence on Marx was the French socialist, Proudhon,
who uttered the famous words: “What is property? Property is theft.” Marx disagreed with the latter
statement insofar as it presupposed real rights in property. Nevertheless, he
admitted the importance of Proudhon’s analysis of private property relations.
“The two forces,” writes Berlin, “which Proudhon conceived as fatal to social
justice and the brotherhood of man were the tendency towards the accumulation
of capital, which led to the continual increase of inequalities of wealth, and
the tendency directly connected with it, which openly united political
authority with economic control, and so was designed to secure a growth of a
despotic plutocracy under the guise of free liberal institutions. The state
became, according to him, an instrument designed to dispossess the majority for
the benefit of a small minority, a legalised form of robbery…”[465]
Before leaving the French thinkers, we should briefly take note of the great historian Michelet. In the first half of his book, The People, written shortly before the 1848 revolution, he analysed industrial society in a way that anticipated Marx, but broader in scope and more balanced in its vision. “Taking the classes one by one, the author shows how all are tied into the social-economic web – each, exploiting or being exploited, and usually both extortionist and victim, generating by the very activities which are necessary to win its survival irreconcilable antagonisms with its neighbors, yet unable by climbing higher in the scale to escape the general degradation. The peasant, eternally in debt to the professional moneylender or the lawyer and in continual fear of being dispossessed, envies the industrial worker. The factory worker, virtually imprisoned and broken in will by submission to his machines, demoralizing himself still further by dissipation during the few moments of freedom he is allowed, enview the worker at a trade. But the apprentice to a trade belongs to his master, is servant as well as workman, and he is troubled by bourgeois aspirations. Among the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, the manufacturer, borrowing from the capitalist and always in danger of being wrecked on the shoal of overproduction, drives his employees as if the devil were driving him. He gets to hate them as the only uncertain element that impairs the perfect functioning of the mechanism; the workers take it out in hating the foreman. The merchant, under pressure of his customers, who are eager to get something for nothing, brings pressure on the manufacturer to supply him with shoddy goods; he leads perhaps the most miserable existence of all, compelled to be servile to his customers, hated by and hating his competitors, making nothing, organizing nothing. The civil servant, underpaid and struggling to keep up his respectability, always being shifted from place to place, has not merely to be polite like the tradesman, but to make sure that his political and religious views do not displease the administration. And, finally, the bourgeoisie of the leisure class have tied up their interests with the capitalists, the least public-spirited members of the nation, and they live in continual terror of communism. They have now wholly lost touch with the people. They have shut themselves up in their class; and inside their doors, locked so tightly, there is nothing but emptiness and chill….
“’Man has come to form his soul according to his material situation. What an amazing thing! Now there is a poor man’s soul, a rich man’s soul, a tradesman’s soul… Man seems to be only an accessory to his position.’”[466]
The
Collectivist Reaction: (3) German Historicism
Even a sketchy study of the sources of Marx’s thought must say something
about the sources of his atheism and historicism.
Not that Marx appears to have been in no need of teachers in respect of
atheism, being not only atheist, but also anti-theist from the beginning. There
is some evidence that in his youth he turned against God and became a Satanist
because God did not give him the girl he loved. And he said: “I shall build my
throne high overhead”, which is a more or less direct quotation of Satan’s
words in Isaiah 14.13.[467] In his
doctor’s thesis he wrote: “Philosophy makes no secret of the fact: her creed is
the creed of Prometheus – ‘In a word, I detest all the gods.’ This is her
device against all deities of heaven or earth who do not recognize as the
highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself.”[468] In
later life he was known as “Old Nick”, and his little son used to call him
“devil”.[469]
“In spite of all Marx’s enthusiasm for the ‘human’,” writes his admirer Edmund
Wilson, “he is either inhumanly dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant”[470] – a
truly demonic combination!
Marx’s atheism received a theoretical
impetus from Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), which in a
sense substituted anthropology for theology, defining God as a projection of
man’s ideal for himself: “The divine essence is nothing else than the essence
of man; or, better, it is the essence of man when freed from the limitations of
the individual, that is to say, actual corporeal man, objectified and venerated
as an independent Being distinct from man himself.”[471]
Marx praised Feuerbach, according to Isaiah Berlin, “for showing that in
religion men delude themselves by inventing an imaginary world to redress the
balance of misery in real life – it is a form of escape, a golden dream, or, in
a phrase made celebrated by Marx, the opium of the people; the criticism of
religion must therefore be anthropological in character, and take the form of
exposing and analysing its secular origins. But Feuerbach is accused of leaving
the major task untouched: he sees that religion is an anodyne unconsciously
generated by the unhappy to soften the pain caused by the contradictions of the
material world, but then fails to see that these contradictions must, in that
case, be removed: otherwise they will continue to breed comforting and fatal
delusions: the revolution which alone can do so must occur not in the
superstructure – the world of thought – but in its material substratum, the
real world of men and things. Philosophy has hitherto treated ideas and beliefs
as possessing an intrinsic validity of their own; this has never been true; the
real content of a belief is the action in which it is expressed. The real
convictions and principles of a man or a society are expressed in their acts,
not their words. Belief and act are one; if acts do not themselves express
avowed beliefs, the beliefs are lies – ‘ideologies’, conscious or not, to cover
the opposite of what they profess. Theory and practice are, or should be, one
and the same. ‘Philosophers have previously offered various interpretations of
the world. Our business is to change it.’”[472]
This is an atheist variation on the Catholic-Protestant debate about
faith and works – with Marx coming down firmly on the Catholic side. Similarly,
in the old Greek philosophical debate about which is more real: time or
eternity, Marx came down on the side of time. In this he was a child of his
time; for by contrast with the Age of Reason, which had sought to elucidate
truths that were valid for all cultures and all times, for the Age of
Revolution truth was ineluctably historical. And this did not mean
simply that the truth about a person or nation can be understood only by
studying him or it in its historical context. It meant that truth itself
changes with time, is moulded by time.
Thus God for the romantics of the Age of Revolution was a dynamic,
evolving being indistinguishable from nature and history, always overcoming
contradictions and rising to ever higher unities. It followed that the notion
of a perfectly revealed religion, a final, unalterable truth, was anathema to
them. “Christians must not be ‘vain and foolish’, Friedrich Schleiermacher
warned, for their religion is not the only ‘revealed religion’. All religions
are revealed from God. Christianity is the center around which all others
gather. The disunity of religions is an evil and ‘only in the totality of all
such possible forms can there be given the true religion,’ Schleiermacher
added.”[473]
This Romantic scheme of history and the evolution of religion was
developed by Friedrich Schelling, who, as Fr. Michael Azkoul writes,
“discoursed on the three ages of history – the age of the Father, the age of
the Son, and the age of the Holy Spirit which correspond to the events of
creation, redemption and consummation. Schelling believed that Christianity was
now passing through ‘the second age’ which Christ ‘incarnated’ almost two
millennia ago.
“In the vocabulary of the Romantics, Christ brought ‘the Idea of
Christianity’ with Him. An ‘Idea’ is the invisible, unchangeable, and eternal
aspect of each thing. (Plato was probably the first to teach ‘Idealism’.)
Phenomena are visible, changeable, and temporary. Put another way, the Idea of
Christianity (‘one Church’) is what the historical institution will become when
it finishes growing, or, as Schelling would say, when God becomes fully God.
One may compare its Idea to wheat and historical Christianity (the Idea) to
what Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Christianity will become.
When the multiplicity of churches grows into the ecumenical Church, then, the
Idea of Christianity, of ‘one church’, will have been actualised in space and
time. It will be actualised in the coming of ‘the third age’, ‘the age of the
Spirit’, ‘the age of consummation’.”[474]
But it was a third Friedrich, Friedrich Hegel,
who really initiated Marx – and the whole of Europe – into the doctrine of
historicism. Even before he composed his famous philosophy of history, he had
already shown an extreme readiness always to keep “in step with the times”.
Thus in 1806 he had hailed Napoleon’s victory at Jena as “the end of history”
and the most perfect revelation of the “World Spirit”, and the revolution that
Napoleon embodied - as the manifestation of the perfect form of statehood. But
the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Prussian monarchy forced him to
change his mind and magnify Prussian monarchism as a still more perfect
historical revelation of the World Spirit. At the same time, he called for
representative institutions in 1821, and in 1831 wrote in praise of the pending
Reform Bill in England.[475] So he
could be said to have dabbled in most of the fashions of the political thought
of his time.
Such “flexibility”, while desirable for those wishing to keep up with
the Zeitgeist, nevertheless required some justifying if it was to pass muster
among intellectuals – and Hegel was a university professor. Hence the origin of
his philosophy of history. This theory is important not only for an
understanding of future movements, especially Marxism and Fascism, which borrowed
much from Hegel, but also in that it constitutes a kind of synthesis of the two
major movements of western thought that we have just examined: rationalism,
with its political child, liberal democracy, and romanticism, with its
offspring, the more collectivist and authoritarian forms of political life.
Hume had demonstrated the irrationality of rationalism, of “pure”
empiricism, but without proposing a way out of the dilemma it posed for
believers in God, the immortal soul, morality and spirituality in general. Kant
had demonstrated that the application of reason presupposes a spirit
transcending the empirical world, but could not explain how this free realm of
spirit related to the causally determined world of matter. Hegel expanded the
realm of spirit to engulf everything, making it into a kind of pantheistic god
called the Absolute Idea or the World Spirit. To this Spirit, which is the All
and can only be understood, like an organism, from the point of view of the
All, he gave all the attributes that romanticism had rescued from the maw of
devouring rationalism: emotion, mystery, dynamism, history, even nationalism.
Thus to the bright empiricist-rationalist thesis, and its dark
romantic-idealist antithesis, Hegel supplied a cloudy, metaphysical, empiricist-rationalist
and romantic-idealist synthesis.[476]
Hegel made rebelliousness and revolution respectable, as being, not
optional modes of thought and action, but inherent in the deepest nature of
things. Rebelliousness was an aspect of “alienation”, and revolution – of the
self-realisation of the World Spirit. For “Hegel’s dialectic,” writes Scruton,
“implies that all knowledge, all activity and all emotions exist in a state of
tension, and are driven by this tension to enact a primeval drama. Each
concept, desire and feeling exists first in a primitive, immediate and unified
form – without self-knowledge, and inherently unstable, but nevertheless at
home with itself. Its final ‘realisation’ is achieved only in a condition of
‘unity restored’, a homecoming to the primordial point of rest, but in a
condition of achieved self-knowledge and fulfilled intention. In order to reach
this final point, each aspect of spirit must pass through a long trajectory of
separation, sundered from its home, and struggling to affirm itself in a world
that it does not control. This state of alienation – the vale of tears – is the
realm of becoming, in which consciousness is separated from its object and also
from itself. There are as many varieties of alienation as there are forms of
spiritual life; but in each form the fundamental drama is the same: spirit can
know itself only if it ‘posits’ an object of knowledge – only if it invests its
world with the idea of the other. In doing this it becomes other to itself, and
lives through conflict and disharmony, until finally uniting with the other –
as we unite with the object of science when fully understanding it; with the
self when overcoming guilt and religious estrangement; with other people when
joined in a lawful body politic.”[477]
Lionel Trilling writes: “The historical process that Hegel undertakes to
expound is the self-realization of Spirit through the changing relation of the
individual to the external power of society in two of its aspects, the
political power of the state and the power of wealth. In an initial stage of
the process that is being described the individual consciousness renders what
Hegel calls ‘obedient service’ to the external power and feels for it an ‘inner
reverence’. Its service is not only obedient but also silent and unreasoned,
taken for granted; Hegel calls this ‘the heroism of dumb service’. This entire
and inarticulate accord of the individual consciousness with the external power
of society is said to have the attribute of ‘nobility’.
“But the harmonious relation of the
individual consciousness to the state power and to wealth is not destined to
endure. It is the nature of Spirit, Hegel tells us, to seek ‘existence on its
own account’ – that is, to free itself from limiting conditions, to press
towards autonomy. In rendering ‘obedient service’ to and in feeling ‘inner
reverence’ for anything except itself it consents to the denial of its own
nature. If it is to fulfil its natural destiny of self-realization, it must
bring an end to its accord with the external power of society. And in
terminating this ‘noble’ relation the individual consciousness moves towards a
relation with external power which Hegel calls ‘base’.
“The change is not immediate. Between the noble relation of the individual
consciousness to state power and to wealth and the developing base relation
there stands what Hegel speaks of as a ‘mediating term’. In this transitional
stage the ‘heroism of dumb service’ modifies itself to become a heroism which
is not dumb but articulate, what Hegel calls the ‘heroism of flattery’. The
individual, that is to say, becomes conscious of his relation to the external
power of society; he becomes conscious of having made the choice the maintain
the relationship and of the prudential reasons which induced him to make it –
the ‘flattery’ is, in effect, the rationale of his choice which the individual
formulates in terms of the virtues of the external power, presumably a personal
monarch. We might suppose that Hegel had in mind the relation of the court
aristocracy to Louis XIV. Consciousness and choice, it is clear, imply a
commitment to, rather than identification with, the external power of society.
“From this modification of the ‘noble’ relation to the external power
the individual proceeds to the ‘baseness’ of being actually antagonistic to the
external power. What was once served and reverenced now comes to be regarded
with resentment and bitterness. Hegel’s description of the new attitude is
explicit: ‘ It [that is, the individual consciousness] looks upon the
authoritative power of the state as a chain, as something suppressing its
separate autonomous existence, and hence hates the ruler, obeys only with
secret malice and stands ever ready to burst out in rebellion.’ And the
relation of the individual self to wealth is even baser, if only because of the
ambivalence which marks it – the self loves wealth but at the same time
despises it; through wealth the self ‘attains to the enjoyment of its own
independent existence’, but it find wealth discordant with the nature of
Spirit, for it is of the nature of Spirit to be permanent, whereas enjoyment is
evanescent.
“The process thus described makes an unhappy state of affairs but not,
as Hegel judges it, by any means a deplorable one. He intends us to understand
that the movement from ‘nobility’ to ‘baseness’ is not a devolution but a
development. So far from deploring ‘baseness’, Hegel celebrates it. And he
further confounds our understanding by saying that ‘baseness’ leads to and
therefore is ‘nobility’. What is the purpose of this high-handed inversion of
common meanings?
“An answer might begin with the observation that the words ‘noble’ and
‘base’, although they have been assimilated to moral judgement, did not originally
express concepts of moral law, of a prescriptive and prohibitory code which is
taken to be of general, commanding, and even supernal authority and in which a
chief criterion of a person’s rightdoing and wrongdoing is the effect of his
conduct upon other persons. The words were applied, rather, to the ideal of
personal existence of a ruling class at a certain time – its ethos, in that
sense of the word which conveys the idea not of abstractly right conduct but of
a characteristic manner of style of approved conduct. What is in accord with
this ethos is noble; what falls short of it or derogates from it is base. The
noble self is not shaped by its beneficent intentions towards others; its
intention is wholly towards itself, and such moral virtue as may be attributed
to it follows incidentally from its expressing the privilege and function of
its social status in mien and deportment. We might observe that the traits once
thought appropriate to the military life are definitive in the formation of the
noble self. It stands before the world boldly defined, its purposes clearly
conceived and openly avowed. In its consciousness there is no division, it is
at one with itself. The base self similarly expresses a social condition, in
the first instance by its characteristic mien and deportment, as these are
presumed or required to be, and ultimately by the way in which it carries out
those of its purposes that are self-serving beyond the limits deemed
appropriate to its social status. These purposes can be realized only by covert
means and are therefore shameful. Between the intentions of the base self and
its avowals there is no congruence. But the base self, exactly because it is
not under the control of the noble ethos, has won at least a degree of autonomy
and has thereby fulfilled the nature of Spirit. In refusing its obedient
service to the state power and to wealth it has lost its wholeness; its
selfhood is ‘disintegrated’; the self is ‘alienated’ from itself. But because
it has detached itself from imposed conditions, Hegel says that it has made a
step in progress. He puts it that the existence of the self ‘on its own
account’ is, strictly speaking, the loss of itself’. The statement can also be
made the other way round: ‘Alienation of self is really self-preservation’.”[478]
Hegel’s historicism, writes Golo Mann, is “a fantastic, almost mad,
almost successful [!] attempt to give an answer to every question every asked,
and to assign to every answer ever given to every question a historical place
within his own great, final answer – an attempt to create being dialectically
from thought, to reconcile idea and reality and to overcome the cleavage
between self and non-self. It was this cleavage – the existence of the self in
an alien world – that Hegel made his starting-point. What he found was the
identity of everything with everything, of God with the world, of logic with
reality, of motion with rest, of necessity with freedom. The world spirit is
everywhere, in nature, in man, in the history of man. The spirit, alienated
from itself in nature, comes into its own in man. This process takes place on
the one hand in the true history of peoples and states, and on the other in
art, religion and philosophy. All these spheres correspond to each other; what
is accomplished in each individual sector belongs to the whole and fits into it
or nothing will be accomplished. ‘As far as the individual is concerned each
person cannot in any even help being the child of his time. So too philosophy
is the expression of its time in ideas.’ ‘He who expresses and accomplishes
what his time wills is the great man of his time.’ Every present is always a
single whole, just as the history of mankind is its general lines a whole. It
finds expression in peoples, states and civilizations, of which the west
European or, as Hegel calls it, the Germanic is the highest so far attained.
Will there be higher ones? On this point the philosopher is silent. [479] One
can only understand the past, and the present to the extent that it is the
final product of all pasts which are preserved in it. The future cannot be
explored or understood; it does not exist for the spirit. No other historical
thinker was so little concerned with the future as Hegel. What he hinted at, or
what followed from his doctrine, was that the future would be something
entirely different from the past. For philosophy comes late, at the end of an
epoch. It does not come to change or improve, but merely to understand and to
express; it constructs in the realm of the spirit what has already been
constructed in the realm of reality. ‘When philosophy paints its picture in
grey on grey, it means that a form of life has grown old, and by painting it
grey on grey it cannot be restored to its youth, but is only recognised…’ This
applies to all true philosophies, and is most valid for the philosophy of all
philosophies, namely the Hegelian, which brings to an end the epoch of all
epochs: the age of Protestantism, enlightenment and revolution. What was still
to come? Hegel shrugged his shoulders sadly at this question. His philosophy
gave no answer, and given its nature could not venture to attempt one. ‘The
spirit is in its full essence in the present…’ But this philosophy of
fulfilment, this song of praise of Man-God contains an element of pessimism: after
1815 nothing further is to be expected.
“Though Hegel’s philosophy as a whole contains rest, fulfilment and
finality, it is full of unrest and struggle, both in the realm of the spirit
and of reality. The spirit is never content with what has been achieved, it
always seeks new conflicts, it must struggle to find and express itself anew.
States and peoples are never at rest, they come into conflict and one of them
must give way. The world spirit advances by catastrophes, and its path is
marked by forms that are used up, emptied, and jettisoned. Quiet is only
apparent quiet, lull before a new storm; as mere rest it is of no interest to
the historian. ‘Epochs of happiness are empty pages in the history of the
world.’ History does not exist for the happiness, the idyllic contentment of
the individual. The goal is set high: the reconciliation of all contradictions,
absolute justice, complete knowledge, the incarnation of reason on earth, the
presence of God. The road to it is one of exertion and ever new confusion. But
what has happened is the only thing that could have happened and how it
happened was right. Terrible things occurred; the rise of the Roman Empire was
terrible and terrible was its fall. But everything had a purpose and was as it
should be. Julius Caesar was murdered after he had done what the age wanted
from him; the Roman Empire collapsed after it had completed its historical
mission. Otherwise how could it have fallen? It is useless to lament the
abysses of history, the crimes of power, the sufferings of good men. The world
spirit is right in the end, its will will be obeyed, its purpose fulfilled;
what does it care about the happiness or unhappiness of individuals?[480] ‘The
real is rational and the rational is the real.’ When something ceases to be
rational, when the spirit has already moved on, it will wither away and die.
The individual may not understand his fate because he is liable to
over-estimate himself and believes that history revolves around his person at
the centre. The philosopher who perceives the kernel in the multi-coloured rind
of what occurs will provide the insight too.
“Power, and war, which creates and enhances power, cannot be omitted
from all this. Man only realizes himself in the state and the state exists only
where there is power to defend and attack. Might gives right. It is unlikely,
it is in fact impossible, that the state without right on its side will win.
What sort of right? Not a universally valid, pale right invented by stoicist
philosophers, but historical right, the superiority of the historical mission.
Thus right was on the side of the Spaniards against the Peruvians, in spite of
all their cruelty and deceit; right was on Napoleon’s side against the
antiquated German Empire. Later, on the other hand, right was on the side of
allied Europe against Napoleon only because, the professor concluded after much
puzzling over this problem in his study, the arrogant Emperor, himself now
outdated, gave the Allies the right to conquer him, and only because he put himself
in the wrong could he be conquered. Success, the outcome, provide the
justification; in power there lies truth…”[481]
Hegel’s
Political Philosophy
Hegel’s philosophy is manifestly false, even, as Popper has
demonstrated, nonsensical. Nevertheless, in view of his historical importance,
especially in his influence on the (no less false) theories of the modern
totalitarians, it will be worth reviewing his political philosophy in a little
more detail.
“In the historical development of Spirit,” writes Bertrand Russell,
expounding Hegel, “there have been three main phases: The Orientals, the Greeks
and Romans, and the Germans. ‘The history of the world is the discipline of the
uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle
and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows,
only that One is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the
German world knows that All are free.’ One might have supposed that democracy
would be the appropriate form of government where all are free, but not so.
Democracy and aristocracy alike belong to the stage where some are free,
despotism to that where one is free, and monarchy to that in which all are
free. This is connected with the very odd sense in which Hegel uses the word
‘freedom’. For him (and so far we may agree) there is no freedom without law;
but he tends to convert this, and to argue that wherever there is law there is
freedom. Thus ‘freedom’, for him, means little more than the right to obey the
law.
“As might be expected, he assigns the highest role to the Germans in the
terrestrial development of Spirit. ‘The German spirit is the spirit of the new
world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited
self-determination of freedom – that freedom which has its own absolute form
itself as its purport.’[482]
“This is a very superfine brand of freedom. It does not mean that you
will be able to keep out of a concentration camp. It does not imply democracy,
or a free press, or any of the usual Liberal watchwords, which Hegel rejects
with contempt. When Spirit gives laws to itself, it does so freely. To our
mundane vision, it may seem that the Spirit that gives laws is embodied in the
monarch, and the Spirit to which laws are given is embodied in his subjects.
But from the point of view of the Absolute the distinction between monarch and
subjects, like all other distinctions, is illusory, and when the monarch
imprisons a liberal-minded subject, that is still Spirit freely determining
itself. Hegel praises Rousseau for distinguishing between the general will and
the will of all. One gathers that the monarch embodies the general will,
whereas a parliamentary majority only embodies the will of all…
“So much is Germany glorified that one might expect to find it the final
embodiment of the Absolute Idea, beyond which no further development would be
possible. But this is not Hegel’s view. On the contrary, he says that America
is the land of the future, ‘where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden
of the world’s history shall reveal itself – perhaps [he adds
characteristically[ in a contest between North and South America.’ He seems to
think that everything important takes the form of war. If it were suggested to
him that the contribution of America to world history might be the development
of a society without extreme poverty, he would not be interested. On the
contrary, he says that, as yet, there is no real State in America, because a
real State requires a division of classes into rich and poor.
“Nations, in Hegel, play the part that classes play in Marx. The
principle of historical development, he says, is national genius. In every age,
there is some one nation which is charged with the mission of carrying the world
through the stage of the dialectic that it has reached. In our age, of course,
this nation is Germany. [483]
But in addition to nations, we must also take account of world-historical
individuals; these are men in whose aims are embodied the dialectical transitions
that are due to take place in their time. These men are heroes, and may
justifiably contravene ordinary moral rules…
“Hegel’s emphasis on nations, together with his peculiar conception of
‘freedom’, explains his glorification of the State – a very important aspect of
his political philosophy….
“We are told in The Philosophy of History that ‘the State is the
actually existing realized moral life’, and that all the spiritual reality
possessed by a human being he possesses only through the State. ‘For his
spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence – Reason – is
objectively present to him, that it possesses objective immediate existence for
him… For truth is the unity of the universal and subjective Will, and the
universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational
arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.’[484]…
“… If the State existed only for the interests of individuals (as
Liberals contend), an individual might or might not be a member of the State.
It has, however, a quite different relation to the individual: since it is
objective Spirit, the individual only has objectivity, truth, and morality in
so far as he is a member of the State, whose true content and purpose is union
as such. It is admitted that there may be bad States, but these merely exist,
and have no true reality, whereas a rational State is infinite in itself.
“It will be seen that Hegel claims for the State much the same position
as St. Augustine and his Catholic successors claimed for the Church. There are,
however, two respects in which the Catholic claim is more reasonable than
Hegel’s. In the first place, the Church is not a chance geographical
association, but a body united by a common creed, believed by its members to be
of supreme importance; it is thus by its very essence the embodiment of what
Hegel calls the ‘Idea’. In the second place, there is only one Catholic Church,
whereas there are many States. When each State, in relation to its subjects, is
made an absolute as Hegel makes it, there is difficulty in finding any
philosophical principle by which to regulate the relations between different
States. In fact, at this point Hegel abandons his philosophical talk, falling
back on the state of nature and Hobbes’s war of all against all.
“The habit of speaking of ‘the State’, as if there were only one, is
misleading so long as there is no world State. Duty being, for Hegel, solely a
relation of the individual to his State, no principle is left by which to
moralize the relations between States. This Hegel recognizes. In external
relations, he says, the State is an individual, and each State is independent
as against the others. ‘Since in this independence the being-for-self of real
spirit has its existence, it is the first freedom and highest honour of a
people.’ He goes on to argue against any sort of League of Nations by which the
independence of separate States might be limited. The duty of a citizen is
entirely confined (so far as the external relations of his State are concerned)
to upholding the substantial individuality and independence and sovereignty of
his own State. It follows that war is not wholly an evil, or something that we
should seek to abolish. The purpose of the State is not merely to uphold the
life and property of the citizens, and this fact provides the moral
justification of war, which is not to be regarded as an absolute evil or as
accidental, or as having its cause in something that ought not to be.
“Hegel does not mean only that, in some situations, a nation cannot
rightly avoid going to war. He means much more than this. He is opposed to the
creation of institutions – such as a world government – which would prevent
such situations from arising, because he thinks it a good thing that there
should be wars from time to time. War, he says, is the condition in which we
take seriously the vanity of temporal goods and things. (This view is to be
contrasted with the opposite theory, that all wars have economic causes.) War has
a positive moral value: ‘War has the higher significance that through it the
moral health of peoples is preserved in their indifference towards the
stabilizing of finite determinations.’ Peace is ossification; the Holy
Alliance, and Kant’s League for Peace, are mistaken, because a family of states
needs an enemy. Conflicts of States can only be decided by war; States being
towards each other in a state of nature, their relations are not legal or
moral. Their rights have their reality in their particular wills, and the
interest of each State is its own highest law. There is no contrast of morals
and politics, because States are not subject to ordinary moral laws.
“Such is Hegel’s doctrine of the State – a doctrine which, if accepted,
justifies every internal tyranny and every external aggression that can
possibly be imagined…”[485]
However, as Copleston points out, “it is essential to remember that
Hegel is speaking throughout of the concept of the State, its ideal essence. He
has no intention of suggesting that historical States are immune from
criticism.”[486]
Having made that qualification, it remains truth that the similarities
between Hegel and the modern totalitarians, especially the Fascists, are clear:
“(a) Nationalism, in the form of the historicist idea that the state is the
incarnation of the Spirit (or now, of the Blood) of the state-creating nation
(or race); one chosen nation (now, the chosen race) is destined for world
domination. (b) The state as the natural enemy of all other states must assert
its existence in war. (c) The state is exempt from any kind of moral
obligation; history, that is, historical success, is the sole judge; collective
utility is the sole principle of personal conduct; propagandist lying and
distortion of the truth is permissible. (d) The ‘ethical’ idea of war (total
and collectivist), particularly of young nations against older ones; war, fate
and fame as most desirable goods. (e) The creative rôle of the Great Man,
the world-historical personality, the man of deep knowledge and great passion
(now, the principle of leadership). (f) The ideal of the heroic life (‘live
dangerously’) and of the ‘heroic man’ as opposed to the petty bourgeois and his
life of shallow mediocrity.”[487]
Barzun has sought to lessen Hegel’s guilt somewhat: “Hegel did express
himself in favor of a strong state. What intelligent German who remembered 200
years of helplessness would want a weak one?”[488] True;
and yet the desire for a strong state, which is compatible with many creeds and
philosophies, need not be translated into the worship of the State as the
Divine Idea on earth, which is in effect Hegel’s idea. As he put it: “the State
is the basis and centre of all the concrete elements in the life of a people:
of Art, Law, Morals, Religion, and Science…”[489] This
is idolatry, and the purest atheism…
So from Hildebrand to Hegel we have come full circle: from the absolute
dominion of the Church in all spheres to the absolute dominion of the State in
all spheres. Hegel’s theories found their incarnation in the State-worshipping
creeds of Communism and Fascism, the most evil in history. Such is the fall of
western civilisation, its thesis and antithesis, which has not yet found – or,
more exactly, has not recovered (since it used to have it in the pre-schism,
Orthodox period) - its synthesis in the Orthodox symphony of powers…
Marx’s
Historical Materialism
By the mid-1840s, writes Wilson, Marx and Engels “had taken stock of
their predecessors and, with their own sharp and realistic minds, they had
lopped off the sentimentality and fantasy which had surrounded the practical
perceptions of the utopians. From Saint-Simon they accepted as valid his
[supposed] discovery that modern politics was simply the science of regulating
production; from Fourier, his arraignment of the bourgeois, his consciousness
of the ironic contrast between ‘the frenzy of speculation, the spirit of
all-devouring commercialism’, which were rampant under the reign of the
bourgeoisie and ‘the brilliant promises of the Enlightenment’ which had
preceded them; from Owen, the realization that the factory system must be the
root of the social revolution. But they saw that the mistake of the utopian
socialists had been to imagine that socialism was to be imposed upon society
from above by disinterested members of the upper classes. The bourgeoisie as a
whole, they believed, could not be induced to go against its own interests. The
educator, as Marx was to write in his Theses on Feuerbach, must, after
all, first have been educated: he is not really confronting disciples with a
doctrine that has been supplied him by God; he is merely directing a movement
of which he is himself a member and which energizes him and gives him his
purpose. Marx and Engels combined the aims of the utopians with Hegel’s process
of organic development”[490],
substituting Hegel’s idea of the historical role of nations with that of the
role of class.
“The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class
struggle”, wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Marx
claimed that this was his only original contribution to what later came to be
called Marxism. Be that as it may (Plato, as Sir Karl Popper points out, had
said something similar), it was certainly one of the two fundamental axioms of
his theory.
The other was his teaching on the economic foundation of all human
civilization. Everything is determined, according to Marx, by man’s struggle
for economic survival, which in turn depends on his relationship to the
economic conditions of production. The juridical, political, religious,
aesthetic and philosophical aspects of man’s existence are all simply
“ideological forms of appearance” of the only true reality, his economic
position in society – that is, his class membership. As he put it in his famous
epigram: “It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence –
rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.”[491]
For “I was led,” he wrote, “to the conclusion that legal relations, as
well as forms of state, could neither be understood by themselves, nor
explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they
are rooted in the material conditions of life which Hegel calls… civil society.
The anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy.”
“The single operative cause,” writes
Berlin, “which makes one people different from another, one set of institutions
and beliefs opposed to another is, so Marx now came to believe, the economic
environment in which it is set, the relationship of the ruling class of
possessors to those whom they exploit, arising from the specific quality of the
tension which persists between them. The fundamental springs of action in the
life of men, he believed, all the more powerful for not being recognised by
them, are their relationships to the alignment of classes in the economic
struggle: the factor, knowledge of which would enable anyone to predict
successfully men’s basic line of behaviour, is their actual social position –
whether they are outside or inside the ruling class, whether their welfare
depends on its success or failure, whether they are placed in a position to
which the preservation of the existing order is or is not essential. Once this
is known, men’s particular personal motives and emotions become comparatively
irrelevant to the investigation: they may be egoistic or altruistic, generous
or mean, clever or stupid, ambitious or modest. Their natural qualities will be
harnessed by their circumstances to operate in a given direction, whatever
their natural tendency. Indeed, it is misleading to speak of a ‘natural
tendency’ or an unalterable ‘human nature’. Tendencies may be classified either
in accordance with the subjective feeling which they engender (and this is, for
purposes of scientific prediction, unimportant), or in accordance with their
actual aims, which are socially conditioned. Men behave before they start to
reflect on the reasons for, or the justification of, their behaviour; the
majority of the members of a community will act in a similar fashion, whatever
the subjective motives for which they will appear to themselves to be acting as
they do. This is obscured by the fact that in the attempt to convince
themselves that their acts are determined by reasons or by moral or religious
beliefs, men have tended to construct elaborate rationalisations of their
behaviour. Nor are these rationalisations wholly powerless to affect action,
for, growing into great institutions like moral codes or religious organisations,
they often linger on long after the social pressures, to explain away which
they arose, have disappeared. Thus these great organised illusions themselves
become part of the objective social situation, part of the external world which
modifies the behaviour of individuals, functioning in the same way as the
invariant factors, climate, soil, physical organism, function in their
interplay with social institutions.
“Marx’s immediate successors tended to
minimise Hegel’s influence upon him; but his vision of the world crumbles and
yields only isolated insights if, in the effort to represent him as he
conceived himself, as the rigorous, severely factual social scientist, the
great unifying, necessary pattern in terms of which he thought, is left out or
whittled down.
“Like Hegel, Marx treats history as phenomenology. In Hegel the
Phenomenology of the human Spirit is an attempt to show… an objective order in
the development of human consciousness and in the succession of civilisations
that are its concrete embodiment. Influenced by a notion prominent in the
Renaissance, but reaching back to an earlier mystical cosmogony, Hegel looked
upon the development of mankind as being similar to that of an individual human
being. Just as in the case of a man a particular capacity, or outlook, or way
of dealing with reality cannot come into being until and unless other
capacities have first become developed – that is, indeed, the essence of the
notion of growth or education in the case of individuals – so races, nations,
churches, cultures, succeed each other in a fixed order, determined by the
growth of the collective faculties of mankind expressed in arts, sciences,
civilisation as a whole. Pascal had perhaps meant something of this kind when
he spoke of humanity as a single, centuries old, being, growing from generation
to generation. For Hegel all change is due to the movement of the dialectic,
which works by a constant logical criticism, that is, by struggle against, and
final self-destruction of, ways of thought and constructions of reason and
feeling which, in their day, had embodied the highest point reached by the
ceaseless growth (which for Hegel is the logical self-realisation) of the human
spirit; but which, embodied in rules or institutions, and erroneously taken as
final and absolute by a given society or outlook, thereby become obstacles to
progress, dying survivals of a logically ‘transcended’ stage, which by their
very one-sidedness breed logical antimonies and contradictions by which they
are exposed and destroyed. Marx translated this vision of history as a
battlefield of incarnate ideas into social terms, of the struggle between
classes. For him alienation (for that is what Hegel, following Rousseau and
Luther and an earlier Christian tradition, called the perpetual self-divorce of
men from unity with nature, with each other, with God, which the struggle of
thesis against antithesis entailed) is intrinsic to the social process, indeed
it is the heart of history itself. Alienation occurs when the results of men’s
acts contradict their true purposes, when their official values, or the parts
they play, misrepresent their real motives and needs and goals. This is the
case, for example, when something that men have made to respond to human needs
– say, a system of laws, or the rules of musical composition – acquires an
independent status of its own, and is seen by men, not as something created by
them to satisfy a common social want (which may have disappeared long ago), but
as an objective law or institution, possessing eternal, impersonal authority in
its own right, like the unalterable laws of Nature as conceived by scientists
and ordinary men, like God and His Commandments for a believer. For Marx the
capitalist system is precisely this kind of entity, a vast instrument brought
into being by intelligible material demands – a progressive improvement and
broadening of life in its own day, that generates its own intellectual, moral,
religious beliefs, values and forms of life. Whether those who hold them know
it or not, such beliefs and values merely uphold the power of the class whose
interests the capitalist system embodies; nevertheless, they come to be viewed
by all sections of society as being objectively and eternally valid for all
mankind. Thus, for example, industry and the capitalist mode of exchange are
not timelessly valid institutions, but were generated by the mounting
resistance by peasants and artisans to dependence on the blind forces of
nature. They had had their moment; and the values these institutions generated
will change or vanish with them.”[492]
Marx differed
from Hegel also in his vision of the final outcome of the historical process.
Whereas for Hegel the self-realization of the Divine Idea culminated in the
Prussian State, for Marx it culminated in the victory of the last and largest
class, the proletariat, in the creation of a classless, and therefore
conflictless society – and there was nothing Divine about it. One thing was certain: the
dominance of the present ruling class, the bourgeoise, could not last.
For Marx and Engels understood the
characteristic of the industrial, bourgeois age that distinguished it from all
previous ages – its dynamism. Whereas previous ages aimed to preserve the
social structure in order to preserve their place in it, the bourgeois were in
effect constantly changing it, knowing that technological advance was
constantly making present relationships obsolete and unprofitable. Not only did
it overthrow the old, patriarchal and feudal society that came before it: it
was constantly working to overthrow itself.
“The bourgeoisie,” they wrote, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their trace of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air.”[493]
But this constant change, although promoted by the bourgeoisie in order
to keep it in business, at the same time built up the numbers and resources of
the proletariat. “Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring
death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield
those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians. In proportion as
the bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the
proletariat, the modern working class, developed.”[494]
Was Marx’s theory true? Neither of its fundamental axioms were true, and
so the whole theory collapsed. If man’s thought is determined by his economic
status, then there is no reason for applying the categories of truth and
falsehood to it – which applies to Marx’s thinking as much as to anybody
else’s. As for the idea that class conflict is the sole determinant of world
history, there are countless counter-examples that disprove it. Popper cites
the conflict between popes and emperors, both of the same class, in the Middle
Ages.[495]
1848 and the Spectre of Communism
As we have seen, Marx declared in his Theses on Feuerbach: “The
philosophers have only interpreted the world. Our business is to change it.”
His chance to do that came in 1848, which began with the publication of his
most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, and continued with a
European-wide revolution.
The 1848 revolution, writes Hobsbawm,
“coincided with a social catastrophe: the great depression which swept across
the continent from the middle 1840s. Harvests – and especially the potato crop
– failed. Entire populations such as those of Ireland, and to a lesser extent
Silesia and Flanders, starved. Food-prices rose. Industrial depression
multiplied unemployment, and the masses of the labouring poor were deprived of
their modest income at the very moment when their cost of living rocketed. The
situation varied from one country to another and within each, and – fortunately
for the existing regimes – the most miserable populations, such as the Irish
and the Flemish, or some of the provincial factory workers were also
politically among the most immature: the cotton operatives of the Nord
department of France, for instance, took out their desperation on the equally
desperate Belgian immigrant who flooded into Northern France, rather than on
the government or even the employers. Moreover, in the most industrialized
economy, the sharpest edge of discontent had already been taken away by the
great industrial and railway-building boom of the middle 1840s. 1846-8 were bad
years, but not so bad as 1841-2, and what was more, they were merely a sharp
dip in what was now visibly an ascending slope of economic prosperity. But,
taking Western and Central Europe as a whole, the catastrophe of 1846-8 was
universal and the mood of the masses, always pretty close to subsistence level,
tense and impassioned.
“A European economic cataclysm thus
coincided with the visible corrosion of the old regimes. A peasant uprising in
Galicia in 1846; the election of a ‘liberal’ Pope in the same year; a civil war
between radicals and Catholics in Switzerland in later 1847, won by the
radicals; one of the perennial Sicilian autonomist insurrections in Palermo in
early 1848: they were not merely straws in the wind, they were the first
squalls of the gale. Everyone knew it. Rarely has revolution been more
universally predicted, though not necessarily for the right countries or the
right dates. An entire continent waited, ready by now to pass the news of
revolution almost instantly from city to city by means of the electric
telegraph. In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard ‘the dull
sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under every
kingdom in Europe its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine
which is Paris’. In 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion
burst.”[496]
“Citizen-King” Louis Philippe tried to
create an impossible compromise between the principles of monarchy and
revolution, but was unable to contain these tensions and abdicated, fleeing to
England in February, 1848. However, the Provisional Government of the Second
Republic, which included a worker in its ranks, the mechanic Albert Martin, did
not last long: the elections to the Constituent Assembly, now on the basis of
universal male suffrage, returned a massive monarchist majority. Many of the
liberal bourgeoisie, fearing social revolution, voted for the right[497], as
did the poor, but property-owning peasantry. As the new government arrested
revolutionary leaders, clawed back some of the concessions of February and
abolished national workshops, the urban poor rose in rebellion against the
republic they had helped to create. This rebellion was put down with much
bloodshed. France now had an ideal liberal constitution, with Louis Napoleon,
nephew of the great Napoleon, as elected President. However, in 1851 he staged
a coup d’état, and proclaimed the Second Empire.
The pattern of events was remarkably
similar to that of the First French Revolution and the First Empire under the
Napoleon the First: as Alfonse Karr wrote, plus ça change, plus c’est
la même chose.[498]
However, two things radically distinguished 1848 from 1789. The first was that
the monarchical principle was now much weaker. Thus in January, 1848 De
Tocqueville, declared: “The old monarchy [of Louis XVI]…. was stronger than
you, because of its [hereditary] origin; it had better support than you from
ancient practices, old customs, ancient beliefs; it was stronger than you, and
yet it fell into the dust… Can you not feel – how shall I put it? – the wind of
revolution in the air?”[499] The
second was that the spirit of revolution now had a more radical and powerful
intellectual support in the form of the theory that took its name from its
founder – Karl Marx, whose Communist
Manifesto, written with Friedrich Engels, was published in the year of
the revolution.
However, this support was still too weak,
too little-known and too extreme for the majority even of the leftists. And
there were several other factors that contributed to the collapse of the
revolution almost as quickly as it spread across Europe. One was the continued
support of the armies for the dynastic principle. Another was the distrust of
the peasants, still by far the majority part of the population in most
countries, for the urban intellectuals. A third was the conflicts created by
nationalist movements, which theoretically should have chimed in with the
liberals’ aims, but in practice often undermined them.
The most important of these nationalist movements were those for the unification of Italy and Germany. Italy was still little more than “a geographical expression”, in Metternich’s phrase. And when the Italian revolutionaries rebelled, as the Tuscan radical, Giuseppe Montanelli, said, “there was no unity of direction; therefore there was no national government. We fought as Piedmontese, as Tuscans, as Neapolitans, as Romans, not as Italians.”
When the Austrians counter-attacked against revolutionary Milan and
Venice, many of their soldiers were poor Italians who distrusted the urban
revolutionaries; and the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies Ferdinand II found
allies amongst the Neapolitan poor.[500]
Mazzini’s slogan, Italia farà da sé (Italy will do it
alone), had failed. His romantic associate Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), who
had fought both in Rome and Venice, fled to South America.[501]
German unification was a little further
advanced; in 1834 Prussia and the other German states except the Austrian
empire had formed a Zollverein, or customs union, to promote trade (an
early model for the European Economic Union); and in March, 1848 an all-German
preparatory parliament (Vorparlament) convened in Frankfurt. But there
were arguments over what kind of constitution a united Germany should have, and
whether it should be a “little Germany” without Austria, or a “great Germany”
with it. In either case, the problem of what to do with non-German national
minorities remained. The Frankfurt parliament ignored the demands of the
Prussian Poles for national self-determination; and the Czechs, among other
national minorities, “saw the [Austro-Hungarian] Empire as a less unattractive
solution than absorption by some expansionist nationalism such as the Germans’
or the Magyars’. ‘If Austria did not already exist,’ Professor Palacky, the
Czech spokesman, is supposed to have said, ‘it would be necessary to invent
it.’”[502]
Of all the European revolutions, the
Hungarian came the nearest to success in 1848. But it, too, came to grief on
the rock of nationalism – and the Russian army. Hobsbawm writes: “Unlike Italy,
Hungary was already a more or less unified political entity (‘the lands of the
crown of St. Stephen’), with an effective constitution, a not negligible degree
of autonomy, and indeed most of the elements of a sovereign state except
independence. Its weakness was that the Magyar aristocracy which governed this
vast and overwhelmingly agrarian area ruled not only over the Magyar peasantry
of the great plain, but over a population of which perhaps 60 per cent
consisted of Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Rumanians and Ukrainians, not to mention a
substantial German minority. Thse peasant peoples were not unsympathetic to a
revolution which freed the serfs, but were antagonised by the refusal of even
most of the Budapest radicals to make any concession to their national
difference from the Magyars, as their political spokesmen were antagonised by a
ferocious policy of Magyarisation and the incorporation of hitherto in som ways
autonomous border regions into a centralised and unitary Magyar state. The
court at Vienna, following the habitual imperialist maxim ‘divide and rule’,
offered them support. It was to be a Croat army, under Baron Jellacic, a friend
of Gay, the pioneer of a Yugoslav nationalism, which led the assault on
revolutionary Vienna and revolutionary Hungary.”[503]
The final coup de grâce was
administered by the 300,000 Russian troops sent by Tsar Nicholas I. Thus did
Russia deserve her reputation as ‘The Gendarme of Europe”, the last support of
the traditional order that had been re-established in 1815 and just hung on in
1848. And the only important socio-political change brought about by the revolution
was the freeing of the serfs of Central Europe…
What role did Freemasonry play in this revolution? L.A. Tikhomirov
writes: “Revolutionary agitation between the years 1830 and 1848 was carried
out mainly by the Carbonari and various ‘Young Germanies’, ‘Young Italies’,
etc. In the Masonic world before 1848 something powerful, similar to 1789, was
being planned, and preparations for the revolution went ahead strongly in all
countries. In 1847 a big Masonic convention was convened in Strasbourg from deputies
elected at several small conventions convened earlier… At the convention it was
decided to ‘masonize’ the Swiss cantons and then produce a revolutionary
explosion at the same time throughout Europe. As we know, movement did in fact
follow, with a difference of several months, in a whole series of countries:
Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Parma, Venice, etc. Reformist ‘banquets’ laying
the beginning of the revolution in Paris were organized by the directors of the
Masonic lodges…
“… When Louis Philippe fled and a republic was proclaimed, the Masonic
lodge loudly expressed its joy. On March 10, 1848 the Supreme Council of the
Scottish Rite welcomed the Provisional government. On March 24 a delegation of
the Grand Orient also welcomed the Provisional government and was received by
two ministers, Crémieux and Garnier-Pagès… who came out in their
Masonic regalia.”[504]
However, the Masons seemed to have undergone some change of heart in the
middle of the revolution, and determined, whether out of fear or for some other
reason, not to allow it to proceed to its logical conclusion. For during the
bloody “June days”, they switched sides, supporting the government General
Cavaignac against the workers in the streets. Thus “on June 27, the day after
the revolutionaries had been defeated, the Grand Orient issued a statement
supporting Cavaignac.”[505]
Perhaps it was the spectre of communism that stopped the Masons from
going all the way in 1848. Perhaps The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels,
published just before the revolution, had set them thinking. In any case, the
consequences were profound. “Hencefore,” writes Hobsbawm, “there was to be no
general social revolution of the kind envisaged before 1848 in the ‘advanced’
countries of the world. The centre of gravity of such social revolutionary
movements, and therefore of twentieth-century socialist and communist regimes,
was to be in the marginal and backward regions… The sudden, vast and apparently
boundless expansion of the world capitalist economy provided political
alternatives in the ‘advanced’ countries. The (British) industrial revolution
had swallowed the (French) political revolution.”[506]
The “political alternatives” came down to
a systematic liberalisation of the western European regimes in the following
decades that blunted the hunger of the more moderate revolutionaries,
persuading them to think of working with rather than against the system to
attain their aims. “In 1848-9 moderate liberals therefore made two important
discoveries in western Europe: that revolution was dangerous and that some of
their substantial demands (especially in economic matters) could be met without
it. The bourgeoisie ceased to be a revolutionary force.”[507]
M.S. Anderson writes: “The governments
which reasserted themselves after the revolutions were much stronger than their
pre-revolutionary predecessors. To some extent this was merely a matter of
physical factors. The new railways were making it easier than ever before to
move soldiers quickly to crush rebellion before it could offer a serious
threat. They also made it possible to transport food rapidly to areas of dearth
and thus stave off the famine which alone could produce mass disorder. The new
telegraph was allowing a central government to be informed almost
instantaneously of events in the most distant parts of its territory, and thus
to control these events and still more the day-to-day activity of its own
officials. More fundamentally, however, the new regimes of the 1850s embodied
attitudes different from those of the age of Metternich, and reflected a
changing intellectual climate. Positivism and materialism were now helping to
give to the actions of governments a cutting edge of ruthlessness, as well as
an energy which they had generally lacked before 1848. In France Louis Napoleon
had dreams, and capacities for good and evil, which were quite beyond the scope
of Louis-Philippe, as well as an apparatus of political control much more
efficient than any possessed by his predecessor. In the Habsburg Empire, Bach
and Kübeck, the dominant ministers of the 1850s, were men of a very
different stamp from Metternich. In Prussia, now beginning a period of
spectacular economic growth, the medievalist dreams of Frederick William IV had
lost all significance before he himself collapsed into insanity in 1858.
Tempered by the fires of successfully resisted revolution, fortified by new
technical aids and helped by a favourable economic climate, the governments of
Europe were entering a new era…”[508]
Of course, this positivist and materialist
stamp to the post-1848 governments guaranteed a further decay in the
foundations of Christian society and therefore a bringing closer of the triumph
of the revolution. But that was not how the disillusioned revolutionaries themselves
– that is, those who had not changed sides, who had not been bought, who
refused to work from within the system – saw it. All believed that a
proletarian revolution was not on the cards for at least another generation.
The fact that the country with the largest proletariat, Britain, had not even
been ruffled by revolutionary fervour, showed the immaturity of the class.
So Marx set about developing a theory according to which a society had
to go through all the stages of bourgeois development before the proletariat
could rise up and take power. That meant that the revolution, according to him,
would not come first in peasant societies such as Russia, but in highly
industrialised ones, such as Germany. He did not see any role in that
revolution for the peasantry, who had proved so frustratingly conservative in
1848, nor for the smaller nations who, like the Croats in 1848, had fought on
the side of counter-revolution.[509] Nor
did he believe that the workers’ lot could be improved by pressing for reforms
and trade-union agitation – although it did improve in the later
nineteenth-century precisely through such means. Altogether, therefore, the
failure of the 1848 revolution and of his own prophecies left Marx a lonely
figure…
The
World as Will: Schopenhauer
If the human faculty most admired by the eighteenth-century
Enlightenment had been reason, and by the early nineteenth-century Romanic
movement – imagination, then the entrepreneurial culture of later nineteenth-century
Europe especially admired the will. These men were primarily doers, not
thinkers, and espoused such creeds as utilitarianism, which emphasised what was
useful and pleasurable in a purely practical sense. In abstract philosophy this
tendency was reflected above all in the work of the admirer of Kant and fierce
critic of Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer.
While retaining German idealism’s characteristic starting-point in
psychology (or meta-psychology), and its post-Hegelian emphasis on history and
becoming, Schopenhauer changed its direction by arguing that the essence of
reality, the “thing-in-itself”, was not Idea or Mind or Reason, but Will.[510]
Not that he denied the sphere of thought: his main work is entitled The
World as Will and Idea. Nevertheless, he ascribed the primacy to will over
knowledge, desire over thought; for Schopenhauer, knowledge and thought were at
all times the servants of will and desire. In this way he provided the
philosophical justification, as it were, of that critical transition in German
life from the dreamy, brilliant but somewhat ineffective Romantic period to the
intensely active and successful period that began after the 1848 revolution and
continued after 1871 into the German Empire.
Copleston asks: “How does Schopenhauer arrive at the conviction that the
thing-in-itself is Will? To find the key to reality I must look within myself.
For in inner consciousness or inwardly directed perception lies ‘the single
narrow door to the truth’. Through this inner consciousness I am aware that the
bodily action which is said to follow or result from volition is not something
different from volition but one and the same. That is to say, the bodily action
is simply the objectified will: it is the will become idea or presentation.
Indeed, the whole body is nothing but objectified will, will as a presentation
to consciousness. According to Schopenhauer anyone can understand this if he
enters into himself. And once he has this fundamental intuition, he has the key
to reality. He has only to extend his discovery to the world at large.
“This Schopenhauer proceeds to do. He sees the manifestation of the one
individual Will in the impulse by which the magnet turns to the north pole, in
the phenomena of attraction and repulsion, in gravitation, in animal instinct,
in human desire and so on. Wherever he looks, whether in the inorganic or in
the organic sphere, he discovers empirical confirmation of his thesis that
phenomena constitute the appearance of the one metaphysical Will.
“The natural question to ask is this. If the thing-in-itself is
manifested in such diverse phenomena as the universal forces of Nature, such as
gravity, and human volition, why call it ‘Will’? Would not ‘Force’ or ‘Energy’
be a more appropriate term, especially as the so-called Will, when considered
in itself, is said to be ‘without knowledge and merely a blind incessant
impulse’, ‘an endless striving’? For the term ‘Will’, which implies
rationality, seems to be hardly suitable for describing a blind impulse or
striving.
“Schopenhauer, however, defends his linguistic usage by maintaining that
we ought to take our descriptive term from what is best known to us. We are
immediately conscious of our own volition. And it is more appropriate to
describe the less well known in terms of the better known than the other way
round.
“Besides being described as blind impulse, endless striving, eternal
becoming and so on, the metaphysical Will is characterized as the Will to live.
Indeed, to say ‘the Will’ and to say ‘the Will to live’ are for Schopenhauer
one and the same thing. As, therefore, empirical reality is the objectification
or appearance of the metaphysical Will, it necessarily manifests the Will to
live. And Schopenhauer has not difficulty in multiplying examples of this manifestation.
We have only to look at Nature’s concern for the maintenance of the species.
Birds, for instance, build nests for the young which they do not yet know.
Insects deposit their eggs where the larva may find nourishment. The whole
series of phenomena of animal instinct manifests the omnipresence of the Will
to live. If we look at the untiring activity of bees and ants and ask what it
all leads to, what is attained by it, we can only answer ‘the satisfaction of
hunger and the sexual instinct’, the means, in other words, of maintaining the
species in life. And if we look at man with his industry and trade, with his
inventions and technology, we must admit that all this striving serves in the
first instance only to sustain and to bring a certain amount of additional
comfort to ephemeral individuals in their brief span of existence, and through
them to contribute to the maintenance of the species…
“Now, if the Will is an endless striving, a blind urge or impulse which
knows no cessation, it cannot find satisfaction or reach a state of
tranquillity. It is always striving and never attaining. And this essential
feature of the metaphysical Will is reflected in its self-objectification,
above all in human life. Man seeks satisfaction, happiness, but he cannot
attain it. What we call happiness or enjoyment is simply a temporary cessation
of desire. And desire, as the expression of a need or want, is a form of pain.
Happiness, therefore, is ‘the deliverance from a pain, from a want’; it is
‘really and essentially always only negative and never positive’. It
soon turns to boredom, and the striving after satisfaction reasserts itself. It
is boredom which makes beings who love one another so little as men do seek one
another’s company. And great intellectual powers simply increase the capacity
for suffering and deepen the individual’s isolation.
“Each individual thing, as an objectification of the one Will to live,
strives to assert its own existence at the expense of other things. Hence the
world is the field of conflict, a conflict which manifests the nature of the
Will as at variance with itself, as a tortured Will. And Schopenhauer finds
illustrations of this conflict even in the inorganic sphere. But it is
naturally to the organic and human spheres that he chiefly turns for empirical
confirmation of his thesis. He dwells, for example, on the ways in which
animals of one species prey on those of another. And when he comes to man, he
really lets himself go. ‘The chief source of the most serious evils which
afflict man is man himself: homo
homini lupus. Whoever keeps this last fact clearly in view sees the
world as a hell which surpasses that of Dante through the fact that one man
must be the devil of another.’ War and cruelty are, of course, grist for Schopenhauer’s
mill. And the man who showed no sympathy with the Revolution of 1848 speaks in
the sharpest terms of industrial exploitation, slavery and such like social
abuses.
“We may not that it is the egoism, rapacity and hardness and cruelty of
men which are for Schopenhauer the real justification of the State. So far from
being a divine manifestation, the State is simply the creation of enlightened
egoism which tries to make the world a little more tolerable than it would
otherwise be.”[511]
The philosopher understands that there is nothing other than this
constant striving and suffering, and therefore no other path for him except the
decision to renounce the Will to live, which is the cause of all the suffering.
This is not accomplished through suicide, as one might expect, for suicide is
in fact an attempt to escape certain evils, and therefore the expression of a
concealed will to live. Only two things relieve the bleakness of this nihilist
vision to any degree: art and asceticism.
In the contemplation of art – especially music, which exhibits the inner
nature of the Will, the thing-in-itself – desire is temporarily stilled. For
“it is possible for me to regard the beautiful object neither as itself an
object of desire nor as a stimulant to desire but simply and solely for its
aesthetic significance.”[512]
However, “aesthetic contemplation affords no more than a temporary or
transient escape from the slavery of the Will. But Schophenhauer offers a
lasting release through renunciation of the Will to live. Indeed, moral
progress must take this form if morality is possible at all. For the Will to
live, manifesting itself in egoism, self-assertion, hatred and conflict, is for
Schopenhauer the source of evil. ‘There really resides in the heart of each of
us a wild beast which only waits the opportunity to rage and rave in order to
injure others, and which, if they do not prevent it, would like to destroy
them.’ This wild beast, this radical evil, is the direct expression of the Will
to live. Hence morality, if it is possible, must involve denial of the Will.
And as man is an objectification of the Will, denial will mean self-denial,
asceticism and mortification.”[513]
“We must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern
behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as
children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through
myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of
the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the
entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly
nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied
itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways – is
nothing.”[514]
With the surrender of the Will, “all those phenomena are also abolished;
that constant strain and effort without end and without rest at all the grades
of objectivity in which and through which the world consists; the multifarious
forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will;
and, finally, also the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space,
and also its last fundamental form, subject and object; all are abolished. No
will: no idea, no world. Before us there is certainly only nothingness.”[515]
So, contrary to the Christian vision, there is no positive end to the
self-denial that Schopenhauer recommends. Nor could there be. For there is
nothing other than the Will to live, which is neither God nor any positive
ideal, but pure egoism “objectified” in various forms and ending in death. The
most a man can hope for as a result of his self-denial is to “penetrate the
veil of Maya [illusion] to the extent of seeing that all individuals are really
one. For they are all phenomena of the one undivided Will. We then have the
ethical level of sympathy. We have goodness or virtue which is characterized by
a disinterested love of others. True goodness is not, as Kant thought, a matter
of obeying the categorical imperative for the sake of duty alone. True goodness
is love, agape or caritas in distinction from eros, which is self-directed. And love is
sympathy. ‘All true and pure love is sympathy (Mitleid), and all love which is not sympathy
is selfishness (Selbstsucht). Eros is selfishness; agape is sympathy.”[516]
However, the existence of a “true and pure love” attainable by
philosophy and self-denial seems to be inconsistent with the premises of
Schopenhauer’s system (and personal life). For how can there be a selfless love
when all that exists is the selfish Will to live? Indeed, for Schopenhauer
“existence, life, is itself a crime: it is our original sin. And it is
inevitably expiated by suffering and death.”[517]
Since for Schopenhauer there is no paradisal innocence, but only original sin,
there can be no escape from sin, and no return to paradise, but only the vain
and self-contradictory attempt of existence to deny itself, of being not to be…
Schopenhauer’s vision represents a significant new turn in European
philosophy. On the one hand, it reflects the highly practical spirit (will rather
than mind) and thrusting energy of the early industrial age. On the other hand,
it reflects the underlying scepticism of that age, and looks forward to the
nihilism of Nietzsche, and of Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed.
Gone is the optimism of the Enlightenment, and its belief in reason and the
perfectibility of man. In its place we find Byronic despair in philosophical
form, the despair of the man who has cut himself off from the last vestiges of
Christian faith, who believes neither in God nor in anything else except his
baser instincts, and is preparing to escape from his suffering by plunging into
what he insists will be a sea of nothingness, but which he fears will be
something very different and much more terrifying…
“What Galileo and Newton were to the
seventeenth century,” writes Russell, “Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin’s
theory had two parts. On he one hand, there was the doctrine of evolution,
which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from
a common ancestry. This doctrine, which is now generally accepted, was not new.
It had been maintained by Lamarck and by Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, not to
mention Anaximander. Darwin supplied an immense mass of evidence for the
doctrine, and in the second part of his theory believed himself to have
discovered the cause of evolution. He thus gave to the doctrine a popularity
and a scientific force which it had not previously possessed, but he by no
means originated it.
“The second part of Darwin’s theory was
the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. All animals and
plants multiply faster than nature can provide for them; therefore in each
generation many perish before the age for reproducing themselves. What
determines which will survive? To some extent, no doubt, sheer luck, but there
is another cause of more importance. Animals and plants are, as a rule, not
exactly like their parents, but differ slightly by excess or defect in every
measurable characteristic. In a given environment, members of the same species
compete for survival, and those best adapted to the environment have the best
chance. Therefore among chance variations those that are favourable will
preponderate among adults in each generation. Thus from age to age deer run
more swiftly, cats stalk their prey more silently, and giraffes’ necks become
longer. Given enough time, this mechanism, so Darwin contended, could account
for the whole long development from the protozoa to homo sapiens.”[518]
“Given enough time…” Time – enormous amounts of it – was indeed a
critical ingredient in Darwin’s theory; some critics would say that it took the
place of a satisfactory causal mechanism. But such a theory chimed in with the
historicist temper of the times.
It also chimed in with the idea, as Barzun writes, “that everything is
alive and in motion – a dynamic universe, as modern jargon has it.”[519]
Liberals believed in progress, socialists believed in revolution, everyone with
the exception of a few diehards like the Pope believed that things had to
change, and that change was for the better. Above all, evolution appealed to
man’s pride, in the belief that man was destined for greater and greater
things. “You know,” says Lady Constance in Disraeli’s novel Tancred (1847),
“all is development – the principle is perpetually going on. First, there was
nothing; then – I forget the next – I think there were shells; then fishes;
then we came – let me see – did we come next? Never mind, we came at last and
the next change will be something very superior to us, something with wings…”[520]
It will be noted that this was written twelve years before Darwin’s Origin
of the Species (1859), which shows that the “scientific” theory filled an
emotional need already expressed by poets and novelists. Evidently not feeling
this need himself, Disraeli said that as between the idea that man was an ape
or an angel, he was “on the side of the angels”[521]; but
he forgot that, as Lady Constance had opined in his novel, evolution was for
many a way of attaining angelic status (“something with wings”) in the very
long run. For those who did not believe in the deification of man through
Christ, evolution provided another, secular form of deification.
This elicited the not unfounded derision of the conservatives. Gobineau
said that man was “not descended from the apes, but rapidly getting there”.[522] The
Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev opined: “Man is descended from
a monkey. Consequently we shall love one another.” But it was the Prophet-King
David who put it best: “Man, being in honour, did not understand; he is
compared to the mindless cattle, and is become like unto them” (Psalm
48.21).
Darwin, a former student of theology, may have waited many years before
publishing his theory because, as David Quammen writes, he was anxious “about
announcing a theory that seemed to challenge conventional religious beliefs –
in particular, the Christian beliefs of his wife, Emma. Darwin himself quietly
renounced Christianity during his middle age, and later described himself as an
agnostic. He continued to believe in a distant, impersonal deity of some sort,
a greater entity that had set the universe and its laws into motion, but not in
a personal God who had chosen humanity as a specially favored species. Darwin
avoided flaunting his lack of religious faith, at least partly in deference to
Emma. And she prayed for his soul…”[523]
The model provided by biological evolution was soon applied to the whole
universe and everything in it, so that physical evolution was joined onto
biological evolution and human and cultural evolution in one seamless fabric.
It achieved what 18th-century Deism had not felt strong enough to do
– dethrone God from His last refuge in “enlightened” minds as First Cause and
Creator. For “in the beginning” now was not “the Word” (i.e. Divine Reason,
Meaning and Order) but mindless chaos, and “all things were made” not by God,
but by blind mutation and “natural selection” (i.e. death and destruction).
These were the two hands of original Chaos, the father of all things – a
conception as old as the pre-Socratic philosophers Anixamander and Heraclitus
and as retrogressive as the pre-Christian religions of Egypt and Babylon. And
they looked forward, not to some golden age of an ever-perfecting and evolving
species, but to the chaos and destruction of the twentieth century.
C.S. Lewis wrote of this conception: “By universal evolutionism I mean
the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to
perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the
elaborate, the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality
springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual
maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from
inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the
contemporary world. It seems to me immensely implausible, because it makes the
general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe.
You remember the old puzzle as to whether the owl came from the egg or the egg
from the owl. The modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of
optical illusion, produced by attending exclusively to the owl’s emergence from
the egg. We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from
the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We
are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that
the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings. We love to notice that
the express engine of today is the descendant of the ‘Rocket’; we do not
equally remember that the ‘Rocket’ springs not from some even more rudimentary
engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself –
namely, a man of genius. The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem
to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure
hallucination…”[524]
Darwin’s evolutionary biology fits
Schopenhauer’s metaphysical philosophy as if they were made for each other. For
both the blind, selfish Will to live is everything; for both there is neither
intelligent design nor selfless love, but only the struggle to survive at all
costs. And if Schopenhauer’s striving for nothingness is Buddhist in
inspiration, Darwin’s idea of the evolution of one species into another recalls
the Hindu idea of reincarnation…
Schopenhauer in metaphysics, Darwin in
science, and Marx in political theory formed a kind of unholy trinity one in
essence, whose essence was Will.[525] Marx liked Darwinism because it
appeared to justify the idea of class struggle as the fundamental mechanism of
human evolution. For, as Fr. Timothy Alferov writes: “The idea of class
struggle logically flows from ‘the law of the struggle for existence’. It is
precisely by this law that Marxism explains the emergence of classes and their
struggle, whence logically proceeds the idea of the dictatorship of the
proletariat. Instead of racist pre-eminence class pre-eminence is preached.” [526]
However, Darwinism was also eminently congenial to Marxism because of
its blind historicism and its implicit atheism. As Wurmbrand notes: “After Marx
had read The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, he wrote a letter to
Lassalle in which he exults that God – in the natural sciences at least – had
been given ‘the death blow’”.[527] “Karl
Marx,” writes Hieromonk Damascene, “was a devout Darwinist, who in Das
Kapital called Darwin’s theory ‘epoch making’. He believed his
reductionist, materialistic theories of the evolution of social organization to
be deducible from Darwin’s discoveries, and thus proposed to dedicate Das
Kapital to Darwin. The funeral oration over Marx’s body, delivered by
Engels, stressed the evolutionary basis of communism: ‘Just as Darwin
discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law
of evolution in human history.’”[528]
As well as completely undermining the Christian understanding of
origins, evolutionism formed the basis of a completely anti-Christian system of
morality. As St. Barsanuphius of Optina wrote: “The English philosopher Darwin
created an entire system according to which life is a struggle for existence, a
struggle for the strong against the weak, where those that are conquered are
doomed to destruction… This is already the beginning of a bestial philosophy,
and those who come to believe in it wouldn’t think twice about killing a man,
assaulting a woman, or robbing their closest friend – and they would do all
this calmly, with a full recognition of their right to commit their crimes.”[529]
The American Civil War
The American Civil War was not unexpected.
As early as 1787 Alexander Hamilton “had made a prediction: The newly created
federal government would either ‘triumph altogether over the state governments
and reduce them to an entire subordination,’ he surmised, or ‘in the course of
a few years… the contests about the boundaries of power between the particular
governments and the general government… will produce a dissolution of the
Union.’”[530]
“Each side,” writes J.M. Roberts, “accused
the other of revolutionary designs and behaviour. It is very difficult not to
agree with both of them. The heart of the Northern position, as Lincoln saw,
was that democracy should prevail, a claim assuredly of potentially limitless
revolutionary implication. In the end, what the North achieved was indeed a
social revolution in the South. On the other side, what the South was asserting
in 1861 (and three more states joined the Confederacy after the first shots
were fired) was that it had the same right to organize its life as had, say,
revolutionary Poles or Italians in Europe.”[531]
In 1924 the Scottish writer John Buchan
wrote that for the South “the vital thing, the thing with which all its
affections and sentiments were intertwined, was the State. The North, on the
other hand, had for its main conception the larger civic organism, the Nation.”[532]
And yet what was “the Nation”? The 1848 revolution in Europe had shown how
difficult it was to define a nation, and how people of the same nation
theoretically speaking (that is, according to theories of language or blood)
nevertheless preferred to remain citizens of States ruled by other nations
rather than go to war for the sake of reuniting the nation in a single,
ethnically homogeneous state.
In any case, had not the United States
come into existence in the first place by rebelling against its own nation, the
British? For states can create nations, just as nations – states. As Norman
Stone writes, in the nineteenth century nationalism “came in two opposing
variants. One of them, state or civil nationalism, was sponsored by the ruling
establishments of existing states. The other, popular or ethnic nationalism,
was driven by the demands of communities living within those states and against
the policy of those governments…. There are as may theories on the essence of nations
as there are theorists. But the essential qualities would seem to be spiritual
in nature. ‘The nation is a soul,’ wrote Renan, ‘a spiritual principle. [It]
consists of two things. One is the common legacy of rich memories from the
past. The other is the present consensus, the will to live together…’”[533]
According to this criterion, the Southerners, who already belonged to different
states from the Northerners, could also count themselves to belong to a
different nation. They had a common legacy of rich memories from the past. And
they had the will together – but separately from the Northerners, if the latter
pressed them too far on issues such as slavery. To put it simply: since they felt
themselves to be a different nation, they were a different nation.
And so, if the revolution of 1776 had been justified in the name of the liberty
of the new nation called America, although it had previously been one nation
with Britain, then that of the Southerners in 1861 was no less justified – not
least because, as they argued, the Constitution of the United States
specifically permitted the secession of individual States.[534]
As they sang:
Rebels
before
Our
fathers of yore,
Rebel’s
the righteous name
Washington
bore.
Why,
then, ours be the same.[535]
The other main justification for the war
was the existence of slavery in the South. “In 1862 [Lincoln] could still say
in a public letter that ‘if I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I
would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do itl
and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also
do that.’”[536]
However, the proclamation of the
emancipation of slavery on New Year’s Day 1863 changed the nature of the war
into one of liberation.
However, asks Eric Hobsbawm: “Was it [the
South] a slave society at all, given that Negroes were always in a minority
even in the Deep South (apart from a few patches), and considering that the
majority of slaves worked not on the classical large plantation but in small
numbers on white farms or as domestics? It can hardly be denied that slavery
was the central institution of Southern society, or that it was the major cause
of friction and rupture between the Northern and Southern states. The real
question is why it should have led to secession and civil war, rather than to
some sort of formula of coexistence. After all, though no doubt most people in
the North detested slavery, militant abolitionism alone was never strong enough
to determine the Union’s policty. And Northern capitalism, whatever the private
views of businessmen, might well have found it as possible and convenient to
come to terms with and exploit a slave South as international business has with
the ‘apartheid’ of South Africa.
“Of course slave societies, including that
of the South, were doomed. None of them survived the period from 1848 to 1890 –
not even Cuba and Brazil… They were already isolated both physically, by the
abolition of the African slave-trade, which was pretty effective by the 1850s,
and, as it were, morally, by the overwhelming consensus of bourgeois liberalism
which regarded them as contrary to history’s march, morally undesirable and
economically inefficient. It is difficult to envisage the survival of the South
as a slave society into the twentieth century, any more than the survival of
serfdom in eastern Europe, even if (like some schools of historians) we
consider both economically viable as systems of production. But what brought
the South the point of crisis in the 1850s was a more specific problem: the
difficulty of coexisting with a dynamic northern capitalism and a flood of
migration into the West.
“In purely economic terms, the North was
not much worried about the South, an agrarian region hardly involved in
industrialisation. Time, population, resources and production were on its side.
The main stumbling-blocks were political. The South, a virtual semi-colony of
the British to whom it supplied the bulk of their raw cotton, found free trade
advantageous, whereas the Northern industry had long been firmly and militantly
committed to protective tariffs, which it was unable to impose sufficiently for
its desires because of the political leverage of the Southern states (who
represented, it must be recalled, almost half the total number of states in
1850). Northern industry was certainly more worried about a nation half-free
trading and half-protectionist than about one half-slave and half-free. What
was equally to the point, the South did its best to offset the advantages of
the North by cutting it off from its hinterland, attempting to establish a
trading and communications area facing south and based on the Mississippi river
system rather than facing east to the Atlantic, and so far as possible
pre-empting the expansion to the West. This was natural enough since its poor
whites had long explored and opened the West.
“But the very economic superiority of the
North meant that the South had to insist with increasing stubbornness on its
political force – to stake its claims in the most formal terms (e.g. by
insisting on the official acceptance of slavery in new western territories), to
stress the autonomy of states (‘states’ rights’) against the national
government, to exercise its veto over national policies, to discourage northern
economic developments, etc. In effect it had to be an obstacle to the North
while pursuing its expansionist policy in the West. Its only assets were
political. For (given that it could not or would not beat the North at its own
game of capitalist development) the currents of history ran dead against it.
Every improvement in transport strengthened the links of the West with the
Atlantic. Basically the railroad system ran from east to west with hardly any
long lines from north to south. Moreover, the men who peopled the West, whether
they came from North or South, were not slave-owners but poor, white and free,
attracted by free soil or gold or adventure. The formal extension of slavery to
new territories and states was therefore crucial to the South, and the
increasingly embittered conflicts of the two sides during the 1850s turned
mainly on this question. At the same time slavery was irrelevant to the West,
and indeed western expansion might actually weaken the slave system. It
provided no such reinforcement as that which Southern leaders hoped for when
envisaging the annexation of Cuba and the creation of a Southern-Caribbean
plantation empire. In brief, the North was in a position to unify the continent
and the South was not. Aggressive in posture, its real recourse was to abandon
the struggle and secede from the Union, and this is what it did when the
election of Abraham Lincoln from Illinois in 1860 demonstrated that it had lost
the ‘Middle West’.
“For four years civil war raged. In terms of
casualties and destruction it was by far the greatest war in which any
‘developed’ country was involved in our period, though relatively it pales
beside the more or less contemporary Paraguayan War in South America, and
absolutely beside the Taiping Wars in China. The Northern states, though
notably inferior in military performance, eventually won because of their vast
preponderance of manpower, productive capacity and technology. After all, they
contained over 70 per cent of the total population of the United States, over
80 per cent of the men of military age, and over 90 per cent of its industrial
production. Their triumph was also that of American capitalism and of the
modern United States. But, though slavery was abolished, it was not the triumph
of the Negro, slave or free. After a few years of ‘Reconstruction’ (i.e. forced
democratisation) the South reverted to the control of conservative white
Southerners, i.e. racists. Northern occupying troops were finally withdrawn in
1877. In one sense it achieved its object: the Northern Republicans (who
retained the presidency for most of the time from 1860 to 1932) could not break
into the solidly Democratic South, which therefore retained substantial
autonomy. The South, in turn, through its block vote, could exercise some
national influence, since its support was essential for the success of the
other great party, the Democrats. In fact, it remained agrarian, poor, backward
and resentful; the whites resented the never-forgotten defeat, the blacks the
disfranchisement and ruthless subordination reimposed by the whites.”[537]
In any case, was slavery in the South as
bad as it was made out to be? Robert Owen did not think so: “Bad and unwise as
American slavery is and must continue to be, the white slavery in the
manufactories of England was at this unrestricted period far worse than the
house slaves which I afterwards saw in the West Indies and in the United
States, and in many respects, especially as regards health, food and clothing,
the latter were much better provided for than were those oppressed and degraded
children and work-people in the home manufactories of Great Britain.”[538]
J.M. Roberts writes: “In a sense there
had been no colour problem while slavery existed. Servile status was the
barrier separating the overwhelming majority of blacks (there had always been a
few free among them) from whites, and it was upheld by legal sanction.
Emancipation swept away the framework of legal inferiority and replaced this
with a framework, or myth, of democratic equality when very few Americans were
ready to give this social reality. Millions of blacks in the South were
suddenly free. They were also for the most part uneducated, largely untrained
except for field labout, and virtually without leadership of their own race.
For a little while in the Southern states they leant for support on the
occupying armies of the Union; when this prop was removed blacks disappeared
from legislatures and public offices of the Southern states to which they had
briefly aspired. In some areas they disappeared from the polling-booths, too.
Legal disabilities were replaced by a social and physical coercion which was
sometimes harsher than the old regime of slavery. The slave at least had the
value to his master of being an investment of capital; he was protected like
other property and was usually ensured a minimum of security and maintenance.
Competition in a free labour market at a moment when the economy of large areas
of the South was in ruins, with impoverished whites struggling for subsistence,
was disastrous for the black. By the end of the century he had been driven by a
poor white population bitterly resentful of defeat and emancipation into social
subordination and economic deprivation. From this was to stem emigration to the
North in the twentieth century and racial problems in our own day.”[539]
That the Northerners’ zeal to destroy the
patriarchal, agrarian, slave-owning society of the South may have been
misguided is indicated by the lives of some of the South’s best representatives.
For example, General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was the South’s best general
and, in the opinion of Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British armies
early in the twentieth century, “one of the greatest natural military geniuses
the world ever saw”. As James I. Robertson Jr. writes, he was deeply religious
man, who deeply loved his two wives. “He owned two slaves, both of whom had
asked him to purchase them after the deaths of their masters. Anna Morrison
[his second wife] brought three slaves to the marriage. Jackson viewed human
bondage with typical simplicity. God had established slavery for reasons man
could not and should not challenge. A good Christian had the twin
responsibilities of treating slaves with paternal affection and of introducing
them to the promises of God as found in holy scriptures. To that end, Jackson
taught a Sunday afternoon Bible class for all slaves and freedmen in Lexington.
“Jackson and the VMI [Virginia Military
Institute] corps of cadets served as gallows guard in December 1859, when the
abolitionist John Brown was executed for treason and murder having seized the
government arsenal at Harpers Ferry. As war clouds thickened in the months
thereafter, Jackson remained calm. The dissolution of the Union, he told a
minister, ‘can come only by God’s permission, and will only be permitted if for
His people’s good.’
“Civil war exploded in mid-April 1861, and
Jackson promptly offered his sword to his native state. Virginia’s close ties
with the South, and its opposition to the federal government using troops to
coerce a state, were the leading issues behind Virginia’s secession. The state
regarded as unacceptable the idea of federal troops marching through Virginia
to wage war on other states. The nation was still so young that the rights of
states remains strongly ingrained in political thinking. Jackson had been a
strong believer in the union until Virginia left it. When this happened Jackson
felt the same as thousands of his neighbours: Virginia, the Old Dominion, had
been in existence for 180 years before a ‘United States’ was established. The
roots of families like the Lees and Jacksons ran deep within Virginia’s soil.
In 1861 an American’s birthright and heritage was his state, not a federation
which, during the last fifteen of its seventy-four years, had been in turmoil
over the slavery question…”[540]
In retrospect, it is difficult to believe that the United States could
have evolved in any other way than as a unitary state, and easy to believe, given
the Union’s contribution to twentieth-century history, that the world as a
whole would not have benefited from the permanent secession of the South. And
yet the cost was horrific: 600,000 Americans died on both sides, more than all
those who died in the two world wars of the twentieth century (520,000). The
war opened up divisions not only between North and South, but also between
people in the North, where many thousands refused to join the Northern armies
and draconian measures were applied to fill the draft. Brutalities were
committed on both sides, but more on the side of the “liberators”. The
“liberated” slaves were “free” to enjoy unemployment, continued poverty and the
continued oppression of the whites. Of course, by comparison with most States, the
United States remained a land with a large measure of religious and political
freedom. But the claim of Southern writers that the intentions of the Founders
were overthrown remains powerful. The power of the state over the individual
was vastly increased for all, in both North and South. It is little wonder that
Marx and Engels welcomed the war…
And what about the teaching of Christ, in Whose name the war was
conducted? In this connection the words of Archbishop Averky of Jordanville are
relevant: “The epistle [of the holy Apostle Paul] to Philemon vividly witness
to the fact that the Church of Christ, in liberating man from sin, does not at
the same time produce a forcible rupture in the established inter-relationships
of people, and does not encroach on the civil and state order, waiting
patiently for an improvement in the social order, under the influence of
Christian ideas. Not only from this epistle, but also from others…, it is
evident that the Church, while unable, of course, to sympathize with slavery,
at the same time did not abolish it, and even told slaves to obey their
masters. Therefore here the conversion of Onesimus to Christianity, which made
him free from sin and a son of the Kingdom of God, did not, however, liberate
him, as a slave, from the authority of his master. Onesimus had to return to
[his master] Philemon, in spite of the fact that the Apostle loved him as a
son, and needed his services, since he was in prison in Rome. The Apostle’s
respect for civil rights tells also in the fact that he could order Philemon to
forgive Onesimus [for fleeing from him], but, recognizing Philemon’s right as
master, begs him to forgive his guilty and penitent slave. The words of the
Apostle: ‘Without your agreement I want to do nothing’ clearly indicate that
Christianity really leads mankind to personal perfection and the improvement of
the social legal order on the basis of fraternity, equality and freedom, but not
by way of violent actions and revolutions, but by the way of peaceful
persuasion and moral influence.”[541]
One of the reasons for the failure of the 1848 revolution was that the
Masons, most of whom were wealthy, drew back from taking the revolution to its
logical extreme. This is understandable. However, it is still surprising, and
worthy of investigation, why they should have blessed (eventually) the
formation of a dictatorship in France under Louis Napoleon.
Ridley writes: “On 10 December 1848 the election was held for the new
President of the Republic. The Freemasons’ journal, Le Franc-Maçon, called
on its readers to vote for Lamartine [though he was not a Mason], because he
believed in ‘the sacred words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’; but Louis
Napoleon Bonaparte (who would soon become the Emperor Napoleon III) was elected
by a very large majority; he defeated Cavaignac, Ledru-Rollin, the Socialist
François Raspail, and Lamartine, receiving 75 per cent of the votes
cast, and coming top of the poll in all except four of the eighty-five
departments of France. He was the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and
in his youth had been involved in the revolutionary movement in Italy in 1831.
It has been suggested that he joined the Carbonari and the Freemasons in Italy,
but this cannot be proved. He afterwards tried twice to make a revolution
against Louis Philippe, and on the second occasion was sentenced to life
imprisonment in the fortress at Ham near St Quentin in north-eastern France;
but he made a sensational escape, took refuge in England, and returned to Paris
to his electoral triumph in 1848.
“Although he had been suspected at one
time of being a Communist, as soon as he was elected President of the Republic
he relied on the support of the Right wing and the Catholic Church. Young
Radicals who flaunted red cravats, and shouted ‘Long live the Social Republic!’
were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment. From time to time a Freemasons’
lodge was raided by the police, and warnings were sent by local officials to
the government that ‘members of the anarchist party’ were planning to gain
control of the Masonic lodges in Paris and the provinces.
“The Grand Orient thought it would be wise
to revise their constitution. In 1839, when they were living happily under
Louis Philippe, they had stated that ‘Masonry is a universal philanthropic
association’ and that one of their objectives was ‘the examination and
discussion of all social and economic questions which concern the happiness of
humanity’. In August 1848, after the June Days and the legislation suppressing
secret political societies, they changed this article in their constitution by
deleting the words ‘social and economic’; and a year later, on 10 August 1849,
Grand Orient stated that all Freemasons must believe in God and in the immortality
of the soul.”[542]
When, in addition to this, Napoleon sent
his troops to crush the Roman republic under Mazzini, it must have seemed that
the Masons would now, at last, turn against him. And indeed, when he
established his dictatorship on December 2, 1861, “there was an attempt at
resistance in Paris next day, led by the deputy Baudin, a Freemason.”[543]
However, Baudin was shot on the barricade; and when Napoleon held a plebiscite
on whether he should continue as President of the Republic for ten years, the
Grand Orient called on all Freemasons to vote for him.
Some light is cast on this mystery by
Tikhomirov: “According
to the very weighty of Deschampes [the historian of Freemasonry], the empire of
Louis Napoleon was considered desirable. This became known to Deschampes
through Michelet, who played an important role in revolutionary circles, but
was a personal friend of Deschampes.
“Soon after the coup of 1851 (more precisely: on February 7, 1852),
Michelet wrote to Deschampes: ‘By this time a great convention of the heads of
the European societies had taken place in Paris, where they discussed France.
Only three members (whose leader was Mazzini) demanded a democratic republic. A
huge majority thought that a dictatorship would better serve the work of the
revolution – and the empire was decreed ‘sur les promesses formelles’ (on
the basis of the formal promises) of Louis Napoleon to give all the forces of
France to the services of Masonry.[544] All
the people of the revolution applied themselves to the success of the state
coup. Narvaets, who was in obedience to Palmerston [British Prime Minister in
1855-1858 and from 1859], even loaned Louis Napoleon 500,000 francs not long
before December 2.’
“If Napoleon III really gave ‘formal promises’, then this could refer
only to the unification of Italy, and consequently, to the fate of the Pope’s
secular dominion. Deschampes has no evidence concerning Louis Napoleon’s
membership of Masonry, otherwise than in the form of Carbonarism. He had long
belonged to the Carbonari in its Italian form, and as such was obliged to work
for the unification of Italy. For breaking this oath he was pursued by attempts
on his life, until, after Orsini’s attempt, he renewed his promise and began to
fulfil it, risking that the Pope would lose his dominions. But in general
Masonry protected Napoleon III. At any rate Palmerston, who had, as they
affirm, been the highest leader of European Masonry (the Orient of Orients),
supported Napoleon with all his strength, and, perhaps, would not have allowed
his fall, if he had not died five years before the Franco-Prussian War.”[545]
So here we see why Napoleon was able to retain the support of the
Masons, while supporting their mortal enemy, the Catholic Church: he had a very
powerful friend, Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, a former supreme
head of Masonry…
And it was Britain under Palmerston, France under Napoleon, the Pope and
the Sultan, who worked together to humble the real enemy of Masonry,
Russia, in the Crimean War of 1854-1856…
Il
Risorgimento and the Pope
But then, as we have seen, frightened by attempts on his life, Napoleon III began to fulfil his promises to the Masons and turned against the Pope. In particular, he began to support Count Cavour, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Pidemont, which would form the core of the movement for the expulsion of the Austrians from Italy, the political unification of the peninsula and the stripping from the Pope of his secular dominions.
Norman Davies writes: “After the fine performance of Sardinian troops in the Crimea, Napoleon III asked quaintly, ‘What can I do for Italy?’ and a Franco-Sardinian Pact was duly signed. France undertook to support Sardinia in the north against Austria, whilst continuing to defend the Papal states in the centre. Three wars later the game was complete. In 1859-60 the victories at Magenta and Solferino assured the success of the Franco-Sardinian attack on Austrian Italy; whilst the sensational private expedition of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ redshirts assured the fall of Sicily and Naples. Plebiscites in Parma, Modena and Tuscany all voted for Italy; France took Savoy and Nice; Austria still held Venetia; and with French help the Pope still ruled in Rome. But in May 1861 an all-Italian parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II (r. 1849-78) King of Italy. In 1866, with Austria at war with Prussia, Italy contrived the cession of Venetia.”[546]
Christopher Duggan continues the story: “Just as Austria’s defeat by
Prussia in 1866 had brought Italy the Veneto, so France’s defeat by Prussia in
1870 led to the capture of Rome. Throughout much of the 1860s the Holy City had
been defended by a garrison of French soldiers. When this was withdrawn in the
summer of 1870 to fight Prussia, and Napoleon III was defeated and forced to
abdicate, there was little to stop the Italian government seizing the historic
capital. On 20 September, less than three weeks after the Battle of Sedan,
Italian troops blew a hole in Leonine walls at Porta Pia and marched into the
city. Pius IX was left with the small enclave of the Vatican. A law was passed
in May 1871 that guaranteed the safety of the pope, provided him with an annual
grant, and gave him the full dignities and privileges of a sovereign; but Pius
IX rejected it out of hand. The rift between the liberal state and the Church
was now broader and deeper than ever.”[547]
As the political power of the Pope crumbled, he sought to compensate for
it by asserting his spiritual power more shrilly than ever. The process had
begun earlier, in 1854, when Pius IX, with the support of five hundred Italian,
Spanish and Portuguese bishops, had proclaimed the doctrine of the immaculate
conception of the Virgin while in exile in Gaeta. His personal secretary, Monsignor
Talbot, had said at that time: “You see, the most important thing is not the
new dogma but the way it is proclaimed.” In other words, the important thing
was that the Pope was asserting his power, showing that he was infallible.
Then in 1870, at the First Vatican Council, the Pope declared his own
infallibility on matters of faith and morals when speaking ex cathedra,
“i.e. when serving as a pastor and teacher of all Christians”, and the Council
declared: "The Pope is a divine man and human god... The Pope is the light
of faith and reflection of truth."
Of course, even in the period of the Ecumenical Councils, the Popes were
far from infallible. Pope Liberius signed an Arian creed in 354; Pope Zosimas
inclined to Pelagianism; Pope Vigilius rejected the Fifth Ecumenical Council
before declaring that he had been the tool of satan towards the overthrow of
the Church before the Lord enlightened him; Pope Honorius was condemned by the
Sixth Ecumenical Council.
At the Vatican Council itself Bishop Joseph Strossmayer and many other
bishops, especially Dupanloup and Gonolli, opposed the new dogma of papal
infallibility…
“Before 1870,” writes Peter de Rosa, “this [dogma] was far from being
universally accepted. The French Church, for example, was renowned for its
opposition. The Fourth of the Gallican Articles of 1682, signed by the great
Bishop Bossuet, said: ‘The pope has the principal share in questions of faith…
nevertheless his judgement is not irreformable without the consent of the
church.’ The decrees of the Council of Constance were still in force in France
in the seventeenth century and, in spite of Rome, many still held them up to
1870.
“The English-speaking world, too, was far from unanimous in accepting
papal infallibility. In 1822, Bishop Barnes, the English Vicar Apostolic, said:
‘Bellarmine and other divines, chiefly Italian, have believed the pope
infallible when proposing ex cathedra an article of faith. But in
England and Ireland I do not believe any Catholic maintains the
infallibility of the pope.’ Later still, Cardinal Wiseman, who in 1850 headed
the restored hierarchy of England and Wales, said: ‘The Catholic church holds a
dogma often proclaimed that, in defining matters of faith, she (that is,
the church, not the pope) is infallible.’ He went on: ‘All agree that
infallibility resides in the unanimous suffrage of the church.’ John Henry
Newman, a convert and the greatest theologian of the nineteenth century, said
two years before Vatican I: ‘I hold the pope’s infallibility, but as a
theological opinion; that is, not as a certainty but as a probability.’
“In the United States, prior to Vatican I, there was in print the
Reverend Stephen Keenan’s very popular Controversial Catechism. It bore
the Imprimatur of Archbishop Hughes of New York. Here is one extract.
‘Question: Must not Catholics believe the pope himself to be infallible?
Answer: This is a Protestant invention, it is no article of the Catholic faith;
no decision of his can bind on pain of heresy, unless it be received and
enforced by the teaching body, that is, the bishops of the church.’ It was
somewhat embarrassing when, in 1870, a ‘Protestant invention’ became defined
Catholic faith. The next edition of the Catechism withdrew this question
and answer without a word of explanation.
“Pius IX, by getting mostly Italian and other Latin bishops to support
him in 1854, was already canonizing ‘the Italian doctrine’ of papal
infallibility.
“The manner of proclaiming the immaculate conception was unique. It did
not come from a General Council; it was the pontiff’s alone. Ten years later,
the Jesuit theologian, Clemens Schrader, was to call the definition ‘an act
peculiar to the pontificate of Pius IX, and one to which no former pontificate can
show any parallel’…
“Absolute power had fashioned an absolute ‘truth’; and other Christians
found one more sky-high barrier between themselves and the Roman church.”[548]
Thierry said: “I, an exhausted rationalist, feel the need for an
infallible authority; my tortured spirit needs rest.”[549] This
shows that papal infallibility, far from being a challenge in the face of
European rationalism, was in fact its furthest logical development. The pope’s
proclamation of his own infallibility represented the high-water mark of
European rationalism and individualism, that disastrous departure from Catholic
(in the non-Romanist sense) truth that began with the Dictatus Papae of
Pius’ predecessor, Gregory VII, in 1075.
European individualism since Gregory VII had branched out into three
distinct types: liberal individualism, which decrees the maximum rights for
every individual person; nationalist individualism, which decree the maximum
rights for one specific nation; and papist individualism which decrees the
maximum rights – and knowledge – for one specific person, the Pope. Papist
individualism had tended to recede into the background as first liberal
individualism, and then nationalist individualism caught the imagination and
swept up the energies of the European and American continents. But now, having
already anathematised the main propositions of liberalism in his Syllabus of
Errors of 1864[550], and
having stubbornly resisted the triumph of nationalism in his native Italy[551], he
reiterated with extra force and fanaticism his own variant of the fundamental
European heresy – the original variant, and the maddest of them all. For is it
not madness in the strict sense of the word to regard oneself as the sole
depository and arbiter of absolute truth?!
For,
as Archimandrite Justin (Popovich) writes: “Through the dogma of infallibility
the pope usurped for himself, that is for man, the entire jurisdiction and all
the prerogatives which belong only to the Lord God-man. He effectively
proclaimed himself as the Church, the papal church, and he has become in her
the be-all and end-all, the self-proclaimed ruler of everything. In this way
the dogma of the infallibility of the pope has been elevated to the central
dogma (svedogmat) of the papacy. And the pope cannot deny this in any
way as long as he remains pope of a humanistic papacy. In the history of the
human race there have been three principal falls: that of Adam, that of Judas,
and that of the pope.”[552]
The
Paris Commune
In the 1860s Napoleon III had introduced several liberal measures in
response to a gradual growth in the opposition to his rule, as was clearly
revealed in the 1869 elections. However, his position was greatly strengthened
by the results of a plebiscite held on May 8, 1870 seeking the electorate’s
verdict on the liberal reforms introduced since 1860. “The results,” writes
Roger Price, “were an overwhelming success for the regime: 7,350,000 voters
registered their approval, 1,538,000 voted ‘no’, and a further 1,900,000
abstained. To one senior official it represented ‘a new baptism of the
Napoleonic dynasty’. It had escaped from the threat of political isolation. The
liberal empire offered greater political liberty but also order and renewed
prosperity. It had considerable appeal. The centres of opposition remained the
cities, with 59 per cent of the votes in Paris negative and this rising to over
70 per cent in the predominantly workers arrondissements of the
north-east. In comparison with the 1869 elections, however, opposition appeared
to be waning. Republicans were bitterly disappointed. Even Gambetta felt bound
to admit that ‘the empire is stronger than ever’. The only viable prospect
seemed to be a long campaign to persuade the middle classes and peasants that
the republic did not mean revolution…”[553]
Nor did the empire face any great dangers abroad. Indeed, “that June,
the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary Lord Granville gazed out with
satisfaction on the world scene and claimed – with reason – that he could not
discern ‘a cloud in the sky’. In all his experience he had never known ‘so
great a lull in foreign affairs’. In Paris, Emperor Napoleon III’s Prime
Minister, Emile Ollivier, echoed Granville by declaring that ‘at no period has
the maintenance of peace seemed better assured’.”[554]
But at that point the Scripture was fulfilled (not for the first or last
time in human history): “When they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden
destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they
shall not escape” (I Thessalonians 5.3). The national vanity of the
French[555],
combined with the still-smouldering fires of the revolution, combined to
destroy the empire.
“The Prussian triumph over Austria in 1866 had altered the European
balance of power, and ever since, French public opinion had believed in the
likelihood of a war by means of which France could re-assert its authority.
When war came in 1870 it was however due to a series of errors by a government
operating under pressure from conservative opinion. The hysterical response of
the right-wing press to the news of a Hohenzollern candidature for the Spanish
throne was a major factor in creating an atmosphere favourable to war. Although
both the emperor and Ollivier might have been willing to accept a simple
withdrawal of this candidature, conservative deputies demanded guarantees which
Bismark [the Prussian Chancellor], in the infamous Ems telegram, refused in
insulting terms. To have accepted this would have meant another humiliating
foreign policy reversal and risked parliamentary disapproval which could have
thrown into doubt the bases of the recently revised constitution and
particularly the emperor’s personal power. In this situation Napoleon, although
aware that the military preparations were seriously defective, succumbed to
pressure from the empress, from the foreign minister the Duc de Gramont, and
from the more authoritarian Bonapartists and hoped that victory would further
consolidate the regime.
“The initial public response was indeed overwhelmingly positive. With the exception of a very small minority of revolutionary militants even republicans felt bound to rally to the national cause. Huge crowds singing patriotic songs gathered in the streets to see the troops off. The first defeats brought panic. The emperor’s response to the developing military crisis was to replace the Ollivier government with one made up of authoritatian Bonapartists under General Cousin-Montauban. This could not alter the fact that the army was better prepared in terms of organisation, training and material for dealing with internal security problems than waging a major European war…
“News of the defeat at Sedan and the capitulation of the emperor and one
major army was received in Paris on the evening of 2 September and became
public knowledge the following day. This failure utterly discredited the
regime. The small group of twenty-seven republican deputies were supported by
large crowds in demanding its replacement. On 4 September these invaded the
Palais Bourbon and drove out the imperial Corps legislative. In such an
uncertain political situation the troops and police responsible for the
assembly’s security were unwilling to use force against the crowds. Inspired as
much by the desire to prevent a take-over by revolutionaries as by the need to
replace the imperial administration a group of moderate Parisian deputies
proclaimed the republic and established a Provisional Government of National
Defence presided over by the military governor of Paris, General Trochu, to
continue the war. In the provinces the news of defeat and revolution usually
came as a great surprise but there appeared to be no immediate alternative to
acceptance of the Parisian initiative. The Empire in its various manifestations
had attracted widespread support. Liberalisation, together with its clear
commitment to law and order had seemed likely to reinforce this. Military
defeat however represented governmental failure on a scale sufficient to
destroy its legitimacy.”[556]
Mark Almond writes: “The Third Republic, proclaimed on 4
September, tried to rally the defence of France, looking back to the example of
the First Republic, eighty years earlier: ‘The Republic was victorious over the
invasion of 1793. The Republic is declared.’ But the dearth of trained soldiers
and equipment made resistance to the Germans very difficult, and by 19
September the German army had surrounded and laid siege to Paris.
“The siege was the essential ingredient in the radicalisation of the
city’s population. The famine and other burdens reduced many of the recently
prosperous to penury, even prostitution…
“Some 350,000 men formed a National Guard to defend the city’ most of
them depended on their soldier’s pay for their livelihood because the economy
had collapsed during the siege. Attempts to break out of the city failed on 27
October 1870 and 19 January 1871, and provoked demonstrations at the
Hôtel de Ville. Already the suspicion was spreading that politicians
outside Paris were less devoted to resistance than the people of the capital…
“Despite the efforts of the Parisians to hold out against the besieging
army, the French government felt it was futile to continue the war and signed
an armistice with Germany on 28 January 1871. This treaty brought an end to the
siege but imposed humiliating terms on France, including the surrender of
Alsace-Lorraine and a crippling war indemnity of 5 million francs.
“France went to the polls on 8 February to vote for a new government
that would (in accordance with the armistice) take responsibility for accepting
or rejecting Germany’s terms for peace. The results revealed how different
Paris was from the rest of France. Paris elected a group of radicals to the
Assembly, while monarchists dominated the elections elsewhere. The monarchist
majority wanted peace with the Germans, whatever the humiliation.
“To achieve this peace, the Prime Minister, Thiers, had to disarm the
National Guard in Paris. He ordered the Guard to hand over its artillery to the
regular army on 18 March 1871. But he had already antagonised the Guard by
cutting its pay, which hit the poor much as the abolition of national workships
had done in 1848. The poor had also been
hit when the new National Assembly boted to end the wartime moratoriumn on
debts and rents. Thus the people of Montmartre, especially the women, rallied
to stop their cannons being hauled away. Bloody clashes occurred between the
army and the people. The mayor of Montmartre, Georges Clemenceau, was shocked
by the violence of the outburst: ‘The mob which filled the courtyard burst into
the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy. Amongst them were chasseurs,
soldiers of the line, National Guards, women and children. All were shrieking
like wild beasts without realizing what they were doing. I observed then that
pathological phenomenon which might be called blood lust. A breath of madness
seemed to have passed over this mob…’
“Several hours of fighting and rioting followed, at the end of which the
government troops appeared to be no nearer to capturing the guns of Montmartre.
Thiers decided to withdraw his forces and remove the Government from the
capital city to Versailles. The rebels in Paris, meanwhile, voted to revive the
Commune (on the model of 1792) in defiance of the government.
“Only four members of the Commune represented the recently founded
Marxist Workingman’s International. Twenty-five out of the Commune’s ninety
members worked with their hands, but mainly as skilled artisans. They were
outnumbered by professionals, such as journalists, radical doctors and
teachers. But two-thirds or more of the Commune’s members would have described
themselves as the heirs of the Jacobins of 1793. Karl Marx himself did not at
first recognise the Communards as the proletarian revolutionaries of his future
Communist society, but his sympathy with their struggle against the French
bourgeoisie encouraged the romanticization of the Communard as a premature
Communist revolutionary…
“Nationalism and popular local government rather than social revolution
were the rallying cries of the Commune, but the flight from Paris of Thiers’
government and most of the wealthy members of society created a new social
situation. In the absence of many of the bourgeois elite, Paris fell into the
hands of members of the lower orders, who had little experience of
administration. Marx noted that the Communards lacked effective leadership.
‘They should at once have marched on Versailles,’ he wrote, before Thiers had
time to complete amassing his army. But the Communards’ revolutionary hostility
to rank meant that their forces lacked an effective commander-in-chief who
might have seized the moment. Spontaneity without strategy was bound to fail.
“From March 1871, two rival authorities existed in France, the national
government at Versailles and the Commune in Paris, each with its own armed
force and each jockeying for political power. Half-hearted negotiations between
the two authorities did take place, but when these broke down Thiers decided to
attempt once more to retake the capital. He brought up an army of provincial
Frenchmen, suspicious and resentful of what they saw as arrogant Parisians
trying to dictate politics to France as so often before. Naturally the Germans
looked favourably on any blood-letting among the French that would weaken them
further.
“On 2 April, government troops seized Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, and
began a new siege of Paris. For several weeks Government troops bombarded the
fortresses protecting the capital, taking them one by one, and by 21 May the
army was able to force its way into Paris through an undefended point to the
south-west of the city. Over the next seven days, known as the ‘bloody week’,
the army methodically reconquered the capital from west to east. Each quartier
defended itself, giving the army the opportunity to pick off district after
district. In the course of the struggle, the Communards set fire to ancient
buildings like the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville. They also shot their
hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. Given the
anti-clerical tradition of revolution in France he might have seemed an ideal
reactionary scapegoat, but Darboy himself was disliked by French conservatives:
he had voted against Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council two years
earlier and was something of a liberal. The Communards ensured that Paris would
not have another liberal archbishop for almost a century…
“As many as 20,000 Communards – including women and children – were
killed as the army fought its way forward through the streets of Paris, while
another 40,000 insurgents were taken prisoner. About half of these were
released soon enough, but 10,000 were transported to the colonies, including
the remote New Caledonia in the South Pacific.”[557]
Far more people died in the fall of the Commune than in the Terror of
1793 in Paris. It represented, if not the fall of the revolution as such, at
any rate the end of the French revolution that had begun in 1789. After
1871 the revolutionary struggle would acquire new forms and pass to other
nations…
The following words of the poet and diplomat Fyodor Tiutchev, while a
reflection on the events of 1848, could still more appropriately a commentary
on the events of 1871: “The revolution is an illness devouring the West… The
revolution is the purest product, the last word and the highest expressionof
that which we have been accustomed to call, already for three centuries now,
the civilization of the West. It is contemporary thought, in all its integrity,
from the time of its break with the Church. The thought is as follows: man, in
the final analysis, depends only on himself both in the government of his
reason and in the government of his will. Every authority comes from man; everything
that proclaims itself to be higher than man is either an illusion or deception.
In a word, it is the apotheosis of the human I in the most literal
meaning of the word… We are quite possibly present at the bankruptcy of the
whole civilization… The revolution is not simply an opponent clothed in flesh
and blood. It is more than a Principle. It is Spirit, reason, in order to gain
victory over it, we must know how to drive it out…
“As regards France, which cannot continue to exist without renouncing at
every step that which has become for the last 60 years its living principle,
the Revolution, this country is by the logic of things and in a most fatal
manner doomed to powerlessness. It is a society doomed from a feeling of
self-preservation to use only one of its arms, and that only in order to
shackle the other… The revolution is the logical consequence and final end of
contemporary civilization, which antichristian rationalism has won from the
Roman church. The revolution has in fact become convinced of its complete
inability to act as a unifying principle, and has to the same degree become
convinced, on the contrary, that it possesses a disintegrating power. On the
other hand, the elements of the old society which have been preserved in Europe
are still sufficiently alive that, in case of necessity, they can throw
everything that has been done by the Revolution back to its point of origin.
But they have also been so penetrated by the revolutionary principle, so
distorted by it, that they are almost incapable of creating anything that could
be accepted by European society as a lawful authority. That is the dilemma
which rears its head with all its exceptional importance at the present time…
The European West is only half of a great organic whole, but the difficulties
undergone by it, difficulties that are from an external point of view
insoluble, will acquire their resolution only in its other half,” that is, in the
Russian Empire.
“In Europe recently we have
become too accustomed to reduce our evaluation of the actions, or, more
accurately, the half-formed intentions of French politics to the phrase which
has turned into a proverb: ‘France herself knows what she wants.’ This may be
true; but in order to be completely just, we should add: ‘France cannot know
what she wants.’ After all, in order to be in a condition to know this, one has
first of all to have a single will; but France has already for the last
sixty years been condemned to have two wills. We are not talking about
that discord, that difference of opinions, whether political or otherwise, that
is inherent in a great country in which society is given over, through force of
circumstances, to the dominion of parties: we are talking about a fact of
incomparably great importance – about that constant, essential and eternally
irreconcilable hatred which for the last sixty years has constituted, so to
speak, the very essence of the people’s conscience in France. The very soul of
France is divided. Although the revolution, since it gained control of this
country, has succeeded in changing it, distorting it and turning it
upside-down, it has not succeeded, and never will succeed, in assimilating it
to itself completely. Whatever it did, in the spiritual life of France there
are deposits and principles which will always offer opposition to it – at any
rate, until France exists in the world; such are the Catholic church with its
beliefs and teaching, Christian marriage and the family, and even property. On
the other hand, it is also possible to foresee that the revolution, having
entered not only into the blood, but also into the soul of this society, will
never voluntarily agree to let go of its prey, and since know of not a single
incantatory formula in the history of the world that would be applicable to a
whole people, we must think that such an unending inner struggle of a constant
and, so to speak, organic bifurcation may become permanent as the natural
condition of the new French society. Already for sixty years there has been a
combination whereby the state, revolutionary in principle, has dragged a merely
rebellious society behind it in tow, while the government, the authorities, who
are necessarily related to both, not being able to reconcile them, has by force
of circumstances been condemned to a false and pitiful situation, surrounded by
dangers and struck by powerlessness…”[558]
4.
THE EAST: THE GENDARME OF EUROPE
The root elements of our Russian life have
been characterised long ago, and they are so powerfully and completely expressed
by the familiar words: Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. That is what we
must preserve! When these principles become weaker or fail, the Russian people
will cease to be Russian. It will then lose its sacred three-coloured flag.
Bishop Theophan the Recluse.[559]
The hegemony of
the Church I do not understand in the form of an inquisition or of persecution
for faith; it consists in the State’s setting itself the task (1) of becoming
imbued with the spirit of the Church, and (2) of seeing in its own existence
only a means for the best establishment of the Church of God on earth.
Ivan Kireevsky.
Beneficent Europe
has taught us external arts and sciences,
But it takes away
our inner goodness and shakes our Orthodox Faith.
It draws money to
itself.
St. Macarius of
Optina.
Introduction:
Instinct and Consciousness
Under the shock of the Decembrist
rebellion, and of the resumption of the revolution’s march in Europe, it was
necessary for Russia clearly to formulate the foundations of her national life,
and her religio-moral-political differences from Europe. And the process now
began, in informal discussion circles in St. Petersburg and in elegant
aristocratic salons in Moscow.
“And so the development of the monarchical principle, its
self-consciousness, in this period could not fail to decline. It was preserved
amongst us in accordance with the former voice of instinct, but it was not
explained by reason. Therefore of all the aspects of scientific creativity, the
state-legal remained throughout the new period the least developed among us, as
well as being the most imitative, the most imbued by a simple copying of
European ideas, and for that reason – in conformity with the state thought of
Europe – assumed a constitutional character.
“The legitimists in Europe in their time were the channels of the
monarchical idea. Our juridical thought was the channel of the
anti-monarchical, democratic idea.
“When the question of limiting the autocracy or even of external
external manifestations of the power of the Monarch in international relations
was raised, voices were found among us which pointed to some close bond between
the Tsar and Russia, a bond that was a limitation for the Monarch. By this
absolutism was denied, as was the teaching that the sovereign can order
everything ‘as he likes’. The political thought of Russian State law was as it
were raised to the level of consciousness.
“Thus at the moment when Emperor Alexander I, who had been brought up on
republican ideas and considered the republic higher than the monarchy, was
thinking about limiting his own autocratic power, he heard an eloquent protest
from Karamzin.
“’If Alexander,’ wrote Karamzin, ‘inspired by a magnanimous hatred for
the abuses of autocracy, had taken a pen to prescribe for himself new laws
besides those of God and conscience, then the true Russian citizen would have
been so bold as to stop his hand and say: Your Majesty, you are transgressing
the bounds of your power. Taught by long-term disasters, Russia entrusted the
autocracy to your forebear before the holy altar and demanded that he rule her
supremely and undividedly. This covenant is the foundation of your power: we
have no other. You can do everything, but you cannot lawfully limit your
power.’
“In his note, ‘The Opinion of a Russian Citizen’, given to the sovereign
in 1819 with reference to plans for the restoration of Poland, Karamzin tried
to prove again that the sovereign had no right to do this:
“’You think,’ writes Karamzin, ‘to restore the ancient kingdom of
Poland, but is this restoration in accordance with the law of the State good of
Russia? Is it in accordance with Your sacred duties, with Your love for Russia
and justice itself?… Do the sovereigns not swear to preserve the integrity of
their domains? These lands (that is, Belorussia, Lithuania, Volhynia and
Podolia) were already Russia when Metropolitan Plato entrusted to you the crown
of Monomakh, Peter and Catherine… Will they say that they unlawfully divided
Poland? But You would be acting still more unlawfully if You thought to wipe
out its injustice by dividing Russia herself. We took Poland by the sword: that
is our right, to which all States are obliged for their existence, for all have
been constituted from conquests. Catherine is responsible before God, and
before history, for her act, but it is already done, and for You it is already
holy: for You Poland is a lawful Russian dominion. There are no old deeds of
purchase in politics: otherwise we would be bound to re-establish the Kazan and
Astrakhan kingdoms, the Novgorod republic, the great Princedom of Ryazan, etc.
Moreover, even according to the old deeds of purchase Belorussia, Volhynia and
Podolia, together with Galicia, were once the indigenous heritage of Russia…
“’Until now,’ he continues, ‘our rule was: not a step to an enemy, not a
step to a friend. Napoleon was able to conquer Russia, but You, although You
are an Autocrat, were not able to cede to him a single Russian hut for free.
That is our character and our State character… Your Majesty, I would vouch my
life to You that an inevitable consequence of the wholesale restoration of
Poland would be the loss, not only of our beautiful provinces, but also of our
love for the Tsar; we would cool in soul in our feeling for the Fatherland,
seeing it become the plaything of self-willed caprice…’
“In these interesting reasonings we catch the voice of feeling which
Karamzin had in his heart and wanted to stir up in the heart of the Sovereign.
But from the point of view of principle this is all very unclear and even
questionable: Karamzin even refers to some pact between the tsar and the people
when the dynasty was elected, although, of course, if that was the whole issue
then the pact agreed upon by the parties could always be reviewed and changed.
In his reasonings on Poland Karamzin bases everything on the obligation to
preserve tradition… This, of course, is easily refuted. Nevertheless a certain
truth can be felt here, the rejection of absolute power and an indication of
the bond between the Tsar and the nation, a bond which serves as the source of
the Tsar’s obligations.
“Instinctual feelings surfaced in Russia sufficiently constantly, but
there was very little consciousness, very little theory of Tsarist power and
the mutual relatins of Tsar and people.
“This consciousness became the more necessary in that bureaucratic
practice inexorably brought to us the idea of absolutism, while the European
influence, affirming that Tsarist power was nothing other than absolutism,
rejected it. In the 19th century Russian thought was sharply divided
into ‘westernizers’ and ‘Slavophiles’, and the whole of the westernising part
conducted propaganda against autocracy…
“Throughout the 19th century the whole current of educated
westernising thought, which created the so-called ‘intelligentsia’, conducted
propaganda against autocracy – in Russia as far as censorship allowed it, and
with complete openness in its press abroad. The national part of educated
society could not help trying to defend its historical Russian institution of
monarchy. The schism in the educated part of Russia between the ‘westernizers’
(under various names) and the national part of the educated class grew still wider
after 1861. Moreover, in the ‘westernizing’ tendency there developed a terrible
rejection of everything that was typically Russian, while its ideas gained
great strength in all the middle educated classes and encompassed the whole
people. This struggle, which embraced every aspect of life, was concentrated
especially strongly on the autocracy, as a principle and as an institution.
“In this long historical period the monarchical idea was nevertheless
clarified to a certain degree. The words of our great artists – Pushkin, Gogol,
A. Majkov and others – sound as excellent expressions of the monarchical
consciousness. [560]
But all these were expressions of feeling, manifestations of instinct, which
was so strong in the Russian personality generally that quite often it
unexpectedly appears even in the most extreme deniers, as, for example,
Bakunin.
“But in the sense of consciousness, the monarchical idea was clarified
mainly by means of public debates, in quarrels with opponents, no by a strictly
scientific method. Scientific works, which remained basically imitative, in
general gave almost nothing to clarify autocracy and most often served only to
mix it up hopelessly with absolutism.
“In general, when our statist scholars passed onto the soil of
explaining autocracy, then in the best case they repeated the judgements of the
publicists. If the monarchical idea of power was in any way clarified amongst
us, then it was not in science, not in the study or auditorium of the professor
and academic, but on the pages of newspapers and journals, in the verbal
disputes of the representatives of the parties and tendencies. Russian
political thought, insofar as it had any success in the national spirit, was
indebted in everything not to statist science, which instilled European ideas
and concept – but to the publicists.
“Among its representatives especially much was done by the Slavophiles
in general and by I.S. Aksakov in particular, and particularly by M.N. Katkov
who stood behind them….”[561]
However, before discussing these debates between the westernizers and
Slavophiles in more detail, it is necessary to examine the work of the Tsar who
dominated the period, to the rage of the westernizers and even of some of the
Slavophiles, but to the undoubted benefit of the Church and State of Russia.
Tsar Nicholas had never been swayed by liberal ideas. Having gained
something of the flavour of democratic life in France during the reign of his
father, he said to Golenischev-Kutuzov: “If, to our misfortune, this evil
genius transferred all these clubs and meetings, which create more noise than
substance, to us, then I would beseech God to repeat the miracle of the
confusion of the tongues or, even better, deprive those who use their tongues
in this way of the gift of speech.”[562] A man
of strict life and strict opinions, who was venerated by Saints Seraphim of
Sarov and Theophilus of the Kiev Caves, his rule was made still stricter by the
fact that he came to the throne in the midst of the Decembrist rebellion.
Some have portrayed the Tsar as having been unreasonably strict and
censorious. However, he wanted to abolish serfdom, and took important
preparatory measures towards that great act carried out by his son. Moreover,
he had the ability to convert, and not simply crush, his opponents. Thus it was
after a long, sincere conversation with Pushkin that he was able to say:
“Gentlemen, I present to you a new Pushkin!” “And it was truly thus,” writes
Lebedev. “Not out of fear before the authorities, not hypocritically, but
sincerely and truly, Pushkin, the friend of the ‘Decembrists’, the worldly
skiver, in life as in poetry, after 1826 renounced his free-thinking and
Masonry and created his best and greatest works!”[563]
“Having rejected a rotten support, the nobility,” writes Lebedev, Tsar
Nicholas “made his supports the Orthodox Church, the system of state
institutions (in which the class of bureaucrats, of officials acquired great
significance) and the Russian people which he loved! Having grasped this main
direction of the Tsar’s politics, Count S. Uvarov, the minister of
enlightenment expressed it [on March 21, 1833] in the remarkable formula:
Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood….”[564]
But the formula alone was not enough. It
had to be explained and clarified and defended: Orthodoxy against Catholicism
and Protestantism, Autocracy against Absolutism and Liberal Democracy,
Nationhood against Socialist Internationalism and Phyletistic Nationalism.
Moreover, the priorities had to be understood: first Orthodoxy, then Autocracy,
and then Nationhood. For the supreme value was Orthodoxy, whose first line of
defence was the Autocracy, which in turn was defended by national feeling. Any
attempt to invert this order – as, for example, to make Orthodoxy merely a
support for Autocracy, or both as supports of Nationhood, would be equivalent
to idolatry and lead to the downfall of Russia.
Some, such as D.S. Khomiakov, thought that
an inversion of this order, placing Autocracy as the supreme value, did indeed
take place.[565]
However, this is not the view of Protopriest Lev Lebedev, who writes:
“Beginning already with Paul I, the rapprochement of imperial power with the
Church continued under Nicholas I, being raised to a qualitatively higher level.
The All-Russian Autocrat from now on did not oppose himself to the Church and
did not even consider himself ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘independent’ of her. On the
contrary, he saw himself as a faithful son of the Orthodox Church, completely
sharing the faith of his people and bound in all his politics to be guided by
the commandments of God, proceeding precisely from the Orthodox world-view
(and not from the demands of a certain non-existent ‘religion of nature’, as
under Catherine II). This was a good, grace-filled radical change. It
made itself immediately felt also in the relations of the two powers – the
tsar’s and the Church’s. From now on the over-procurators of the Synod were
people who enjoyed the respect and trust of the Russian hierarchs and considered
themselves faithful children of the Church. Such were Admiral Shishkov and
Count Protasov. There was not always unanimity between them and the members of
the Synod. Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), for example, more than once
‘warred’ with Protasov. But these were quarrels about separate matters, where
both sides were governed by the single desire to benefit Holy Orthodoxy (even
if they understood this differently).”[566]
This beneficial change in Church-State
relations was reflected in the extremely important, successful and (western
cavillers notwithstanding) voluntary reunion of the uniates in the
western territories with the Orthodox Church. Favourable conditions for this
change had been created by the fall of Poland in 1815, the expulsion of the Jesuits
from Russia in 1820 and the suppression of the Polish rebellion in 1830-1831.
Then, in 1835, a secret committee on the uniate question was formed in St.
Petersburg consisting of the uniate bishop Joseph Semashko, the real soul of
the movement, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, the over-procurator of the Holy
Synod and the minister of the interior. By 1839 1,600,000 had converted to
Orthodoxy.[567]
In spite of these positive changes, it must be admitted that there was
no formal change in the Tsar’s relationship to the Church, which
continued to fall short of the symphonic ideal. In 1832 he published a new
collection of the Fundamental Laws of the Empire[568], which
included the article: “The Emperor as the Christian sovereign is the supreme
defender and preserver of the dogmas of the dominant faith and the supervisor
of right faith and every good order in the Holy Church”. In the administration
of the Church, intoned articles 42 and 43, “the autocratic power acts by means
of the Holy Governing Synod, which was founded by it.”
And yet when there were clashes between the Tsar and the hierarchs on
matters of conscience, the Tsar showed himself ready to give way, which gives
strength to Lebedev’s claim that a qualitatively higher level of Church-State relations
had been attained. Thus once Metropolitan Philaret refused to bless a triumphal
monument because it had some pagan hieroglyphs and unseemly figures
representing pagan gods on it. The Emperor, showing a good grasp of church
history, said: “I understand, but tell him [Philaret] that I am not Peter the
Great and he is not St. Metrophanes.” Nevertheless, he allowed Philaret not to
take part in the ceremony.[569]
According to another account, on hearing of Philaret’s disinclination to serve,
the Emperor said: “Prepare the horses; I’m leaving today”, so that the ceremony
took place without either Tsar or metropolitan.[570]
Afterwards, on returning to the Trinity Lavra, Philaret said to his spiritual
father, Archimandrite Anthony: “Did I act well? I annoyed the Tsar. I don’t
have the merits of the hierarch Metrophanes.” “Don’t take them upon yourself,”
replied Fr. Anthony, “but remember that you are a Christian bishop, a pastor of
the Church of Christ, to whom only one thing is terrible: to depart from the
will of Jesus Christ.” Then the hierarch revealed that the previous night St.
Sergius had entered his locked room, come up to his bed, and said: “Don’t be
disturbed, it will all pass…”[571]
Again, in 1835 the Emperor wanted his son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexander
Nikolaevich, to become a member of the Holy Synod. But Metropolitan Philaret,
together with the other hierarchs, was against the idea, and on meeting the
tsarevich once, asked him when he had received clerical ordination. This forced
the tsarevich to refrain from attending sessions of the Holy Synod.[572]
When the Englishman William Palmer criticised the dominance of the State
over the Church in Russia, Alexis Khomiakov replied: “That the Church is not
quite independent of the state, I allow; but let us consider candidly and
impartially how far that dependence affects, and whether it does indeed affect,
the character of the Church. The question is so important, that is has been
debated during this very year [1852] by serious men in Russia, and has been
brought, I hope, to a satisfactory conclusion. A society may be dependent in
fact and free in principle, or vice-versa. The first case is a mere historical
accident; the second is the destruction of freedom, and has no other issue by
rebellion and anarchy. The first is the weakness of man; the second the
depravity of law. The first is certainly the case in Russia, but the principles
are by no means deteriorated. Whether freedom of opinion in civil and political
questions is, or is not, too much restrained, is no business of ours as member
of the Church (though I, for my part, know that I am almost reduced to complete
silence); but the state never interferes directly in the censorship of works
written about religious questions. In this respect, I will confess again that
the censorship is, in my opinion, most oppressive; but that does not depend
upon the state, and is simply the fault of the over-cautious and timid prudence
of the higher clergy. I am very far from approving of it, and I know that very
useful thoughts and books are lost in the world, or at least to the present
generation.
“But this error, which my reason condemns, has nothing to do with
ecclesiastical liberty; and though very good tracts and explanations of the
Word of God are oftentimes suppressed on the false supposition of their perusal
being dangerous to unenlightened minds, I think that those who suppress the
Word of God itself should be the last to condemn the excessive prudence of our
ecclesiastical censors. Such a condemnation coming from the Latins would be
absurdity itself. But is the action of the Church quite free in Russia?
Certainly not; but this depends wholly on the weakness of her higher
representatives, and upon their desire to get the protection of the state, not
for themselves, generally speaking, but for the Church. There is certainly a
moral error in that want of reliance upon God Himself; but it is an accidental
error of persons, and not of the Church, and has nothing to do with our
religious convictions. It would be a difference case, if there was the smallest
instance of a dogmatic error, or something near to it, admitted or suffered
without protestation out of weakness; but I defy anybody to find anything like
that…”[573]
Bishop Ignatius of the
Caucasus: The Struggle against Westernism
Khomiakov’s point is well taken. And yet the danger posed by the
personal weakness of some of the Church hierarchs, and their over-reliance on
the power of the State, was perhaps greater than he realised. The danger was
the greater in that the educated classes were gradually losing the savour of
True Christianity, which meant that in order for the Church to defend her
position and increase her influence, she would have to struggle, not only
against a State that interfered too much in her internal affairs, but also
against the secularist views of the majority of the leading laymen in both
Church and State.
One of the ways in which this secularism was manifested was in tolerance
for Christian heresies to the extent of placing them on a par with Orthodoxy.
Thus in the 1850s the great elder, St. Ambrose of Optina wrote: “Was any
benefit gained by religious tolerance in Russia in relation to foreign nations:
the French and others, not to speak of the Jew, who, as a people rejected by God,
is despised by all, and nowhere has any significance? Religious tolerance of
the indicated nations could have no influence on the simple people, because the
way of life of our simple people is completely different from the condition and
situation of these nations: but in the circle of Russian educated people this
religious tolerance had a great influence on morality and on their domestic way
of life. Now many educated people bear only the name of Orthodox, but in actual
fact completely adhere to the morals and customs of foreign lands and foreign
beliefs. Without any torment of conscience they violate the regulations of the
Orthodox Church concerning fasts and gather together at balls and dances on the
eves of great Feasts of the Lord, when Orthodox Christians should be in church
in prayerful vigil. This would be excusable if such gatherings took place on
the eves of ordinary days, but not on the eves of Feasts, and especially great
Feasts. Are not such acts and deeds clearly inspired by our enemy, the destroyer
of souls, contrary to the commandment of the Lord which says: carry out your
ordinary affairs for six days, but the seventh (festal) day must be devoted to
God in pious service? How have Orthodox Christians come to such acts hated by
God? It is not for no other reason than indiscriminate communion with believers
of other faiths…”
The danger of what we would not call ecumenist indifferentism was
especially noted by Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov (+1867), who wrote: “You say,
‘heretics are Christians just the same.’ Where did you take that from? Perhaps
someone or other calling himself a Christian while knowing nothing of Christ,
may in his extreme ignorance decide to acknowledge himself as the same kind of
Christian as heretics, and fail to distinguish the holy Christian faith from
those offspring of the curse, blasphemous heresies. Quite otherwise, however,
do true Christians reason about this. A whole multitude of saints has received
a martyr’s crown, has preferred the most cruel and prolonged tortures, prison,
exile, rather than agree to take part with heretics in their blasphemous
teaching.
“The Ecumenical Church has always recognised heresy as a mortal sin; she
has always recognised that the man infected with the terrible malady of heresy
is spiritually dead, a stranger to grace and salvation, in communion with the
devil and the devil’s damnation. Heresy is a sin of the mind; it is more a
diabolic than a human sin. It is the devil’s offspring, his invention; it is an
impiety that is near idol-worship. Every heresy contains in itself blasphemy
against the Holy Spirit, whether against the dogma or the action of the Holy
Spirit…”[574]
Bishop Ignatius was pessimistic about the future of Russia: “We are
helpless to arrest this apostasy. Impotent hands will have no power against it
and nothing more will be required than the attempt to withhold it. The spirit
of the age will reveal the apostasy. Study it, if you wish to avoid it, if you
wish to escape this age and the temptation of its spirits. One can suppose,
too, that the institution of the Church which has been tottering for so long
will fall terribly and suddenly. Indeed, no one is able to stop or prevent it.
The present means to sustain the institutional Church are borrowed from the
elements of the world, things inimical to the Church, and the consequence will
be only to accelerate its fall. Nevertheless, the Lord protects the elect and
their limited number will be filled.”
Bishop Ignatius’ attacks on ecumenism and the influence of the western
heresies on Russian society and Church life marked the beginning of the return
of Russian theology to the patristic traditions of the Ecumenical Church. He
was highly valued by the best of his contemporaries, such as Elder Anthony
(Bochkov) of Optina, who called him the finest writers and teacher on
monasticism of his age, unrivalled in his knowledge of the Holy Fathers, “a
living library of the Father@. He was also “the teacher of weeping, the new
Jeremiah”.[575]
One of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow’s great achievements was a
harmonious and deeply-thought-out exposition of the nature of the State in
Orthodox thinking. He thought that “it was necessary for there to be a close
union between the ruler and the people – a union, moreover, that was based
exclusively on righteousness. The external expression of the prosperity of a
state was the complete submission of the people to the government. The
government in a state had to enjoy the rights of complete inviolability on the
part of the subjects. And if it was deprived of these rights, the state could
not be firm, it was threatened with danger insofar as two opposing forces would
appear: self-will on the part of the subjects and predominance on the part of
the government. ‘If the government is not firm,’ taught Philaret, ‘then the
state also is not firm. Such a state is like a city built on a volcanic
mountain: what does its firmness signify when beneath it is concealed a force
which can turn it into ruins at any minute? Subjects who do not recognize the
sacred inviolability of the rulers are incited by hope of self-will to attain
self-will; an authority which is not convinced of its inviolability is incited
by worries about its security to attain predominance; in such a situation the
state wavers between the extremes of self-will and predominance, between the
horrors of anarchy and repression, and cannot affirm in itself obedient
freedom, which is the focus and soul of social life.’
“The holy hierarch understood the rebellion [of the Decembrists] as
being a rebellion against the State, against itself. ‘Subjects can themselves
understand,’ said Philaret, ‘that in destroying the authorities they are
destroying the constitution of society and consequently they are themselves
destroying themselves.’”[576]
Philaret, writes V. Shokhin, “did not doubt that monarchical rule is
‘power from God’ (Romans 13.1) in its significance for Russian history
and statehood, and more than once in his sermons expressed the most
submissively loyal feelings with regard to all the representatives of the Royal
Family. But he was one of the very few archpastors who had the courage to
resist the tendency – very characteristic of Russian conditions – to reduce
Orthodoxy to ‘glorification of the tsar’. Thus, contrary to many hierarchs, who
from feelings of servility warmly accepted Nicholas I’s attempt to introduce
the heir among the members of the Synod, he justly saw in this a manifestation
of caesaropapism…, and in the application of attributes of the Heavenly King to
the earthly king – a most dangerous deformation of religious consciousness…,
and in such phenomena as the passing of a cross procession around statues of
the emperor – a direct return to paganism.”[577]
Metropolitan Philaret, as Fr. Georges Florovsky writes, “distinctly and
firmly reminded people of the Church’s independence and freedom, reminded them
of the limits of the state. And in this he sharply and irreconcilably parted
with his epoch, with the whole of the State’s self-definition in the new,
Petersburgian Russia. Philaret was very reserved and quiet when speaking. By
his intense and courageous silence he with difficulty concealed and subdued his
anxiety about what was happening. Through the vanity and confusion of events he
saw and made out the threatening signs of the righteous wrath of God that was
bound to come. Evil days, days of judgement were coming – ‘it seems that we are
already living in the suburbs of Babylon, if not in Babylon itself,’ he feared…
‘My soul is sorrowful,’ admitted Metropolitan Philaret once. ‘It seems to me
that the judgement which begins at the house of God is being more and more
revealed… How thickly does the smoke come from the coldness of the abyss and
how high does it mount’… And only in repentance did he see an exit, in
universal repentance ‘for many things, especially in recent years’.
“Philaret had his own theory of the State, of the sacred kingdom. And in
it there was not, and could not be, any place for the principles of state
supremacy. It is precisely because the powers that be are from God, and the
sovereigns rule by the mercy of God, that the Kingdom has a completely subject
and auxiliary character. ‘The State as State is not subject to the Church’, and
therefore the servants of the Church already in the apostolic canons are
strictly forbidden ‘to take part in the administration of the people’. Not from
outside, but from within must the Christian State be bound by the law of God
and the ecclesiastical order. In the mind of Metropolitan Philaret, the State
is a moral union, ‘a union of free moral beings’ and a union founded on mutual
service and love – ‘a certain part of the general dominion of the Almighty,
outwardly separate, but by an invisible power yoked into the unity of the
whole’… And the foundation of power lies in the principle of service. In the
Christian State Philaret saw the Anointed of God, and before this banner of
God’s good will he with good grace inclined his head. ‘The Sovereign
receives the whole of his lawfulness from the Church’s anointing’, that is,
in the Church and through the Church. Here the Kingdom inclines its head before
the Priesthood and takes upon itself the vow of service to the Church, and its
right to take part in ecclesiastical affairs. He possesses this not by virtue
of his autocracy and authority, but precisely by virtue of his obedience and
vow. And this right does not extend or pass to the organs of state
administration, and between the Sovereign and the Church there cannot and must
not be any dividing wall or mediation. The Sovereign is anointed, but not the
State. The Sovereign enters into the Church, but the State as such remains
outside the Church. And for that reason it has no rights and privileges in the
Church. In her inner constitution the Church is completely independent, and has
no need of the help or defence of the secular authorities – ‘the altar does not
fear to fall even without this protection’. For the Church is ruled by Christ
Himself, Who distributes and realizes ‘his own episcopacy of souls’ through the
apostolic hierarchy, which ‘is not similar to any form of secular rule’.
“The Church has her own inviolable code of laws, her own strength and
privileges, which exceed all earthly measures. ‘In His word Jesus Christ did
not outline for her a detailed and uniform statute, so that His Kingdom should
not seem to be of this world’… The Church has her own special form of action –
in prayer, in the service of the sacraments, in exhortation and in pastoral
care. And for real influence on public life, for her real enchurchment,
according to Metropolitan Philaret’s thought, the interference of the hierarchy
in secular affairs is quite unnecessary – ‘it is necessary not so much that a
bishop should sit in the governmental assembly of grandees, as that the
grandees and men of nobles birth should more frequently and ardently surround
the altar of the Lord together with the bishop’… Metropolitan Philaret always
with great definiteness drew a firm line between the state and ecclesiastical
orders. Of course, he did not demand and did not desire the separation of the
State from the Church, its departure from the Church into the arbitrariness of
secular vanity. But at the same time he always sharply underlined the complete
heterogeneity and particularity of the State and the Church. The Church cannot
be in the State, and the State cannot be in the Church – ‘unity and harmony’
must be realized between them in the unity of the creative realization of God’s
commandments.
“It is not difficult to understand how distant and foreign this way of
thinking was for the State functionaries of the Nicolaitan spirit and time, and
how demanding and childish it seemed to them. Philaret did not believe in the
power of rebukes and reprimands. He did not attach great significance to the
external forms of life – ‘it is not some kind of transformation that is needed,
but a choice of men and supervision’, he used to say. And above all what was
necessary was an inner creative uplift, a gathering and renewal of spiritual
forces. What was needed was an intensification of creative activity, a
strengthening and intensification of ecclesiastical and pastoral freedom. As a
counterweight to the onslaught of the State, Metropolitan Philaret thought
about the reestablishment of the living unity of the local episcopate, which
would be realized in constant consultative communion of fellow pastors and
bishops, and strengthened at times by small congresses and councils, until a
general local Council would become inwardly possible and achievable.[578]
Metropolitan Philaret always emphasized that ‘we live in the Church militant’…
And with sadness he recognized that ‘the quantity of sins and carelessnesses
which have mounted up in the course of more than one century almost exceeds the
strength and means of correction’… Philaret was not a man of struggle, and was
weighed down ‘by remaining in the chatter and cares of the city and works of
men’. He lived in expectation ‘of that eternally secure city, from which it
will not be necessary to flee into any desert’, He wanted to withdraw, to run
away, and beyond the storm of affairs to pray for the mercy and longsuffering
of God, for ‘defence from on high’.”[579]
The State, wrote Philaret, is “a union of free moral beings, united
amongst themselves with the sacrifice of part of their freedom for the
preservation and confirmation by the common forces of the law of morality,
which constitutes the necessity of their existence. The civil laws are nothing
other than interpretations of this law in application to particular cases and
guards placed against its violation.”[580]
Philaret emphasised the rootedness of the State in the family, with the
State deriving its essential properties and structure from the family: “The
family is older than the State. Man, husband, wife, father, son, mother,
daughter and the obligations and virtues inherent in these names existed before
the family grew into the nation and the State was formed. That is why family
life in relation to State life can be figuratively depicted as the root of the
tree. In order that the tree should bear leaves and flowers and fruit, it is
necessary that the root should be strong and bring pure juice to the tree. In
order that State life should develop strongly and correctly, flourish with
education, and bring forth the fruit of public prosperity, it is necessary that
family life should be strong with the blessed love of the spouses, the sacred
authority of the parents, and the reverence and obedience of the children, and
that as a consequence of this, from the pure elements of family there should
arise similarly pure principles of State life, so that with veneration for
one’s father veneration for the tsar should be born and grow, and that the love
of children for their mother should be a preparation of love for the
fatherland, and the simplehearted obedience of domestics should prepare and
direct the way to self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness in obedience to the
laws and sacred authority of the autocrat…”[581]
The idea that the State grows out of the family, and must therefore
retain the same bonds of love and filial submission that exist in the family,
was imbibed by the bearers of the monarchical idea. Thus Tsar Alexander III of
Russia told his son, the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas: “Strengthen the family,
because it is the basis of every State”.[582] And
the link between family feeling and feeling for the monarchical State is
illustrated by the feelings of Prince Sergius Trubetskoy during his childhood
under the same Tsar Alexander: “Father and mother, grandfathers and
grandmothers were for us in childhood not only sources and centres of love and
unquestioned authority; they were enveloped in our eyes by a kind of aura which
the modern generation does not know… Our fathers and grandfathers were in our
children’s eyes both patriarchs and family monarchs, while our mothers and
grandmothers were family tsaritsas.”[583]
If the foundation of the State is the family, and each family is both a
miniature State and a miniature monarchy, it follows that the most natural form
of Statehood is Monarchy – more specifically, a Monarchy that is in union with,
as owing its origin to, the Heavenly Monarch, God. Despotic monarchies identify
themselves, rather than unite themselves, with the Deity, so they cannot be
said to correspond to the Divine order of things. In ancient times, the only
monarchy that was in accordance with the order and the command of God was the
Israelite autocracy.
As Metropolitan Philaret demonstrates, this superiority of the Israelite
Autocracy makes of it a model for all nations in all times: “It is in the
family that we must seek the beginnings and first model of authority and
submission, which are later opened out in the large family which is the State.
The father is… the first master… but since the authority of the father was not
created by the father himself and was not given to him by the son, but came
into being with man from Him Who created man, it is revealed that the deepest
source and the highest principle of the first power, and consequently of every
later power among men, is in God – the Creator of man. From Him ‘every family
in heaven and on earth is named’ (Ephesians 3.15). Later, when sons of
sons became a people and peoples, and from the family there grew the State,
which was too vast for the natural authority of a father, God gave this
authority a new artificial image and a new name in the person of the King, and
thus by His wisdom kings rule (Proverbs 8.15). In the times of
ignorance, when people had forgotten their Creator… God, together with His
other mysteries, also presented the mystery of the origin of the powers that be
before the eyes of the world, even in a sensory image, in the form of the
Hebrew people whom He had chosen for Himself; that is: in the Patriarch Abraham
He miraculously renewed the ability to be a father and gradually produced from
him a tribe, a people and a kingdom; He Himself guided the patriarchs of this
tribe; He Himself raised judges and leaders for this people; He Himself ruled
over this kingdom (I Kings 8.7). Finally, He Himself enthroned kings
over them, continuing to work miraculous signs over the kings, too. The Highest
rules over the kingdom of men and gives it to whom He wills. ‘The Kingdom is
the Lord’s and He Himself is sovereign of the nations’ (Psalm 21.29).
‘The power of the earth is in the hand of the Lord, and in due time He will set
over it one that is profitable’ (Sirach 10.4).”
“A non-Russian would perhaps ask me now: why do I look on that which was
established by God for one people (the Hebrews) and promised to one King
(David) as on a general law for Kings and peoples? I would have no difficulty
in replying: because the law proceeding from the goodness and wisdom of God is
without doubt the perfect law; and why not suggest the perfect law for all? Or
are you thinking of inventing a law which would be more perfect than the law
proceeding from the goodness and wisdom of God?”
“Let us not go into the sphere of the speculations and controversies in
which certain people – who trust in their own wisdom more than others – work on
the invention… of better, as they suppose, principles for the transfiguration
of human societies… But so far they have not in any place or time created such
a quiet and peaceful life… They can shake ancient States, but they cannot
create anything firm… They languish under the fatherly and reasonable authority
of the King and introduce the blind and cruel power of the mob and the
interminable disputes of those who seek power. They deceive people in affirming
that they will lead them to liberty; in actual fact they are drawing them from
lawful freedom to self-will, so as later to subject them to oppression with
full right. Rather than their self-made theorising they should study the royal
truth from the history of the peoples and kingdoms… which was written, not out
of human passion, but by the holy prophets of God, that is – from the history
of the people of God which was from of old chosen and ruled by God. This
history shows that the best and most useful for human societies is done not by
people, but by a person, not by many, but by one. Thus: What government gave
the Hebrew people statehood and the law? One man – Moses. What government dealt
with the conquest of the promised land and the distribution of the tribes of
the Hebrew people on it? One man – Joshua the son of Nun. During the time of
the Judges one man saved the whole people from enemies and evils. But since the
power was not uninterrupted, but was cut off with the death of each judge, with
each cutting off of one-man rule the people descended into chaos, piety
diminished, and idol-worship and immorality spread; then there followed woes
and enslavement to other peoples. And in explanation of these disorders and
woes in the people the sacred chronicler says that ‘in those days there was no
king in Israel; every man did what was pleasing in his own eyes’ (Judges
21.25). Again there appeared one man, Samuel, who was fully empowered by the
strength of prayer and the prophetic gift; and the people was protected from
enemies, the disorders ceased, and piety triumphed. Then, to establish
uninterrupted one-man rule, God established a King in His people. And such
kings as David, Josaphat, Hezekiah and Josiah present images of how successfully
an autocratic Majesty can and must serve for the glorification of the Heavenly
King in the earthly kingdom of men, and together with that – for the
strengthening and preservation of true prosperity in his people… And during the
times of the new grace the All-seeing Providence of God deigned to call the one
man Constantine, and in Russia the one man Vladimir, who in apostolic manner
enlightened their pagan kingdoms with the light of the faith of Christ an
thereby established unshakeable foundations for their might. Blessed is that
people and State in which, in a single, universal, all-moving focus there
stands, as the sun in the universe, a King, who freely limits his unlimited
autocracy by the will of the Heavenly King, and by the wisdom that comes from
God.”[584]
In 1851, Metropolitan Philaret preached as follows: “As heaven is
indisputably better than the earth, and the heavenly than the earthly, it is
similarly indisputable that the best on earth must be recognised to be that
which was built on it in the image of the heavenly, as was said to the God-seer
Moses: ‘Look thou that thou make them after their pattern, which was showed
thee in the mount’ (Exodus 25.40). In accordance with this, God
established a king on earth in the image of His single rule in the heavens; He
arranged for an autocratic king on earth in the image of His almighty power;
and He placed an hereditary king on earth in the image of His imperishable
Kingdom, which lasts from ages to ages.
“Oh if only all the kings of the earth paid sufficient attention to
their heavenly dignity and to the traits of the image of the heavenly impressed
upon them, and faithfully united the righteousness and goodness demanded of
them, the heavenly unsleeping watchfulness, purity of thought and holiness of
intention that is in God’s image! Oh if only all the peoples sufficiently
understood the heavenly dignity of the king and the construction of the
heavenly kingdom in the image of the heavenly, and constantly signed themselves
with the traits of that same image – by reverence and love for the king, by
humble obedience to his laws and commands, by mutual agreement and unanimity,
and removed from themselves everything of which there is no image in the
heavens – arrogance, disputes, self-will, greediness and every evil thought,
intention and act! Everything would be blessed in accordance with the heavenly
image if it were well constructed in accordance with the heavenly image. All
earthly kingdoms would be worthy of being the ante-chamber of the Heavenly
Kingdom.
“Russia! You participate in this good more than many kingdoms and
peoples. ‘Hold on to that which thou hast, that no man take thy crown’ (Rev.
3.11). Keep and continue to adorn your radiant crown, ceaselessly struggling to
fulfil more perfectly the crown-giving commandments: ‘Fear God, honour the
king’ (I Peter 2.17).
“Turning from the well-known to that which has perhaps been less
examined and understood in the apostle’s word, I direct our attention to that
which the apostle, while teaching the fear of God, reverence for the king and
obedience to the authorities, at the same time teaches about freedom: ‘Submit’,
he says, ‘to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake; whether to the king,
as being supreme, or to governors as being sent through him… as free’. Submit
as free men. Submit, and remain free…
“But how are we more correctly to understand and define freedom?
Philosophy teaches that freedom is the capacity without restrictions rationally
to choose and do that which is best, and that it is by nature the heritage of
every man. What, it would seem, could be more desirable? But this teaching has
its light on the summit of the contemplation of human nature, human nature as
it should be, while in descending to our experience and actions as they are in
reality, it encounters darkness and obstacles.
“In the multiplicity of the race of men, are there many who have such an
open and educated mind as faithfully to see and distinguish that which is best?
And do those who see the best always have enough strength decisively to choose
it and bring it to the level of action? Have we not heard complaints from the
best of men: ‘For to will is present in me, but how to perform that which is
good I find not’ (Romans 7.18)? What are we to say about the freedom of
people who, although not in slavery to anybody, are nevertheless subject to
sensuality, overcome by passion, possessed by evil habits? Is the avaricious
man free? Is he not bound in golden chains? Is the indulger of his flesh free? Is
he not bound, if not by cruel bonds, then by soft nets? Is the proud and
vainglorious man free? Is he not chained, not by his hands, and not by his
legs, but by his head and heart, is he not chained to his own idol?
“Thus does not experience and consciousness, at least of some people in
some cases, speak of that of which the Divine Scriptures speak generally: ‘He
who does sin is the servant of sin’ (John 8. 34)?
“Observation of people and human societies shows that people who to a
greater degree allow themselves to fall into this inner, moral slavery –
slavery to sin, the passions and vices – are more often than others zealots for
external freedom – freedom broadened as far as possible in human society before
the law and the authorities. But will broadening external freedom help them to
freedom from inner slavery? There is no reason to think that. With greater
probability we must fear the opposite. He in whom sensuality, passion and vice
has already acquired dominance, when the barriers put by the law and the
authorities to his vicious actions have been removed, will of course give
himself over to the satisfaction of his passions and lusts with even less
restraint than before, and will use his external freedom only in order that he
may immerse himself more deeply in inner slavery. Unhappy freedom which, as the
Apostle explained, ‘they have as a cover for their envy’! Let us bless the law
and the authorities which, in decreeing and ordering and defending, as
necessity requires, the limits placed upon freedom of action, hinder as far
they can the abuse of natural freedom and the spread of moral slavery, that is,
slavery to sin, the passions and the vices.
“I said: as far as they can, because we can not only not expect from the
law and the earthly authorities a complete cutting off of the abuse of freedom
and the raising of those immersed in the slavery of sin to the true and perfect
freedom: even the law of the Heavenly Lawgiver is not sufficient for that. The
law warns about sin, rebukes the sinner and condemns him, but does not
communicate to the slave of sin the power to break the bonds of this slavery,
and does not provide the means of blotting out the iniquities that have been
committed, which lie on the conscience like a fiery seal of sinful slavery. And
in this consists ‘the weakness of the law’ (Romans 8.3), to which the
Apostle witnesses without a moment’s hesitation.
“Here the question again presents itself: what is true freedom, and who
can give it, and – especially – return it to the person who has lost it through
sin? True freedom is the active capacity of the man who has not been enslaved
to sin and who is not weighed down by a condemning conscience, to choose the
best in the light of the truth of God and to realize it with the help of the
power of God’s grace.
“Giving back this freedom to the slave of sin is possible only for Him
Who gave it to sinless man at his creation. The Creator of freedom Himself
declared this: ‘If the Son will set you free, then you will truly be free’ (John
8.36). ‘If you remain in My words, you will truly be My disciples, and you will
know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 31.32). Jesus
Christ, the Son of God, having suffered and died for us in the nature He
received from us, by His ‘Blood has cleansed our conscience from dead works’ (Hebrews
9.14), and, having torn apart the bonds of death by His resurrection, has torn
apart also the bonds of sin and death that bind us, and, after His ascension to
heaven, has sent down the Spirit of truth, giving us through faith the light of
His truth to see what is best, and His grace-filled power to do it.
“This is freedom, which is restrained neither by heaven, nor by the
earth, nor by hell, which has as its limit the will of God, and this not to its
own diminution, because it also strives to fulfil the will of God, which has no
need to shake the lawful decrees of men because it is able to see in these the
truth that ‘the Kingdom is the Lord’s and He Himself is sovereign of the
nations’ (Psalm 21.28), which in an unconstrained way venerates lawful
human authority and its commands that are not contrary to God, insofar as it
radiantly sees the truth that ‘there is no power that is not of God, the powers
that be are ordained of God’ (Romans 13.1). And so this is freedom,
which is in complete accord with obedience to the law and lawful authority,
because it itself wishes for that which obedience demands.
“I would have much to say about the freedom that is Christian and inner,
and not external, which is moral and spiritual, and not carnal, which always
does good and is never rebellious, which can live in a hut just as comfortably
as in a noble’s house or a royal palace, which a subject, without ceasing to be
a subject, can enjoy as much as a master, which is inviolable in bonds and
prison, as we can see in the Christian martyrs. But it is already bring our
sermon to an end.
“Love Christian freedom – freedom from sin, from passion, from vice, the
freedom of willing obedience to the law and the authorities, and do good for
the sake of the Lord, in accordance with your faith in and love for Him. And
let nobody be seduced by the people from whom the Apostolic word warns us, who
‘promise freedom, being themselves the slaves of corruption’ (II Peter
2.19). Amen.”[585]
The most important influence on young intellectuals in Russia in the
1820s was the philosophy of Hegel. Many went to Germany and listened to the
lectures of Hegel himself, and of other important German philosophers such as
Schelling. It was above all Hegel’s historicism, and his concept of “the
historical nation”, that stimulated Russian thinkers to take a more historical
and dialectical approach to the study of their own land and its present
situation.[586]
Also important was the influence of Herder, and his concept of the unique
essence of every nation.
“What was the relationship between the old, pre-Petrine Russia and the
new, post-Petrine Russia?” they asked. “Could these antithetical Russias be
reconciled in a new synthesis of the future?” “Is it necessary decisively to
choose the one and reject the other?”
More particularly, it was Hegel’s failure “to find room for the Slavs”,
as G. Vernadsky put it, in his historical schema that provoked and intrigued
the Russian intellectuals. He wrote: “[The Slavs] did indeed found kingdoms and
sustain vigorous conflicts with the various nations that came across their
path. Sometimes, as an advance guard – an intermediate nationality – they took
part in the struggle between Christian Europe and unchristian Asia. The Poles
even liberated beleagured Vienna from the Turks; and Slavs have to some extent
been drawn within the sphere of Occidental Reason. Yet this entire body of
peoples remains excluded from our consideration because hitherto it has not
appeared as an independent element in the series of phases that reason has
assumed in the world.”[587]
Was Russia no more than “an intermediate nationality”?, asked the
Russian intellectuals. Had History really passed the Slavs by? Were they just a
footnote to “the sphere of Occidental Reason”? Or did they have something
original to contribute? In the next stage of the historical dialectic perhaps?
After all, if Hegel thought that the Romano-French period of history had been
overtaken by the German, why should not the German in its turn be overtaken by
the Slav?[588]
Other elements in Hegelianism that proved attractive to Russian thinkers
were the concept of alienation (for they themselves felt alienated from their
country and both its leadership and the common people) and the concept of
reconciliation with reality (for they were Russian after all, and wanted, if at
all possible, to be reconciled with that reality). Less attractive to them were
its determinism; and characteristic of almost all these thinkers was their
emphasis on the importance of the individual and individual freedom. Those who
inherited the determinism of Hegelianism later took the more radical road of
atheism and Marxism.
These questions and preoccupations led to the
emergence of two schools of thought on the nature and destiny of Russia: the
westerners, who basically thought that the westernizing path chosen by Peter
had been correct, and the Slavophiles, who believed in Orthodoxy, in the
pre-Petrine symphony of powers, and in a special, distinct path chosen by God
for Russia. Almost the whole of the public intellectual life of Russia until
the revolution could be described as increasingly complex variations on these
two viewpoints and the various intermediate positions: Chaadaev and Pushkin,
Belinsky and Gogol, Herzen and Khomiakov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Soloviev and
Pobedonostev, Lenin and Tikhomorov. The result was paradoxical: an increasing
westernization of the noble educated classes, who had suffered most from
Peter’s revolution, and an increasing “Slavophilisation” of the tsars
themselves, culminating in the most Orthodox and Slavophile of all the tsars,
Nicholas II.
The great debate began in 1836 with the publication, by the nobleman
Peter Yakovlevich Chaadaev, a convert to Catholicism, of the first of his Philosophical
Letters. There were eight of these, the first of which was dated 1829 and
the last - 1831. N.O. Lossky writes: “The letters are ostensibly addressed to a
lady who is supposed to have asked Chaadaev’s advice on the ordering of her
spiritual life. In the first letter Chaadaev advises the lady to observe the
ordinances of the Church as a spiritual exercise in obedience. Strict
observance of church customs and regulations may only be dispensed with, he
says[589], when
‘beliefs of a higher order have been attained, raising our spirit to the source
of all certainty;’ such beliefs must not be in contradiction to the ‘beliefs of
the people’. Chaadaev recommends a well-regulated life as favorable to
spiritual development and praises Western Europe where ‘the ideas of duty,
justice, law, order’ are part of the people’s flesh and blood and are, as he
puts it, not the psychology, but the physiology of the West. He evidently has
in mind the disciplinary influence of the Roman Catholic Church. As to Russia,
Chaadaev is extremely critical of it. Russia, in his opinion, is neither the
West nor the East. ‘Lonely in the world, we have given nothing to the world,
have taught it nothing; we have not contributed one idea to the mass of human
ideas.’ ‘If we had not spread ourselves from [the] Behring Straits to [the]
Oder, we would never have been noticed.’ We do not, as it were, form part of
the human organism and exist ‘solely in order to give humanity some important
lesson’.”[590]
According to Chaadaev, “not a single useful thought has sprouted in our
country’s barren soil; not a single great truth has emerged from our ambit….
Something in our blood repulses all true progress. In the end we have lived and
now live solely to serve as some inscrutable great lesson for the distant
generations that will grasp it; today, whatever anyone may say, we are a void
in the intellectual firmament.”[591]
Though writing from a westerning, anti-Russian viewpoint, Sir Isaiah
Berlin sums up the matter well: “Chaadaev’s attack, with its deification of
Western traditions, ideas and civilisation, was the key to later Russian
‘social thought’. Its importance was enormous. It set the tone, it struck the
dominant notes which were echoed by every major Russia writer up to and beyond
the Revolution. Everything is there: the proclamation that the Russian past is
blank or filled with chaos, that the only true culture is the Roman West, and
that the Great Schism robbed Russia of her birthright and left her barbarous,
an abortion of the creative process, a caution to other peoples, a Caliban
among nations. Here, too, is the extraordinary tendency toward
self-preoccupation which characterises Russian writing even more than that of
the Germans, from whom this tendency mainly stems. Other writers, in England,
France, even Germany, write about life, love, nature and human relations at
large; Russian writing, even when it is most deeply in debt to Goethe or Schiller
or Dickens or Stendhal, is about Russia, the Russian past, the Russian present,
Russian prospects, the Russian character, Russian vices and Russian virtues.
All the ‘accursed questions’ (as Heine was perhaps the first to call them) turn
in Russian into notorious proklyatye voprosy – questions about the
destinies (sud’by) of Russia: Where do we come from? Whither are we
bound? Why are we who we are? Should we teach the West or learn from it? Is our
‘broad’ Slav nature higher in the spiritual scale than that of the ‘Europeans’
– a source of salvation for all mankind – or merely a form of infantilism and
barbarism destined to be superseded or destroyed? The problem of the
‘superfluous man’ is here already; it is not an accident that Chaadev was an
intimate friend of the creator of Eugene Onegin [Pushkin]. No less
characteristic of this mental condition is Chaadaev’s contrary speculation that
was also destined to have a career in subsequent writing, in which he wondered
whether the Russians, who have arrived so late at the feast of the nations and
are still young, barbarous and untried, do not thereby derive advantages,
perhaps overwhelming ones, over older or more civilised societies. Fresh and
strong, the Russians might profit by the inventions and discoveries of the
others without having to go through the torments that have attended their
mentors’ struggles for life and civilisation. Might there not be a vast
positive gain in being late in the field? Herzen and Chernyshevsky, Marxists
and anti-Marxists, were to repeat this with mounting optimism. But the most
central and far-reaching question was still that posed by Chaadaev. He asked:
Who are we and what should be our path? Have we unique treasures (as the
Slavophils maintained) preserved for us by our Church – the only true Christian
one – which Catholics and Protestants have each in their own way lost or
destroyed? Is that which the West despises as coarse and primitive in fact a
source of life – the only pure source in the decaying post-Christian world? Or,
on the contrary, is the West at least partially right: if we are ever to say
our own word and play our part and show the world what kind of people we are,
must we not learn from the Westerners, acquire their skills, study in their
schools, emulate their arts and sciences, and perhaps the darker sides of their
lives also? The lines of battle in the century that followed remained where
Chaadaev drew them: the weapons were ideas which, whatever their origins, in
Russian became matters of the deepest concern – often of life and death – as
they never we in England or France or, to such a degree, in Romantic Germany.
Kireevsky, Khomiakov and Aksakov gave one answer, Belinsky and Dobrolyubov
another, Kavelin yet a third.”[592]
This letter, in the words of Count Ficquelmont, “fell like a bomb amidst
Russian vanity and those principles of religious and political pre-eminence to
which the capital is much inclined”, while Herzen later remarked that it “shook
the whole of intellectual Russia”.
The tsar was furious. Klementy Rosset, an officer of the General Staff,
wrote to the famous poet Alexander Pushkin: “The Emperor has read Chaadaev’s
article and found it absurd and extravagant, saying that he was sure ‘that
Moscow did not share the insane opinions of the Author’, and has instructed the
governor-general Prince Golitsyn to inquire daily as to the health of
Chaadaev’s wits and to put him under governmental surveillance…”[593]
This letter, together with the other Philosophical Letters,
elicited from Pushkin the first, and one of the best statements of the
opposing, Slavophile position.
Pushkin had known Chaadaev for a long time. In 1818, when his views were
more radical (and blasphemously atheist) than they came to be at the end of his
life, he had dedicated to Chaadaev the following lines:
Upon our sight, a radiant token;
Russia will rise from her long sleep;
And where autocracy lies, broken,
Our names shall yet be graven deep.[594]
But even here anti-autocratic sentiments are
combined with a belief in Russia. So although Pushkin admitted to the Tsar that
he would have participated in the Decembrist rebellion if he had not been in
exile, he was never a typical westernizer. This fact, combined with his deep
reading in Russian history, the stabilising experience of marriage and, as we
have seen, an enlightening interview with the Tsar himself, led Pushkin to a
kind of conversion to Russia and to a belief in her significance as a
phenomenon independent of Europe.
The
sincerity of his conversion was demonstrated during the Polish rebellion in
1830. Although “enlightened” Europe condemned the Tsar for crushing the
rebellion, on August 2, 1830, just three weeks before the taking of Warsaw by
Russian troops, Pushkin wrote “To the Slanderers of Russia”. From that time, as
the friend of the poet’s brother, Michael Juzefovich, wrote, “his world-view
changed, completely and unalterably. He was already a deeply believing person:
[he now became] a citizen who had changed his mind, having understood the
demands of Russian life and renounced utopian illusions.”[595]
However, Chaadaev had not undergone this conversion, and was still not
convinced that Russia’s past was anything more than “a blank sheet of paper”,
“an unhappy country with neither past, present nor future”.
Valery Lepakhin and Andrei Zavarzin have summarised the debate between
Chaadaev and Pushkin as follows: “Russia and Europe. This problem especially
occupied the minds of Russians at the beginning of the 19th century.
Chaadaev considered the schism (the division of the Churches [in 1054]) as a
tragedy for Russia, which separated it from Christianity (of course, from
Catholicism, and not from Christianity, but at that time these terms were
synonymous for Chaadaev), from ‘the world idea’, form ‘real progress’, from
‘the wonderworking principle’, from ‘the enlightened, civilised peoples’. In
principle Pushkin agreed with Chaadaev, but specified that ‘the schism
disunited us from backward Europe’: first, it separated ‘us’, that is, not only
Russia, but in general the whole of the eastern branch of Christianity, and
secondly, it separated simply from ‘backward Europe’, and not from ‘enlightened
and civilised people’, as Chaadaev claimed. In reading the Russian chronicles,
sermons and lives of saints, it is impossible not to notice the fact that they
are full of gratitude to God for the fact the Russ’ accepted baptism from
Orthodox Constantinople, and not from Catholic Rome.[596] This
fact is never viewed as a tragedy in Russian literature and history, rather the
opposite: beginning with the description of the holy Prince Vladimir’s choice
of faith, this event became the subject of poetry and chant. And not out of
hostility to Catholicism, and from faith in Divine Providence, which judged
that it should be so and which the consciousness of believers perceived with
gratitude, for Providence cannot err. But Chaadaev, who speaks so much about
Christianity, sees in this fact ‘the will of fate’ in a pagan manner.
“Pushkin agreed with his friend of many years that ‘we did not take part
in any of the great events which shook her (Europe)’. But it does not occur to
Chaadaev to ask the simple question: why should Rus’ have taken part.
Or, for example, would not this ‘participation’ have been for the worse, both
for Europe and for Rus’? Pushkin gives a simple, but principled reply at this
point: Russia has ‘her own special calling’, which Pushkin in another place
calls ‘lofty’: ‘It was Russia and her vast expanses that were swallowed up by
the Mongol invasion. The Tartars did not dar to cross our western frontiers and
leave us in their rear. They departed for their deserts, and Christian
civilisation was saved… By our martyrdom the energetic development of Catholic
Europe was delivered from all kinds of hindrances’. From Pushkin’s reply it
follows that indirectly at any rate Russia did take part in the life of Western
Europe, and, in accordance with its historical significance, this participation
was weighty and fraught with consequences for the West. It was not a direct
participation insofar as Russia had a different calling. The complete
opposition of Pushkin’s and Chaadaev’s views on the problem is characteristic.
For the latter the Tartar-Mongol yoke was a ‘cruel and humiliating foreign
domination’. For Pushkin this epoch was sanctified by the lofty word
‘martyrdom’, which Russia received not only for herself, but also for her
western brothers, for Christian civilization generally. In his reply Pushkin
links the special calling of Russia with her reception of Orthodoxy, and see in
it not ‘the will of fate’, but Russia’s preparation of herself for this
martyrdom.
“Chaadaev’s attitude to Byzantium also elicited objections from Pushkin.
Chaadaev called Byzantium ‘corrupt’, he affirmed that it was at that time (the
10th century – the reception of Christianity by Rus’) ‘an object of
profound disdain’ for the West European peoples. Now it is difficult even to
say what there is more of in this passage from Chaadaev: simple ignorance of
the history of Byzantium and Europe and complete absorption in his speculative
historiosophical conception, or the conscious prejudice of a westerniser. The
beginning of the 10th century in Byzantium was marked by the
activity of Leo VI, ‘the Wise’, the middle – by the reign of Constantine VII
Porphyrogennitus, and the end – by the victories of Basil II the Bulgar-slayer.
It was precisely this period that saw the development of political theories and
the science of jurisprudence, theoretical military thought and knowledge of the
natural sciences. New schools were opened, and a good education was highly
prized both in the world and in the Church. Significant works were produced in
the sphere of philosophy, literature and the fine arts, and theology produced
such a light as Simeon the New Theologian, the third (after the holy Evangelist
John the Theologian and St. Gregory the Theologian) to be given the title
‘theologian’ by the Orthodox Church. … This period is considered by scientists
to be the epoch of the flourishing of Byzantine aesthetic consciousness, of
architecture and music. If one compares the 10th century in
Byzantium and in Europe, the comparison will not be in favour of the latter.
Moreover, Chaadaev himself speaks of the ‘barbarism’ of the peoples that
despised Byzantium.
“’You say,’ writes Pushkin, ‘that the source from which we drew up
Christianity was impure, that Byzantium was worthy of disdain and was
disdained’, but, even if it was so, one should bear in mind that ‘from the
Greeks we took the Gospel and the traditions, and not the spirit of childish
triviality and disputes about words. The morals of Byzantium never were the
morals of Kiev. For Chaadaev it was important ‘from where’, but for Pushkin
‘how’ and ‘what’ they took it. After all, ‘was not Jesus Christ Himself born as
a Jew and was not Jerusalem a proverb among the nations?’ Pushkin did not want
to enter into polemics on the subject of Byzantium insofar as that would have
dragged out his letter. Moreover, the problem was a special one not directly
connected with the polemic surrounding the history of Russia. For him it was
evident that Russia, as a young and healthy organism, had filtered through her
Byzantine heritage, assimilated the natural and cast out that which was foreign
and harmful. Above mention was made of the fact that in the chronicles praise
was often offered to God for the reception of Christianity by Rus’ from
Byzantium. But no less often do we find critical remarks about the Greek
metropolitans, and of the Greeks and Byzantium in general. Therefore Pushkin
placed the emphasis on the critical assimilation of the Byzantine heritage. For
him, Rus’ received from Byzantium first of all ‘the light of Christianity’….
“Both Chaadaev and Pushkin highly esteemed the role of Christianity in
world history. In his review of The History of the Russian People by N.
Polevoj, the latter wrote: ‘The greatest spiritual and political turning-point
[in the history of] of our planet is Christianity. In this sacred element the
world disappeared and renewed itself. Ancient history is the history of Egypt,
Persia, Greece, Rome. Modern history is the history of Christianity.’ Chaadaev
would also have signed up to these words, but immediately after this common
affirmation differences would have arisen. For Chaadaev true Christianity
rules, shapes and ‘lords over everything’ only in Catholic Europe – ‘there
Christianity accomplished everything’. Chaadaev even considers the history of
Catholic Europe to be ’sacred, like the history of the ancient chosen people’.
“He recognises the right of the Russians, as, for example, of the
Abyssinians, to call themselves Christians, but in the Christianity of the
former and the latter that ‘order of things’, which ‘constitutes the final calling
of the human race’ was not realised at all. ‘Don’t you think,’ says Chaadaev to
his correspondent, ‘that these stupid departures from Divine and human truths
(read: Orthodoxy) drag heaven down to earth?’ And so there exist Catholic
Europe, the incarnation of Christianity, and Russia, Abyssinia and certain
other historical countries which have stagnated in ‘stupid departures from
Divine and human truths’. Chaadaev refuses these countries the right to their
own path, even the right to have a future.
“In one of his reviews Pushkin indirectly
replies to Chaadaev: ‘Understand,’ he writes, ‘that Russia never had anything
in common with the rest of Europe; her history demands other thoughts, other
formulae, different from the thoughts and formulae extracted by Guizot from the
history of the Christian West’. For Pushkin it is absolutely obvious that any
schema of historical development will remain a private, speculative schema and
will never have a universal character. Any conception is built on the basis of
some definite historical material, and to transfer it, out of confidence in its
universality, to other epochs or countries would be a mistake. After all, as
often as ot that which does not fit into a once-worked-out schema is cut off
and declared to have no significane and not worthy of study or analysis. But
Pushkin makes his own generalisations, proceeding from history, from concrete
facts. S. Frank wrote: ‘The greatest Russian poet was also completely original
and, we can boldly say, the greatest Russian political thinker of the 19th
century’. This was also noticed by the poet’s contemporaries. Vyzamesky wrote:
‘In Pushkin there was a true understanding of history… The properties of his
mind were: clarity, incisiveness, sobriety… He would not paint pictures
according to a common standard and size of already-prepared frames, as is often
done by the most recent historians in order more conveniently to fit into them
the events and people about to be portrayed’. But it was precisely this that
was the defect of Chaadaev’s method. Moreover, the non-correspondence of schema
and historical reality (frame and picture) was sometimes so blatant with him
that he had completely to reject the historical and religious path of Russia
for the sake of preserving his schema of world development.
“Pushkin also did not agree with Chaadaev concerning the unity of
Christianity, which for Chaadaev ‘wholly consisted in the idea of the merging
of all the moral forces of the world’ for the establishment of ‘a social system
or Church which would have to introduce the kingdom of truth among people’.[597] To
this Pushkin objected already in his letter of 1831: ‘You see the unity of
Christianity in Catholicism, that is, in the Pope. Does it not consist in the
idea of Christ, which we find also in Protestantism?’ Pushkin notes the
Catholicentrism of Chaadaev, and reminds him of the Protestant part of the
Western Christian world. But the main point is that Pushkin turns out to be
better-prepared theologically than Chaadaev. The Church is the Body of Christ,
and Christ Himself is Her Head, according to the teaching of the Apostle Paul (Ephesians
1.23, 4.16; Colossians 1.18, etc.). Here Pushkin in a certain sense
anticipates the problems of Dostoyevsky, who considered that Rus’ had preserved
that Christ that the West had lost, and that the division of the Churches had
taken place precisely because of different understandings of Christ.
“Pushkin considered it necessary to say a few words also about the
clergy, although Chaadaev had not directly criticised them in his first letter.
‘Our clergy,’ writes the poet, ‘were worthy of respect until Theophan
[Prokopovich]. They never sullied themselves with the wretchednesses of
papism…, and, of course, they would never have elicited a Reformation at a
moment when mankind needed unity more than anything.’ In evaluating the role of
the clergy in Russian history, Pushkin distinguished between two stages: before
Peter and after Peter. The role of the clergy in Russian life before Peter was
exceptionally great. Ancient Rus’ inherited from Byzantium, together with the
two-headed eagle on her arms, the idea of the symphony of secular and
ecclesiastical power. This idea was equally foreign both to caesaropapism and
papocaesarism and the democratic idea of the separation of the Church from the
State. Of course, symphony never found its full incarnation in State life, but
it is important that as an idea it lived both in the Church and in the State,
and the role of the clergy as the necessary subject of this symphony was
naturally lofty and indisputable. But even outside the conception of
‘symphony’, the clergy played an exceptionally important role in the history of
Russia. In the epoch of the Tatar-Mongol yoke they were almost the only
educated class in Russian society: ‘The clergy, spared by the wonderful
quick-wittedness of the Tatars alone in the course of two dark centuries kept
alive the pale sparks of Byzantine education’. In another place Pushkin even
found it necessary to contrast the Russian and Catholic clergy – true, without
detailed explanations of his affirmation: ‘In Russia the influence of the
clergy was so beneficial, and in the Roman-Catholic lands so harmful…
Consequently we are obliged to the monks of our history also for our
enlightenment’.
“A new era began from the time of Theophan Prokopovich (more exactly:
Peter I), according to Pushkin. In a draft of a letter dated 1836 he wrote to
Chaadaev: ‘Peter the Great tamed (another variant: ‘destroyed’) the clergy,
having removed the patriarchate’. Peter made the clergy into an institution
obedient to himself and destroyed the age-old idea of symphony. Now they had
begun to be excised from the consciousness both of the clergy and of the simple
people, and of state officials. In losing their role in society, the clergy
were becoming more and more backward, more and more distant from the needs and
demands of the life of society. They were being forced to take the role of
‘fulfillers of the cult’.
“In Pushkin’s opinion, a serious blow against the clergy was later
delivered by Catherine II. And if we are to speak of the backwardness of the
Russian clergy, it is there that we must see its source. ‘Catherine clearly
persecuted the clergy, sacrificing it to her unlimited love of power, in the service
of the spirit of the times… The seminaries fell into a state of complete
collapse. Many villages did not have priests… What a pity! For the Greek
confession gives us our special national character’. If Chaadaev reproaches
Russia for not having ‘her own face’, then for Pushkin it is evident that
Russia has ‘her own face’ and it was formed by Orthodoxy. Therefore a sad note
is heard in Pushkin’s evaluation of the era of Catherine: she has her own face,
her ‘special national character’, if only she does not lose it because of
ill-thought-out reforms and orders foreign to the spirit of Russian life. In
contrast to Chaadaev, Pushkin linked the backwardness of the contemporary
clergy not with the reception of Christianity from Byzantium, but with the recent
transformations in Russian State and Church life, and sought the roots of this
backwardness not in the 10th century but in the 18th
century, in the reforms of Peter and in the epoch of the so-called
Enlightenment…”[598]
Such was the debate in its main outlines. And yet, just as Pushkin moved
towards the Slavophile position later in life, so, less surely and certainly,
did Chaadaev. Thus in 1830 he praised Pushkin’s nationalist poems on the Warsaw
insurrection. And later, in his Apology of a Madman (1837), he was
inclined to think that the very emptiness of Russia’s past might enable her to
contribute to the future. Indeed, he then believed that Russia was destined “to
resolve the greater part of the social problems, to perfect the greater part of
the ideas which have arisen in older societies, to pronounce judgement on the
most serious questions which trouble the human race”.[599]
Moreover, in the same Apology (1837), he spoke of the Orthodox Church as
“this church that is so humble and sometimes so heroic”. And in a conversation
with Khomiakov in 1843 he declared: “From Holy Byzantium holy Orthodoxy shines
out for us”. [600]
However, while Slavophile tendencies sometimes surfaced in Chaadaev, as
in other westernizers, his fundamentally westernising radicalism was revealed
by his anti-monarchical remark on the occasion of the European revolutions in
1848: “We don’t want any King except the King of heaven”…[601]
Russia and Europe:
(2) Belinsky vs. Gogol
The figure of Peter the Great continued to be a critical point of
difference between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. The Westernizers
admired him (for Chaadaev he was, with Alexander I, almost the only significant
Russian): the Slavophiles criticised him as the corrupter of the true Russian
tradition. All felt they had to interpret his place in Russian history. Once
again it was Pushkin who began the reappraisal with his famous poem on the
statue of Peter, The Bronze Horseman. However, it was the literary
critic Vissarion Belinsky who made the decisive contribution from the
westernizers’ side.
Unlike most of the intellectuals of the time, Belinsky was not a
nobleman, but a raznochinets (that is, of undetermined or “sundry”
rank). Moreover, he was an atheist. In fact, he rejected all the traditional
pillars of Russian life. He was one of the first to recognize the greatness of
Pushkin. And he was equally perceptive of the talent of Nicholas Vasilyevich
Gogol and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. And yet these writers, “discovered”
by Belinsky, turned decisively against his westernising philosophy…
Belinsky was concerned, writes Walicki, “above all with the role of
Peter the Great and the antithesis of pre-and post-reform Russia. In his
analysis, he made use of a dialectical scheme current among the Russian
Hegelians, although he was the first to apply it to Russian history.
Individuals as well as whole nations, he argued, pass through three
evolutionary stages: the first is the stage of ‘natural immediacy’; the second
is that of the abstract universalism of reason, with its ‘torments of
reflection’ and painful cleavage between immediacy and consciousness; the third
is that of ‘rational reality’, which is founded on the ‘harmonious
reconciliation of the immediate and conscious elements’.
“Belinsky developed this idea in detail as early as 1841, in his long
essay on ‘The Deeds of Peter the Great’, in which he wrote: ‘There is a
difference between a nation in its natural, immediate and patriarchal state,
and this same nation in the rational movement of its historical development’.
In the earlier stage, he suggested, a nation cannot really properly be called a
nation (natsiia), but only a people (narod). The choice of terms
was important to Belinsky: during the reign of Nicholas the word narodnost’,
used… by the exponents of Official Nationality [together with the words
‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Autocracy’ to express the essence of Russian life], had a
distinctly conservative flavour; natsional’nost’, on the other hand,
thanks to its foreign derivation evoked the French Revolution and echoes of
bourgeois democratic national developments.
“Belinsky’s picture of pre-Petrine Russia was surprisingly similar to
that presented by the Slavophiles, although his conclusions were quite
different from theirs. Before Peter the Russian people (i.e. the nation in the
age of immediacy) had been a close-knit community held together by faith and
custom – i.e. by the unreflective approval of tradition idealized by the
Slavophiles. These very qualities, however, allowed no room for the emergence
of rational thought or individuality, and thus prevented dynamic social change.
“Before Russians could be transformed into a nation it was necessary to
break up their stagnating society… Belinsky argued that the emergence of every
modern nation was accompanied by an apparently contradictory phenomenon –
namely the cleavage between the upper and lower strata of society that so
disturbed the Slavophiles. He regarded this as confirmation of certain general
rules applying to the formation of modern nation-states: ‘In the modern world,’
he wrote, ‘all the elements within society operate in isolation, each one
separately and independently… in order to develop all the more fully and
perfectly… and to become fused once more into a new and homogeneous whole on a
higher level than the original undifferentiated homogeneity’. In his polemics
with the Slavophiles, who regarded the cleavage between the cultivated elite
and the common people as the prime evil of post-Petrine Russia, Belinsky argued
that ‘the gulf between society and the people will disappear in the course of
time, with the progress of civilization’. This meant ‘raising the people to the
level of society’, he was anxious to stress, and not ‘forcing society back to
the level of the people’, which was the Slavophiles’ remedy. The Petrine
reforms, which had been responsible for this social gulf, were therefore, in
Belinsky’s view, the first and decisive step toward modern Russia. ‘Before
Peter the Great, Russia was merely a people [narod]; she became a nation
[natsiia] thanks to the changes initiated by the reformer.’”[602]
Berlin writes: “The central question for all Russians concerned about
the condition of their country was social, and perhaps the most decisive single
influence on the life and work of Belinsky was his social origin. He was born
in poverty and bred in the atmosphere, at once bleak and coarse, of an obscure
country town in a backward province. Moscow did, to some degree, soften and
civilise him, but there remained a core of crudeness, and a self-conscious,
rought, sometimes aggressive tone in his writing. This tone now enters Russian
literature, never to leave it. Belinsky spoke in this sort of accent becaue
this kind of rasied dramatic tone, this harshness, was as natural to him as to
Beethoven. Belinsky’s followers adopted his manner because they were the party
of the enrages, and this was the traditional accent of anger and revolt,
the earnest of violence to come, the rough voice of the insulted and the
oppressed peasant masses proclaiming to the entire world the approaching end of
their suffering at the hands of the discredited older order.
“Belinsky was the first and most powerful of the ‘new men’, the radicals
and revolutionaries who shook and in the end destroyed the classical
aristocratic tradition in Russian literature. The literary elite, the
friends of Pushkin, despite radical ideas obtained abroad after the Napoleonic
wards, despite Decembrist tendencies, was on the whole conservative, if not in
conviction, yet in social habits and temper, connected with the court and the
army, and deeply patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook,
was convinced that Russia had more to learn from the West than to teach it,
that the Slavophile movement was romantic illusion, at times blind
nationalistic megalomania, that Western scientific progress offered the only
hope of lifting Russia from her backward state. And yet this same prophet of
material civilisation, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was
emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries,
spoke no foreign language, could not breathe freely in any environment save
that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecution-ridden abroad. He found
Western habits worthy of respect and emulation, but to him personally quite
insufferable. When abroad he began to sigh most bitterly for home and after a
month away was almost insane with nostalgia. In this sense he represents in his
person the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life to a
far sharper degree than any of his contemporaries, even Dostoevsky.
“This deep inner clash between intellectual conviction and emotional –
sometimes almost physical – predilection is a very characteristically Russian
disease. As the nineteenth century developed, and as the struggle between
social classes became sharper and more articulate, this psychological conflict
which tormented Belinsky emerges more clearly: the revolutionaries, whether
they are social democrats, or social revolutionaries, or communists, unless
they are noblemen or university professors – that is, almost professionally
members of an international society – may make their bow with great conviction
and sincerity to the West in the sense that they believe in its civilisation,
above all its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but
when they are forced to emigrate they find life abroad more agonising than
other exiles…
“To some degree this peculiar amalgam of love and hate is intrinsic to
contemporary Russian feeling about Europe: on the one hand intellectual
respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate and excel; on the other emotional
hostility and suspicion and contempt, a sense of being clumsy, de trop,
of being outsiders; leading as a result to an alternation between excessive
self-prostration before, and aggressive flouting of, Western values. No recent
visitor to the Soviet Union can have failed to remark this phenomenon: a
combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of
the West as enviably self-restrained, clever, efficient and successful; also
cramped, cold, mean, calculating and fenced in, incapable of large views or
generous emotion, incapable of feeling which at times rises too high and
overflows its banks, unable to abandon everything and sacrifice itself in
response to some unique historical challenge; incapable of ever attaining a
rich flowering of life. This attitude is the most constant element in
Belinsky’s most personal and characteristic writings: if it is not the most
valuable element in him, it is the most Russian: Russian history past and
present is not intelligible without it, today more palpably than ever…”[603]
The Slavophiles were free of this neurotic attitude to the West that
Belinsky typified among the westernizers; they were both more critical of the
West, and calmer in relation to it. The reason was that they, unlike the
Westernizers, had discovered the heart of Russia, her Orthodox Christianity.
For them, the critical event in European history was the schism between Eastern
and Western Christianity in the middle of the eleventh century. In thus tracing
the origins of the difference between East and West to the religious schism
between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics of the eleventh century, as
opposed to later events such as the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth
century or the reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth, the
Slavophiles made a very important step in the reintegration of Russian historical
thought with the traditional outlook on history of Orthodox Christianity. This
wider and deeper historical perspective enabled them to see that, having been
sundered from the unity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of the
East for so many centuries, it was inevitable that a new kind of man, homo
occidentalis, with a new psychology, new aims and new forms of social and
political organization, should have been created in the West.
One of the first to see this clearly was
Belinsky’s protégé, Nicholas Vasilyevich Gogol. Having made his
name by satirical and fantastical works such as Notes of a Madman, The
Greatcoat, The Government Inspector and, above all, Dead Souls, he
suddenly and quite unexpectedly turned to Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood.
This change of heart was clearly proclaimed in Correspondence with Friends.
While Belinsky looked forward to the rationalism of Tolstoy, Gogol’s
views on the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy both looked back to Pushkin and
forward to Dostoyevsky’s Pushkin Speech. “All these Slavists and
Europeans, or old believers and new believers, or easterners and westerners,
they are all speaking about two different sides of one and the same subject,
without in any way divining that they are not contradicting or going against
each other.” The quarrel was “a big misunderstanding”. And yet “there is more
truth on the side of the Slavists and easterners”, since their teaching is more
right “on the whole”, while the westerners are more right “in the details”.[604]
“The main theme of the book,” writes I.M.
Andreev, “was God and the Church. And when Gogol was reproached for this, he
replied, simply and with conviction: ‘How can one be silent, when the stones
are ready to cry out about God.’
“Like Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky, God
summoned all ‘to life in the Church’.
“The pages devoted to the Orthodox Church
are the best pages of the book! No Russian writer had expressed as did Gogol
such sincere, filial love for the Mother Church, such reverence and veneration
for Her, such a profound and penetrating understanding both of Orthodoxy as a
whole and of the smallest details of the whole of the Church’s rites.
“’We possess a treasure for which there is
no price,’ is how he characterizes the Church, and he continued: ‘This Church
which, as a chaste virgin, has alone been preserved from the time of the
Apostles in her original undefiled purity, this Church, which in her totality
with her profound dogmas and smallest external rites has been as it were
brought right down from heaven for the Russian people, which alone has the
power to resolve all our perplexing knots and questions… And this Church, which
was created for life, we have to this day not introduced into our life’…
“The religio-political significance of Correspondence
was huge. This book appeared at a time when in the invisible depths of
historical life the destiny of Russia and Russian Orthodox culture was being
decided. Would Russia hold out in Orthodoxy, or be seduced by atheism and
materialism? Would the Russian Orthodox autocracy be preserved in Russia, or
would socialism and communism triumph? These questions were linked with other,
still more profound ones, that touched on the destinies of the whole world.
What was to come? The flourishing and progress of irreligious humanistic
culture, or the beginning of the pre-apocalyptic period of world history?
“Gogol loudly and with conviction
proclaimed that the Truth was in Orthodoxy and in the Russian Orthodox
Autocracy, and that the historical ‘to be or not to be’ of Russian Orthodox
culture, on the preservation of which there also depended the destiny of the
whole world in the nearest future, was now being decided. The world was on the
edge of death, and we have entered the pre-apocalyptic period of world history.
“Correspondence came out in 1847.
Pletnev published it at Gogol’s behest.
“This book, in its hidden essence, was not
understood by its contemporaries and was subjected to criticism not only on the
part of enemies, but also of friends (of course, the former and the latter
proceeded from completely different premises).
“The enemies were particularly disturbed
and annoyed by Gogol’s sincere and convinced approval of the foundations of
those social-political ordered which to so-called ‘enlightened’ people seemed
completely unsustainable.”[605]
Belinksy was furious. “Russia expects from her writers
salvation from Orthodox, Nationhood and Autocracy,” he wrote in his Letter
to Gogol in 1847. And he now called Gogol a “preacher of the knout, apostle
of ignorance, champion of superstition and obscurantism”.
Russia, he thundered, “does not need sermons (she has had her fill of
them!), nor prayers (she knows them by heart), but the awakening in people of
the feeling of human dignity, for so many centuries buried in mud and dung; she
needs laws and rights compatible not with the doctrines of the church, but with
justice and common sense.”[606]
Gogol’s friends, continues Andreev,
“criticized Correspondence for other reasons…
“The most serious and in many respects
just criticism belonged to the Rzhev Protopriest Fr. Matthew Konstantinovsky,
to whom Gogol, who did not yet know him personally, sent his book for review.
Fr. Matthew condemned many places, especially the chapter on the theatre, and
wrote to Gogol that he ‘would give an account for it to God’. Gogol objected,
pointing out that his intention had been good. But Fr. Matthew advised him not
to justify himself before his critics, but to ‘obey the spirit living in us,
and not our earthly corporeality’ and ‘to turn to the interior life’.
“The failure of the book had an
exceptionally powerful effect on Gogol. After some resistance and attempts to
clarify ‘the whirlwind of misunderstandings’, without rejecting his principled
convictions, Gogol humbled himself and acknowledged his guilt in the fact that
he had dared to be a prophet and preacher of the Truth when he personally was
not worthy of serving it. Even to the sharp and cruel letter of Belinsky Gogol
replied meekly and humbly: ‘God knows, perhaps there is an element of truth in
your words.’”[607]
Russia and Europe: (3) Herzen vs. Khomiakov
Belinsky had deified the West, but never felt at home there. Alexander
Ivanovich Herzen was the first Westernizer to symbolize the Westernizers’ exile
from Russian values by permanently settling in the West, in London. From there,
writes Berlin, “he established his free printing press, and in the 1850s began
to publish two periodicals in Russia, The Pole Star [recalling the
Masonic lodge of the same name] and The Bell (the first issues appeared
in 1855 and 1857 respectively), which marked the birth of systematic
revolutionary agitation – and conspiracy – by Russian exiles directed against
the tsarist regime.”[608]
Herzen followed Belinsky and the
westernizers in his disdain for Russia’s pre-Petrine past: “You need the past
and its traditions, but we need to tear Russia away from them. We do not want
Russia before Peter, because for us it does not exist, but you do not want the
new Russia. You reject it, but we reject ancient Rus’”.[609]
However, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, Herzen began to lose
faith in the western path to happiness. He began to see the futility (if not
the criminality) of violent revolution, and of such slogans as Proudhon’s “all
property is theft”, or Bakunin’s “the Passion to destroy is the same as the
Passion to create”. The revolution had only left the poor poorer than they had
been before, while the passion to destroy seemed as exhilarating as the passion
to create only in the heat of the moment, and not when the pieces had to be
picked up and paid for the next day… “A curse on you,” he wrote with regard to 1848, “year of blood
and madness, year of the triumph of meanness, beastliness, stupidity!… What did
you do, revolutionaries frightened of revolution, political tricksters,
buffoons of liberty?… Democracy can create nothing positive… and therefore it
has no future… Socialism left a victor on the field of battle will inevitably
be deformed into a commonplace bourgeois philistinism. Then a cry of denial
will be wrung from the titanic breast of the revolutionary minority and the
deadly battle will begin again… We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the
abstract and general, just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer
and contemplation.”[610]
As V.F. Ivanov writes, “he was disillusioned with western civilization
and found that it was deeply penetrated by the petty bourgeois spirit, and was
built on ‘respect for the sacred right of property’ and ‘has no other ideals
except a thirst for personal security’.
“’Europe,’ said Herzen, ‘is approaching a terrible cataclysm. The
medieval world is collapsing. The political and religious revolutions are
weakening under the burden of their own powerlessness, they have done great
things, but they have not fulfilled their task… They have destroyed faith in
the throne and the altar, but have not realized freedom, they have lit in
hearts a desire which they are not able to satisfy. Parliamentarism,
Protestantism – all these were deferments, temporary salvation, powerless
outposts against death and degeneration; their time has passed. From 1849 they
began to understand that neither ossified Roman law nor cunning casuistry nor
nauseating deistic philosophy nor merciless religious rationalism are able to
put off the realization of the destinies of society.’
“Herzen did not believe in the creative function of contemporary
democracy, he considered that it possessed only a terrible power of
destruction, but not the capacity to create.
“’In democracy,’ said Herzen, ‘there is a terrible power of destruction,
but when it takes it upon itself to create something, it gets lost in student
experiments, in political etudes. There is no real creativity in democracy.’
“Hence Herzen drew the merciless conclusion that the perishing order
must be destroyed to its foundations.
“This destruction had to be universal, it would come in a storm and
blood.
“’Who knows what will come out of this blood? But whatever comes out, it
is enough that in this paroxysm of madness, revenge, discord and retribution
the world that restricts the new man, and hinders him from living, hinders him
for establishing himself in the future, will perish. And that is good, and for
that reason let chaos and destruction flourish and may the future be
constructed.’”[611]
But then comes the unexpected: disillusioned with the West, this
westernizer par excellence turns in hope to – Russia. “’The future,’
declared Herzen, not without some pride, ‘belongs to the Russian people, who is
called to bring an end to the decrepit and powerless world and clear a place
for the new and beautiful [world].’
“In 1851 in a letter to Michelet Herzen wrote: ‘Amidst this chaos,
amidst this dying agony and tormented regeneration, amidst this world falling
into dust around its cradle, men’s gaze is involuntarily directed towards the
East.’”[612]
And when Alexander II emancipated the peasants in 1861, he hailed him in the
words of Julian the Apostate to Christ: “You have conquered, Galilaean!” And
yet he continued his revolutionary agitation against “the Galilaean”,
especially in Poland. But when the Polish uprising failed in 1863,
subscriptions to Kolokol fell by a factor of six times.
But what in particular in Russian reality attracted the gaze and arouse
the hopes of Herzen? The Russian peasant commune or mir. Perhaps, he
thought, this was a specifically kind of socialism…
As N.O. Lossky writes: “disappointed with Western Europe and its ‘petty
bourgeois’ spirit, he came to the conclusion that the Russian village commune
and the artel hold a promise of socialism being realized in Russia
rather than in any other country. The village commune meant for him peasant
communism [‘The Russian People and Socialism’, 1852, II, 148]. In view of this
he came to feel that reconciliation with the Slavophils was possible. In his
article ‘Moscow Panslavism and Russian Europeanism’ (1851) he wrote: Is not
socialism ‘accepted by the Slavophils as it is by us? It is a bridge on which
we can meet and hold hands’ (I, 338).”[613]
Was there indeed a bridge between Slavophiles and westernizers in their
common support of the Russian village commune, or mir? Certainly, the
Slavophiles agreed with Herzen in their high estimate of the mir. Among
them was the most famous among them, Alexis Stepanovich Khomiakov, who
“attached the greatest value to the Russian village commune, the mir,
with its meetings that passed unanimous decisions and its traditional justice
in accordance with custom, conscience, and inner truth.”[614]
Moreover, there would seem to be some prima facie similarity
between Herzen’s idea of “Russian socialism” and Khomiakov’s key idea of sobornost’.
Let us explore this similarity here.
Khomiakov had not gone through the tormenting journey from westernism to
Orthodoxy that his friend Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky had undergone, but had
remained that rarity in the Russian educated classes – a man completely au
fait with modern developments (he had several inventions to his credit),
but also a committed Orthodox who practised his faith openly and without shame.
As Roy Campbell writes, “he was not reactionary, and neither did he romanticize
the past, as fellow Slavophiles were sometimes apt to do. He was as far removed
from the ‘ridiculousness of conservatism’ as he was from the revolution
movement with its ‘immoral and passionate self-reliance’”.[615]
“In contradistinction to Kireyevsky and K. Aksakov,” writes Lossky,
“Khomiakov does not slur over the evils of Russian life but severely condemns
them. At the beginning of the Crimean War (against Turkey, France and England,
1854-1855) he denounced with the fire and inspiration of a prophet, the Russia
of his day (before the great reforms of Alexander II) and called her to
repentance.
“Western Europe has failed to embody the Christian ideal of the
wholeness of life through overemphasizing logical knowledge and rationality;
Russia has so far failed to embody it because complete, all-embracing truth
from its very nature develops slowly… Nevertheless Khomiakov believes in the
great mission of the Russian people when it comes fully to recognize and
express ‘all the spiritual forces and principles that lie at the basis of Holy
Orthodox Russia.’ ‘Russia is called to stand at the forefront of universal
culture; history gives her the right to do so because of the completeness and
manysidedness of her guiding principles; such a right given to a nation imposes
a duty upon every one of its members.’ Russia’s ideal is not to be the richest
or most powerful country but to become ‘the most Christian of all human
societies’.
“In spite of Khomiakov’s… critical attitude toward Western Europe,… [he]
speaks of it in one of his poems as ‘the land of holy miracles’. He was
particularly fond of England. The best things in her social and political life
were due, he thought, to the right balance being maintained between liberalism
and conservatism. The conservatives stood for the organic force of the national
life developing from its original sources while the liberals stood for the
personal, individual force, for analytical, critical reason. The balance
between these two forces in England has never yet been destroyed because ‘every
liberal is a bit of a conservative at bottom because he is English’. In
England, as in Russia, the people have kept their religion and distrust
analytical reason. But Protestant scepticism is undermining the balance between
the organic and the analytic forces, and this is a menace to England in the
future…”[616]
In another place, Khomiakov saw the menace to England in her
conservatism: “England with its modest science and its serious love of
religious truth might give some hope; but – permit the frank expression of my
thoughts – England is held by the iron chain of traditional custom.”[617]
While attached to England, when it came to comparing the Eastern and
Western forms of Christianity, Khomiakov was very severe in his judgements.
Influenced by Elder Ambrose of Optina as Kireevsky had been by Elder Macarius,
he had a deep, unshakeable confidence in the Orthodox Church. This
enabled him to write perhaps the first completely Orthodox ecclesiological
tract in Russian history, and one of the best of any age, The Church is One.
“The
Church,” he wrote, “does not recognise any power over herself other than her
own, no other’s court than the court of faith”.[618] The Church is One, declared
Khomiakov, and that Church is exclusively the Orthodox Church. “Western Christianity
has ceased to be Christianity,” he wrote. “In Romanism [Roman Catholicism]
there is not one word, not one action, upon which the seal of spiritual life
might lie”. “Both Protestantisms (Roman and German)… already bear death within
themselves; it is left to unbelief only to take away the corpses and clean the
arena. And all this is the righteous punishment for the crime committed by the
‘West’”.[619]
This sharp rejection of the right of Catholics and Protestants to call
themselves members of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church was in
itself remarkable after the mild ecumenism that was so prevalent in his time.
This anti-ecumenism was shared by some of his educated contemporaries, such as
Elder Ambrose and Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, but not by many.
However, it was not only the Oneness of the Church that Khomiakov
explicated with particular success, but also Her Catholicity, or sobornost’
in the Slavonic translation, which he defined as “unity-in-diversity”. “The
Church is called Catholic,” writes Khomiakov, “because She belongs to the whole
world, and not to some particular locality; because the whole of humanity and
the whole of the earth is sanctified by Her, and not some particular people or
country; because Her essence consists in the agreement and unity of spirit and
life of all Her members who recognize Her throughout the earth.
“It follows from this that when a community is called a local Church,
like the Greek, Russian or Syrian, this signifies only the gathering of the
members of the Church living in such-and-such a country (Greece, Russia, Syria,
etc.), and does not contain within itself the presupposition that one community
of Christians could express the teaching of the Church, or give a dogmatic
interpretation to the teaching of the Church, without the agreement of the
other communities; still less does it presuppose that some community or
community pastor could prescribe its or his interpretation to others. The grace
of faith is not separate from holiness of life and not one community of
Christians or pastor can be recognized as preservers of the whole faith, just
as not one pastor or community can be considered representative of the whole
holiness of the Church.”[620] For
“it is not people, or a multitude of people, that preserve tradition and write
in the Church, but the Spirit of God, Who lives in the coming together of the
Church.”[621]
The principle of sobornost’, writes Lossky, “implies that the
absolute bearer of truth in the Church is not the patriarch who has supreme
authority, not the clergy, and not even the ecumenical council, but only the
Church as a whole. ‘There have been heretical councils,’ says Khomiakov; ‘for
instance, those in which a half-Arian creed was drawn up; externally, they
differed in no way from the ecumenical councils – but why were they rejected?
Solely because their decisions were not recognized by the whole body of the
faithful as the voice of the Church.’ Khomiakov is referring here to the
epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs to Pope Pius IX (1848), which says: ‘The
invincible truth and immutable certainty of the Christian dogma does not depend
upon the hierarchs of the Church; it is preserved by the whole of the people
composing the Church which is the body of Christ’ (A letter to Palmer, October
11, 1850. II, 363).”[622]
Although councils are not infallible, it is nevertheless in the coming
together of the clergy and the people in councils to decide dogmatic and
canonical questions that the Holy Spirit of truth reveals Himself, as in the Seven
Ecumenical Councils. And so the Church is Conciliar by essence; Her
truth is revealed to a multitude of Her members meeting in council, and not to
just one of her members thinking in solitude, as the West supposes - whether
that individual is the Roman Pope or a Protestant layman. It is at this
point that the Slavonic translation of of the Greek word kaqolikh, “Catholic”, by the Slavonic
word sobornaia becomes illuminating. For the word sobornaia is
derived from sobor, meaning "council" (or a large church with
two or three altars). This implies a direct link between the Church's
Catholicity and Her Conciliarity. And this in turn suggests that the vital
distinguishing quality of Orthodox Catholicity, as opposed to Roman Catholicism
and Protestant democratism lies in its Conciliarity. For it is in Her conciliar
life that the Church preserves Her unity and drives out heresies - which
Protestant individualism cannot do, since it makes the opinion of every man
the supreme arbiter of truth, and which Roman pseudo-Catholicism cannot do,
since it makes the opinion of one man the supreme arbiter.
Now, as Fr. Michael Pomazansky points out, "in Greek there is no
philological or linguistic connection between the concepts "catholic"
and "council" (ecumenical). A council of the Church is called in
Greek SunodoV,
and an ecumenical council, oikoumenikh SunodoV".[623]
Nevertheless, the lack of a philological connection does not mean that there is
no deeper semantic and theological connection, a connection seen by the translators
Saints Cyril and Methodius when they chose this translation.
And there is no serious difference between Khomiakov’s definition of
Catholicity and Pomazansky’s: "Catholicity refers to the fact that the
Church is not limited to space, by earthly boundaries, nor is it limited in
time, that is, by the passing of generations into the life beyond the grave. In
its catholic fullness, in its catholicity, the Church embraces both the Church
of the called and the Church of the chosen, the Church on earth and the Church
in Heaven."[624]
Or St. Maximus the Confessor’s: "Men, women and children,
profoundly divided as to race, nation, language, manner of life, work,
knowledge, honour, fortune... are all recreated by the Church in the Spirit. To
all equally she communicates a divine aspect. All receive from her a unique
nature which cannot be broken asunder, a nature which no longer permits one
henceforth to take into consideration the many and profound differences which
are their lot. In that way all are raised up and united in a truly catholic
manner."[625]
Khomiakov's argument was as follows: "’Sobor’ expresses the idea of
a gathering not only in the sense of an actual, visible union of many in a
given place, but also in the more general sense of the continual possibility of
such a union. In other words: it expresses the idea of unity in multiplicity.
Therefore, it is obvious that the word kaqolikoV, as understood by the two great
servants of the Word of God sent by Greece to the Slavs, was derived not from kata and ola, but from kata and olon; for kata often has the same meaning as
our preposition 'according to', for instance: kata Matqaion, kata Markon, 'according to Matthew',
'according to Mark'. The Catholic Church is the Church according to all, or
according to the unity of all, kaq'olwn twn pisteuontwn, the Church according to
complete unanimity, the Church in which all peoples have disappeared and in
which there are no Greeks, no barbarians, no difference of status, no
slaveowners, and no slaves; that Church about which the Old Testament
prophesied and which was realised in the New Testament - in one word, the
Church as it was defined by St. Paul."[626]
"The Apostolic Church of the ninth century (the time of Saints
Cyril and Methodius) is neither the Church kaq' ekaston (according to the understanding
of each) as the Protestants have it, nor the Church kata ton episkopon thV RwmhV (according to the understanding
of the bishop of Rome) as is the case with the Latins; it is the Church kaq' olon (according to the understanding
of all in their unity), the Church as it existed prior to the Western split and
as it still remains among those whom God preserved from the split: for, I
repeat, this split is a heresy against the dogma of the unity of the Church."[627]
The Catholicity of the Orthodox Church was shared, according to
Khomiakov, neither by the Roman Catholic “Church”, which sacrificed diversity
for the sake of unity, nor with Protestantism, which sacrificed unity for
diversity. Instead of Orthodox Catholicity, which belonged only to the Orthodox
Church, the Papists had Romanism, that is, mechanical obedience to the
Bishop of Rome and his ex cathedra definitions of truth. This guaranteed
external unity (for a time), but no inner consensus. And so it violated the
truth of the Church Herself, Her Catholicity.
Moreover, Romanism contains the seeds of Protestantism insofar as the
Pope was the first protester against the inner Catholicity of the Church as
expressed in the Seven Ecumenical Councils accepted in both East and West. As
Khomiakov put it: "having appropriated the right of independently deciding
a dogmatic question within the area of the Ecumenical Church, private opinion
carried within itself the seed of the growth and legitimation of Protestantism,
that is, of free investigation torn from the living tradition of unity based on
mutual love."[628]
The truth, according to Khomiakov, is given, not to individuals as such,
but to the Church, - “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Timothy
3.15), in St. Paul’s words, - understood as a conciliar organism united in
freedom and love. Thus “clarity of understanding is placed in dependence on the
moral law. The communion of love is not only useful, but completely necessary
for the attainment of the truth, and the attainment of the truth is based on it
and is impossible without it. The truth, being unattainable for individualistic
thought, is accessible only to the coming together of thoughts bound by love.”[629]
We see, then, that Khomiakov’s conception of sobornost’ is
strictly theological and ecclesiological, and cannot be identified with
Herzen’s idea of the mir as the embryo of “Russian socialism”.
However, some have accused him of just such a degradation of a
theological mystery into a secular ideal, of confusing sobornost’ with
democracy, the spiritual warmth of communion in Christ with the natural warmth
of a family or society.
“One could even say,” writes S. Khoruzhij, “that the social aspect, the
interpretation of sobornost’ as the principle of social existence, in
time came to occupy centre stage, leaving the original ecclesiological meaning
of the concept in the background and almost forgotten. Here we see a fairly
systematic evolution. From the beginning there lived in the minds of the early
Slavophiles an idea of the communal ideal expressing the harmonious management
of social life. They were in agreement in considering the closest historical
approximation to it the village commune, the peasant mir, and,
correspondingly, the ideal was usually called ‘communality’ or ‘communal
unity’, being defined as ‘unity which consists in… the concept of a natural and
moral brotherhood and inner justice’ (I, 99). It is a banal tradition to
reproach the Slavophiles for idealizing the communal set-up and Russian
history. For all its triteness, the reproach is just; although Khomiakov tried
to moderate this tendency (especially after the Crimean war), he never managed
to measure with one measure and judge with an equal judgement home and abroad,
Russia and the West. But we must point something else out here. However
embellished were his descriptions of the sources and bases of Russian history
and statehood, embellishment never became deification, nor was communality
identified with sobornost’. They were two different principles, and
Khomiakov did not think of merging them into each other, bringing a human,
secular matter to the level of the Theandric and grace-filled. He saw an
impassible boundary between the one and the other.
“However, it was not long before people with frightening ease lost the
ability to discern this boundary – and then learned to deny it. Sobornost’
was inexorably, with greater and greater strength and openness, brought down to
earth, deprived of its grace-filled content and reduced to a simple social and
organic principle: to a certain degree this process was the very essence of the
ideological evolution of Slavophilism, from its earlier to its later variants,
and from it to the conservatism of the last reign, to post-revolutionary
Eurasianism and still further. In this process of the degeneration of the path
of sobornost’ it crossed paths with the socialist idea: as has been
pointed out more than once, ‘in this attraction to the ideal of… the commune it
is not difficult to discern a subconscious and erroneous thirst for sobornost’
[Florovsky]’. Therefore in the same descending line we find in the end all the
communard variations on the theme of collectivisation, Soviet patriotism and
even National Bolshevism… At the same as grace freedom is cast out – and, as a
result, sobornost’ completely lost its spiritual nature, being turned
into the regulative principle either of mechanical statehood, or of the organic
life of the primitive community. The link with the Church, churchness, was for
the main part preserved externally. However, it goes without saying the very
idea of the Church could here become just as degenerate as the idea of sobornost’.
In the first case the Church was approximated with the state to the point of
being indistinguishable frm it, and in the second case it emerged as a
primitively pagan institution for the sanctification of life and manners. They
claimed to be preserving churchness, while rejecting the principle of freedom –
and this was spiritual blindness. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is
freedom’, says Paul, and Orthodoxy reveals his covenant through the ascetic
principle of synergy: the grace of the Holy Spirit lives in the Church, but
each member of the Church acquires it by his personal spiritual activity, to
the realization of his own personal liberty. And only in ‘the agreement of
personal liberties’ (Khomiakov) is the grace-filled Body of the Lord put
together.”[630]
Russia
and Europe: (4) Kireevsky
We have seen that the Slavophiles believed
that western civilization since the Schism in the eleventh century had created
a new kind of man, homo occidentalis. The question, then, was: what were
the main characteristics of this new man, and in what did he differ from homo
orientalis, the older, original kind of Christian and European, who was now
to be found only in those Balkan lands conquered by the Turks and in the
distant outpost of Kievan Rus’? The first clear answer to this question was expounded by Ivan
Vasilievich Kireevsky in his Reply to Khomiakov (1839) and On the
Character of European Civilization and Its Relationship to Russian Civilization
(1852).
Kireevsky,
a man of thoroughly western education, tastes and habits, who converted to the
eastern ideal in adult life, found the answer to this question in the growth of
western rationalism.
The beginning of Kireevsky’s spiritual emancipation may be said to date
to 1829, when, as Fr. Sergius Chetverikov writes, he “appeared for the first
time in the field of literature with an article about Pushkin, which revealed a
remarkably clear understanding of the works of this poet. In this article he
already expressed doubt in the absolute truth of German philosophy and pointed
out the pressing need for the development of a school of original Russian
scientific thought. ‘German philosophy can not take root in us. Our philosophy
must arise from current questions, from the prevailing interest of our people
and their individual ways of life.’ But at the same time we must not reject the
experience of Western European thought. ‘The crown of European enlightenment
served as the cradle of our education. It was born when the other states had
already completed the cycle of their intellectual development; and where they
finished, there we began. Like a young sister in a large harmonious family,
Russia was enriched by the experience of her older brothers and sisters prior
to her entry into the world.’”[631]
At this stage the full uniqueness and saving truth of Orthodoxy was
perhaps not yet fully revealed to Kireevsky. The decisive moment in his
conversion, as Nina Lazareva writes, was his marriage to Natalya Petrovna
Arbeneva in 1834: “The beginning of his family life was for Ivan Vasilievich
also the beginning of the transformation of his inner world, the beginning of
his coming out of that dead-end in which his former rationalistic world-view
had led him. The difference between the whole structure of Natalya Petrovna’s
life, educated as she had been in the rules of strict piety, and that of Ivan
Vasilievich, who had passed his days and nights in tobacco-filled rooms reading
and discussing the latest philosophical works, could not fail to wound both of
them.
“In the note written by A.I. Koshelev from the words of N.P. Kireevsky and entitled ‘The Story of Ivan Vasilievich’s Conversion’, we read: ’In the first period after their marriage her fulfilment of our Church rites and customs made an unpleasant impression on him, but from the tolerance and delicacy that was natural to him he did not hinder her in this at all. She on her side was still more sorrowfully struck by his lack of faith and complete neglect of all the customs of the Orthodox Church. They had conversations which ended with it being decided that he would not hinder her in the fulfilment of her obligations, and he would be free in his actions, but he promised in her presence not to blaspheme and by all means to cut short the conversations of his friends that were unpleasant to her. In the second year of their marriage he asked his wife to read Cousin. She willing did this, but when he began to ask her for her opinion of this book, she said that there was much good in it, but that she had not found anything new, for in the works of the Holy Fathers it was all expounded in a much profounder and more satisfying way. He laughed and was quiet. He began to ask his wife to read Voltaire with him. She told him that she was ready to read any serious book that he might suggest to her, but she disliked mockery and every kind of blasphemy and she could neither hear nor read them. Then after some time they began to read Schelling together, and when great, radiant thoughts stopped them and I.V. Kireevsky demanded wonderment from his wife, she first said that she knew these thoughts from the works of the Holy Fathers. She often pointed them out to him in the books of the Holy Fathers, which forced Ivan Vasilievich to read whole pages sometimes. It was unpleasant for him to recognise that there really was much in the Holy Fathers that he had admired in Schelling. He did not like to admit this, but secretly he took his wife’s books and read them with interest.’
“At that time the works of the Holy Fathers were hardly published in
Russia, lovers of spiritual literature transcribed them themselves or for small
sums of money they engaged transcribers. Natalya Petrovna made notes from those
books which her spiritual father, Hieromonk Philaret (Puliashkin) gave her to
read. In his time he had laboured much to prepare the Slavonic Philokalia for
publication. These were works of the Holy Fathers collected by St. Paisius
Velichkovsky which contained instructions on mental prayer, that is, on the
cleansing of the soul from passions, on the means to attaining this and in
particular on the union of the mind and the heart in the Jesus prayer. In 1836
Ivan Vasilievich for the first time read the works of St. Isaac the Syrian, who
was called the teacher of silence. Thus the philosopher came into contact with
the hitherto unknown to him, centuries-old Orthodox enlightenment, which always
witnessed to the True Light, our Lord Jesus Christ.
“’Acquaintance with the Novospassky monk Philaret, conversations with
the holy elder and the reading of various works of the Holy Fathers gave him
pleasure and drew him to the side of piety. He went to see Fr. Philaret, but
each time as it were unwillingly. It was evident that he wanted to go to him,
but forcing was always necessary.’ This continued until, according to the
Providence of God, and thanks to the clairvoyance of Elder Philaret and his
knowledge of the human soul, a truly wondrous event took place: ‘I.V. Kireevsky
in the past never wore a cross round his neck. His wife had more than once
asked him to do that, but Ivan Vasilyevich had not replied. Finally, he told
her once that he would put on a cross if it would be sent to him by Fr.
Philaret, whose mind and piety he warmly admired. Natalya Petrovna went to Fr.
Philaret and communicated this to him. The elder made the sign of the cross,
took it off his neck and said to Natalya Petrovna: ‘Let this be to Ivan
Vasilyevich for salvation.’
“When Natalya Petrovna went home, Ivan Vasilyevich on meeting her said:
‘Well, what did Fr. Philaret say?’ She took out the cross and gave it to Ivan
Vasilyevich. Ivan Vasilyevich asked her: ‘What is this cross?’ Natalya Petrovna
said to him that Fr. Philaret had taken it off himself and said: let this be to
him for salvation. Ivan Vasilyevich fell on his knees and said: ‘Well, now I
expect salvation for my soul, for in my mind I had determined: if Fr. Philaet
takes off his cross and sends it to me, then it will be clear that God is
calling me to salvation.’ From that moment a decisive turnaround in the
thoughts and feelings of Ivan Vasilyevich was evident.’”[632]
Soon Kireevsky met the famous Optina Elder Macarius, with whom he
started the series of Optina translations of the works of the Holy Fathers into
Russian. This, as well as being of great importance in itself, marked the
beginning of the return of a part of the educated classes to a more than
nominal membership of the Church. It was on the basis of the teaching of the
Holy Fathers that Kireevsky determined to build a philosophy that would engage
with the problems felt by the Russian intelligentsia of his day and provide
them with true enlightenment.
A
very important element in this philosophy would be a correct “placing” of
Russia in relation to Western Europe. According to Kireevsky, “three
elements lie at the foundation of European [i.e. Western European] education:
Roman Christianity, the world of the uneducated barbarians who destroyed the
[western] Roman empire, and the classical world of ancient paganism.
“This classical world of ancient paganism,
which did not enter into the inheritance of Russia, essentially constitutes the
triumph of the formal reason of man over everything that is inside and within
him – pure, naked reason, based on itself, recognizing nothing higher than or
outside itself and appearing in two forms – the form of formal abstraction and
the form of abstract sensuality. Classicism’s influence on European education
had to correspond to this same character.
“Whether it was because Christians in the
West gave themselves up unlawfully to the influence of the classical world, or
because heresy accidentally united itself with paganism, the Roman Church
differs in its deviation from the Eastern only in that same triumph of
rationalism over Tradition, of external ratiocination over inner spiritual
reason. Thus it was in consequence of this external syllogism drawn out of the
concept of the Divine equality of the Father and the Son [the Filioque]
that the dogma of the Trinity was changed in opposition to spiritual sense and
Tradition. Similarly, in consequence of another syllogism, the pope became the
head of the Church in place of Jesus Christ. They tried to demonstrate the
existence of God with a syllogism; the whole unity of the faith rested on
syllogistic scholasticism; the Inquisition, Jesuitism – in a word, all the
particularities of Catholicism, developed by virtue of the same formal process
of reason, so that Protestantism itself, which the Catholics reproach for its
rationalism, proceeded directly from the rationalism of Catholicism…
“Thus rationalism was both an extra element
in the education of Europe at the beginning and is now an exclusive
characteristic of the European enlightenment and way of life. This will be
still clearer if we compare the basic principles of the public and private way
of life of the West with the basic principles of the same public and private
way of life which, if it had not developed completely, was at least clearly
indicated in old Russia, when she was under the direct influence of pure
Christianity, without any admixture from the pagan world.
“The
whole private and public way of life of the West is founded on the concept of
individual, separate independence, which presupposes individual isolation.
Hence the sacredness of formal relationships; the sacredness of property and
conditional decrees is more important than the personality. Every individual is
a private person; a knight, prince or city within his or its rights is
an autocratic, unlimited personage that gives laws to itself. The first step of
each personage into society is to surround himself with a fortress from the
depths of which he enters into negotiations with others and other independent
powers.
“… I was speaking about the difference
between enlightenment in Russia and in the West. Our educative principle
consisted in our Church. There, however, together with Christianity, the still
fruitful remnants of the ancient pagan world continued to act on the
development of enlightenment. The very Christianity of the West, in separation
from the Universal Church, accepted into itself the seeds of that principle
which constituted the general colouring of the whole development of Greco-Roman
culture: the principle of rationalism. For that reason the character of
European education differs by virtue of an excess of rationalism.
“However, this excess appeared only later,
when logical development had already overwhelmed Christianity, so to speak. But
at the beginning rationalism, as I said, appeared only in embryo. The Roman
Church separated from the Eastern because it changed certain dogmas existing in
the Tradition of the whole of Christianity into others by deduction. She
spread other dogmas by means of the same logical process, again in opposition
to Tradition and the spirit of the Universal Church. Thus a logical belief lay
at the very lowest base of Catholicism. But the first action of rationalism was
limited to this at the beginning. The inner and outer construction of the
Church, which had been completed earlier in another spirit, continued to exist
without obvious changes until the whole unity of the ecclesiastical teaching
passed into the consciousness of the thinking part of the clergy. This was
completed in the philosophy of scholasticism, which, by reason of the logical
principle at the very foundation of the Church, could not reconcile the
contradictions of faith and reason in any other way than by means of syllogism,
which thereby became the first condition of every belief. At first, naturally,
this same syllogism tried to demonstrate the truth of faith against reason and
subdue reason to faith by means of rational arguments. But this faith,
logically proved and logically opposed to reason, was no longer a living, but a
formal faith, not faith as such, but only the logical rejection of reason.
Therefore during this period of the scholastic development of Catholicism,
precisely by reason of its rationality, the Western church becomes an enemy of
reason, its oppressive, murderous, desperate enemy. But, taken to its extreme,
as the continuation of this same logical process, this absolute annihilation of
reason produced the well-known opposite effect, the consequences of which
constitute the character of the present enlightenment. That is what I meant
when I spoke of the rational element of Catholicism.
“Christianity in the East knew neither
this struggle of faith against reason, nor this triumph of reason over faith.
Therefore its influence on enlightenment was dissimilar to that of Catholicism.
“When examining the social construction of
old Russia, we find many differences from the West, and first of all: the
formation of society into so-called mirs [communes]. Private, personal
idiosyncracy, the basis of western development, was as little known among us as
was social autocracy. A man belonged to the mir, and the mir to him.
Agricultural property, the fount of personal rights in the West, belonged with
us to society. A person had the rights of ownership to the extent that entered
into the membership of society.
“But this society was not autonomous and
could not order itself, or itself acquire laws for itself, because it was not
separated from other similar communities that were ruled by uniform custom. The
innumerable multitude of these small communes, which constituted Russia, was
all covered with a net of churches, monasteries and the remote dwellings of
hermits, whence there spread everywhere identical concepts of the relationship
between social matters and personal matters. These concepts little by little
were bound to pass over into a general conviction, conviction – into custom,
whose place was taken by law, which established throughout the whole space of
the lands subject to our Church one thought, one point of view, one aim, one
order of life. This universal uniformity of custom was probably one of the
reasons for its amazing strength, which has preserved its living remnants even
to our time, in spite of all the opposition of destructive influences which, in
the course of two hundred years, strove to introduce new principles in their
place.
“As a result of these strong, uniform and
universal customs, it was impossible for there to be any change in the social
order that was not in agreement with the order of the whole. Every person’s
family relationships were defined, first of all, by his birth; but in the same
predetermined order the family was subject to the commune, and the wider
commune to the assembly, the assembly to the veche, and so on, whence
all the private circles came together in one centre, in one Orthodox Church. No
personal reasoning, no artificial agreement could found any new order, think up
new rights and privileges. Even the very word right was unknown among us
in its western sense, but signified only justice, righteousness. Therefore no
power could be given to any person or class, nor could any right be accorded,
for righteousness and justice cannot be sold or taken, but exist in themselves
independently of conditional relationships. In the West, by contrast, all
social relationship are founded on convention or strive to attain this
artificial basis. Outside convention there are no correct relationships,
but only arbitrariness, which in the governing class is called autonomy,
in the governed – freedom. But in both the one and the other case this
arbitrariness demonstrates not the development of the inner life, but the
development of the external, formal life. All social forces, interests and
rights exist there in separation, each in itself, and they are united not by a
normal law, but either accidentally or by an artificial agreement. In the first
case material force triumphs, in the second – the sum of individual reasonings.
But material force, material dominance, a material majority, the sum of
individual reasonings in essence constitute one principle only at different
moments of their development. Therefore the social contract is not the
invention of the encyclopaedists, but a real ideal to which all the western
societies strove unconsciously, and now consciously, under the influence of the
rational element, which outweighs the Christian element.”[633]
“Private and social life in the West,’ Kireevsky wrote, ‘are based on
the concept of an individual and separate independence that presupposes the
isolation of the individual. Hence the external formal relations of private
property and all types of legal conventions are sacred and of greater
importance than human beings”.
“Only one serious thing was left to man, and that was industry. For him
the reality of being survived only in his physical person. Industry rules the
world without faith or poetry. In our times it unites and divides people. It
determines one’s fatherland, it delineates classes, it lies at the base of
state structures, it moves nations, it declares war, makes peace, changes mores,
gives direction to science, and determines the character of culture. Men bow
down before it and erect temples to it. It is the real deity in which people
sincerely believe and to which they submit. Unselfish activity has become
inconceivable; it has acquires the same significance in the contemporary world
as chivalry had in the time of Cervantes.”[634]
This long and tragic development had its roots, according to Kireevsky,
in the falling away of the Roman Church. "In the ninth century the western
Church showed within itself the inevitable seed of the Reformation, which
placed this same Church before the judgement seat of the same logical reason
which the Roman Church had itself exalted... A thinking man could already see
Luther behind Pope Nicolas I just as… a thinking man of the 16th century could
foresee behind Luther the coming of 19th century liberal Protestantism..."[635]
According to Kireevsky, just as, in a marriage, separation or divorce
takes place when one partner asserts his or her self against the other, so in
the Church schisms and heresies take place when one party asserts itself over
against Catholic unity. In the early,
undivided Church “each patriarchate, each tribe, each country in the Christian
world preserved its own characteristic features, while at the same time
participating in the common unity of the whole Church.”[636] A
patriarchate or country fell away from that unity only if it introduced heresy,
that is, a teaching contrary to the Catholic understanding of the Church. The
Roman patriarchate fell away from the Unity and Catholicity of the Church
through an unbalanced, self-willed development of its own particular strength,
the logical development of concepts, by iintroducing the Filioque into
the Creed in defiance of the theological consciousness of the Church as a
whole. But it fell away from that Unity and Catholicity in another way, by
preaching a heresy about Unity and Catholicity. For the Popes taught
that the Church, in order to be Catholic, must be first and above all Roman –
and “Roman” not in the sense employed by the Greeks when they called themselves
Roman, that is, belonging to the Christian Roman Empire and including both
Italians and Greeks and people of many nationalities. The Popes now understood
“Rome”, “the Roman Church” and “the Roman Faith” in a different, particularist,
anti-Catholic sense – that is, “Roman” as opposed to “Greek”, “the Roman
Church” as opposed to “the Greek Church”, “the Roman Faith” as opposed to, and
something different from and inherently superior to, “the Greek Church”. From
this time that the Roman Church ceased to be a part of the Catholic Church,
having trampled on the dogma of Catholicity. Instead she became the
anti-Catholic, or Romanist, or Latin, or Papist church.
“Christianity penetrated the minds of the western peoples through the
teaching of the Roman Church alone – in Russia it was kindled on the
candle-stands of the whole Orthodox Church; theology in the West acquired a
ratiocinative-abstract character – in the Orthodox world it preserved an inner
wholeness of spirit; there there was a division in the powers of the reason –
here a striving for their living unity; there: the movement of the mind towards
the truth by means of a logical chain of concepts – here: a striving for it by
means of an inner exaltation of self-consciousness towards wholeness of heart
and concentration of reason; there: a searching for external, dead unity –
here: a striving for inner, living unity; there the Church was confused with
the State, uniting spiritual power with secular power and pouring
ecclesiastical and worldly significance into one institution of a mixed
character – in Russia it remained unmixed with worldly aims and institution;
there: scholastic and juridical universities – in ancient Russia: prayer-filled
monasteries concentrating higher knowledge in themselves; there: a rationalist
and scholastic study of the higher truths – here: a striving for their living
and integral assimilation; there: a mutual growing together of pagan and
Christian education – here: a constant striving for the purification of truth;
there: statehood arising out of forcible conquest – here: out of the natural
development of the people’s everyday life, penetrated by the unity of its basic
conviction; there: a hostile walling-off of classes – in ancient Russia their
unanimous union while preserving natural differences; there: the artificial
connection of knights’ castles with what belonged to them constituted separate
states – here: the agreement of the whole land spiritually expresses its
undivided unity; there: agrarian property is the first basis of civil
relationships – here: property is only an accidental expression of personal
relationships; there: formal-logical legality – here: legality proceeding from
everyday life; there: the inclination of law towards external justice – here:
preference for inner justice; there: jurisprudence strives towards a logical
codex – here: instead of an external connectedness of form with form, it seeks
the inner connection of lawful conviction with convictions of faith and everyday
life; there improvements were always accomplished by violent changes – here by
a harmonious, natural growth; there: the agitation of the party spirit – here:
the unshakeability of basic conviction; there: the pursuit of fashion – here:
constancy of everyday life; there: the instability of personal self-rule –
here: the strength of familial and social links; there: the foppishness of
luxury and the artificiality of life – here: the simplicity of vital needs and
the exuberance of moral courage; there: tender dreaminess – here: the healthy
integrity of rational forces; there: inner anxiety of spirit accompanied by
rational conviction of one’s moral perfection – among the Russians: profound
quietness and the calm of inner self-consciousness combined with constant lack
of trust of oneself and the unlimited demands of moral perfection – in a word,
there: disunity of spirit, disunity of thoughts, disunity of sciences, disunity
of state, disunity of classes, disunity of society, disunity of family rights
and obligations, disunity of the whole unity and of all the separate forms of
human existence, social and personal – in Russia, by contrast, mainly a
striving for integrity of everyday existence both inner and outer, social and
personal, speculative and practical, aesthetic and moral. Therefore if what we
have said above is just, disunity and integrity, rationalism [rassudochnost’]
and reason [razumnost’] will be the final expression of West
European and Russian education.”[637]
We may wonder whether the contrast between East and West has been drawn
too sharply, too tidily here. But there can be no doubt that Kireevsky has
unerringly pointed to the main lines of bifurcation between the development of
the the Orthodox East and the Catholic-Protestant West. “Having himself been a
son of the West and gone to study with the most advanced philosophers,” writes
Fr. Seraphim Rose, ‘Kireyevsky was thoroughly penetrated with the Western
spirit and then became thoroughly converted to Orthodoxy. Therefore he saw that
these two things cannot be put together. He wanted to find out why they were
different and what was the answer in one’s soul, what one had to choose.”[638]
Russia and Europe: (5) Dostoyevsky
The young writer Fyodor Mikhailovich
Dostoyevsky had, like Gogol, been a protégé of Belinsky. But,
again like Gogol, he had broken with Belinsky, because of the latter’s atheism
and readiness to subordinate art to propaganda. However, he did not decisively
cast off his socialist acquaintances, and his return to conscious Christianity
was correspondingly tortuous, slow and punctuated by harsh lessons from life.
Dostoyevsky’s Christian critique of socialism, though not yet fully
articulate in the 1840s, had already begun to reveal itself in his relations
with Belinsky, of whom he wrote much later: “Treasuring above all reason,
science and realism, at the same time he comprehended more keenly than anyone
that reason, science and realism alone can merely produce the ant’s nest, and
not social ‘harmony’ within which man can organize his life. He knew that moral
principles are the basis of all things. He believed, to the degree of delusion
and without any reflex, in the new moral foundations of socialism (which,
however, up to the present have revealed nothing but abominable perversions of
nature and common sense). Here was nothing but rapture. Still, as a socialist
he had to destroy Christianity in the first place. He knew that the revolution
must necessarily begin with atheism. He had to dethrone that religion whence
the moral foundations of the society rejected by him had sprung up. Family,
property, personal moral responsibility – these he denied radically. (I may
observe that, even as Herzen, he was also a good husband and father.)
Doubtless, he understood that by denying the moral responsibility of man, he
thereby denied also his freedom; yet, he believed with all his being (much more
blindly than Herzen, who, at the end, it seems, began to doubt) that socialism
not only does not destroy the freedom of man, but, on the contrary, restores it
in a form of unheard-of majesty, only on a new and adamantine foundation.
“At this juncture, however, there remained the radiant personality of
Christ Himself to contend with, which was the most difficult problem. As a
socialist, he was duty bound to destroy the teaching of Christ, to call it
fallacious and ignorant philanthropy, doomed by modern science and economic
tenets. Even so, there remained the beatific image of the God-man, its moral
inaccessibility, its wonderful and miraculous beauty. But in his incessant,
unquenchable transport, Belinsky did not stop even before this insurmountable
obstacle, as did Renan, who proclaimed in his Vie de Jésus – a
book permeated with incredulity – that Christ nevertheless is the ideal of human
beauty, an inaccessible type which cannot be repeated even in the future.
“’But do you know,’ he screamed one evening (sometimes in a state of
great excitement he used to scream), ‘do you know that it is impossible to
charge man with sins, to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek,
when society is organized so meanly that man cannot help but perpetrate
villainies; when, economically, he has been brought to villainy, and that it is
silly and cruel to demand from man that which, by the very laws of nature, he
is impotent to perform even if he wished to…?’
“That evening we were not alone: there was present one of Belinsky’s
friends whom he respected very much and obeyed in many ways. Also present was
an author, quite young, who later gained prominence in literature
[Dostoyevsky].
“’I am even touched to look at him,’ said Belinsky, suddenly
interrupting his furious exclamations, turning to his friend and pointing at
me. ‘Every time I mention Christ his face changes expression, as if he were
ready to start weeping… But, believe me, naïve man,’ he jumped at me
again, ‘believe me that your Christ, if He were born in our time, would be a
most imperceptible and ordinary man; in the presence of contemporary science
and contemporary propellers of mankind, He would be effaced!’”[639]
The essence of “The Parable of the Grand
Inquisitor” in that scene, with Belinsky in the role of Inquisitor and
Dostoyevsky - in that of the silent Christ.
However, Dostoyevsky was not yet ready to
break decisively with the socialist camp. As he wrote: “All these new ideas of
those days carried to us, in Petersburg, a great appeal; they seemed holy in
the highest degree and moral, and – most important of all – cosmopolitan, the
future law of all mankind in its totality. Even long before the Paris
revolution of ’48 we fell under the fascinating influence of these ideas.
Already in ’46 I had been initiated by Belinsky into the whole truth of
that future ‘regenerated world’ and into the whole holiness of the forthcoming
communist society. All these convictions about the immorality of the very
foundations (Christian) of modern society, the immorality of religion, family,
right of property; all these ideas about the elimination of nationalities in
the name of universal brotherhood of men, about the contempt for one’s native
country, as an obstacle to universal progress, and so on, and so forth – all
these constituted such influences as we were unable to overcome and which,
contrarywise, swayed our hearts and minds in the name of some magnanimity. At
any rate, the theme seemed lofty and far above the level of the then prevailing
conceptions, and precisely this was tempting…
“The human mind, once having rejected
Christ, may attain extraordinary results. This is an axiom. Europe, in the
persons of her highest intellectual representatives, renounces Christ, while
we, as is known, are obligated to imitate Europe…”[640]
The revolution of 1848 in Europe, writes V.F. Ivanov, “gave wings of
hope to all the antichristian and destructive forces.
“The profound thinker V.A. Zhukovsky, in January, 1848, in an excerpt
from a letter, What is Going to Happen, prophetically foretold the
bloody chaos of which we are the witnesses in our own days.
“’We live,’ wrote Zhukovsky, ‘on the crater of a volcano which not long
ago was giving out fire, which calmed down and which is now again preparing to
throw up. Its first lava flow has not yet cooled, and already in its depths a
new one is bubbling, and the thunder of stones flying out of the abyss is
announcing that it will soon pour out. One revolution has ended, and another
stepping on its toes, and what is remarkable is that the course of the last is
observing the same order as did the first, in spite of the difference in their
characters. The two are similar in their first manifestations, and now, as
then, they are beginning with a shaking of the main foundation of order:
religion. But now they are doing it in a bolder way and on a broader scale.
Then they attack the faith obliquely, preaching tolerance, but now they are
directly attacking every faith and blatantly preaching atheism; then they were
secretly undermining Christianity, apparently arming themselves against the
abuses of Church authorities, but now they are yelling from the roots that both
Christianity and the Church and the Church authorities and every authority is
nothing other than abuse. What is the aim of the present reformers? – I am
speaking about those who sincerely desire what is better,
sincerely believe in the reality and beneficence of their speculations – what
is the aim of the present reformers?, who are entering on the same path which
their predecessors trod, whose end we saw with shuddering, knowing that the
desired improvement would never be found there. What is the aim of the present
reformers? They themselves do not clearly see it. It is very probable that many
of them are deceiving themselves, and, while going forward with banners on
which there shine the words of our age: forward, freedom, equality, humanity,
they themselves are sure that their path leads straight to the promised land.
And perhaps it is fated for them, as for many others of their predecessors, to
shudder on the edge or on the bottom of this abyss, which will soon open up
under their feet.
“’Behind these preachers of education and
progress, who are acting openly, others are acting in secret, who
are not blinded, who have a practical aim which they see clearly in front of
them: for them it is no longer a matter of political transformation, or of the
destruction of privileges and age-old historical formations (that was already
accomplished in the first revolution), but simply of the annihilation of the
difference between yours and mine, or, more correctly, of turning yours
into mine.’”[641]
The first revolutionary movement in Russia after 1848 was the abortive
“Petrashevtsy” rebellion of 1849, named after its leader, Michael Butashevich
Petrashevsky. He expressed his “realist” views with typically Russian
explicitness: "[Naturalism] means a science which holds that by thought
alone, without the help of tradition, revelation, or divine intervention, man
can achieve in real life a state of permanent happiness through the total and
independent development of all his natural faculties. In the lower phases of
its evolution, naturalism considers the appearance of the divine element in
positive religions to be a falsehood, the result of human rather than divine
action. In its further evolution, this science - having absorbed pantheism and
materialism - conceives divinity as the supreme and all-embracing expression of
human understanding, moves towards atheism, and finally becomes transformed
into anthropotheism - the science that proclaims that the only supreme being is
man himself as a part of nature. At this stage of its rational evolution,
naturalism considers the universal fact of the recognition of God in positive
religions to be a result of man's deification of his own personality and the
universal laws of his intellect; it considers all religions that reflected the
historical evolution of mankind to be a gradual preparation for anthropotheism,
or - in other words - total self-knowledge and awareness of the vital laws of
nature."[642]
The Petrashevtsy especially admired Fourier; and at a meeting on his
birthday D.D. Akhsharumov declared: “We venerate his memory because he showed
us the path we must follow, he revealed the source of wealth, of happiness.
Today is the first banquet of the Fourierists in Russia, and we are all here:
ten people, not much more! Everything begins from something small and grows
into something big. Our aim is to destroy the capitals and cities and use all
their materials for other buildings, and turn the whole of this life of
torments, woes, poverty and shame into a life that is luxurious, elegant, full
of joy, wealth and happiness, and cover the whole poor land with palaces and
fruits and redecorate them in flowers. We here, in our country, will begin its
transfiguration, and the whole land will finish it. Soon the human race will be
delivered from intolerable sufferings…”[643]
One member of the circle, the proud, silent and handsome Nikolai
Speshnev, considered all distinctions between beauty and ugliness, good and
evil to be “a matter of taste”. He did not believe in the transformation of
Russia from the top, but in a socialist revolution from below, to which end
only verbal propaganda was necessary. “I intend to use it, without the
slightest shame or conscience, to propagandise or socialism, atheism, terrorism,
and all that is good.”[644]
Speshnev formed his own “Russian Society”, which was joined by
Dostoyevsky. He probably modelled Stavrogin in The Possessed on
Speshnev, and who called him his “Mephistopheles”. Dostoyevsky was fascinated
by these revolutionaries, but was never with them wholly, and continued to
believe in Christ.
However, in April, 1849 the Petrashevtsy, including Dostoyevsky, were
arrested, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress, and then, after a
mock-execution, sent to four years’ hard labour in Siberia. The experience –
recounted in The House of the Dead – weaned Dostoyevsky forever from his
revolutionary leanings and brought him to repentance. As he wrote to his
brother: “In my absolute spiritual solitude [in the Peter and Paul fortress], I
re-examined the whole of my former life. I scrutinized every minute detail. I
thought very carefully about my past. Alone as I was, I judged myself harshly,
without mercy. Sometimes I even thanked my fate because it had sent me into
solitude, for without it, this new judgement of myself would never have
happened…”[645]
As St. Ambrose of Optina said of him in the 1870s: “This is a man who repents!”[646]
Then, in Siberia, by being “personally classed with villains”, he came
to know the Russian people as they really were for the first time. And through
them, as he wrote later, “I again received into my soul Christ, Who had been
revealed to me in my parents’ home and Whom I was about to lose when, on my
part, I transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’.”[647] And
so, as with Pushkin and Gogol, another great writer was rescued from atheism
and revolution and converted to Christ…
“The moral idea is Christ. In the West, Christ has been distorted and
diminished. It is the kingdom of the Antichrist. We have Orthodoxy. As a
consequence, we are the bearers of a clear understanding of Christ and a new
idea for the resurrection of the world… If faith and Orthodoxy were shaken in
the people, then they would begin to disintegrate… The whole matter lies in the
question: can one believe, being civilized, that is, a European, that is,
believe absolutely in the Divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ? (for all
faith consists in this)… You see: either everything is contained in faith or
nothing is: we recognize the importance of the world through Orthodoxy. And the
whole question is: can one believe in Orthodoxy? If one can, then everything is
saved: if not, then better to burn… But if Orthodoxy is impossible for the
enlightened man, then… all this is hocus-pocus and Russia’s whole strength is
provisional… It is possible to believe seriously and in earnest. Here is everything,
the burden of life for the Russian people and their entire mission and
existence to come…”[648]
The Slavophiles on Autocracy
We have discussed Orthodoxy and Nationhood. But we have said little
about the central element in the tripartite formula of Nicholas I’s reign:
Autocracy, which was coming more and more under attack from the westernizers as
the century wore on. What did the Slavophiles have to say about this?
If we exclude Kireevsky, the answer is:
not much. As Lev Tikhomirov writes, “the greatest merit of the Slavophiles
consisted not so much in their working out of a political teaching, as
in establishing the social and psychological bases of public
life.”[649]
They were not opposed to the autocracy; but the emphasis of their thought,
especially Khomiakov’s, was on the people rather than on the autocracy.[650] Thus
Khomiakov wrote: “The people transferred to the Emperor all the power with
which it itself was endowed in all its forms. The sovereign became the head of
the people in Church matters as well as in matters of State administration. The
people could not transfer to its Emperor rights that it did not itself have. It
had from the beginning a voice in the election of its bishops, and this voice
it could transfer to its Emperor. It had the right, or more precisely the
obligation to watch that the decisions of its pastors and their councils were
carried out – this right it could entrust to its chosen one and his successors.
It had the right to defend its faith against every hostile attack upon it, -
this right it could also transfer to its Sovereign. But the Church people did
not have any power in questions of dogmatic teaching, and general Church piety
– and for that reason it could not transfer such power to its Emperor.”
Here again we see the myth of an early
pact between the Tsar and the people which Karamzin believed in, and which
Tikhomirov criticised (see above). For this was what the Slavophiles were above
all concerned to emphasize: that the Tsar is not separated from his people,
that Tsar and people form one harmonious whole and have a single ideal.
Khomiakov was also concerned to emphasize
that it was not the Tsar who ruled the Russian Orthodox Church, as the
Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire might have suggested. “’It is true,’ he
says, ‘the expression “the head of the local church” has been used in the Laws
of the Empire, but in a totally different sense than it is interpreted in other
countries’ (II, 351). The Russian Emperor has no rights of priesthood, he has
no claims to infallibility or ‘to any authority in matters of faith or even of
church discipline’. He signs the decisions of the Holy Synod, but this right of
proclaiming laws and putting them into execution is not the same as the right
to formulate ecclesiastical laws. The Tsar has influence with regard to the
appointment of bishops and members of the Synod, but it should be observed that
such dependence upon secular power is frequently met with in many Catholic
countries as well. In some of the Protestant states it is even greater (II,
36-38, 208).”[651]
“The whole pathos of Slavophilism,” writes
Bishop Dionysius (Alferov), “lay in ‘sobornost’’, ‘zemstvo’, in
‘the popular character of the monarchy, and not its service as ‘he who
restrains [the coming of the Antichrist]’. Byzantium, in which there were neither Zemskie Sobory nor
self-government of the land, elicited only irritation in them and was used by
them to put in the shade the free ‘Slavic element’. The Russian Tsar for the
Slavophiles was first of all ‘the people’s Tsar’, and not the Tsar of the Third
Rome. According to the witness of Konstantin Leontiev, Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich
himself noticed that under the Slavophiles’ Russian caftan there stuck out the
trousers of the most vulgar European democracy and liberalism (K. Leontiev,
‘Slavophilism in theory and Slavophilism in life’).”[652]
This estimate is probably least true in relation to Kireevsky, although
of all the Slavophiles he had the most problems with the Tsarist censor. At one
point he was required to give an assurance to the minister of popular
enlightenment that in his thinking he did not “separate the Tsar from Russia”.
Offended by the very suggestion, Kireyevsky proceeded to give one of the
earliest, and, with Metropolitan Philaret’s writings on the subject, one of the
best justifications of the Autocracy in post-Petrine Russian history.
He began from the fact that “the Russian man loves his Tsar. This
reality cannot be doubted, because everyone can see and feel it. But love for
the Tsar, like every love, can be true and false, good and bad – I am not
speaking about feigned love. False love is that which loves in the Tsar only
one’s advantage; this love is base, harmful and, in dangerous moments, can turn
to treachery. True love for the Tsar is united in one indivisible feeling with
love for the Fatherland, for lawfulness and for the Holy Orthodox Church.
Therefore this love can be magnanimous. And how can one separate in this matter
love for the Tsar from the law, the Fatherland and the Church? The law is the
will of the Tsar, proclaimed before the whole people; the Fatherland is the
best love of his heart; the Holy Orthodox Church is his highest link with the
people, it is the most essential basis of his power, the reason for the
people’s trust in him, the combination of his conscience with the Fatherland,
the living junction of the mutual sympathy of the Tsar and the people, the
basis of their common prosperity, the source of the blessing of God on him and
on the Fatherland.
“But to love the Tsar separately from Russia means to love an external
force, a chance power, but not the Russian Tsar: that is how the Old Believer
schismatics and Balts love him, who were ready to serve Napoleon with the same
devotion when they considered him stronger than Alexander. To love the Tsar and
not to venerate the laws, or to break the laws given or confirmed by him under
the cover of his trust, under the protection of his power, is to be his enemy
under the mask of zeal, it is to undermine his might at the root, to destroy
the Fatherland’s love for him, to separate the people’s concept of him from
their concept of justice, order and general well-being – in a word, it is to
separate the Tsar in the heart of the people from the very reasons for which
Russia wishes to have a Tsar, from those good things in the hope of which she
so highly venerates him. Finally, to love him without any relation to the Holy
Church as a powerful Tsar, but not as the Orthodox Tsar, is to think that his
rule is not the service of God and His Holy Church, but only the rule of the
State for secular aims; it is to think that the advantage of the State can be separated
from the advantage of Orthodoxy, or even that the Orthodox Church is a means,
and not the end of the people’s existence as a whole, that the Holy Church can
be sometimes a hindrance and at other times a useful instrument for the Tsar’s
power. This is the love of a slave, and not that of a faithful subject; it is
Austrian love, not Russian; this love for the Tsar is treason before Russia,
and for the Tsar himself it is profoundly harmful, even if sometimes seems
convenient. Every counsel he receives from such a love bears within it a secret
poison that eats away at the very living links that bind him with the
Fatherland. For Orthodoxy is the soul of Russia, the root of the whole of her
moral existence, the source of her might and strength, the standard gathering
all the different kinds of feelings of her people into one stronghold, the
earnest of all her hopes for the future, the treasury of the best memories of
the past, her ruling object of worship, her heartfelt love. The people
venerates the Tsar as the Church’s support; and is so boundlessly devoted to
him because it does not separate the Church from the Fatherland. All its trust
in the Tsar is based on feeling for the Church. It ses in him a faithful
director in State affairs only because it knows that he is a brother in the
Church, who together with it serves her as the sincere son of the same mother
and therefore can be a reliable shield of her external prosperity and
independence…
“He who has not despaired of the destiny of his Fatherland cannot
separate love for it from sincere devotion to Orthodoxy. And he who is Orthodox
in his convictions cannot not love Russia, as the God-chosen vessel of His Holy
Church on earth. Faith in the Church of God and love for Orthodox Russia are
neither divided nor distinguished in the soul of the true Russian. Therefore a
man holding to another confession cannot love the Russian Tsar except with a
love that is harmful for the Tsar and for Russia, a love whose influence of
necessity must strive to destroy precisely that which constitutes the very
first condition of the mutual love of the Tsar and Russia, the basis of his
correct and beneficent rule and the condition of her correct and beneficent
construction.
“Therefore to wish that the Russian government should cease to have the
spirit and bear the character of an Orthodox government, but be completely
indifferent to the confessions, accepting the spirit of so-called common
Christianity, which does not belong to any particular Church and was thought up
recently by some unbelieving philosophers and half-believing Protestants – to
wish for this would signify for the present time the tearing up of all bonds of
love and trust between the government and the people, and for the future, -
that is, if the government were to hide its indifference to Orthodoxy until it
educates the people in the same coldness to its Church, - it would produce the
complete destruction of the whole fortress of Russia and the annihilation of
the whole of her world significance. For for him who knows Russia and her
Orthodox Faith, there can be no doubt that she grew up on it and became strong
by it, since by it alone is she strong and prosperous.”[653]
In a critical review of an article by the Protestant Pastor Wiener, who
was defending the principle of complete separation of Church and State and the
most complete tolerarnce, Kireevsky wrote: “The author says very justly that in
most states where there is a dominant religion, the government uses it as a
means for its own private ends and under the excuse of protecting it oppresses
it. But this happens not because there is a dominant faith in the state,
but, on the contrary, because the dominant faith of the people is not
dominant in the state apparatus. This unfortunate relationship takes place
when, as a consequence of some chance historical circumstances, the rift opens
up between the convictions of the people and of the government. Then the faith
of the people is used as a means, but not for long. One of three things must
unfailingly happen: either the people wavers in its faith and then the whol
state apparatus wavers, as we see in the West; or the government attains a
correct self-knowledge and sincerely converts to the faith of the people, as we
hope; or the people sees that it is being deceived, as we fear.
“But what are the normal, desirable relations between the Church and the
State? The state must not agree with the Church so as to search out and
persecute heretics and force them to believe (this is contrary to the spirit of
Christianity and has a counter-productive effect, and harms the state itself
almost as much as the Church); but it must agree with the Church so as to place
as the main purpose of its existence to be penetrated constantly, more and
more, with the spirit of the Church and not only not look on the Church as a
means to its own most fitting existence, but, on the contrary, see in its own
existence only a means for the fullest and most fitting installation of the
Church of God on earth.
“The State is a construction of society having as its aim earthly,
temporal life. The Church is a construction of the same society having as its
aim heavenly, eternal life. If society understands its life in such a way that
in it the temporal must serve the eternal, the state apparatus of this society
must also serve the Church. But if society understands its life in such a way
that in it earthly relationships carry on by themselves, and spiritual
relations by themselves, then the state in such a society must be separated from
the Church. But such a society will consist not of Christians, but of
unbelievers, or, at any rate, of mixed faiths and convictions. Such a state
cannot make claims to a harmonious, normal development. The whole of its
dignity must be limited by a negative character. But there where the
people is bound inwardly, by identical convictions of faith, there it has the
right to wish and demand that both its external bonds – familial, social and
state – should be in agreement with its religious inspirations, and that its
government should be penetrated by the same spirit. To act in hostility to this
spirit means to act in hostility to the people itself, even if these actions
afford it some earthly advantages.”[654]
Another Russian supporter of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality who is
sometimes classified as a Slavophile was the poet and diplomat F.I. Tiutchev.
Already at the age of 19, in his poem, “On Pushkin’s Ode on Freedom”, he had
rebuked his fellow-poet for disturbing the hearts of the citizens by his call
to freedom.[655]
While sharing the world-view of the Slavophiles, he took their sympathies and
antipathies to their logical conclusions. As Demetrius Merezhkovsky expressed
it, Tiutchev put bones into the soft body of Slavophilism, crossed its ‘t’s and
dotted its ‘i’s…[656]
Thus he posed the contrast between Russia and the West as a struggle
between Christ and Antichrist. “The supreme power of the people,” he wrote, “is
in essence an antichristian idea.” Popular power and Tsarist power mutually
exclude each other. So it was not a question of two cultures living side by
side with each other and complementing each other in some sense. No: it was a
fight to the death between the Russian idea and the European idea, between the
Rome of the Papacy and the political and social structures it evolved, and the
Third Rome of the Orthodox Tsar…
Tiutchev believed in the Empire, whose soul was the Orthodox
Church and whose body was the Slavic race. More particularly, he believe in
“the Great Greco-Russian Eastern Empire”, whose destiny was to unite the two
halves of Europe under the Russian Emperor, with some Austrian lands going to
Russia. Then there would be an Orthodox Pope in Rome and an Orthodox Patriarch
in Constantinople. The Empire was a principle, and indivisible. Western history
had been a struggle between the schismatic Roman papacy and the usurper-empire
of Charlemagne and his successors. This struggle “ended for the one in the
Reformation, i.e. the denial of the Church, and for the other in the Revolution,
i.e. the denial of the Empire”. The struggle between Russia and Napoleon had
been the struggle “between the lawful Empire and the crowned Revolution”.[657]
As a diplomat Tiutchev knew much about the threat both to the Orthodox
autocracy posed by the 1848 revolution under the new Napoleon in Europe; and in
April, 1848, just as this revolution was gathering pace, he wrote: “There have
long been only two real powers in Europe – the revolution and Russia. These two
powers are now opposed to each other, and perhaps tomorrow they will enter into
conflict. Between them there can be no negotiations, no treaties; the existence
of the one is equivalent to the death of the other! On the outcome of this
struggle that has arisen between them, the greatest struggle that the world has
ever seen, the whole political and religious future of mankind will depend for
many centuries.
“The fact of this rivalry is now being revealed everywhere. In spite of
that, the understanding of our age, deadened by false wisdom, is such that the
present generation, faced with a similar huge fact, is far from completely
comprehending its true significance and has not evaluated its real causes.
“Up to now they have sought for its explanation in the purely political
sphere; they have tried to interpret by a distinction of concepts on the
exclusively human plane. In fact, the quarrel between the revolution and Russia
depends on deeper causes. They can be defined in two words.
“Russia is first of all the Christian Empire; the Russian people is
Christian not only by virtue of the Orthodoxy of its convictions, but also
thanks to something more in the realm of feelings than convictions. It is
Christian by virtue of that capacity for self-denial and self-sacrifice which
constitutes as it were the basis of her moral nature. The revolution is first
of all the enemy of Christianity! Antichristian feeling is the soul of the
revolution: it is its special, distinguishing feature. Those changes in form to
which it has been subjected, those slogans which it has adopted in turn,
everything, even its violence and crimes have been secondary and accidental.
But the one thing in it that is not accidental is precisely the antichristian
feeling that inspires it, it is that (it is impossible not to be convinced of
this) that has acquired for it this threatening dominance over the world. He
who does not understand this is no more than a blind man present at a spectacle
that the world presents to him.
“The human I, wishing to depend only on itself, not recognising and not
accepting any other law besides its own will – in a word, the human I, taking
the place of God, - does not, of course, constitute something new among men.
But such has it become when raised to the status of a political and social
right, and when it strives, by virtue of this right, to rule society. This is
the new phenomenon which acquired the name of the French revolution in 1789.
“Since that time, in spite of all its permutations, the revolution has
remained true to its nature, and perhaps never in the whole course of this
development has it recognized itself as so of one piece, so sincerely
antichristian as at the present moment, when it has ascribed to itself the
banner of Christianity: ‘brotherhood’. In the name of this we can even suppose
that it has attained its apogee. And truly, if we listen to those naively
blasphemous big words which have become, so to speak, the official language of
the present age, then will not everyone think that the new French republic was
brought into the world only in order to fulfil the Gospel law? It was precisely
this calling that the forces created by the revolution ascribed to themselves –
with the exception, however, of that change which the revolution considered it
necessary to produce, when it intended to replace the feeling of humility and
self-denial, which constitutes the basis of Christianity, with the spirit of
pride and haughtiness, free and voluntary good works with compulsory good
works. And instead of brotherhood preached and accepted in the name of God, it
intended to establish a brotherhood imposed by fear on the people-master. With
the exception of these differences, its dominance really promises to turn into
the Kingdom of Christ!
“And nobody should be misled by this despicable good will which the new
powers are showing to the Catholic Church and her servers. It is almost the
most important sign of the real feeling of the revolution, and the surest proof
of the position of complete power that it has attained. And truly, why should
the revolution show itself as hostile to the clergy and Christian priests who
not only submit to it, but accept and recognize it, who, in order to propitiate
it, glorify all its excesses and, without knowing it themselves, become
partakers in all its unrighteousness? If even similar behaviour were founded on
calculation alone, this calculation would be apostasy; but if conviction is
added to it, then this is already more than apostasy.
“However, we can foresee that there will be no lack of persecutions,
too. On that day when concessions have reached their extreme extent, the
catholic church will consider it necessary to display resistance, and it will
turn out that she will be able to display resistance only by going back to
martyrdom. We can fully rely on the revolution: it will remain in all respects
faithful to itself and consistent to the end!
“The February explosion did the world a great service in overthrowing
the pompous scaffolding of errors hiding reality. The less penetrating minds
have probably now understood that the history of Europe in the course of the
last thirty three years was nothing other than a continuous mystification. And
indeed with what inexorably light has the whole of this past, so recent and
already so distant from us, been lit up? Who, for example, will now not
recognize what a laughable pretension was expressed in that wisdom of our age
which naively imagined that it had succeeded in suppressing the revolution with
constitutional incantations, muzzling its terrible energy by means of a formula
of lawfulness? After all that has happened, who can still doubt that from the
moment when the revolutionary principle penetrated into the blood of society,
all these concessions, all these reconciling formulas are nothing other than
drugs which can, perhaps, put to sleep the sick man for a time, but are not
able to hinder the further development of the illness itself…”[658]
In spite of his fervent support for the Autocracy, Tiutchev criticised
the Tsarist imposition of censorship.
In 1857 he wrote: “It is impossible to impose on minds an absolute and
too prolonged restriction and yoke without substantial harm for the social
organism…. Even the authorities themselves in the course of time are unable to
avoid the disadvantages of such a system. Around the sphere in which they are
present there is formed a desert and a hugh mental emptiness, and governmental
thought, not meeting from outside itself either control or guidance or even the
slightest point of support, ends by weakening under its own weight even before
it destined to fall under the blows of events.”[659]
“Why,” he wrote to his daughter Anna in 1872, “can we oppose to harmful
theories and destructive tendencies nothing except material suppression? Into what
has the true principle of conservatism been transformed with us? Why has our
soul become so horribly stale? If the authorities because of an insufficiency
of principles and moral convictions passes to measures of material oppression,
it is thereby being turned into the most terrible helper of denial and
revolutionary overthrow, but it will begin to understand this only when the
evil is already incorrigible.”
This “liberal monarchism” was characteristic of all the early
Slavophiles to a greater or lesser extent.
Thus “K. Aksakov,” writes N. Lossky, “was against the idea of limiting
the autocratic power of the Tsar, but at the same time he championed the spiritual
freedom of the individual. On the accession of Alexander II to the throne
in 1855 Aksakov submitted to him, through Count Bludov, a report ‘On the Inner
Condition of Russia’. In it he reproached the Government for suppressing the
people’s moral freedom and following the path of despotism, which has led to
the nation’s moral degradation. He pointed out that this might popularise the
idea of political freedom and create a striving to attain it by revolutionary
means. To avoid these dangers he advised the Tsars to allow freedom of thought
and of speech and to re-establish the practice of calling Zemski Sobors.”[660]
There was undoubtedly some truth in this. The government’s oppressive
measures were sometimes undiscerning, and its ability to develop a coherent
philosophy to counteract the revolutionary propaganda – limited. This was due in
large part to the superficial Orthodoxy of the ruling circles, which Tiutchev
expressed as follows:
Not flesh, but spirit is today corrupt,
And man just pines away despairingly.
He strives for light, while sitting in the
dark,
And having found it, moans rebelliously.
From lack of faith dried up, in fire tossed,
The unendurable he suffers now.
He knows right well his soul is lost, and
thirsts
For faith – but ask for it he knows not how.
Ne’er will he say, with prayers and tears
combined,
However deep before the closed door his
grief:
“O let me in, my God, O hear my cry!
Lord, I believe! Help Thou mine unbelief!”[661]
By
contrast, Tiutchev continued to believe in the Orthodoxy of the common people
and in the unique destiny of Russia, poor in her exterior aspect but rich in
inner faith and piety:
These
poor villages which stand
Amidst a nature sparse, austere –
O beloved Russian land,
Long to pine and persevere!
The foreigner’s disdainful gaze
Will never understand or see
The light that shines in secret rays
Upon your humility.
Dear native land! While carrying
The Cross and struggling to pass through,
In slavish image Heaven’s King
Has walked across you, blessing you.[662]
However, the successes of government measures are easily forgotten. We
have already noted the conversion of Pushkin and Gogol. In 1849 the
revolutionary “Petrashevtsy” circle was arrested and after a fake execution its
leaders sent to Siberia. Among them was the young Dostoyevsky. Far from being
embittered by the experience, and he came back changed for the better, a
fervent monarchist who devoted his life to providing precisely that coherent
philosophy of life which could justify Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality in
the eyes of the educated classes.
Moreover, those who were urging the government to remove censorship were
not supported by the leading churchmen of the age, and showed a dangerous
naivety about the way in which the forces of evil could – and, in the reign of
Alexander II, did – exploit this freedom. This naivety manifested itself in a
certain anti-statism, an attempt to bypass the state as being irrelevant
to the deeper life of the people, the “ancient Russian freedom” that existed in
the peasant communes and the Church. We see this particularly clearly, as
Walicki writes, “in the historical writings of Konstantin Aksakov. Republican
liberty, he argued, was political freedom, which presupposed the people’s
active participation in political affairs; ancient Russian freedom, on the
other hand, meant freedom from politics – the right to live according to
unwritten laws of faith and tradition, and the right to full realization in a
moral sphere on which the state would not impinge.
“This theory rested on a distinction the Slavophiles made between two
kinds of truth: the ‘inner’ and the ‘external’ truth. The inner truth is in the
individual the voice of conscience, and in society the entire body of values
enshrined in religion, tradition, and customs – in a word, all values that
together form an inner unifying force and help to forge social bonds based on
shared moral convictions. The external
truth, on the other hand, is represented by law and the state, which are
essentially conventional, artificial, and ‘external’ – all the negative
qualities Kireevsky and Khomiakov ascribed to institutions and social bonds
that had undergone a rationalizing and formalizing process. Aksakov went even
further than the other Slavophiles in regarding all forms of legal and
political relations as inherently evil; at their opposite pole was the communal
principle embodied in the village commune, based (in Aksakov’s view) purely on
truth and unanimity and not on any legal guarantees or conditions and
agreements characteristic of a rational contract. For Aksakov the difference
between Russian and the West was that in Russia the state had not been raised
to the ‘principle’ on which social organization was largely founded. When the
frailty of human nature and the demands of defense appeared to make political
organization necessary, Russians ‘called’ their rulers from ‘beyond the sea’ in
order to avoid doing injury to the ‘inner truth’ by evolving their own
statehood; Russian tsars were given absolute powers so that the people might
shun all contacts with the ‘external truth’ and all participation in affairs of
state. Relations between ‘land’ (that is the common people who lived by the
light of the inner truth) and state rested upon the principle of mutual
non-interference. Of its own free will the state consulted the people, who
presented their point of view at Land Assemblies but left the final decision in
the monarch’s hands. The people could be sure of complete freedom to live and
think as they pleased, while the monarch had complete freedom of action in the
political sphere. This relationship depended entirely on moral convictions
rather than legal guarantees, and it was this that constituted Russia’s
superiority to Western Europe. ‘A guarantee is an evil,’ Aksakov wrote. ‘Where
it is necessary, good is absent; and life where good is absent had better
disintegrate than continue with the aid of evil.’ Aksakov conceded that there
was often a wide gap between ideal and reality, but ascribed this entirely to
human imperfections. He strongly condemned rulers who tried to interfere in the
inner life of the ‘land’, but even in the case of Ivan the Terrible, whose
excessed he condemned, he would not allow that the ‘land’ had the right to
resistance and he praised its long-suffering loyalty.”[663]
Although there is some truth in this account, it is exaggerated.
Certainly, the “inner truth” of Orthodoxy was more important than the “external
truth” of government and law; and it was true that the presence of this inner
truth in Russia had prevented statehood becoming the “primary principle” it had
become in the West, where “inner truth” had been lost. And yet the State had
always taken a very active and essential role in Russian life from the
beginning in protecting and fostering the internal freedom provided by
the Orthodox way of life, and was accepted as such with gratitude by the
people. Moreover, it was inaccurate to represent the power of the Russian tsars
as being “external” to the true life of the people. For the tsars were
themselves Orthodox Christians anointed for their role by the Church and guided
in their decisions by the Church, the Holy Scriptures and the dogmas and
decrees of the Ecumenical and Local Councils.
Paradoxically, Aksakov betrays the influence of precisely that western
political tradition – in its English liberal “hands off” approach to government
– which he sincerely claimed to deplore.
As Walicki writes, “he subconsciously adopted and applied to Russia’s
past one of the chief assumptions of Western European liberal doctrine – the
principle of the total separation of the political and social spheres. At the
same time he rejected both liberal constitutionalism and the very content of
the liberal idea of freedom. Aksakov’s interpretation of the freedom of the
‘land’ is not to be confused with the freedom of the individual, since in his
interpretation freedom only applied to the ‘land’ as a whole; it was not the
freedom of the individual in the community, but the community’s freedom from
outside interference in matters of faith, traditions, or customs. This
non-interference had nothing to do with the liberal doctrine of laissez-faire,
since, according to Aksakov, the moral principles of the ‘land’ rendered
economic individualism out of the question. Even his call for freedom of speech
was not a truly liberal postulate since it did not envisage the acceptance of
pluralistic beliefs or of minority oppositions within society. While demanding
freedom in the non-political sphere, Aksakov wanted every individual to submit
totally to his mir – a submission, moreover, that was to be ‘according
to conscience’ and not only ‘according to law’. His ideal was a ‘free unity’
based on a total unanimity that would reduce external constraints to a minimum
but at the same time exclude individual autonomy and any departure from
communal tradition.”[664]
With the failure of the 1848 revolution in Europe, and in view of
Russia’s prominent role in suppressing it, hopes were raised in the hearts of
Russian intellectuals of a Slavophile orientation that the time had at last
come for the fulfilment of the age-old dream of Russia the Third Rome. Tiutchev
had his own idiosyncratic version of this dream, seeing Russia as the new
Slavic Empire which could liberate the East Europeans, including even the
Czechs and Moravians (the first disciples of SS. Cyril and Methodius), from the
false empire, church and civilization of the West.
According to V. Tsimbursky, Tiutchev called on Nicholas I “to play on
the revolutionary self-destruction of western civilization to place on its
ruins the ‘ark’ of the new Empire: may ‘the Europe of Peter’ take the place of
‘the Europe of Charles’. With Tiutchev, as in the fears of the West, the
europeanization of Russia becomes the growth of a power called to take the
place and replace Romano-German Europe. Tiutchev… in return for the Florentine
unia of 1439, puts forward a project for helping the Roman papacy out of the
corner it was driven into by the Italian revolution on condition of its
honourable return to Orthodoxy.”[665]
However, Nicholas did not share this particular vision, and in 1849 he
imprisoned K. Aksakov for disseminating a similar Pan-Slavism. For, almost
alone among the rulers of Europe, he believed in the legitimacy and
inviolability of Europe’s existing regimes, with the exception of revolutionary
France but including Austria’s, in which many of the Slavs lived.
For Nicholas, as K.N. Leontiev wrote, “was a true and great
‘legitimist’. He did not like even the Orthodox ‘rayas’ [peoples of the Ottoman
Empire] permitting themselves to rebel against the Sultan, reasonably ascribing
to himself alone the lawful right to conquer the Sultan and bring him
into submission, as the Tsar of a tsar… The unsuccessful and lightmindedly
liberal Decembrist rebellion of the nobility had a less profound influence on
his royal mind that the later events of the 1830s, which shook him and made him
understand. From that time the Tsar began an opponent of all emancipation, all equalization,
all confusion both in Russia and in other countries…. The
explanatory note which the young [I.S.] Aksakov was forced to present in reply
to the questions of the Third Department in 1849 was interesting. Some passages
in this reply were underlined by Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich, and objections
against them were made by the Tsar in his own hand. Opposite the place where
Aksakov writes about ‘the heartfelt sympathy of the so-called Slavophiles for
the western Slavs and in general for the situation of their co-religionist and
consanguineous brothers’, the Emperor made the following comment: ‘Under the
guise of sympathy for the Slavic tribes supposedly oppressed in other states,
there is hidden the criminal thought of a rebellion against the lawful
authority of neighbouring and in part allied states, and of a general union,
which they expect to attain not through the will of God’…. By these
‘states’ we must understand, of course, first of all Austria, and then in part
Turkey. And I have already mentioned the fact that Nicholas Pavlovich
recognized himself to have the right of exerting pressure on the Sultan
in favour of his co-religionists, the right to war with him and even subject
him to himself, but did not recognize the right of the subjects of the Sultan
to carry out their own self-willed liberation…. Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich did not
live to the end of the 19th century, when ‘reaction’ is beginning
little by little to acquire for itself theoretical justifications and
foundations. However, he felt by his political instinct not only that the West
was on the path to a corruption which could be contagious for us, too, but also
that our Russia herself under him had attained its cultural-state apogee,
after which living state construction would come to an end and on which it was
necessary to stop as far as possible and for as long as possible, not fearing
even a certain stagnation. And all his major political actions and
sympathies are explained by this conservative instinct of genius: his revulsion
from the liberal monarchy of Louis Philippe; his defence of the ‘crafty’, but
necessary for some time to come, perhaps, Austria; the Hungarian war; his
helping of the Sultan against Mehmed Ali; his good disposition toward England,
which was still at that time aristocratic and conservative; his desire that the
Eastern Christians should not of their own will rise up against the lawful and
autocratic Turkish government; and finally, his disillusionment in emancipated
Greece, which was expressed in his words (legendary or historical, it doesn’t
matter): ‘I will not give an inch of land to this demagogic people.’”[666]
However legitimate the Tsar might consider most of the governments of
Europe (except that of Napoleon III) to be, this was not how they looked at
him. The 1848 revolution, while in general unsuccessful, had changed the
political atmosphere and balance of forces in Europe. Gratitude to Russia for
keeping the peace in Europe, never strong, had completely disappeared with the
rise of a new generation of leaders, such as the rabidly anti-Russian
Palmerston in England and the French Emperor Napoleon III, who was looking to
challenge the Vienna settlement of 1815 and divide Austria and Russia. [667] In
1851 the exiled Hungarian revolutionary Kossuth denounced Russian “despotism”
in front of a cheering crowd in London. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable
turn-around for these countries to ally themselves with the Ottoman empire
against a Christian state. How had this radical change in the international
situation taken place?
One factor making for instability was the gradual weakening of the power
of Turkey, “the sick man of Europe”, in the Tsar’s phrase. Clearly, if Turkey
collapsed, its subject peoples of Orthodox Christian faith would look to Russia
to liberate them, if not incorporate them into the Russian Empire. But the
Western Powers were determined to prevent this, which would threaten their
hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean and greatly increase the power of their
rival Russia. Before 1848 a Metternich might have stayed the hand of the
Western Powers. But now there was no Metternich…
There were also religious rivalries. The Tsar saw himself as the natural
protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire. But the Catholics,
whose main political protector was France, were not prepared to allow him to
play this role.
“The spark to the tinderbox,” writes Trevor
Royle, “was the key to the main door of the Church of the Nativity in
Bethelehem. By tradition, history, and a common usage which had been built up
over the centuries, the great key was in the possession of the monks of the
eastern, or Greek Orthodox… Church; they were the guardians of the grotto in
which lay the sacred manger where Christ himself was… born. That state of
affairs was contested with equal fervour by their great rivals, the monks of
the Roman Catholic, or Latin, church who had been palmed off with the keys to
the lesser inner doors to the narthex (the vestibule between the porch and the
nave). There was also the question of whether or not a silver star adorned with
the arms of France should be permitted to stand in the Sanctuary of the
Nativity, but in the spring of 1852 the rivals’ paramount thoughts were
concentrated on the possession of the great key to the church’s main west
door….
“[The first historian of the Crimean war Alexander] Kinglake wrote:
‘When the Emperor of Russia sought to … keep for his Church the holy shrines of
Palestine, he spoke on behalf of fifty millions of brave, pious, devoted
subjects, of whom thousands for the sake of the cause would joyfully risk their
lives. From the serf in his hut, even up to the great Tsar himself, the faith
professed was the faith really glowing in his heart…’”[668]
“Nicolas I had both temporal and spiritual reasons for wanting to extend
his protection of the eastern church within the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon III’s
were rather different. Having dismissed the French parliament he needed all the
support he could get, most especially from the Roman Catholics, before he could
declare himself emperor. It suited him therefore to have France play a greater
role in Palestine and ‘to put an end to these deplorable and too-frequent
quarrels about the possession of the Holy Places’. To that end the Marquis de
Lavalette, his ambassader to the Porte – or the Sublime Porte, the court or
government of the Ottoman Empire – insisted that the Turks honour the agreement
made in 1740 that confirmed that France had ‘sovereign authority’ in the Holy
Land. Otherwise, hinted de Lavalette, force might have to be used.
“On 9 February 1852 the Porte agreed the validity of the Latin claims
but no sooner had the concession been made than the Turks were forced to bow
once more, this time to Russian counter-claims. Basing his argument on an
agreement, or firman, of 1757 which restored Greek rights in Palestine and on
the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainarji (1774) which gave Russia protection of the
Christian religion within the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas’s ambassador succeeded
in getting a new firman ratifying the privileges of the Greek Church. This
revoked the agreement made to the French who responded by backing up their
demands with a show of force.
“Later that summer, much to Nicholas’s fury and to Britain’s irritation,
Napoleon III ordered the 90-gun steam-powered battleship Charlemagne to
sail through the Dardanelles. This was a clear violation of the London
Convention of 1841 which kept the Straits closed to naval vessels, but it also
provided a telling demonstration of French sea power. It was nothing less than
gunboat diplomacy and it seemed to work. Impressed by the speed and strength of
the French warship, and persuaded by French diplomacy and money, Sultan
Abd-el-Medjid listened ever more intently to the French demands. At the
beginning of December he gave orders that the keys to the Church of the
Nativity were to be surrendered to the Latins and that the French-backed church
was to have supreme authority over the Holy Places. On 22 December a new silver
star was brought from Jaffa and as Kinglake wrote, in great state ‘the keys of
the great door of the church, together with the keys of the sacred manger, were
handed over to the Latins’.
“Napoleon III had scored a considerable diplomatic victory. His subjects
were much gratified, but in so doing he had also prepared the ground for a much
greater and more dangerous confrontation. Given the strength of Russian
religious convictions Tsar Nicholas was unwilling to accept the Sultan’s
decision – which he regarded as an affront not just to him but to the millions
of Orthodox Christians under his protection – and he was determined to have it
reversed, if need be by using force himself.”[669]
In October, 1852, the Tsar arrived in Kiev and confided to the
metropolitan: “I do not want to shed the blood of the faithful sons of the
fatherland, but our vainglorious enemies are forcing me to bare my sword. My
plans are not yet made – no! But my heart feels that the time is nearing and
they will soon be brought to fulfilment.” Seeking advice on his political
projects, the Tsar asked if there were any holy elders in Kiev. The Metropolitan
mentioned the clairvoyant fool-for-Christ, Hieroschemamonk Theophilus. They set
off there immediately. On the way, they saw Blessed Theophilus lying by the
side of the road in the middle of an ant-hill, not moving. His arms were folded
on his chest crosswise, as in death, and his eyes were completely closed. Ants
swarmed in masses all over his body and face, but he, as if feeling nothing,
pretended to be dead. Puzzled, the Tsar and the Metropolitan returned to Kiev…
Russian troops moved into the Romanian Principalities, and on July 2,
1853, Tsar Nicholas proclaimed: “By the occupation of the Principalities we
desire such security as will ensure the restoration of our dues [in the Holy
Land]. It is not conquest that we seek but satisfaction for a just right so
clearly infringed.” As he told the British ambassador in St. Petersburg,
Seymour: “You see what my position is. I am the Head of a People of the Greek
religion, our co-religionists of Turkey look up to me as their natural
protector, and these are claims which it is impossible for me to disregard. I
have the conviction that good right is on my side, I should therefore begin a
War, such as that which now impends, without compunction and should be prepared
to carry it on, as I have before remarked to you, as long as there should be a
rouble in the Treasury or a man in the country.”[670]
Nevertheless, when the Powers drew up a compromise “Note”, which Nicholas
promptly accepted. However, the Turks rejected it, having been secretly assured
of Franco-British support. On October 4, 1853 the Turks delivered an ultimatum
to the Russians to leave the Principalities within a fortnight. When the
Russians rejected the ultimatum, war broke out. On the same day A.F. Tiutcheva
noted in her diary: “A terrible struggle is being ignited, gigantic opposing
forces are entering into confict with each other: the East and the West, the
Slavic world and the Latin world, the Orthodox Church in her struggle not only
with Islam, but also with the other Christian confessions, which, taking the
side of the religion of Mohammed, are thereby betraying their own vital
principle.”[671]
A.S. Khomiakov wrote: “Whatever political bases and excuses for the
struggle there may be for the struggle that is convulsing Europe now, it is impossible
not to notice, even at the most superficial observation, that on one of the
warring sides stand exclusively peoples belonging to Orthodoxy, and on the
other – Romans and Protestants, gathered around Islam.”
And Khomiakov quoted from an epistle of the Catholic Archbishop of Paris
Sibur, who assured the French that the war with Russia “is not a political war,
but a holy war; not a war of states or peoples, but solely a religious war”.
All other reasons were “in essence no more than excuses”. The true reason was
“the necessity to drive out the error of Photius; to subdue and crush it”.
“That is the recognized aim of this new crusade, and such was the hidden aim of
all the previous crusades, even if those who participated in them did not admit
it.”[672]
The British, the French and later the Sardinians joined the Turks. The
British foreign minister Palmerston, in a letter to the Prime Minister John
Russell, made clear that his war aim was not the restoration of some supposed
injustice, but the weakening of Russia and the giving of different parts of her
territory to different western powers.
On February 18, 1855, the Tsar, worn out and intensely grieved by the
losses in the war, died. (According to one version, he was poisoned by the the
medic Mandt on the orders of Napoleon III.[673])
Metropolitan Philaret asked his valet whether he remembered the trip with the
Tsar to Blessed Theophilus, and the fool-for-Christ’s strange behaviour. “Up to
now I could not understand his strange behaviour. Now, the prophecy of the
Starets is as clear as God’s day. The ants were the malicious enemies of our
fatherland, trying to torment the great body of Russia. The arms folded on his
chest and the closed eyes of Theophilus were the sudden, untimely death of our beloved
Batiushka-Tsar….”[674]
After the taking of Sebastopol, the new Tsar, Alexander II, signed the
Treaty of Paris bring the war to an end. While the Russians had lost some
battles and the major port of Sebastopol, the allies were hardly able to touch
Russia proper – and on the Anatolian front the Russians conquered Kars and
Erzurum with forces less than half those of the Turks.[675] At the
Peace Conference in Paris in March, 1856, both Russia and Turkey were forbidden
to have fleets in the Black Sea (although Alexander II abrogated this clause in
1870), the Straits were closed for warships, and the Aland islands in the
Baltic were demilitarised. On the other hand, as the Russian representative
A.F. Orlov telegraphed to St. Petersburg: “The English claims on the
independence of Mingrelia, the Trans-Caucasus and other demands have been
completely rejected. The quarrels over Nikolaev stirred up by Lord Clarendon
have been resolved by our replies.”[676] The
allies evacuated Sebastopol in exchange for the Russians’ withdrawal from Kars.
Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, the Bishop of the Caucasus, wrote to N.N.
Muraviev, the conqueror of Kars: “The allies cannot make up for their losses:
the gates of Asia Minor were opened before you – these gates no longer exist…
The taking of Kars produced general rejoicing in the capital. One can say that
everyone understood the importance of the consequences of the fall of this, as
you call it, fortress of Asia Minor.”[677] As
Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow put it: “In spite of all this, in Europe we
were unconquered, while in Asia we were conquerors. Glory to the Russian army!”[678]
So in purely military terms, the Crimean war was not such a disaster for
Russia; and if the war had continued, might well have ended with victory as
superior Russian manpower began to tell. The situation had been much more
perilous for Russia in 1812, and yet they had gone on to enter Paris in
triumph. As Tsar Alexander II had written to the Russian commander Gorchakov
after the fall of Sebastopol: “Sebastopol is not Moscow, the Crimea is not
Russia. Two years after we set fire to Moscow, our troops marched in the
streets of Paris. We are still the same Russians and God is still with us.” And
within a generation, Russian armies were at the gates of Constantinople…
However, the fact remained that while the war of 1812-14 had ended in
the rout of Russia’s enemies, this had not happened in 1854-56. Moreover,
Russia’s primary war-aim, the retention of her right to act as guardian of the
Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, had not been achieved. And this
turned out to be costly for, for example, the Orthodox of Damascus, who in 1860
were subjected to a massacre which the Russians were not able to prevent or
avenge.[679]
Still more serious was the dispiriting
effect that the war had on public opinion in Russia. Observers had noted the
enthusiasm of the simple people for the war, which they considered to be a
holy, religious war; the soldiers in the Crimea had shown feats of heroism; and
the intercession of the Mother of God had clearly been seen in the deliverance
of Odessa through her “Kasperovskaya” icon.[680]
However, examples of unbelief had been seen among the commanding officers at
Sebastopol; some of the intelligentsy, such as B.N. Chicherin, openly
scoffed the idea of a holy war; and the nation as a whole could not be said to
have been as united behind their Tsar as in 1812, which divisions were
accentuated after its unsuccessful conclusion. The conclusion drawn by Konstantin
Aksakov (who, somewhat contrary to his anti-statist views, had ardently
supported the war) was as follows: “From the very beginning of the matter the
reason for all our failures has lain, not in the power, strength or skill of
our enemies, but in us ourselves; we ourselves, of course, have been our
most terrible adversaries. It is no wonder that we have been overcome when we
ourselves give in and retreat… Believe me, the danger for Russia is not in the
Crimea, and not from the English, the French and the Turks, no, the danger, the
real danger is within us, from the spirit of little faith, the spirit of doubt
in the help of God, a non-Russian, western spirit, a foreign, heterodox spirit,
which weakens our strength and love for our brothers, which cunningly counsels
us to make concessions, to humiliate ourselves, to avoid quarrels with Germany,
to wage a defensive war, and to go on the offensive, and not go straight for
the liberation of our brothers. We have protected ourselves! That is the source
of our enslavement and, perhaps, of our endless woes. If we want God to be for
us, it is necessary that we should be for God, and not for the Austrian or in
general for the German union, for the sake of which we have abandoned God’s
work. It is necessary that we should go forward for the Faith and our brothers.
But we, having excited the hopes of our brothers, have allowed the cross to be
desecrated, and abandoned our brothers to torments… The struggle, the real
struggle between East and West, Russia and Europe, is in ourselves and not at
our borders.”[681]
Opinion was also divided among the Orthodox of the Ottoman empire. The
Slavs looked to the Russians to liberate them from the Ottoman yoke. But the
Greek bishops and merchants had in some ways a privileged life under the
cosmopolitan and increasingly liberal Ottoman regime. During the period
1839-76, writes Mansel, Turkey was effectively ruled by “a trio of able if
autocratic pashas, Reshid, Fuad and Ali… Under their aegis, the two great
imperial decrees of 1839 and 1856 were issued, forming the basis for what was
known as tanzimat: the policy of reform followed by the Ottoman
government after 1839. They promised Christians and Muslims equality before the
law in place of their separate legal systems, equal liability to military
service and access to government positions, freedom from confiscation and, in
the words of the 1856 decree, ‘the attainment of full happiness for all classes
of our imperial subjects who are bound to one another by the heartfelt bonds of
a common patriotism and are all equal in our equitable compassionate view’. The
last execution of a convert to Islam, who had reverted to Christianity, took
place on 4 October 1843.”[682]
In view of this comfortable relationship with the Turkish authorities,
it is perhaps not surprising that the Greek bishops, according to Mansel,
“feared that ‘protection’ would mean ‘slavery’. They told a Russian diplomat:
‘We are now rich and strong. Nine million souls in the hands of the Patriarch,
his synod and seventy bishops. You with the right of protectorate will deprive
us of everything.’”[683]
However, this was not the position of the more religious Greeks, and
especially of the monks of Mount Athos. Thus we read in the Life of
Hieroschemamonk Hilarion the Georgian (whom we have met before as Fr. Ise, the
confessor of the Imeretian King Solomon II) that during the Crimean War he
instructed his disciple, Hieromonk Sabbas, every day to celebrate the Divine
Liturgy and pray for the Russians during it, and read the whole Psalter and
make many prostrations for the aid of “our Russian brethren”. Hieromonk Sabbas
witnesses: “In this way we celebrated the Divine Liturgy every day. When some
time had passed, the elder [Hilarion] said to me: ‘Let’s go to the monastery, let’s
ask the abbot what they know about the war, whether the Russians are winning or
the enemies.’ When we arrived at the monastery, the abbot with the proestoses
showed us a paper which the Patriarch and one other hierarch had sent from
Constantinople, for distributing to the serving hieromonks in all the
monasteries. The Patriarch wrote that they were beseeching God, at the Great
Entrance in the Divine Liturgy, to give strength to the Turkish army to subdue
the Russians under the feet of the Turks. To this was attached a special prayer
which had to be read aloud. When the abbot, Elder Eulogius, had read us this
patriarchal epistle and said to the elder: ‘Have you understood what our head,
our father is writing to us?’, my elder was horrified and said: ‘He is not a
Christian,’ and with sorrow asked: ‘Have you read this in the monastery during
the Liturgy, as he writes?’ But they replied: ‘No! May it not be!’ But in the
decree the Patriarch was threatening any monastery that did not carry out this
order that it would suffer a very severe punishment. The next day we went back
to our cell. A week passed. A monk came from Grigoriou monastery for the
revealing of thoughts, and my elder asked him: ‘Did you read this prayer which
the Patriarch sent to the monasteries?’ He replied: ‘Yes, it was read last
Sunday during the Liturgy.’ The elder said: ‘You have not acted well in reading
it; you have deprived yourselves of the grace of Holy Baptism, you have
deprived your monastery of the grace of God; condemnation has fallen on you!’
This monk returned to the monastery and told his elders and abbot that ‘we have
deprived the monastery of the grace of God, the grace of Holy Baptism – that is
what Papa Hilarion is saying.’ On the same day a flood swept away the mill, and
the fathers began to grumble against the abbot: ‘You have destroyed the
monastery!’ In great sorrow the abbot hurried to make three prostrations before
the icon of the Saviour and said: ‘My Lord Jesus Christ, I’m going to my
spiritual father Hilarion to confess what I have done, and whatever penance he
gives me I will carry it out, so that I should not suffer a stroke from
sorrow.’ Taking with him one hierodeacon and one monk, he set off for the cell
of the Holy Apostle James, where we living at the time. When they arrived, my
elder was outside the cell. The abbot with his companions, on seeing my elder,
fell face downwards in prostrations to the earth and said: ‘Bless, holy
spiritual father.’ Then they went up to kiss his hand. But my elder shouted at
them: ‘Go away, away from me; I do not accept heretics!’ The abbot said: ‘I
have sinned, I have come to ask you to give me a penance.’ But the elder said:
‘How did you, wretched one, dare to place Mohammed higher than Christ? God and
the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ says to His Son: “Sit Thou at My right
hand, until I make Thine enemies the footstool of Thy feet’ (Psalm
109.1), but you ask Him to put His Son under the feet of His enemies! Get away
from me, I will not accept you.’ With tears the abbot besought the elder to
receive him in repentance and give him a penance. But my elder said: ‘I am not
your spiritual father, go, find a spiritual father and he will give you a
penance.’ And leaving them outside his cell weeping, the elder went into it and
locked the door with a key. What could we do? We went into my cell and there
served an all-night vigil, beseeching God to incline the elder to mercy and
give a penance to the abbot. In the morning the elder went into the church for
the Liturgy, not saying a word to those who had arrived, and after the
dismissal of the Liturgy he quickly left for his cell. Those who had arrived
with the abbot began to worry that he would suffer a heart attack; they asked
me to go in to the elder and call him; perhaps he would listen to me. I went,
fell at his feet and asked him: ‘Be merciful, give them a penance – the abbot
may suffer a stroke in the heart attack with fatal consequences.’ Then the
elder asked me: ‘What penance shall I give them? God on high is angry with
them. What epitimia should I give them which would propitiate God?’ When I said
to my father: ‘Elder, since I read the whole Psalter of the Prophet-King David
every day, as you told me, there is one psalm there which fits this case – the
82nd: “O God, who shall be likened unto Thee? Be Thou not silent,
neither be still, O God…” Command them to read this psalm tomorrow during the
Liturgy, when the Cherubic hymn is being sung, at the Great Entrance; let the
hieromonk who read the prayer of the Patriarch before stand under the great
chandelier, and when all the fathers come together during the Great Entrance,
the priest must come out of the altar holding the diskos and chalice in his
hands, then let one monk bring a parchment with this psalm written on it in
front, and let the hieromonk, who has been waiting under the chandelier, read
the whole psalm loudly to the whole brotherhood, and while they are reading it
from the second to the ninth verses let them all repeat many times: “Lord, have
mercy”. And when the remaining verses are being read, let them all say: “Amen!”
And then the grace of God will again return to their monastery.’ The elder
accepted my advice and asked me to call them. When they joyfully entered the
cell and made a prostration, the elder said to them: ‘Carry out this penance,
and the mercy of God will return to you.’ Then they began to be disturbed that
the exarch sent by the Patriarch, who was caring for the fulfilment of the
patriarchal decree in Karyes, might learn about this and might bring great woes
upon the monastery. They did not know what to do. The elder said: ‘Since you
are so frightened, I will take my hieromonk and go to the monastery; and if the
exarch or the Turks hear about it, tell them: only Monk Hilarion the Georgian
ordered us to do this, and we did it, and and you will be without sorrow.’ Then
the abbot said: ‘Spiritual father, we are also worried and sorrowful about you,
because when the Turks will learn about this, they will come here, take you,
tie you up in sacks and drown you both in the sea.’ My elder replied: ‘We are
ready, my hieromonk and I, let them drown us.’ Then we all together set off in
the boat for Grigoriou monastery. When the brothers of the monastery saw us,
they rejoiced greatly. In the morning we arranged that the hieromonk who had
read the prayer of the Patriarch should himself liturgize; they lit the
chandelier during the Cherubic hymn, and when all the fathers were gathered
together and the server had come out of the altar preceded by the candle and
candle-holder and carrying the chalice and diskos on his head and in his hands,
he declared: “May the Lord remember you all in His Kingdom”, and stopped under
the great chandelier. Then one monk, having in his hand the parchment with the
82nd psalm written on it, stood in front of the priest and began to
read: “O God, who shall be likened unto Thee? Be Thou not silent, neither be
still, O God…” – to the end. Meanwhile the fathers called out: “Lord, have
mercy” until the 10th verse, and then everyone said: “Amen” many
times. And they all understood that the grace of God had again come down on the
monastery, and the elders from joy embraced men, thanking me that I had done
such a good thing for them; and everyone glorified and thanked God.’
“All this took place under Patriarch Anthimus VI. At the end of the
[Crimean] war he was for a second time removed from his throne [on September
20, 1855]. After this he came to Athos and settled in the monastery of
Esphigmenou, where he had been tonsured. Once, in 1856, on a certain feast-day,
he wanted to visit the monastery of St. Panteleimon, where Fr. Hilarion was at
that time. During the service the Patriarch was standing in the cathedral of
the Protection on the hierarchical see. Father Hilarion passed by him with Fr.
Sabbas; he didn’t even look at the venerable Patriarch, which the latter
immediately noticed. The Patriarch was told about the incident with the prayer
in Grigoriou monastery. At the end of the service, as usual, all the guests
were invited to the guest-house. The Patriarch, wanting somehow to extract
himself from his awkward situation in the eyes of the Russians and Fr.
Hilarion, started a conversation on past events and tried to develop the
thought that there are cases when a certain ‘economia’ is demanded, and the care
of the Church sometimes requires submission also to some not very lawful
demands of the government, if this serves for the good of the Church. ‘And so
we prayed for the granting of help from on high to our Sultan, and in this way
disposed him to mercifulness for our Church and her children, the Orthodox
Christians.’ When Patriarch Anthimus, under whom the schism with the Bulgarians
took place, arrived on Athos after his deposition, and just stepped foot on the
shore, the whole of the Holy Mountain shuddered from an underground quake and
shook several times. All this was ascribed by the Athonites to the guilt of the
Patriarch, and the governing body sent an order throughout the Mountain that
they should pray fervently to God that He not punish the inhabitants of the
Holy Mountain with His righteous wrath, but that He have mercy according to His
mercy.”[684]
Thus there was a fine line to be drawn between submission to the Sultan
as the lawful sovereign of the Balkan Orthodox, and a too-comfortable adaptation
to the conditions of this Babylonian captivity, forgetting the Jerusalem of a
truly Orthodox polity. The Russian tsar, as we have seen, considered that the
Orthodox peoples did not have the right to rebel against the Sultan of their
own will, without his blessing – a blessing that he alone could give as being
the Emperor of the Third Rome and therefore the true political ruler of all
the Orthodox Christians. But the corollary of this view was that when the
Tsar entered into war with the Sultan, it was the duty of the Orthodox subjects
of the Sultan to pray for victory for the Tsar. For, as Schema-Hieromonk
Hilarion said: “The other peoples' kings often make themselves out to be something
great, but not one of them is a king in reality, but they are
only adorned and flatter themselves with a great name, but God is not
favourably disposed towards them, and does not
abide in them. They reign only in part, by the condescension
of God. Therefore he who does not love his
God-established tsar is not worthy of being called a Christian.”[685]
Relations
with Heretics and Schismatics
The views of Hieroschemamonk Hilarion were shared by the Russian
Fathers. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow was very disturbed by the Old
Believers’ and uniates’ not commemorating the Emperor during their services. He
considered the commemoration of the Emperor to be an obligatory condition of
the reunion of the uniates with the Orthodox Church.[686]
From 1843 the Old Ritualists had begun to seek a degree of legality from
the State and permission to build churches and prayer houses. Metropolitan
Philaret of Moscow strongly resisted these moves. And he reported that in the
Preobrazhensky workhouse the Old Ritualists were distributing books that taught
“that no marriages should be recognised; the schismatics in marital unions with
people not belonging to the schism should have their union broken; that bodily
relationship should not be recognized in the Christian marriages; that from
1666… married Christians are a satanic nest of vipers and the most shameful
dwelling-place of his demons; that now satan is thinking about the
multiplication of the human race and a soul is being given from the devil for
the conception of a child.”[687]
In spite of Metropolitan Philaret’s protests, little was done to
restrain the schismatic and heretical activities of the Old Ritualists. Then
the Popovtsi began to look for a bishop overseas. No such bishop was
found in the Caucasus, Syria, Palestine, Persia and Egypt. Finally, writes
Dobroklonsky, they “lured to themselves a former metropolitan of Bosnia, the
Greek Ambrose, who had been deprived of his see and was living in
Constantinople. In 1846 he was brought to Belaia Krinitsa (in Bukovina, in
Austria) and was received into the communion of the Popovtsi by cursing
some supposed heresies and chrismation. In 1847, in accordance with the wish of
the schismatics, he consecrated Bishop Cyril as his deputy and Arcadius for the
Nekrasovtsy (in Turkey). Thus was the existence of the Belokrinitsy
hierarchy established. Although in the following year, at the insistence of the
Russian government, Ambrose was removed from Belaia Krinitsa to restricted
residence in the city of Tsilla (in Styria) and the Belokrinitsky monastery was
sealed, in 1859 the Austrian government again recognised the lawfulness of the
Belokrinitskaia metropolia and the monastery was unsealed. Cyril, who succeeded
Ambrose, took care to consecrate new bishops, and such soon appeared for the
Turkish, Moldavian and, finally, Russian schismatics. The first of the Russians
was the shopkeeper Stephen Zhirov, who was made bishop of Simbirsk with the
name Sophronius in 1849; by 1860 there were already up to 10 schismatic
dioceses within the boundaries of Russia. A ‘spiritual council’ was formed in
Moscow to administer church affairs; it was composed of false bishops and false
priests. Sophronius was dreaming of founding a patriarchate, and even set up a
patriarch, but, at the insistence of the schismatics, himself condemned his own
undertaking. At first the government repressed the Old Believer hierarchs and
the priests ordained by them. However, the Austrian priesthood continue to
spread. From the time of Alexander II it began to enjoy toleration, although
the government did not recognize it as lawful. In spite of a visible success,
the Austrian hierarchy from the very beginning of its existence displayed signs
of disintegration. Quarrels constantly arose between the schismatic bishops.
They became especially fierce after the publication in 1862 in the name of the
spiritual council of a certain ‘encyclical of the one, holy, catholic and
apostolic church’. It was composed by an inhabitant of Starodub, Hilarion Egor.
Kabanov with the aim of condemning the reasonings of the Bespopovtsi,
whose distribution had dealt a blow to the Austrian priesthood. Having examined
several books of the Bespopovtsi, the epistle expressed [the following]
view of the Orthodox Church: ‘The ruling church in Russia, as also the Greek,
believe in the same God as we (the Old Believers), the Creator of heaven and
earth… Therefore, although we pronounce and write the name of the Saviour
‘Isus’, we do not dare to condemn that which is written and pronounced ‘Iisus’
as being the name of some other Jesus, the opponent of Christ, as certain Bespopovtsi
think to do. Similarly, we do not dishonour and blaspheme the cross with four
ends…’ It was also recognised that the true priesthood of Christ continued in
the Orthodox Church (Great Russian and Greek) and would remain until the day of
judgement. While some accepted the epistle, others condemned it. Thus there
appeared mutually opposing parties of ‘encylicalers’ and ‘anti-encyclicalers’.
The latter, who had tendencies towards Bespopovschina, began to affirm
that the name ‘Iisus’, as accepted by the Orthodox Church, is the name of
another person that ‘Isus’, and is the name of the Antichrist. Both parties had
their own bishops…”[688]
After the creation of the Belokrinitskaia hierarchy, the attitude of the
Russian government towards the Old Ritualists became stricter. In 1854 the
schismatics were deprived of all rights as merchants, and their chapel in the
Rogozhsky cemetery was closed. However, from the beginning of Alexander II’s
reign in 1856, they were allowed to have services in the Rogozhsky cemetery. In
1865 the government wanted to introduce a further weakening of the legislation
against the Old Ritualists, and only the voice of Metropolitan Philaret stopped
it.
“The struggle of the holy hierarch with the schism in the last years of
his life had, if not a very large, at any rate a definite success. Many of the
schismatics joined either Orthodoxy or the Edinoverie [i.e. the Orthodox
Church, but with permission to use the Old Ritual]. Thus in 1854 a certain
number of schismatics from the Preobrazhensky cemetery joined the Edinoverie,
and in 1865 the following activists of the Belokrinitskaia metropolia joined
with the rights of the Edinoverie: among the bishops, the metropolitan’s
deputy, Onuphrius of Braila, Paphnutius of Kolomna, Sergius of Tula and Justin
of Tulchinsk; Hieromonk Joasaph; the archdeacon of Metropolitan Cyril, his
secretary and the keeper of the archives Philaret; Hierodeacon Melchizedek, who
was able to take the archive of the metropolia and transfer it across the
Russian frontier.
“The success might have been greater if the government had more actively
supported Philaret and his undertakings in the struggle against the schism…”[689]
It was in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I that the beginning of what may be
called “ecumenical relations” with the western confessions can be discerned.
The pioneer in this on the Orthodox side was A.S. Khomiakov, whose
correspondence with the Anglican William Palmer may be considered not only the
earliest, but also the best, exemplar of how to conduct ecumenical relations
without betraying the truth. He was very well informed about the religious
situation in bothe East and West, clearly longed for union, and was not seeking
merely to “score points” over an adversary. He was generous in what was good in
the West, and not afraid to admit weaknesses in the East. But he was politely
but unbendingly firm in his defence of the Orthodox position on questions of
faith (e.g. the Filioque) and ecclesiology (where the True Church is and
where it is not).
In spite of his ardent desire for union, Khomiakov was pessimistic about
its prospects; and this not so much because of the doctrinal obstacles, as of
the moral obstacles. As he explained to Palmer: “A very weak conviction
in points of doctrine can bring over a Latin to Protestantism, or a Protestant
to the Latins. A Frenchman, a German, an Englishman, will go over to
Presbyterianism, to Lutheranism, to the Independents, to the Cameronians, and
indeed to almost every form of belief or misbelief; he will not go over to
Orthodoxy. As long as he does not step out of the circles of doctrines which
have taken their origin in the Western world, he feels himself at home;
notwithstanding his apparent change, he does not feel that dread of apostasy
which renders sometimes the passage from error to faith as difficult as from
truth to error. He will be condemned by his former brethren, who will call his
action a rash one, perhaps a bad one; but it will not be utter madness,
depriving him, as it were, of his rights of citizenship in the civilized world
of the West. And that is natural. All the Western doctrine is born out of the
Latins; it feels (though unconsciously) its solidarity with the past; it feels
its dependence from one science, from one creed, from one line of life; and
that creed, that science, that life was the Latin one. This is what I hinted
at, and what you understand very rightly, viz., that all Protestants are
Crypto-Papists; and, indeed, it would be a very easy task to show that in their
theology (as well as philosophy) all the definitions of all the objects of
creed or understanding are merely taken out of the old Latin System, though
often made negative in the application. In short, if it was to be expressed in
the concise language of algebra, all the West knows but one datum, a;
whether it be preceded by the positive sign +, as with the Latins, or with the
negative -, as with the protestants, the a remains the same. Now, a
passage to Orthodoxy seems indeed like an apostasy from the past, from its science,
creed, and life. It is rushing into a new and unknown world, a bold step to
take, or even to advise.
“This, most reverend sir, is the moral obstacle I have been speaking
about; this, the pride and disdain which I attribute to all the Western communities.
As you see, it is no individual feeling voluntarily bred or consciously held in
the heart; it is no vice of the mind, but an involuntary submission to the
tendencies and direction of the past. When the unity of the Church was
lawlessly and unlovingly rent by the Western clergy, the more so inasmuch as at
the same time the East was continuing its former friendly intercourse, and
submitting to the opinion of the Western Synods the Canons of the Second
Council of Nicaea, each half of Christianity began a life apart, becoming from
day to day more estranged from the other. There was an evident self-complacent
triumph on the side of the Latins; there was sorrow on the side of the East,
which had seen the dear ties of Christian brotherhood torn asunder – which had
been spurned and rejected, and felt itself innocent. All these feelings have
been transmitted by hereditary succession to our time, and, more or less,
either willingly or unwillingly, we are still under their power. Our time has
awakened better feelings; in England, perhaps, more than anywhere else, you are
seeking for the past brotherhood, for the past sympathy and communion. It would
be a shame for us not to answer your proferred friendship, it would be a crime
not to cultivate in our hearts an intense desire to renovate the Unity of the
Church; but let us consider the question coolly, even when our sympathies are
most awakened.
“The Church cannot be a harmony of discords; it cannot be a numerical
sum of Orthodox, Latins, and Protestants. It is nothing if it is not perfect
inward harmony of creed and outward harmony of expression (notwithstanding
local differences in the rite). The question is, not whether the Latins and
protestants have erred so fatally as to deprive individuals of salvation, which
seems to be often the subject of debate – surely a narrow and unworthy one,
inasmuch as it throws suspicion on the mercy of the Almighty. The question is
whether they have the Truth, and whether they have retained the ecclesiastical
tradition unimpaired. If they have not, where is the possibility of unity?…
“Do not, I pray, nourish the hope of finding Christian Truth without
stepping out of the former protestant circle. It is an illogical hope; it is a
remnant of that pride which thought itself able and wished to judge and decide
by itself without the Spiritual Communion of heavenly grace and Christian love.
Were you to find all the truth, you would have found nothing; for we alone can
give you that without which all would be vain – the assurance of Truth.”[690]
In 1864, four years after Khomiakov’s death, Pastor Jung, a delegate of
the New York convocation of the Episcopalian Church with authority from some of
the bishops there to enter into relations with the older Russian hierarchs, came
to Russia. In a meeting with Metropolitan Philaret and other bishops, he
explained the significance of the 39 articles for the Anglicans and
Episcopalians. The metropolitan said that a rapprochement between the Russian
and American Episcopalian Churches might create problems with their respective
“mother churches” in England and Greece.
Thus the Greeks were less accommodating with regard to the canonicity of
baptism by pouring than their Russian co-religionists. The metropolitan
probably had in mind here the experience of William Palmer, who, being a member
of the “Oxford movement” and its “branch theory” of the Church (i.e. that the
True Church consists of three branches: the Orthodox, the Catholic and the
Anglican), had been shocked to find that the Greeks would receive him into
communion by baptism, and the Russians by chrismation only. In spite of
Khomiakov’s attempts to explain the Orthodox use of condescension or “economy”,
Palmer remained dissatisfied by what he saw as a difference in ecclesiology
between the Greeks and the Russians, and eventually joined the Roman Catholic
Church.[691]
In another meeting with Pastor Jung, Metropolitan Philaret posed five
questions relating to the 39 articles:
1. How can the 39 articles not being
a stumbling-block to the union of the Churches?
2. How can the teaching of the
American Episcopalian Church’s teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit
[the Filioque] being made to agree with the teaching of the Eastern
Church?
3. Is the uninterruptedness of
apostolic hierarchical ordination fully proven in the American Church?
4. Does the American Church
recognize reliable Church Tradition to be a subsidiary guiding principle for
the explanation of Holy Scripture and for Church orders and discipline?
5. What is the view of the American
Church on the sevenfold number of sacraments in the Eastern Church?
At another meeting the pastor gave preliminary replies to the questions,
and insisted that the 39 articles had a political rather than a spiritual
meaning, and did not have a fully dogmatic force.
Although the two sides parted on friendly terms, nothing positive came
from the meeting. The public in America were not ready for this, and there even
began something in the nature of a reaction. Learning about this, Philaret
sadly remarked: “The reconcilers of the churches… are weaving a cover for
division, but are not effecting union.” “How desirable is the union of the
Churches! But how difficult to ensure that the movement towards it should soar
with a pure striving for the Truth and should be entirely free from attachment
to entrenched opinions.” “O Lord, send a true spirit of union and peace.”[692]
Coming from Georgia, Schemahieromonk Hilarion had another reason for
insisting on loyalty to the Tsar: Georgia depended for her very survival on the
support of Russia against the Muslim peoples to the south. Correspondingly,
Russia’s constant aim in the Caucasus region was to establish a firm and
reliable bridge with her protectorate, Georgia.
To this end, as Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes, “it was necessary to
overcome the opposition of Persia and Turkey and the warlike mountain peoples
of the Northern Caucasus and the Caspian and Black Sea coasts whom they often
stirred up.
“It is fashionable to talk about the cruelties committed by the Russian
armies in this ‘Caucasian war’. But it is not fashionable to talk about the
beastly acts of the Muslim mountaineers in relation to the Russians, and also
in relation to those of their own people who had accepted Orthodoxy (for
example, the Osetians and Georgians). And these acts exceeded all human
imagination. War is war! The mutual hardening of the sides was, alas,
inevitable here. And so there were also excesses of violence and cruelty on the
side of the Russians. But it is not by the cruelty of the Russians that such
measures as the periodical mass extermination of the male population of
Chechnya is to be explained! They did not resort to such measures in relation
to other Caucasian tribes. But the Chechens ‘deserved’ such harsh punitive
actions by their exceptional ferocity and cunning. However, this does not apply
to the whole Chechen people. The blame here lies on the fanatics from Islam.
This fanaticism makes itself felt today also… Gradually, at a dear price,
Russia managed to break the opposition of the mountaineers and thereby
guarantee a constant safe ‘bridge’ of communication with Orthodox Georgia. This
is the main meaning and result of the Caucasian war.”[693]
Russia first made contact with the Caucasian mountaineers at precisely
the time that she achieved her great victory over the Tatar Muslims at the
taking of Kazan. In 1552 two Cherkessian princes asked Ivan IV, the conqueror
of Kazan, to receive them as subjects to help them in their struggle against
the Turkish sultan and his vassal, the Crimean Khan. In 1557 two Kabardinian
princes, Temryuk and Tizryut, asked for the same in their struggle against
Shamkhal of Tarki.
Soon there were Cossacks on the banks of Terek, and in 1586 the Russian
Tsar and King Alexander of Georgia formed an alliance against Shamkhal, as a
result of which Tarki was stormed in 1594. But Sultan-Muta, son of Shamkhal,
and the whole of Dagestan rebelled against the Russians. Tarki was destroyed in
1604 and the Russian armies were destroyed.
It was not until over a century later, in 1722, that Peter I resumed the
Russian advance and conquered the Caspian coast. This brought the Russians in
conflict with the Shah of Persia, who in 1741 tried to conquer the area, but
was defeated.
“To some extent,” writes Dominic Lieven, “the Russians were pulled into
the Trans-Caucasus – in other words, across the mountains – by appeals for
support from the Georgians, a fellow Orthodox people. Georgia was too weak to defend
itself against increasing pressure from both the Ottomans and the Persians.
Georgia had good reason to seek the protection of empire and to escape the
anarchy, economic devastation and loss of population that had resulted from
existing in an insecure borderland. In the mid-thirteenth century there were
five million Georgians, by 1770 there barely 500,000. In the last decades of
the eighteenth century Petersburg wavered as to whether it was worthwhile to
take on the burden of defending and ruling Georgia. In the end what mattered
most were strategic and geopolitical considerations. Given both traditional
hostility to the Ottoman Empire and growing rivalry with Napoleonic France and
Britain in Persia and the Ottoman Empire, it was decided to annex Georgia as
Russia’s base and centre of power beyond the Caucasus. Once established in the
region, however, the Russians to some extent had to obey the laws of local
geopolitics. This entailed, for example, conquering the land and sea
communications between the Trans-Caucasus and Russia. Subduing the mountain
peoples of the North Caucasus proved a hugely expansive and time-consuming
struggle, not concluded until the 1860s.”[694]
In 1785-87 Sheikh Mansur led Chechnya and Dagestan in rebellion against
the Russians. He was defeated. However, in 1812 rebellion flared up again.
Then, “in 1826,” writes Lebedev, “for the sake of her interests in
Georgia and without a declaration of war, Persia invaded the Transcaucasus.
General Ermolov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian armies in the Caucasus,
was not able with his forces to deal with the invasion. There came to his help
the armies led by General Paskevich. In a series of battles Paskevich defeated
the Persians, took Erivan (Yerevan), invaded Persia and headed for its capital
– Teheran. The Persian Shah sought peace, which was concluded in 1828 in
Turkmanchai, in accordance with which the lands of present-day Armenia and
Azerbaidjan passed permanently to Russia. An end was placed to Persia’s
pretensions. Nicholas I bestowed the title of Count of Erivan on Paskevich. It
was more difficult to bring into submission the mountain tribes of the Northern
Caucasus, with whom the Russian Cossack settlements on the Terek and Kuban had
long had dealings. The Chechens, the Cherkessy and other warlike peoples not
only warred against the Cossacks, they also lived next to them and entered into
peaceful relations with the Russians, encountering in these cases a completely
friendly response from the Russians. But in 1825 there began the ‘Miurizm’
movement, which was introduced from Turkey. The ‘Miuridy’ (novices) were
obliged to wage a holy war against the ‘infidel’ Russians under the leadership
of ‘holy elders’ – imams and sheiks – with the aim of creating an extensive
‘caliphate’ from Stambul to the Kuban. The imams Kazi-mullah and later Shamil
became popular leaders.”[695]
From the middle of the 1840s Shamil became both the political and the
religious leader of the state of Imamat, taking the title of “ruler of the
right-believing”; all executive, judicial and legislative power was in his
hands. Declaring all the tribal leaders who submitted to the Russians to be
traitors and apostates, he united all the North Caucasus mountaineers for the
first time.[696]
In the 1840s the French consul in Tiflis wrote: “We have to distinguish
two personalities united in Shamil.... On the one hand, - the political leader,
dictator, to whom limitless power was presented by events with a democratic
system based on the principle of absolute equality. But at the same time he is
a religious leader, to whom the calling of the great imam, the supreme head of
the right believers, a sacred character is attached. Having this dual calling,
he is the only judge in the question of offering the sacrifices demanded by the
war… His power is firmly organized.”[697]
However, God was with the Russian armies. Thus on December 24, 1853
Archbishop Isidore, the exarch of Georgia, wrote to Metropolitan Philaret of
Moscow: “The captured Turks told us openly that when the battle near
Alexandropol’ became fierce, and the whole Russian detachment became involved,
the Turks saw a radiant woman coming down from heaven holding a banner in her
hands and accompanied by two warriors. The light from her was so bright that it
was like the shining of the sun, and no eye could stand it. This appearance
produced horror in the ranks of the fighters and was the reason why, on seeing
that God was on the side of Rus’, all the Turks turned to flight and lost the
battle.
“The Russians did not see this appearance. By the Providence of God our
foreign enemies witnessed to it.”[698]
In 1859 Shamil was captured, and by 1864 the Caucasian wars had come to
an end, having claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 Russians killed since 1801.
At this point, writes Lieven, most of the
population of the western region of the Caucasus “were ‘encouraged’ to emigrate
to the Ottoman Empire amidst great suffering and loss of life. The Chechens and
Dagestanis of the eastern region, who had resisted the Russians with equal
determination, were allowed to remain in their homeland. The reason for this
was that the western region, bordering on a Black Sea on which Russia
[following the Crimean War] was not permitted to have a navy, was acutely
vulnerable to Ottoman or British attack. In the aftermath of the Crimean War,
St. Petersburg’s perception was that Russia was dangerously weak, and
Palmerston’s England on the offensive worldwide. Palmerston himself commented
that ‘these half-civilized governments such as those of China, Portugal,
Spanish America require a Dressing every eight or ten years to keep them in
order’, and no one who knew his views on Russia could doubt his sense that she
too deserved to belong to this category of states. The Russians were not
therefore prepared to leave on this coastline a Sunni population whom they
quite rightly believed to be potential allies of the Ottomans in any future
war. A British historian of the ‘Great Game’ (i.e. Anglo-Russian
nineteenth-century rivalry in Central Asia) comments that ‘the forcible exile
of six hundred thousand Circassians from the Black Sea Coast deprived the Turks
and the British of their most valuable potential allies within the Russian
Empire.’”[699]
Russia the Third Rome was extending her civilizing and Christianizing
influence far beyond the borders of Europe and the Middle East. Her missions to
Siberia and Central Asia were to bring forth rich fruit. But perhaps her most
striking success was on the American continent, in Alaska.
In the eighteenth century the Russian Holy Synod sent a mission to
convert the Indians of Alaska to Orthodoxy. The most famous member of this
mission was the Valaam monk St. Herman of Alaska, who died in 1837 and was
canonized by the Russian Church Abroad in 1970. “From 1823,” writes Lebedev,
“there begins a second special Church mission, whose most prominent
representative turned out to be the young priest Fr. John Popov-Veniaminov,
later Metropolitan Innocent of Moscow and Kolomna. This great and wonderful man
was born in 1797 in the village of a poor village reader near Irkutsk. He
finished his studies at the Irkutsk seminary, where he displayed great interest
both in theological and in secular sciences. In 1823, with the whole of his family,
wife and children, he arrived at the island of Unalaska and began his apostolic
ministry among the Aleuts, Kadyaks, Eskimos and Indians of the west coast of
Alaska and Northern California (the city of Novo-Arkhangelsk on the island of
Sitka). Teaching the local inhabitants various arts and household crafts, he
with their help built a church, introduced schools, work-houses and hospitals,
and baptised thousands of natives without ever resorting to violence or
any pressure, but acting only through love and the word of truth. Fr. John
mastered six local languages, and studied and described the everyday life,
manners and anthropology of the bribes, the local geography and climates,
becoming a true father of the ‘wild’ peoples, or, as St. Herman of Alaska used
to say about himself, their ‘nanny’! For the Aleuts he composed an alphabet and
translated the Gospel of Matthew and some necessary prayers and other books
into their language. His works on the ethnography of the peoples of Alaska,
California and the adjacent islands are still used in science to this day and
are considered models. Even then, during his lifetime, they were highly valued
by the academies of science of Russia and Europe! Father John Popov-Veniaminov
continued the best traditions of the Russian missionaries of Siberia, the Altai
and the Far East. In those times that was not simply, it demanded courage,
asceticism. The point is that the interests of the apostolate of the Church in
those places often contradicted the interests of the Russian-American Company
(RAC), which traded in furs and sea animals. ‘Industrial’ people and RAC
officials sometimes displayed cruelty, and sometimes were inclined mercilessly
to exploit the natives, although one has to say that these were excesses,
but not the rule! As a rule, even our ‘industrials’ behaved in a friendly and
fraternal manner to the native population of America. Shelikhov considered
marriages between Russian and Indians as very desirable. There were mixed
marriages. The children from these marriages (Creoles) often turned out to be
very capable people, while some of them attained high rank in state service in
Russia. Catherine II and Paul I prescribed only friendly relations towards the
natives under threat of punishment. A special decree of Emperor Alexander I
ordered the RAC ‘first of all to venerate humanity’ in all the peoples of
America, and in no case to resort to cruelty and violence. Russia often sent
notes of protest to the USA, whose merchants sold firearms to the Indians. The
USA replied that they were ‘free’, and that they could not ban this trade in
death… But in the 19th century among our workers in RAC there were
people who were completely foreign to Orthodox, who simply did not understand
it (for example, the RAC’s ‘chronicler’, Khlebnikov). And sometimes it was
difficult for our missionaries to defined whom they had to enlighten
first of all – the Aleuts and Indians, or our own people, the Russians!… In such
circumstances only an all-encompassing (spiritual and secular) education of
the apostles of America, like Fr. John Popov, could force some of the
officials of RAC to venerate the Church and her missionary work. In 1840, on
the recommendation of Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), who had become friends
with Fr. John, Tsar Nicholas I appointed the priest Popov-Veniaminov, who had
been widowed by this time and had accepted monasticism, as the first bishop of
the newly formed Kamchatka, Kurile islands and Aleut diocese. When the Tsar
gave this name to the diocese, people remarked to him: ‘But Your Majesty! There
is not a single church on the Kurile islands!’ ‘Build them!’ snapped the
Emperor. That is how the new hierarch of the Russian Church Innocent
(Veniaminov) appeared…”
Bishop Innocent, of whom Metropolitan Philaret said that he recognized
the apostolic spirit in him, later succeeded him in the see of Moscow and is
counted among the saints of the Russian Church. His labours, together with
those of Archimandrite Macarius in the Altai and Archbishop Nicholas in Japan,
give the lie to the idea that Russian Orthodoxy was “ossified” or “paralysed”.
In fact, the missionary labours of these men, supported as always by the Tsars
of the period, prove both the vitality of Russian Orthodoxy in general and the
continuing existence of Church-State “symphony” in particular.
In the Tsar’s encouragement of the
American mission “was reflected, as in a drop of water, the essence of the
politics of the Third Rome – the widening of the boundaries of the Church. In
her expansion to Alaska and Northern California, to the possessions of Japan
and China, and to the sands of Central Asia, Russia derived not only commercial
and military-strategic advantages (although these, too, were not of little
importance), but brought to the new lands the light of her Orthodox Faith and
spirituality. Besides, as has already been pointed out, she related to the
peoples of these new lands with great respect. In contrast to the expansion of
the Roman Catholic church, the Russian Orthodox Church and state did not
convert one people to Christianity by forcible means! Amidst the pagan
tribes of Siberia, the North, the Far East and America, the Russian
spiritual missions were very active in preaching the Word of God, building
churches and monasteries, hospitals, homes for invalids and the elderly,
providing medical help and what would now be called ‘social security’, often
quarrelling because of these good works with the local secular bosses. As
regards the Muslim peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, here there
was almost no missionary work.[700] After
the unsuccessful attempts to create spiritual missions for the Tatars and
Kalmyks in the 18th century, Russia renounced special ecclesiastical
missions in Muslim areas distinguished for their strong predeliction for Islam.
Orthodoxy was not imposed on the Muslim people; they were left to live freely
in accordance with their own customs, but Orthodox churches naturally arose on
their lands for the Russians who had settled there, so that all those desiring
it among those peoples received the opportunity to learn Orthodoxy! And
not more than that. The widening of the boundaries of Russia (and of the
Russian Church!) encountered the interests of the USA, Japan, China and
England. The latter in those times was striving to expand northwards from
India, Afghanistan and Persia, threatening mainly the Central Asian interests
of Russia. To forestall England, and stop her advancement … was a very
important task of Russia in Central Asia, in the basin of the Caspian sea, a
task that she would carry out in the middle and second half of the 19th
century…”[701]
This being so, why did Tsar Alexander II
sell Alaska and the Aleutian islands to the United States in 1867 for $7.2
million (Fort Ross in California had been sold already in 1848 for $30,000)?
The parlous finances of Russia after the Crimean War were one reason; another
was the fact that only 10,000 Russians lived in Alaska (there were 40,000
Indians), and that the defence of the vast and distant territory against the
expected influx of American explorers and settlers was not considered
practical. A third was the desire to secure the United States as a friend and
not a foe. All these were weighty reasons – although it was already known that
there were gold deposits under the Alaskan soil...[702]
But was not the Third Rome obliged to
protect the interests of her converts in the New World? Those interests were
protectd; permission was granted to the Russian Spiritual Mission to continue
to work in Alaska. And within fifty years Russia herself came under the yoke of
the atheists…
Nihilist Realism: “Fathers and Sons”
In sharp contrast to the God-inspired and enormously fruitful activity
of her missionaries in the East was the wholly destructive activity of Russia’s
false sons both at home and abroad, the lovers of the West, who were spreading
socialist and anti-monarchist propaganda. The generation that came of age after
the Crimean War was characterised by a sharp and categorical rejection of the
values of their fathers, whether these were Slavophile or westernising. Such
people were called “nihilists” by Turgenev in his famous novel Fathers and
Sons: “a person who does not take any principle for granted, however much
that principle may be revered”.
“The figure of Bazarov in that novel,” writes Fr. Seraphim Rose, “is the
type of the ‘new men’ of the ‘sixties’ in Russia, simple-minded materialists
and determinists, who seriously thought (like D. Pisarev) to find the salvation
of mankind in the dissection of the frog, or thought they had proved the
non-existence of the human soul by failing to find it in the course of an
autopsy. (One is reminded of the Soviet Nihilists, the ‘new men’ of our own
‘sixties’, who fail to find God in outer space.) This ‘Nihilist’ is the man who
respects nothing, bows before no authority, accepts (so he thinks) nothing on
faith, judges all in the light of a science taken as absolute and exclusive
truth, rejects all idealism and abstraction in favor of the concrete and
factual. He is the believer, in a word, in the ‘nothing-but’, in the rejection
of everything men have considered ‘higher’, the things of the mind and spirit,
to the lower or ‘basic’: matter, sensation, the physical.
“As opposed to Liberal vagueness, the Realist world-view seems perfectly
clear and straightforward. In place of agnosticism or an evasive deism, there
is open atheism; in place of vague ‘higher values’, naked materialism and
self-interest. All is clarity in the Realist universe – except what is most
important and most requires clarity: its beginning and end. Where the Liberal
is vague about ultimate things, the Realist is childishly naïve: they
simply do not exist for him; nothing exists but what is most obvious.
“Such Realism, of course, is a self-contradiction, whether it takes the
form of a ‘naturalism’ that tries to establish an absolute materialism and
determinism, or a ‘positivism’ that purports to deny the absolute altogether,
or the doctrinaire ‘agnosticism’ that so readily discourses on the
‘unknowability’ of ultimate reality…”[703]
“Brainwashing in favour for the revolution was already being carried out
by Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, Pisarev, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky. Chernyshevsky
was a Fourierist in his world-view. His views and arguments were drawn from
western socialist arsenals. He did not know Russian reality, he had not studied
the way of life of the villages and agricultural relations, but he was
categorical. Chernyshevsky saw in the village commune a possible earnest of the
future socialist order and called on people to struggle for the establishment
of this order.
“He was helped by the talented Dobroliubov, who directed the whole force
of his exceptional talent to the criticism of the whole of contemporary social
life, the whole of the Russian reality of ‘the dark kingdom’.
“Debunking the liberals, and mercilessly persecuting the gradualists,
Dobroliubov sharply expressed his sympathies with real radicalism. His heroes
were the radical leaders of democracy, the Masons Mazzini and Garibaldi.
“The
rulers of the minds of the young generation were Herzen, Chernyshevsky and
Dobroliubov.
“Herzen’s Bell was freely passed from hand to hand, and went
throughout Russia.
“Chernyshevsky’s and Dobroliubov’s articles were taken for revelations.
“The propaganda of political and socialist ideas alternated with the
preaching of atheism. In 1859 Metropolitan Philaret wrote about the state of
the Moscow diocese: ‘A sad sight is presented, and still sadder anxieties are
inspired by this negative and blasphemous literature, which is as widely, if
not more widely distributed [here] than in a certain European state of the last
century, where it turned out to be destructive. Callings, posts and persons are
all subjected to cruel denials and are portrayed in an ugly, unbelievably
exaggerated and slanderous form. It is not necessary to point to many examples:
contemporary publications are full of them… May the Lord direct the wisdom of
the Most Holy Synod and the Orthodox government to seek means to heal and
conserve.’
“In 1860 there came out of the ranks of the university youth a new
prophet of the younger generation – Pisarev.
“’Allow us, youths,’ he wrote in May, 1861, ‘to speak, write and
publish, allow us to shake off through our natural scepticism those things
which have become stale, that clapped-out junk, which you call general
authorities.’ ‘Here is the concluding word of our youth camp: what can be
broken should be broken; that which withstands a blow can stay, but that which
will fly off into fragments is rubbish; in any case beat to the right and to
the left, no harm will come of it nor can come of it…’ ‘Literature in all its
varieties must strike at one point; it must with all its powers emancipate the
human person from those various restrictions which make him ashamed of his own
thought, caste prejudices, the authority of tradition, the striving for a
common ideal and all that outdated rubbish which hinders the living man
from breathing and developing freely.’
“In his striving to free the human mind from the influence of feeling
Pisarev nurtured in himself a hatred for all aesthetics and denied art on
principle. He completely denied any significance for portraiture, sculpture,
the plastic arts and music. He gave almost the same secondary role to poetry.
“Pisarev recognized Turgenev after he had created Bazarov, but he with a
special inspiration debunked the old literary gods, calling, for example, the
works of Pushkin ‘soft-boiled boots’.
“Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov and Pisarev revolutionised youth and
prepared the cadres of the destroyers.
“Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov called for the liberation of the people
from political and social oppression. Pisarev concentrated all his attention on
the liberation of the person and human thought from all religious, everyday and
family paths and prejudices.
“The seed sown by these ‘luminaries’ excited the young people…
“The movement of youth was encouraged by the movement among the nobility
demanding ‘the crowning of knowledge’, that is, a constitution…”[704]
Paradoxically, the rise of nihilism and revolutionary sentiment in Russia coincided with a series of liberal reforms unparalleled in any country on earth, and undertaken by Tsar Alexander himself, for which he earned the title of “Tsar-Liberator”. These were elicited, in the first place, by the fact that after the Crimean war, which exposed various inadequacies in Russia’s internal life, both Slavophile and Westernizing intellectuals began to focus more and more on serfdom as the underlying cause of Russia’s ills.
Geoffrey Hosking writes: “As the Westerner and close friend of Granovskii, B.N. Chicherin put it, ‘Someone bound hand and foot cannot compete with someone free to use all his limbs. Serfdom is a shackle which we drag around with us, and which holds us back just when other peoples are racing ahead unimpeded. Without the abolition of serfdom none of our problems, political, administrative or social, can be solved.’ He gave as an example the way in which the Tsar had had to revoke the decree creating a milita because it aroused among serfs the false hope that they would be freed…
“The existence of serfdom obstructed modernization of the army and thereby burdened the treasury with huge and unproductive military expenditure. As the military reformer R.A. Fadeev pointed [out], ‘Under serfdom, anyone becoming a soldier is freed; hence one cannot, without shaking the whole social order, admit many people to military service. Therefore we have to maintain on the army establishment in peacetime all the soldiers we need in war.’
“[The Slavophile] Iurii Samarin summed up serfdom as a moral and legal split running right down the middle of Russian society. ‘Why should twenty-two million subjects who pay poll tax to the state be place outside the law and outside any direct relationship with the supreme power, appearing on official lists merely as the lifeless chattels of another social estate?’”[705]
Moreover, these were not merely theoretical concerns. Violence was
building up in the countryside. Hobsbawm writes: “There were 148 outbreaks of
peasant unrest in 1826-34, 216 in 1835-44, 348 in 1844-54, culminating in the
474 outbreaks of the last years preceding the emancipation of 1861.”[706] These
were not caused by poverty alone – as English observers noted, the Russian
peasants were on the whole richer than their British or Irish counterparts.[707] No
less important was a feeling of injustice. For the peasants’ understanding of
their relationship with their noble masters was: “we are yours, but the land is
ours”, or even: “we are yours, and you are ours”.[708]
And so, whatever the merits of the previous system, it could not
continue to exist unaltered if not only the intellectuals clamoured for its
removal, but also the deeply Orthodox peasantry. Nicholas I had long planned to
emancipate the serfs, and his son Alexander II brought these plans to fruition
in 1861. In essence, the peasants were to given their personal freedom gratis,
but they would have to pay the nobles for the land which they worked (about a
third). They would be given 49 years to pay for the land, helped by generous
loans from the government.
Emancipation changed the relationship between landowners and peasants
from patriarchal to civil. From a purely material, economic point of view, it
had the advantage that it paved the way for more efficient agriculture and the
provision of labour for the industrialization of Russia, so sorely needed in
view of the relative failure of the Crimean War. Moreover, “more than 80% of
the small and middle nobility were in debt to the state on the security of
their own estates, and this debt would have been unrepayable if it had not been
for the reform. The value of the payments for the land cleared many debts.”[709] Nor
did they have to wait for the peasants to pay them: the government immediately
paid them 80% of the value of the land by wiping out their debts, while the
peasants were given a 49-year period at a cheap rate of interest. The remaining
20% was paid by the peasants directly to the landowners in cash payments or
labour.
Among the disadvantages of the reform was the disillusion of the
peasants, many of whom had not expected to pay for the land, and found the
payments greater than the rents they had been paying earlier. Moreover, once
liberated they lost access to timber and firewood in landowners’ forests.
There is much disagreement about the most far-reaching social
transformation produced by the reform: the replacement of the authority of the
landowner by that of the village commune, or mir, for those peasants who
did not take advantage of their freedom to leave the land and until they had
paid their redemption payments. The commune had the right to redistribute the
land among the peasants, and the collective responsibility to pay for taxes,
the building of bridges and roads, etc. If one member of the commune could not
contribute payments or labour, he fell into debt, as it were, to the commune.
The intellectuals, as we have seen, regarded the commune as the essence
of Russianness. And the socialists saw it as quintessentially “Russian
socialism”. However, Fr. Lev Lebedev points out that the commune was by no
means as anciently Russian as was then thought: “In ancient Rus’ (Russia) the
peasants possessed or used plots of land completely independently, according to
the right of personal inheritance or acquisition, and the commune (mir)
had no influence on this possession. A certain communal order obtained only in
relation to the matter of taxes and obligations… To this ancient ‘commune’
there corresponds to a certain degree only the rule of ‘collective
responsibility’ envisaged by the Statute of 1861 in relation to taxes and obligations.
But in Rus’ there was never any ‘commune’ as an organization of communal
land-use with the right of the mir to distribute and redistribute
plots among members of the ‘commune’…”[710]
The institution of serfdom came into being in the first place as a
result of military needs. As Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote: “Russia from
the very beginning of her existence until almost the most recent times was an
extensive military camp. Her history has been a history of unceasing war.
Russia has sometimes attacked neighbouring peoples, and sometimes repulsed
their attacks. For two centuries [during the Kievan period of Russian history]
she was occupied in incessant civil war, while not ceasing to fight her
neighbours. Then she fought to overthrow the Tatar yoke, she fought for the
restoration of the autocracy, she fought to enter those frontiers in which she
had been under the Equal-to-the-Apostles Vladimir. She fought in order to open
for herself communications with Europe, so as to occupy a place in the number
of its states. Finally, she fought against the whole of Europe for the
liberation of Europe.
“With the military character of the state, it was impossible for the
military class not to occupy the first place in the state. In particular in
ancient and middle-period Russia the military element absorbed and overshadowed
all the other elements…
“The necessity of muzzling the self-will of the simple people and the
impossibility of having a police force in an unorganised state forced Tsar Boris
Godunov to tie the peasants to the lands. Then all the Russian peasants were
turned into unfree peasants [by Catherine II]…
“From the time of Alexander I views on the subject changed: the state
finally became organized, a police force consisting of officials was
established everywhere, the people began to emerge from their condition of
childhood, received new ideas, felt new needs. The nobility began to chafe with
their condition of guardianship over the peasants, the peasants began to chafe
at the restrictions on their liberty, at their patriarchal way of life. All
this began to appear and express itself strongly in the second half of the
reign of Emperor Nicholas I.
“Now the prosperously reigning Emperor Alexander II has found the matter
already prepared and has found it necessary to change the form of
administration of landowners’ peasants. What is the essential significance of
the improvement in the peasants’ way of life? It is the change in the form of
their administration. They are being given freedom, but not self-will. They are
coming out from under the jurisdiction of the landowners as if from under the
supervisions of educators and guardians, into a relationship of personal
service to the state…”[711]
Bishop Ignatius summarised the Church’s views on the subject in two
points:
“1. That both the Word of God and the Church – both the Universal Church
and the Russian Church – in the persons of the Holy Fathers, has never said
anything at all about the abolition of civil slavery, that there is nothing in
common between spiritual and civil freedom, that both slaves and masters were
constantly taught by the Church the most exact and conscientious fulfilment of
their obligations, that the violators of Christ’s commanment on love were subject
to rebukes and exhortations.
“2. That the emancipation of slaves has always been recognized by the
Church as a good deed, a deed of mercy, a deed of brotherly Christian love.
“… The most pious Russian Autocrat has indicated to the class of the
nobility the accomplishing of a great Christian work, a work of love. The
Church invokes the blessing of God upon the great work of the fatherland with
her warmest prayers. Her pastors invite the nobility to noble
self-renunciation, to sacrifice, to the immediate sacrifice of material goods
for the sake of moral goods, while they instruct the peasants to accept this
gift of the Tsar with due veneration and humility – the true indications that
the gift will be used wisely and usefully.
“But one must not think that civil liverty morally exalts only the
peasants: the class of the nobility must unfailingly enter onto a higher level
of moral acheivement in renouncing the ownership of slaves. That is the
characteristic of self-sacrifice and the offering of material goods as a
sacrifice for spiritual goods: it exalts, changes and perfects man.”[712]
Bishop Ignatius saw the Tsar’s decree as “a most happy initiative, a
majestic order amazing Europe”. However, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow was
worried. He considered “that Russia was not sufficiently prepared for
emancipation, that there was no unity even among those who had been called to
put it into effect, and that, finally, the nobility were not acquainted with
the subject presented to them.
“We can clearly see in what form the holy hierarch wanted to see a
resolution of the peasant question from his letter to Archimandrite Anthony
[Bochkov] dated 3 January, 1858: “’In Austria,’ he wrote to his deputy, ‘the
new organization of the peasants, which ours wishes to resemble, has not turned
out successfully. Some lands, which used to be worked when they were under the
authority of the landowners, remain unworked after the liberation of the
peasants. The estates appropriated by the peasants are being sold off at
auctions because dues are not being paid, with the result that poverty is on
the increase.
“But with us, it seems, things could be better if the good landowners
correctly interpreted the matter to the peasants and established some
well-thought-out agreements with them. One landowner summoned the elders among
his peasants, and gave them to read through what the government proposed; and
although their first word was: it was better the old way, still, seeing the
necessity of it, they began to discuss an agreement. The landowner offered them
estates, not through redemption payments, but as a gift; then he said how much
land he was giving them for agriculture, with what payment per dessiatina [2.7
acres], while he offered that his own landowner’s arable land could be hired
for ploughing; and they, agreeing to all the rest, said about the last article:
“No, governor, you’ll destroy yourself; hiring free labourers will be
expensive; say that we work this portion for you as before; it’s not difficult for
us.” Continuing the agreement in this way, they drew up rules in which they
took precautions also against disorders arising from self-will. If that’s how
best to set about the task, the matter could be worked out also with the worse
with less fear of harm. But will many understand and make the effort?’
“In essence, of course, the holy hierarch was not an opponent of the
emancipation of the serfs, he only wanted it to take place in a better way than
that marked out by the government. ‘We must pray,’ wrote Philaret to
Archimandrite Anthony, ‘that the Lord will instruct them [the reformers] in
that which is true and useful.’
“However, all this was only the thoughts of the holy hierarch with his
spiritual father: in society he preferred to be silent.
“’The peasant question is dark, contentious, unresolved,’ wrote Philaret
to Bishop Alexis of Tula, ‘it does not yet allow us to foresee how it will be
resolved, so that we can talk about it only through necessity and obligation,
and that with great caution… and it may happen that we are not discerning the
thought of the government, which is as yet not completely revealed; and in such
a situation it is vain for us to depart from the ecclesiastical way in order to
fall into a pit on the political way.’
“The fear of falling into a pit forced Philaret to watch the development
of events with regard to the peasant question in silence. But when the matter
was coming to a conclusion, a manifesto on the liberation had to be composed.
And at this point, willy-nilly, the hierarch was, so to speak, forcibly dragged
into the political whirlpool, from he had tried so hard to keep away, as from
something that did not concern him. The hierarch was asked to compose the
project of a manifesto. True, the original composition of this document was
entrusted to Yu. Samarin under the editorship of N. Miliutin and with the
participation in the composition of Great Prince Constantine Nikolaevich and
Bludov. But the project composed by Samarin, both because of its excess of
details not understandable to the people, and because of the weightiness of its
style, did not satisfy expectations. It was then decided that this work should
be placed on the metropolitan of Moscow.
“Philaret refused, referring to the fact that “the subject of the task
was difficult for him, being far from the circle of [his] understanding and
occupation’, but agreed to compose the project of the manfesto after long
discussions with the secret counsellor Topilsky, and that not for the sake of his
consciousness of satisfying a demand, but for the sake of obedience to the
Tsar.
“In the opinion of various contemporaries, the manifesto turned out to
be heavy, without sufficient uplift of spirit, without the spark from God in
it. And this is completely understandable. The hierarch wrote it without inner
fire, simply as a duty, as a necessity, with many doubts about the successful
outcome of the reform itself.
“Philaret feared the ‘great affair’, he feared its consequences. The
transformation of the life of the landowners’ peasants was not a matter of joy
for him; and he deliberately made no mention of joy in the project of the
manfesto. ‘People who believe in theoretical progress delight in the broad
transformation that is being undertaken,’ he wrote on February 19, 1861, ‘but
many well-intentioned people with experience are waiting for it with
perplexity, foreseeing difficulties.’
“In intimation of some disturbances, three days before the signing of
the manifesto, the hierarch wrote with sincerity: ‘O Lord, save the Tsar and
have mercy on all of us. It has been noted that the expectations of the people
are strongly trained on the 19th; but it will hardly produce what
they are expecting… Now they are writing from Petersburg about their anxieties,
including that the first blow will fall on the higher clergy, the monasteries,
the churches.’
“The great matter was carried out, it became ‘great’ also in the eyes of
Philaret. And only now did the hierarch express himself in defence of the reform
and castigate all those who said that an inadequate freedom had been granted.”[713]
It was the liberals who talked about “inadequate freedom”, stirring up
feelings against the government because of the “scandal” of serfdom. Herzen in
particular “sounded his outrageous bell and called on the peasants to take up
their axes”, as Bishop Ignatius put it.[714] And this spirit of rebellion crept into
ecclesiastical circles, too, which involved Herzen and Bishop Ignatius in a
fiery debate…
Metropolitan Philaret “remarked that ‘true freedom is Christian freedom
– internal, not external freedom, - moral and spiritual, not carnal, - always
doing good and never rebellious, which can live in a hut just as comfortably as
in an aristocrat’s or tsar’s house, - which a subject can enjoy as much as the
master without ceasing to be a subject, - which is unshakeable in bonds and
prison, as we can see in the Christian martyrs’ (‘Spiritual Bouquet’, Moscow,
1903). According to the remark of Bishop Plato, ‘Christian freedom is the
freedom to say no, to restrict oneself, and it is also the weight of Christian
love. This weight would be beyond the strength of man, if the same love did not
indicate to it blessed eternity..’[715]
However, it was not
so much “inadequate freedom” that remained the real criticism to which the
emancipation act was subject, so much as the fact that it introduced “the wrong
kind of freedom”. The problem was, to use a distinction made by Dostoyevsky,
that the change in formal structures brought about by the emancipation
of the serfs introduced a change in the spiritual content of the serfs’
lives. The old order, as we have seen, was never really one of traditional
slavery. It had been dictated by the military situation of the time, in which
Russia had vast extended borders with no natural defences. A quasi-monastic way
of life was developed in which everyone from the Tsar to the humblest peasant
had his “obedience”. The Tsar had to obey his calling; the nobles had to obey
the Tsar (by providing military service or service in the bureaucracy); and the
peasants had to obey the landowners. It was a common effort for a common cause
– the preservation of Orthodox Russia. Nobody literally “owned” anybody else;
but there were relations of obedience enforced by law that were carried out in
the Spirit of Orthodoxy. For, as St. John of Kronstadt said, “the varied forms
of service... to the tsar and the fatherland are an image of the main service
to our heavenly King, which must continue forever. Him first of all are we
obliged to serve, as fervent slaves of His by creation, redemption and
providence… Earthly service is a test, a preparatory service for service in the
heavens”.[716]
The old patriarchal
system began to break down as the nobles lost their Orthodoxy, their feeling of
duty and obedience to the State for Orthodoxy’s sake. Correspondingly, the
peasants began to feel their obedience to the nobles as a burden that was not
justified, as in the past, by the common defence of the land. As such, the
formal structure probably had to change in view of the change in its spiritual
content. But the change in formal structure meant that the sanctifying bonds of
obedience broke down still faster than they would have done otherwise. To that
extent, the reform, though rational from a politico-economic point of view, was
harmful. As Schema-Monk Boris of Optina said: “The old order was better, even
though I would really catch it from the nobleman… Now it’s gotten bad, because
there’s no authority; anyone can live however he wants.”[717]
Again, Solzhenitsyn
writes, citing Gleb Uspensky: “Under serfdom our peasantry was placed in a more
correct relationship to the land than today; the landowner had to
support everything that made agriculturalists out of his peasants. Even
military service was more just: they first took those who belonged to large
families; they had been preceded by all those who were incapable and the
drunkards, so that there were no workers in the village who prevented the
mouzhik from being an agriculturalist. ‘Our ancestors knew their people, they
wanted the best for them and gave them Christianity, the best that mankind has
come to in centuries of suffering. While now we rummage around in every kind of
national and European bric-à-brac, in rubbish dumps.’ In the same way,
‘the parish school, the school of the people, was founded on the principle:
transform the egoistical heart into a heart open to all suffering.”[718]
Fr. Lev Lebedev
writes: “Later critics of the reform also justly point out that it suffered
from an excessive ‘slant’ in one direction, being inspired most of all by the
idea of the immediate emancipation of the serfs from the landowners, but
without paying due attention to the question how and with what to substitute
the guiding, restraining and, finally, educating function of ‘the lords’ (the
landowners) for the peasants. Indeed, delivered as it were in one moment to
themselves, to their own self-administration (after 100 years of the habit of
being guided by the lord), could the Russian peasants immediately undertake
their self-administration wisely and truly, to their own good and that of the
Fatherland? That is the question nobody wanted to think about at the beginning,
being sometimes ruled by the illusion of the ‘innateness’ of the people’s
wisdom!… They began to think about this, as often happens with us, ‘in
hindsight’, after they had encountered disturbances and ferment among the
peasantry. All the indicated mistakes in the reform of 1861 led to the
peasantry as a whole being dissatisfied in various respects. Rumours
spread among them that ‘the lords’ had again deceived them, that the Tsar had
given them not that kind of freedom, that the real ‘will of the Tsar’
had been hidden from them, while a false one had been imposed upon them. This
was immediately used by the ‘enlighteners’ and revolutionaries of all kinds.
The peasants gradually began to listen not to the state official and the former
lord, but to the student, who promised ‘real’ freedom and abundant land,
attracting the peasant with the idea of ‘the axe’, by which they themselves
would win all this from the deceiver-lords… In such a situation only the
Church remained in her capacity of educator and instructor of the people,
which task she immediately began to fulfil, although it was very difficult
because of the restricted and poor condition of the Church herself. Therefore
there soon arose the question of the broadening and strengthening of the rights
and opportunities of the Russian Church. The most powerful and influential person
who completely understood this was Pobedonostsev, who did a great deal in this
respect, thereby eliciting the hatred of all ‘democrats’.
“But in spite of
inadequacies and major mistakes, the reform of 1861, of course, exploded and
transfigured the life of Great Russia. A huge mass of the population (about 22
million people) found themselves nevertheless a free and self-governing estate
(class), juridically equal to the other estates. This immediately
elicited the need to build its life and activity on new foundations…”[719]
Dostoyevsky thought
that emancipation strengthened the bond between the Tsar and the people, the
union in faith and love which was at the very heart of Holy Russia. For the
peasants had always looked to the Tsar as their father, and as protector
against the greed of the landowners. They had been expecting the Tsar to
liberate them, and their expectations had been fulfilled. For Dostoyevsky, “the
reform of 1861 created a historical precedent of exceptional importance. It presented
an example of voluntary renunciation of an age-old [100-year-old] historical
injustice, a peaceful resolution of a social conflict that threatened to have
terrible consequences. In this sense the emancipation of the peasants was as it
were the first step to ‘the Russian resolution of the question’: the action
taken from above hinted at the possibility of the creation of a
world-order that would be founded on just – and only on justice.”[720]
As he wrote very
shortly before his death: “Is the saying that ‘the Tsar is their father’ a mere
phrase, an empty sound in Russia? He who so believes understands nothing about
Russia! Nay, this is a profound and most original idea, - a live and mighty
organism of the people merging with the Tsar. This idea is a force which has
been moulding itself in the course of centuries, especially the last two
centuries, which were so dreadful to the people, but which we so ardently
eulogize for European enlightenment, forgetting the fact that this
enlightenment was bought two centuries ago at the expense of serfdom and a
Calvary of the Russian people serving us. The people waited for their
liberator, and he came. Why, then, shouldn’t they be his own, true children?
The Tsar to the people is not an extrinsic force such as that of some conqueror
(as were, for instance, the dynasties of the former Kings of France), but a
national, all-unifying force, which the people themselves desired, which they
nurtured in their hearts, which they came to love, for which they suffered
because from it alone they hoped for their exodus from Egypt. To the people,
the Tsar is the incarnation of themselves, their whole ideology, their hopes
and beliefs.
“So recently these
hopes have been completely realized. Would the people renounce their further
hopes? Wouldn’t the latter, on the contrary, be strengthened and reinforced,
since after the peasants’ reform the Tsar became the people’s father not merely
in hope but in reality. This attitude of the people toward the Tsar is the
genuine, adamant foundation of every reform in Russia. If you wish, there is in
Russia no creative, protective and leading force other than this live organic
bond of the people with their Tsar, from which everything is derived. For
instance, who would have ventured to dream about the peasants’ reform without
knowing and believing in advance that the Tsar was a father to the people, and
that precisely this faith of the people in the Tsar as their father would save
and protect everything and stave off the calamity?…”[721]
The
Great Reforms: (2) The Zemstvo Assemblies
“In 1864,” continues
Lebedev, “the ‘Statute on the provincial and uyezd zemstvos’ was
issued. Instead of the former institutions of estate self-administration
there were now created institutions applying to all estates. From now on
elected glasnijs from all estates of the population, including the
peasant communes, were called to regulate economic and social matters in each
province. The zemstvo assemblies at the uyezd level decided
common affairs under the presidency of a leader of the uyezd
nobility. The zemstvo assemblies at the provincial level were
correspondingly directed by the provincial leader of the nobility. For
routine matters the meetings elected uyezd and provincial ustavy
that were constantly in session. All this was under the supervision of the
provincial governors and the Ministry of internal affairs. In controversial
cases the zemstva could refer to the Senate. Within the administration
of the zemstva there came popular education (schools), health (hospitals),
charity (‘social security and defence’), food provision, the upkeep of roads
and bridges, insurance, etc. To secure these matters the zemstva
received the right to collect a special local ‘zemstvo tax’ and to
acquire property. The priest, the zemstvo teacher, the zemstvo
doctor (or medical orderly), the local policeman and the excise officer (the
inspection of taxes (excise) on wine, sugar, tobacco and salt) now constituted the
village intelligentsia and became key figures in the village, no less,
and perhaps more authoritative and influential than the landowner. But at the
level of the uyezd the leader was the representative of the
landowners, the nobility. The same at the level of the province.
The ‘City Statute’ of 1870 established an omni-estate self-administration
similar to that of the zemstvo. Representatives of the merchants,
industrialists, craftsmen and shopkeepers – all those who had a certain amount
of property and capital – were elected to the city dumas (assemblies)
and upravas. Here the influence of the nobility was significantly less.
The city leader was, as a rule, a rich merchant or industrialist. But the
‘provincial office for city affairs’ was under the authority of the provincial
governor, a nobleman. Moreover, the uyezd and provincial assemblies of
the nobility continued to operate like the former narrowly estate-based
representations. Thus the nobility, having ceased to be the ruling estate, and
becoming the, as it were, first among equals of the other estates,
nevertheless kept a definite leading position. The city dumas and
upravas were in charge of the same matters as the zemstva. These
and other very nearby and closely related zemstva constantly tried bring
their actions into unity and agreement. The city and zemstvo self-administrations
livened up local economic, social and cultural life to an exceptional degree.
And although the system of these institutions was under the control of
the state, it became a wonderful mechanism for the penetration into the very
depths of Russian life of the influence and activity of Masonry, which
did not for one moment cease its activity in Russia!… That is why the zemstva
and city dumas very soon began to strive for their representatives’
participation in the administration of the state, that is, towards a parliamentary
form of state structure. The zemstva had to be forcibly restrained
within the sphere of only local concerns, and the creation of inter-city
corporations of the zemstva of neighbouring provinces had to be
forbidden.”[722]
The initiative here came from Moscow. Ivanov writes: “In January, 1865,
the Moscow nobility agitated for the convening of the people’s representatives,
thanking the Tsar for his wise beginnings. The Moscow nobility, who always
strove for the good of the State, asked him not to stop on his chosen path and
bring to completion the state building begun by him ‘through the convening
of a general assembly of elected delegates from the Russian land for the
discussion of the needs that are common to the whole state’. Emperor
Alexander did not accept this appeal. He underlined that ‘not one assembly can
speak in the name of the other classes’ and that the right to care for what is
useful and beneficial for the state belonged to him as emperor.
“Alexander thought and wisely foresaw that the granting of a
constitution for Russia would be disastrous for the latter.
“In a private conversation with one of the composers of the appeal
(Golokhvostov), Alexander said: ‘What do you want? A constitutional form of
administration? I give you my word, at this table, that I would be ready to
sign any constitution you like if I were convinced that it was useful for
Russia. But I know that if I do this today, tomorrow Russia will
disintegrate into pieces.’
“The Tsar’s forebodings had solid foundations.
“On April 4, 1868 Karakozov made an attempt on the life of the Tsar.
“It was necessary to
speak, not about a constitution, but about the salvation of the state…”[723]
The
Great Reforms: (3) Crime and Punishment
The juridical reforms of 1864, writes
Lebedev, “came down to making Russian jurisprudence on all levels and in all
regions maximally just, incorruptible, based not on the whim of judges, but on
the law and (which is very important!) on the public understanding of
the law and its application in every individual case! For the resolution of
civil suits, property and other quarrels, and also small criminal cases there
were created special ‘volost’ courts’ for the peasants. For all the
other classes there were created two systems – ‘secular courts’ (for civil
matters and petty criminal ones) that were elected by uyezd and
city assembly, and ‘circuit courts’, the members of which were appointed by
the State. In the latter particularly
important matters and major criminal cases were examined. In criminal cases in
the circuit courts ‘jurors’ too part; they had been chosen by lot from the
population. All this, that is, the investigation in court, took place publicly,
in the presence of the people. The final decision belonged, not to the judge,
but to the jurors, who pronounced a ‘verdict’ after a secret
consultation amongst themselves. On the basis of the verdict the judges
formulated the sentence. The court did not depend on any institutions of the
authorities. Thus was created the most perfect juridical system in the world
(!) of that time, which quickly taught all the feelings of legality and
a good consciousness of one’s rights. In this connection humiliating
corporal punishments were abolished, and the system of punishments was in
general made softer.”[724]
Surprisingly,
Lebedev does not seem to be aware that this “most perfect juridical system in
the world” was purely Anglo-Saxon in inspiration, and that the introduction of
the jury system did not prevent some extraordinary miscarriages of justice,
notably the acquittal of Vera Zasulich for the attempted murder of Tsar
Alexander II in 1878. Moreover, “consciousness of one’s rights” was a
quintessentially western characteristic in the eyes of Slavophiles, something
that derived from feudalism and that the Orthodox East was fortunate to have
escaped. Perhaps there were indeed good things deriving from the juridical
reforms; but there is no question that they introduced a new spirit into
Russian jurisprudence.
Dostoyevsky was more perceptive. He did not
comment directly on the rightness or wrongness of the juridical reforms. But he
sensed that something was deeply wrong in the spirit in which they were
applied.
“For several years
in succession, I have been living abroad. When I left Russia, the new courts
were merely beginning to function. How avidly I used to read there in our
newspapers everything concerning the Russian courts… I would be reading: a
wife, who murdered her husband, was acquitted. The crime was an obvious and
proved one; she confessed to it. And yet: ‘No, not guilty.’ Then, again, a
young man breaks open a strong box and steals the cash: ‘He was very much in
love, you see; he had to get money to please his sweetheart. – No, not guilty.’
And if at least all these cases could be explained by compassion or pity! But
the thing I could not understand was the reason for the acquittals – and I got
confused…”[725]
The problem, as so
often, was that while the westernising reform might be formally superior
to the existing Russian practice, its spirit was profoundly subversive
of, and inferior to, the traditional ideas of the Russian people, rooted as
they were in the Orthodox Faith. For what was the use of importing the best
western model of juridical practice in the form of prosecution and defence
counsels and a twelve-man jury, while at the same time importing the worst
western theory of morality – that is, Benthamite utilitarianism, according to
which the criterion of morality is “the greatest happiness of the greatest
number”? And what was the use of the most incorruptible judges if they worked
on the assumption that man is not free, and that his actions are exclusively
the result of his upbringing and environment? It was ironic that the West, whose
god was individual freedom, had come to believe, by the logic of its own
ideology, to deny that freedom. And still more ironic that the freedom and
responsibility of the individual was upheld precisely in “despotic” Russia, the
so-called “prison of the peoples”, and by such champions of traditional Russian
values as Dostoyevsky.
Speaking from his
experience as a former convict, he knew that he had sinned freely, and had been
punished justly. And yet belief in crime and punishment has to be tempered, he
believed, with genuine compassion for the criminal and the knowledge that we
ourselves are no better than he. And this was the traditional point of view of
the Russian people.
“In fact,” he wrote,
“if we believe that, at times, we ourselves are worse than the criminal, we
thereby also admit that we are half-guilty of his crime. If he broke the law
which the country prescribed for him, we ourselves are at fault that he stands
now before us. For if we all were better, he, too, would be better, and he
would not be standing facing us…
“So, then, we should
be acquitting at this juncture?”
“No, on the
contrary, at this juncture it is necessary to state the truth, and to call evil
– evil. As against this, however, we should assume half the burden of the
verdict. This distress of the heart which nowadays everybody fears so much, and
with which we shall leave the courtroom, will be our punishment. If the pain is
genuine and sharp, it will purify us and make us better. In fact, having ourselves
become better, we will improve our environment and will make it better. This
alone can rectify it. Because escapism from one’s own compassion for the sake
of evading personal suffering and wholesale acquittals is easy. In this way,
by-and-by, we may reach the conclusion that there are no crimes at all, and
that ‘environment is guilty’ of everything. We will come to the point,
following the thread of a ball, that crime is even a duty, a noble protest
against ‘environment’. ‘Since society is wickedly organized, it is impossible
to struggle out of it without a knife in hand.’
“Indeed, this is
what the doctrine of the environment contends in opposition to Christianity
which, fully recognizing the pressure of the milieu, and which, having
proclaimed mercy for him who has sinned, nevertheless makes it a moral duty for
man to struggle against environment, and draws a line of demarcation between
where environment ends and duty begins. Making man responsible, Christianity eo
ipso also recognizes his freedom. However, making man dependent on any
error in social organization, the environmental doctrine reduces man to
absolute impersonality, to a total emancipation from all personal moral duty,
from all independence; reduces him to a state of the most miserable slavery
that can be conceived.”[726]
These ideas were
explored in Notes from Underground (1864), which affirmed the
ineluctable free will of man, and his freedom to commit evil, and especially in
his novel Crime and Punishment (1865). The hero of the novel is called
Raskolnikov, which comes from the Russian raskolnik, meaning
“schismatic”. For he is in schism from the real springs of life, from God, the
Church and Holy Russia. That is what enables him to murder an old woman
moneylender and convince himself, by the most rational of arguments, - arguments derived from utilitarianism, -
that he has done no wrong but actually benefited mankind thereby. For an
avaricious and worthless woman has been disposed of; and her money, which was
going to a monastery, can now be used not only to help the impoverished student
Raskolnikov (who might, after all, turn out to be a genius, an immense
benefactor of mankind), but also, more altruistically, to rescue Raskolnikov’s
sister Dunya from a dishonourable marriage and the prostitute Sonya Marmeladov
from death, both spiritual and physical. So from the utilitarian point of view
his crime was no crime, and merited no punishment.
Who was to gainsay
such reasoning? Conscience? But what was conscience, according to the westernizers,
if not a learned product of one’s environment? And if the environment was as
bad as the liberals considered contemporary Russia to be, what blame was to be
attached to crimes determined by it? Was it not the system that was to be
blamed, and especially the apex of it, the autocracy, rather than those victims
of the system who were conventionally called criminals?
However, by a series
of extraordinary coincidences that mimic the workings of Divine Providence,
Raskolnikov is brought to repentance. As he wrote to Katkov: “The truth of God
and the law of the earth take their toll and in the end he has an inner
compulsion to go and confess. He is compelled to do this, for even if he is to
perish in prison, he will be in touch with the people again; the feeling of
being isolated and separated from mankind, which he began to experience
immediately after he had committed the crime, had tortured him beyond
endurance. The law of truth and human nature has won out. The criminal himself
resolves to accept suffering and thereby atone for his deed.”[727]
Dostoyevsky believed
firmly in the need of the criminal to atone for his deed through suffering; so
just as he believed that crime was really crime, and not merely the result of
ignorance or environmental determinism, so he believed that punishment had to
be real punishment – the soul of the criminal, or at any rate the Russian
criminal, in whom Orthodoxy was not completely extinguished, thirsted for it.
The
Autocracy, the Church and the Revolution
But what if the criminal felt no remorse?
And what if he had ventured on the greatest crime – that of parricide,
attempted murder of the father of the nation, the Tsar himself? Was execution
of the criminal the answer?
For example: “On September 1, 1866 Dmitri Karakazov, condemned to death
by hanging, decided to ask the Tsar for clemency. His letter ended thus: ‘And
now, your Majesty, I ask forgiveness from you as a Christian from a Christian,
and as a man from a man.’
“Alexander II smiled meekly as he listened to these words which were
read to him by the Minister of Justice. And with regret he threw out his hands.
“The following day, September 2, the president of the Supreme Criminal
Court, the 77-year-old Prince Gagarin (incidentally, in 1849 he had conducted
the investigation into the affair of Dostoyevsky and the other Petrashevtsy)
summoned the condemned man and said: ‘Karakazov, the sovereign Emperor has
ordered me to declare to you that his Majesty forgives you as a Christian, but
as a Sovereign he cannot forgive you. You must prepare for death…’
“On September 3,
Karakazov was hanged.”[728]
Dostoyevsky never
disputed the guilt of the terrorists, nor the right of the Tsar to punish them.
But he had serious doubts whether the terrorist sons were more guilty than
their liberal fathers, a theme he explored in the relationship between Stepan
and Peter Verkhovensky in The Devils. And so when the police chief
General Mezentsov was assassinated in 1878, and the liberal press rose up in
indignation, Dostoyevsky commented in a letter to Putsykovich, the editor of The
Citizen: “All these are articles of liberal fathers in disagreement with
the diversions of their nihilist children, who went further than them” –
further, that is, on essentially the same path of apostasy from God and Holy
Russia. “If you’re going to write about the nihilist Russians, then for God’s
sake don’t abuse them more than their fathers. Introduce this thought, for the
root of nihilism is not only in the fathers, but it is the fathers who are
still more nihilist than their children. Our underground evil-doers at any rate
have a certain disgusting ardour, but in the fathers there are the same
feelings, but [also] cynicism and indifferentism, which are still worse.”[729]
Volgin writes: “One
of the characters of The Devils cites the Apocalypse: ‘And to the Angel
of the Church of Laodicea write: thus says the Amen, the faithful and true
Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God: I know your works; you are
neither cold nor hot; O if only you were cold or hot! But since you are
lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue you out of My mouth’.
“In the letter to
Putsykovich he was in essence talking about the same thing. Ardour, albeit
‘disgusting’, witnesses to sincerity and faith: ‘lukewarmness’ is a property of
the fathers; ‘to the Angel of the Church of Laodicea…’ does not extend to the
children. If guilt is not removed completely from the revolutionaries of the
‘70s, then to a significant degree it is transferred onto the shoulders of the
people of the ‘40s.
“Here we discern,
perhaps, a not very prominent, but still very essential trait distinguishing
Dostoyevsky from the camp to which Putsykovich belonged.
“Like Katkov, who
tirelessly demanded that the whole weight of ‘the punishing sword of the state’
should descend upon the heads of the nihilists, Putsykovich expected the
authorities, and only the authorities, to eradicate the rebellion: force had to
be broken by force.
“Not in one declaration of
Dostoyevsky in the years 1878-81 – neither in his letters, nor in The Diary
of a Writer, nor in utterances recorded by memoirists – do we meet any
indication that the author of The Brothers Karamazov considered it
possible to solve the problem by purely administrative means. A supporter of
the monarchy, he found not a single word of approval for the repressions to
which the monarchical authority resorted in order to preserve itself.
“In the duel between
the revolution and the autocratic state he saw not so much a struggle between
the existing political forces (‘who conquers whom’), so much as a profound
historical drama. For the rift with the people was characteristic, in his
opinion, not only for the revolutionary underground, but also that which
resisted this underground: for the whole system of Russian statehood. The
authorities were just as guilty of the rift with the people as those who were
trying to destroy this authority. The sources of the drama were one.
“The thought of
universal guilt (the guilt of the whole of educated society) did not leave
Dostoyevsky to his last day. In his ‘before-death’ notebook he wrote: ‘Nihilism
has appeared among us because we are all nihilists. We have only been
frightened by a new form of its manifestation…’
“The Russian
revolution, therefore, was not the cause, but the consequence: it was only an
‘original form’ of a very old national disease. This disease… would not submit
to healing ‘by blood and iron’.”[730]
Volgin (and perhaps
also Dostoyevsky) is here identifying the autocracy too closely with the
educated classes. The next age, until the Russian revolution of 1917, would see
the autocracy drawing further away from the westernised educated classes and
closer to the Orthodox people, not out of fear but for conscience’s sake. But
the main point is true: a disease of the mind cannot be healed by physical
means, but only by a spiritual healing.
For the spiritual
disease of the Russian educated classes, therefore, a disease contracted in the
West and now after a long period of incubation coming to its climax in the
East, only the spiritual healing provided by the Church, the One, Holy,
Catholic-Orthodox and Apostolic Church, would suffice – the healing provided by
her God-inspired confession of faith, her holy sacraments and, not least, the
blood of her martyrs. “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And
this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith. Who is he that
overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” (I John
5.4-5). And so the coming age, the Age of the Antichrist, would witness the
final, climactic, unprecedently bloody (in both physical and spiritual terms)
battle between the Church and the revolution, between Christ as revealed in the
Orthodox Church of the East and the Antichrist as born and grown to awful
maturity in the apostasy of the West…
[1] Hieromonk Damascene Christensen,
Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of
Alaska Press, 2003, p. 708.
[2] Gribanovsky, Besedy s
sobstvennym serdtsem, Jordanville, 1998, p. 33 (in Russian).
[3] Hobsbawn, The Age of
Revolution, 1789-1848, London: Abacus, 1992, p. 75.
[4] Quoted in Stephen J. Lee, Aspects
of European History, 1494-1789, London & New York: Routledge, 1994, p.
279.
[5] De
Tocqueville, l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856, book
3, chapter 4.
[6] Hobsbawn, op. cit., p.
79. As the Princes of the Blood wrote to Louis XVI: “The French monarchy must
decline into despotism or become a democracy – two opposite kinds of
revolution, but both calamitous” (quoted in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History
in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 515).
[7] Quoted in Foi Transmise et
Sainte Tradition, N 68, January, 1993, p. 13 (in French).
[8]
Quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw: Synodal Press, part
III, p. 238 (in Russian).
[9] Burke, Remarks on the Policy
of the Allies (1793), in David P. Fidler and Jennifer M. Welsh (eds.), Empire
and Community: Edmund Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International Relations,
Oxford: Westview Press, 1999, p. 280.
[10] Cohen and Major, op. cit.,
p. 516.
[11] In Russian: Komitet
Gosudarstvennoj Besopasnosti – KGB.
[12] Norman
Davies, op. cit., p. 694.
[13] Quoted in Jocelyn Hunt, The
French Revolution, London & New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 25-26.
[14] William Doyle, The Oxford
History of the French Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp.
114-115.
[15] In 1791
Olympe de Gouges wrote The Rights of Women and the Citizen, in which she
declared: “1. Woman is born free, and remains equal to Man in rights… 4. The
exercise of Woman’s natural rights has no limit other than the tyranny of Man’s
opposing them… 17. Property is shared or divided equally by both sexes.” (Cohen
and Major, op. cit., p. 518). In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she denies that there are any
specifically feminine qualities. Thus “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny
the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty.” (Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 483) Her daughter was Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein…
[16] Davies, op.
cit., pp. 713-714.
[17] Rejection was probably his more
constant and sincere opinion. In October, 1789 he wrote to the Spanish King,
his cousin, protesting “against all the decrees contrary to royal authority to
which I have been compelled by force to assent, since 15th July of
this year. I beg your Majesty to keep my protest secret until its publication
becomes necessary” (Mark Almond, Revolution, London: De Agostini
Editions, 1996, p. 74. See also Munro Price, “Countering the Revolution”, BBC
History Magazine, vol. 3, ¹
7, July, 2002, pp. 18-20).
[18] The day before his attempted
escape the king declared: “What remains to the King other than a vain semblance
of royalty?…The King does not think it possible to govern a kingdom of such
great extent and importance as France through the means established by the
National Assembly… The spirit of the clubs and dominates everything… In view of
all these facts, and the impossibility of the King’s being able to do the good
and prevent the evil which is being committed, is it surprising that the King
has sought to recover his liberty and find security for himself and his
family?” (Hunt, op. cit., p. 41).
[19] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p.
86.
[20] Hunt, op. cit., p. 34.
[21] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
60-62.
[22] Roy Porter, Enlightenment, London:
Penguin books, 2000, p. 451.
[23] Mark Goldie, “John Locke: Icon
of Liberty”, History Today, vol. 54 (10), October, 2004, pp. 35, 36.
[24] Goldie, op. cit., p. 36.
[25] Witness his famous remark:
“Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire
and little minds go ill together” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 503).
[26] Burke, Letter to a Member of
the National Assembly (1791).
[27] Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment”,
in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico, 1998, pp. 256-257.
[28] Scruton,
Modern Philosophy, London : Arrow Books, 1997, p. 417.
[29] Tikhomirov, “Demokratia
liberal’naia i sotsial’naia”, in Kritika Demokratii, Moscow: “Moskva”,
1997, p. 122 (in Russian).
[30] Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France, quoted in Fidler & Welsh, op. cit., p. 30.
[31] Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France, quoted in Fidler & Welsh, op. cit., p. 30.
[32] Burke, Reflections on the
Revolution in France, quoted in Fidler & Welsh, op. cit., p. 31.
[33] Gooch, “Europe and the French
Revolution”, in The Cambridge Modern History, Cambridge University
Press, 1934, vol. VIII, p. 757.
[34] Doyle, op. cit., pp.
167-168.
[35] This greatly increased influence
of the printed word, which has become such an important feature of the modern
world, was another of Burke’s correct predictions: “What direction the French
spirit of proselytism is likely to take, and in what order it is likely to
prevail in the several parts of Europe, it is not easy to determine. The seeds
are sown almost everywhere, chiefly by newspaper circulations, infinitely more
efficacious and extenseive than ever they were. And they are a more important
instrument than is generally imagined. They are a part of the reading of all,
they are the whole of the reading of the far greater number. There are thirty
of them in Paris alone. The language diffuses them more widely than the
English, though the English too are much read. The writers of these papers
indeed, for the greater part, are either unknown or in contempt, but they are
like a battery in which the stroke of any one ball produces no great effect,
but the amount of continual repetition is decisive. Let us only suffer one
person to tell us his story, morning and evening, but for one twelvemonth, and
he will become our master” (Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), in Fidler
and Welsh, op. cit., p. 240).
[36] Paine, The Rights of Man,
London: Penguin Books, 1984, part I.
[37] Paine, op. cit., p. 48.
[38] Paine, op. cit., pp.
41-42, 65-66.
[39] Norman Hampson, “What Difference
did the French Revolution Make?” History, vol. 74, ¹ 241, June, 1989, p. 233.
[40] Hampson, op.
cit., p. 233.
[41] In the Romantic age, “feeling”
was considered higher than rational knowing.
[42] Burke, quoted in Golo Mann, The
History of Germany since 1789, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 90-91.
[43]
Paine, The Age of Reason, 1793, in Davies, op. cit., p. 679.
[44] Paine, Rights of Man, op.
cit.., p. 86.
[45] Paine, quoted in Porter, op.
cit., p. 454.
[46] Paine, op. cit., p. 87.
[47] Paine, op. cit., p. 69.
[48] Paine, op. cit., p. 69.
[49] Hamilton, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 510.
[50] Jefferson, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 510.
[51] Jefferson, in Almond, op.
cit., p. 69.
[52] Washington, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 509.
[53] Ellis, Founding Brothers, New
York: Vintage Books, 2002, p. 59. See also Simon Collinson, “President or
King?”, History Today, vol. 50 (11), November, 2000, pp. 12-13.
[54] Ellis, op.
cit., pp. 91-92, 93.
[55] Ellis, op.
cit., p. 158.
[56] Ellis, op.
cit., p. 108.
[57] Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness:
Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1999, p. 51.
[58] Doyle, op. cit., pp.
64-65.
[59] May 1, which has been adopted as
International Labour Day by the Socialists, was a feast “of satanic forces –
witches, sorcerers, evil spirits, demons” (O.A. Platonov, Ternovij Venets
Rossii, Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, p. 194 (in Russian)). It was called
“Walpurgisnacht” in Germany after the eighth-century English missionary to
Germany, St. Walburga, whose feast is May 1.
[60] Nesta Webster, Secret
Societies and Subversive Movements, Christian Book Club of America, 1924,
p. 205. According to his second-in-command, Baron von Knigge, Weishaupt, had a
“Jesuitical character” and his organisation was “such a machine behind which perhaps
Jesuits may be concealed” (quoted in Webster, op. cit., p. 227). He was
in fact “a Jew by race who had been baptized a Roman Catholic and had become
professor of canon law at the Roman Cathlic university of Ingoldstadt in
Bavaria” (Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p.
114).
[61] Platonov, op. cit., p.
195.
[62] Platonov, op. cit., pp.
195-196.
[63] Webster, op. cit., p.
221.
[64] Webster, op. cit., p.
205.
[65] Henri Martin, Histoire
de France, XVI, 533; in Webster, op. cit., p. 207.
[66] Webster, op. cit., pp.
213-217.
[67] Webster, op. cit., pp.
218-219.
[68] Ridley, op. cit., p. 115.
[69] Webster, op. cit., pp.
241-242.
[70] Webster, op. cit., pp.
244-245.
[71] Rose, Nihilism,
Forestville, Ca.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1994, p. 54.
[72] Doyle, op. cit., p. 183.
[73] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
75-76.
[74] Doyle, op. cit., p. 193.
[75] At Valmy the Prussian army was
led by the Duke of Brunswick, the leader of German Masonry, who quite clearly
betrayed his country and an overwhelmingly superior position in order to let
the forces of the revolution win (L.A. Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie
Osnovy Istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of History),
Moscow, 1997, pp. 460-461 (in Russian)).
[76] Hunt, op. cit., 1998, p.
37.
[77] Doyle, op. cit., p. 195.
The Robespierrist lawyer Bertrand Barère said, borrowing a phrase from
Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty does not flourish unless moistened with
the blood of kings. I vote for death” (in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p.
522).
[78] Ridley, op. cit., pp.
136-137.
[79] Eliphas Levi, in Fomin, op.
cit., p. 38. Who was Jacob? There
are various theories. Some think it was Jacob Molet, the leader of the Templars
who was executed by the Catholic Church. Others think it refers to Masons of
the Scottish rite who were supporters of the Stuart Jacobites. Others think it
was a reference to the Patriarch Jacob’s “struggle with God” in Genesis
32.
[80] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
1-2.
[81] Camus, The Rebel, New
York, 1956, p. 120.
[82] Doyle, op. cit., p. 201.
[83] Doyle, op. cit., p. 199.
[84] Doyle, op. cit., p. 210.
[85] General Westermann reported to
the Convention: “The Vendée is no more… I have buried it in the woods
and marshes of Savenay… According to your orders, I have trampled their
children beneath our horses’ feet; I have massacred their women, so they will
no longer give birth to brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach
me. I have exterminated them all. The roads are sown with corpses. At Savenay,
brigands are arriving all the time claiming to surrender, and we are shooting
them non-stop… Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment” (in Davies, op. cit.,
p. 705).
[86] Doyle, op. cit., p. 227.
[87] Doyle, op. cit., p. 226.
[88] Doyle, op. cit., p. 242.
[89] David’s painting of the dead
Marat in his bath gave the revolution and “iconic” representation of its first
martyr. (V.M.)
[90] Ridley, op. cit., p. 140.
[91] As Pierre Vergniaud said before
the Convention in March, 1793: “It must be feared that the Revolution, like
Saturn, will devour its children one after the other” (Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 522).
[92] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
458.
[93] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
460.
[94] Doyle, op. cit., p. 250.
[95] Doyle, op. cit., pp.
251-252.
[96] Doyle, op. cit., p. 252.
[97] Doyle, op. cit., p. 254.
[98] Hunt, op. cit., p. 63.
[99] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 258,
259. For precise figures with breakdown according to class and sex, see Hunt, op.
cit., p. 70.
[100] Cohen and Major, op. cit.,
p. 524.
[101] Roland, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 523.
[102] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
64.
[103] Doyle, op. cit, pp.
143-144, 145.
[104] Catherine II, in Cohen and
Major, op. cit., p. 520.
[105] Cohen and Major, op. cit.,
p. 523.
[106] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
25.
[107] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
35.
[108] Hobsbawn, op. cit., p.
80.
[109] Hobsbawn, op. cit., p.
80.
[110] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
88.
[111] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
63-64.
[112] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
71-72.
[113]
Gascoigne, A Brief History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, p.
215.
[114] He said: “There are people who
are superstitious in perfectly good faith. They are sick people whom we must
restore to good health by winning their confidence. A forced curé would
drive them to fanaticism. Priests have been denounced for saying the Mass. They
will continue to do so all the longer if you try to prevent them. He who wants
to prevent them is more fanatical than the priest himself” (in Gascoigne, op.
cit., p. 214). (V.M.).
[115] He said: “Atheism is
aristocratic; the idea of a great being who watches over oppressed innocence,
is altogether popular... If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent
him” (Hunt, op. cit., p. 68). (V.M.)
[116] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 259-262.
[117] Raynal, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 518.
[118] Hunt, op. cit., p. 66.
[119] Doyle, op. cit., p. 277.
[120] On February 12, 1792 the Jacobin
club had ceremoniously called Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin and Mirabeau “gods”
(Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 67).
[121] Doyle, op. cit., p. 288.
[122] Hampson, op. cit., p.
234.
[123] Hampson, op. cit., p.
235.
[124] Hampson, op. cit. p. 235.
[125] Hampson, op. cit, p. 238.
[126] Wilson, To the Finland
Station, London: Phoenix, 2004, p. 71.
[127] Wilson, op. cit., pp.
72-74, 79.
[128] Cohen
and Major, op. cit., p. 530.
[129] Johnson,
Napoleon, London: Phoenix, 2002, p. 46.
[130] Davies, op.
cit., p. 701.
[131] The result of the plebiscite was
3,571,329 ‘yes’ votes to 2,570 ‘noes’. As Johnson points out, “Bonaparte was
the first dictator to produce fake election figures.” (op. cit., pp.
49-50). (V.M.)
[132] Roberts, History of the
World, Oxford: Helicon, 1996, pp. 589-590.
[133] Mansel, “Napoleon the
Kingmaker”, History Today, vol. 48 (3), March, 1998, pp. 40, 41.
[134] Mansel, op. cit., p. 43.
[135] Mansel, op. cit., p. 43.
[136] Johnson writes: “He liked the
vague and abstract notion of Rousseau’s concept, the General Will, offering a
ruling elite that knew its business the opportunity to harness the people to a
national effort without any of the risks of democracy. In practice an elite always
formed itself into a pyramid, with one man at its summit. His will expressed
the General Will… and gave it decisiveness, the basis for action. Constitutions
were important in the sense that window-dressing was important in a shop. But
the will was the product to be sold to the nation and, once sold, imposed” (op.
cit, p. 17). (V.M.)
[137] As he said to Metternich: “You
see me master of France; well, I would not undertake to govern her for three
months with liberty of the press” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 530).
(V.M.)
[138] Johnson writes: “Fouché,
who operated the world’s first secret police force, and who was the prototype
of Himmler or Beria, was an important element in Bonaparte’s legacy of evil,
for some of his methods were widely imitated in Austria and Prussia, where they
became permanent, and even in harmless Sweden, where they were carried out by
Bonaparte’s marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte” (op. cit., p. 105). (V.M.)
[139] Hunt, op. cit., pp. 104,
105-106, 107, 108, 112. He had no time for the press either.
[140] Cohen and Major, op. cit.,
p. 531.
[141] De
Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856, book
3, chapter 8 ; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 527.
[142] Johnson, op. cit., p.
119.
[143] De Staël, in Johnson, op.
cit., p. 119.
[144] Quoted in Cronin, op. cit.,
p. 202.
[145] Quoted in Cronin, op. cit.,
p. 211.
[146] Quoted in Gascoigne, op. cit.,
p. 216.
[147] Quoted in Gascoigne, op. cit.,
p. 217.
[148] Quoted in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 532. In 1816 Napoleon gave another, less honest account of his
motives: “As soon as I had power, I immediately re-established religion. I made
it the groundwork and foundation upon which I built. I considered it as the
support of sound principles and good morality, both in doctrine and in
practice. Besides, such is the restlessness of man, that his mind requires that
something undefined and marvellous which religion offers; and it is better for
him to find it there, than to seek it of Cagliostro, of Mademoiselle Lenormand,
or of the fortune-tellers and imposters” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p.
532).
[149] Doyle, op. cit., pp.
385-386.
[150] Cronin, op. cit., p. 212.
[151] Cronin, op. cit., pp.
216-217.
[152] Johnson, op. cit., p. 48.
[153] Cronin, op. cit., p. 220.
[154] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 532.
[155] Peter De Rosa,
Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 66.
[156]
Cronin, op. cit., pp. 220-223.
[157] Cronin, op. cit., p. 221.
[158] Vincent Cronin, Napoleon,
London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 253.
[159] Davies, op.
cit., p. 675.
[160] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
110.
[161] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
130.
[162] In fact, with regard to the
abolition of slavery the revolutionary French were behind their enemies, the
anti-revolutionary Birtish. “Gradually in the 18th century an
anti-slavery lobby built up in Europe, notably in Britain, the superpower of
the seas. In 1772 Lord Mansfield, a judge, ruled that a runaway slave there
could not be forced back by his master to the West Indies. The ruling was
interpreted (questionably, but this was the effect) as confirming that there
could be no slavery in Britain. In America, it created fears that Britain might
try to abolish slavery in its colonies. The desire to maintain slavery was not
the least motive for the American war of independence, in which some blacks
fought on the British side. In 1807 Britain banned the slave trade, and began
using its navy to stop it. But slavery itself did not end in the British
Caribbean until 1838, in the United States (in practice) 1865, in Spanish-owned
Cuba 1886, in Brazil 1888” (“Guilty Parties”, The Economist, December
31, 1999, p. 90).
[163] For example, during the siege of
Saragossa in 1808-09, 54,000 Spanish civilians were killed. A French officer
later recorded one episode: “With a petard, we brought down the door of the
church, which the monks were defending to the death. Behind them a mass of men,
women and children had taken refuge at the foot of the altar, and were crying
for mercy. But the smoke was too thick for us to distinguish the victims we
would have wished to spare. We wrought havoc everywhere, and death alone
stifled their cries…” (Quoted in The Economist, December 31, 1999, p.
41). The counter-revolution could be almost as brutal: on November 4, 1794
Russian troops broke into the Warsaw suburb of Praga and killed 20,000 people
(Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 93).
[164] Doyle, op. cit., p. 419.
[165] Doyle, op. cit., p. 417.
[166] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p.
109.
[167] Doyle, op. cit., p. 411.
[168] Webster, op. cit., p.
247.
[169] David Vital, A People Apart,
Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 35-36.
[170] Webster, op. cit., p.
247.
[171] Paul Johnson, A History of
the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 306.
[172] Vital, op. cit., p. 49.
[173] Vital, op. cit.,
[174] Vital, op. cit., pp.
43-45.
[175] General A.
Nechvolodov, L’Empéreur Nicolas II et les Juifs, Paris, 1924, pp.
216-220 (in French).
[176] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
365.
[177] Johnson, op. cit., pp.
306-307.
[178] Vital, op. cit., p. 101.
[179] Vital, op. cit., p. 103.
[180] Stone, Europe: A History, London:
Pimlico, 1997, p. 843.
[181] Socrates, Ecclesiastical
History, III, 20; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, V, 22; Theodoret,
Ecclesiastical History, III, 15; Karen Armstrong, A History of
Jerusalem, London: HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 194-196.
[182] Nechvolodov, op. cit.,
pp. 221-222.
[183] Johnson, op. cit., p.
310.
[184] Nechvolodov, op. cit.,
pp. 225-226.
[185] Vital, op. cit., p. 57.
[186] O.A. Platonov, Ternovij
Venets Rossii, Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, p. 266 (in Russian).
[187] This did not mean, however, that
the complaints of the citizens of Alsace were ignored. According to the
“infamous decree” of March 17, 1808, writes Vital, “existing debts to Jews [in
Alsace] were to be heavily and arbitrarily reduced. But the stipulations of the
decree went a great deal further. Restrictions were to be levelled on the
freedom of Jews to engage in a trade of their choice and to move from one part
of the country to another without special permission. They were to submit to
special commercial registration. They were not to employ the Hebrew language in
their commercial transactions. Unlike all other citizens, they were to be
forbidden to offer substitutes in case of conscription for military service. And
the entry of foreign Jews into France was to be conditional either on military
performance or on satisfaction of specified property qualifications.” (op.
cit., p. 59). The decree lasted for ten years, but was not then renewed by
the Restoration government.
[188] Reed, The Controversy of
Zion, Durban, SA, p. 130.
[189] Platonov, op. cit., pp.
267-268.
[190] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
366.
[191] Nechvolodov, op. cit., p.
226.
[192] Vital, op. cit., p. 62.
[193] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
151.
[194] Almond, op. cit., p. 89.
[195] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
156.
[196] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
229.
[197] Quoted in M.J. Cohen and John
Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 546.
[198] “Mixed Blessing”, The
Economist, December 31, 1999, p. 68.
[199] Horton Box, The Origins of
the Paraguayan War, University of Illinois, 1927.
[200] Lanes, The Wealth and Poverty
of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 330, 331.
[201] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
230.
[202] Barzun, op. cit., p. 491.
[203] Berlin, “The Essence of European
Romanticism”, The Power of Ideas, op. cit., pp. 201-204.
[204] Berlin, “My Intellectual Path”, The
Power of Ideas, op. cit., pp. 10-11.
[205]
Berlin, "The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism", The Crooked
Timber of Humanity. London: John Murry, p. 245.
[206] Thus: “The genius of foreigners
will be like the amiable hummingbird [or] the industrious and skilful been
which gathers in the honey… but the German spirit will be the eagle which will
lift his heavy body on powerful wings and, through a long and exciting flight,
climbs ever higher and higher towards the sun” (Addresses to the German
Nation). (V.M.)
[207] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
162, 163-165.
[208] F.M. Dostoyevsky, The Diary
of a Writer, May-June, 1877, chapter III, 1; Haslemere: Ianmead, 1984, pp.
727, 728-730. “It may perhaps be accidental,” writes Sir Karl Popper, “but it
is in any case remarkable, that there is still a cultural frontier between
Western Europe and the regions of Central Europe which coincide very nearly
with those regions that did not enjoy the blessings of Augustus’ Roman Empire,
and that did not enjoy the blessings of the Roman peace, i.e. of the Roman
civilization. The same ‘barbarian’ regions are particularly prone to be
affected by mysticism, even though they did not invent mysticism. Bernard of
Clairvaux had his greatest successes in Germany, where later Eckhart and his
school flourished, and also Boehme.
“Much later Spinoza, who attempted to combine Cartesian intellectualism
with mystical tendencies, rediscovered the theory of a mystical intellectual
intuition, which, in spite of Kant’s strong opposition, led to the post-Kantian
rise of ‘Idealism’, to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel” (The Open Society and
its Enemies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, p. 353.
[209] Fichte, Addresses to the
German Nation, 1807; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 535.
[210] Johnson, The Birth of the
Modern, World Society 1815-1830, London: Phoenix, 1992, pp. 810-811.
[211] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
455.
[212] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
166, 167-168, 169-170.
[213] George L. Mosse, The Culture
of Western Europe, Boulder & London: Westview Press, 1988, p. 68.
[214] Görres, in Cohen and Major,
op. cit., p. 535.
[215] Mosse, op. cit., p. 83.
[216] Mann, op.
cit, p. 35.
[217] Davies, Europe,
London: Pimlico, 1997, pp. 762-763.
[218]
Hence Tom Paine’s declaration: “My country is the world, and my religion is to
do good” (The Age of Reason (1793)).
[219] Hobsbawm, The Age of
Revolution, 1789-1848, London: Abacus, 1992, pp. 116-117.
[220] Johnson, op. cit., 1991,
p. 662.
[221] Johnson, op. cit., pp.
665-666. The highest members of the Carbonari swore the following oath:
“Property boundaries shall be erased, all possessions shall be reduced to
communal wealth, and the one and only patria, most gentle of mothers, shall
furnish food, education and work to the whole body of her beloved and free
children. This is the redemption invoked by the wise. This is the true
recreation of Jerusalem. This is the manifest and inevitable decisions of the
Supreme Being” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 547). (V.M.)
[222] In Spain, for example, the
left-wing and Masonic Isabelinos “were supported by Palmerston and by the
British Legion of volunteers from Britain… They were also supported by the
government of Louis Philippe [of France]. Metternich and Tsar Nicholas were not
in a position to help the Carlists” (Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons,
London: Constable, 1999, p. 200).
[223] Johnson, op. cit., p.
691.
[224] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p.
129.
[225] “Suddenly the door opened; and
silently there entered vice leaning on the arm of crime, M. de Talleyrand
supported by Fouché… the trusty regicide, kneeling, put the hand which
had made Louis XVI’s head roll in the hands of the martyred king’s brother; the
apostate bishop stood surety for the oath” (Viscount de Chateaubriand, Mémoires
d’Outremer, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 543).
[226] Cohen and Major, op. cit.,
p. 542.
[227] De Maistre, The St.
Petersburg Dialogues; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 543.
[228] De Bonald, On Opposition to
the Government and the Liberty of the Press, 1827; in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 544.
[229] Berlin, “The
Counter-Enlightenment”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico,
1998, pp. 264-268.
[230] Baidin,
“Ikonosphera russkoj kultury” (“The iconosphere of Russian culture”), Vestnik
Russkogo Khristianskogo Dviznenia (Gazette of the Russian Christian Movement), ¹¹
162-163, 1991, p. 45 (in Russian).
[231] Metropolitan Philaret,
“Rassuzhdenie o nrastvennykh prichinakh neimovernykh uspekhov nashikh v
nastoiaschej vojne” (“Reflection on the moral reasons for our amazing successes
in the present war”), Philareta Mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo
Tvorenia (The Works of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and Kolomna), Moscow,
1994, p. 314 (in Russian).
[232] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie
Zakona o Prestolonasledovanii v Rossii (The Origin of the Law on the Succession
to the Throne in Russia), Shanghai, 1936, Podolsk, 1994; quoted in “Svyatoj
Tsar-Muchenik Pavel” (“Holy Tsar-Martyr Paul”), Svecha Pokayania (Candle of
Repentance), ¹N
4, February, 2000, p. 18 (in Russian).
[233] Tsar Paul, 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, 1997, p.
211 (in Russian).
[234]
The decree said: “The Law of God given to us in the ten commandments teaches us
to devote the seventh day to God; which is why on this day, which is glorified
by the triumph of the Faith, and on which we have been counted worthy to
receive the sacred anointing and royal crowning on our Forefathers’ Throne, we
consider it our duty before the Creator and Giver of all good things to confirm
the exact and constant fulfilment of this law throughout our Empire, commanding
each and every one to observe it, so that no one should have any excuse to dare
to force his peasants to work on Sundays….”
[235] Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great
Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 239-240 (in Russian).
[236] “Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, Svecha
Pokaiania, ¹
4, February, 2000, p. 18 (in Russian).
[237]
Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 240, 241.
[238] “Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, op.
cit.
[239] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op.
cit., p. 242. A.P. Dobroklonsky writes: “At the beginning of the [19th]
century the over-procurator Yakovlev planned to place [the consistories] in a
position more independent of the bishops and presented to the sovereign a
report about establishing in them a special post of procurator subject only to
the over-procurator; but the realisation of this report was hindered by
Metropolitan Ambrose Podobedov of St. Petersburg, who presented a report on his
part that in such a case the canonical authority of the bishops would be shaken
and they would become dependent on secular officials” (Rukovodstvo po
istorii russkoj tserkvi (Handbook on the History of the Russian Church),
Moscow, 2001, p. 534 (in Russian)).
[240] Fr. Alexis Nikolin, Tserkov’
i Gosudarstvo (The Church and the State), Moscow, 1997, p. 106 (in
Russian).
[241] Papmehl, Metropolitan Platon
of Mosow (Petr Levshin, 1737-1812): The Enlightened Prelate, Scholar and
Educator, Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1983, p. 78.
[242] “Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, op.
cit.
[243] Ioseliani, A Short History of
the Georgian Church, Jordanville, 1983, pp. 190-193.
[244] “Tower of Virtue: The Life and
Ascetic Labors of St. Hilarion the Georgian of Mount Athos”, The Orthodox
Word, vol. 39, ¹¹ 3-4 (230-231), May-August, 2003, pp. 117-118.
[245] Glazkov, “K voprosu o edinoverii
v sviazi s ego dvukhsotletiem” (“Towards the Question of the ‘One Faith’ in
connection with its 200th anniversary”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The
Orthodox Way), 2000, pp. 74-75, 76-77 (in Russian).
[246] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 211.
[247] Suvorov’s extraordinarily
successful career was based, according to Lebedev, “on Orthodox
spirituality. He taught the soldiers prayer and life according to the
commandments of God better than any preacher, so that at times it was difficult
to say what Suvorov taught his soldiers more – to be a warrior or to be a real
Orthodox Christian!” (Velikorossia, op. cit., p. 234).
[248] Not too much should be of the
fact that the Tsar was sympathetic towards Catholicism, which, as Nikolin
points out, “was to a large extent linked with fear of the French revolution,
which had dealt cruelly with believing Catholics, monks and clergy. This
relationship is attested by such facts as his offering the Pope of Rome to
settle in Russia, his cooperation with the establishment of the Jesuit order in
Russia, and his support for the establishment of a Roman Catholic chapel in St.
Petersburg. At the same time attention should be drawn to Paul I’s ukaz
of March 18, 1797, which protected the consciences of peasants whom landowners
were trying to detach forcibly from Orthodoxy into the unia or convert to
Catholicism.” (Nikolin, op. cit., p. 106). “On October 12, 1799 the holy
things of the Order were triumphantly brought to Gatchina: the right hand of
St. John the Baptist, a particle of the Cross of the Lord and the icon of the
Filerma Odigitria icon of the Mother of God. Only a spiritually blind man,
on learning this fact, would not see the Providence of God in the fact that the
Tsar became Master of the Maltese Order. October 12 was introduced into the
number of festal days by the Church, and a special service to this feast was
composed…” (“Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, op. cit.).
[249] This was, of course, a great
mistake. Napoleon was a child of the revolution and the instrument of the
spread of its ideas throughout Europe. (V.M.)
[250] Another mistake, for it did
precisely the opposite, weakening the continental economies and allowing
England, with her superior navy, to seize the colonies of her rivals around the
world. (V.M.)
[251]
They had crossed the Volga on March 18 when they heard of the death of the
Tsar…
[252] Alan Palmer writes: “One of the
older conspirators, more sober than the others, pertinently asked the question
which Alexander had always ignored: what would happen if the Tsar offered
resistance? ‘Gentlemen,’ Pahlen replied calmly, ‘you cannot make an omelette
without breaking eggs’. It was an ominous remark, difficult to reconcile with
his assurance to Alexander” (Alexander I, London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1974, p. 44). (V.M.)
[253] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op.
cit., pp. 245-249.
[254] “Monk Abel ‘the Prophet’ of
Valaam”, The Orthodox Word, vol. 36, ¹ 1, January-February, 2000.
[255] Shabelsky-Bork, in Fomin S., Rossia
pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Sergiev Posad,
1993, p. 121 (in Russian).
[256] Alexander had once said to his
tutor {La Harpe, a Swiss republican}: “Once… my turn comes, then it will be
necessary to work, gradually of course, to create a representative assembly of
the nation which, thus directed, will establish a free constitution, after
which my authority will cease absolutely” (in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia:
People and Empire 1552-1917, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 123).
[257] Palmer, op. cit., p. 50.
[258] The Masonic historian Richard
Rhoda writes: “The tradition exists that Alexander became a Mason in 1803 and
there is evidence that he was the member of a lodge in Warsaw” (“Russian
Freemasonry: A New Dawn”, paper read at Orient Lodge no. 15 on June 29, 1996,
http”//members.aol.com/houltonme/ru.htm. (V.M.)
[259] Hartley, op. cit., pp.
233-235.
[260] Andrzej Walicki, A History of
Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 73.
[261] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 247.
[262] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 249.
[263] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 255.
[264] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 246.
[265] Palmer, op.
cit., pp. 59-60.
[266] Palmer, op.
cit., pp. 63-64.
[267] Palmer, op.
cit., pp. 81-82.
[268] Palmer, op.
cit., p. 84.
[269] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 260. Cf.
Cronin, Napoleon, London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 315; Palmer, op.
cit., pp. 126-127.
[270] Solzhenitsyn,
Le ‘problème russe’ à la fin du xxe siècle (The
‘Russian Problem’ at the End of the 20th Century), Paris: Fayard, 1994, pp.
52-53 (in French).
[271] Palmer, op.
cit., p. 138.
[272] Papmehl, op. cit., p. 84.
[273] Papmehl, op. cit., p.
125.
[274] Quoted in Palmer, op. cit.,
p. 148.
[275]
Professor Theodore Shiman, Alexander I, Moscow, 1908. L. A.
Tikhomirov writes: “From the beginning of the 19th century,
the Petrine institutions finally collapsed. Already the practice of our 19th
century has reduced ‘the collegiate principle’ to nothing. Under Alexander I
the elegant French system of bureaucratic centralisation created by Napoleon on
the basis of the revolutionary ideas captivated the Russian imitative spirit.
For Russians this was ‘the last word’ in perfection, and Speransky, an admirer
of Napoleon, together with the Emperor, an admirer of the republic, created a
new system of administration which continued essentially until Emperor
Alexander II.
“Alexander I’s institutions completed the
absolutist construction of the government machine. Until that time, the very
imperfection of the administrative institutions had not allowed them to escape
control. The supreme power retained its directing and controlling character.
Under Alexander I the bureaucracy was perfectly organised. A strict separation
of powers was created. An independent court was created, and a special organ of
legislation – the State Council. Ministries were created as the executive
power, with an elegant mechanism of driving mechanisms operating throughout the
country. The bureaucratic mechanism’s ability to act was brought to a peak by
the strictest system of centralisation. But where in all these institutions was
the nation and the supreme power?
“The nation was subjected to the ruling
mechanism. The supreme power was placed, from an external point of view, at the
intersection of all the administrative powers. In fact, it was surrounded by
the highest administrative powers and was cut off by them not only from the
nation, but also from the rest of the administrative mechanism. With the
transformation of the Senate into the highest judicial organ, the supreme power
lost in it an organ of control.
“The idea of the administrative
institutions is that they should attain such perfection that the supreme power
will have no need to conduct any immediate administrative activity. As an ideal
this is correct. But in fact there is hidden here the source of a constant
usurpation of administrative powers in relation to the supreme power. The point
is that the most perfect administrative institutions act in an orderly fashion
only under the watchful control of the supreme power and his constant
direction. But where control and direction by the supreme power is undermined,
the bureaucracy becomes the more harmful the more perfectly it is constructed.
With this it acquires the tendency to become de facto free of the
supreme power and even submits it to itself…” (Monarkhicheskaia
Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp.
342-343 (in Russian)).
[276] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 255-258.
[277] Palmer, op. cit., p. 203.
[278] Papmehl, op. cit., p. 85.
In 1805 Platon remarked to an English visitor that “the English government had
done a very wicked thing in tolerating Popery” (op. cit., p. 82).
[279] Debidour, Histoire des
rapports de l’église et de l’état en France (History of
Church-State Relations in France), p. 255; in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh
Nikon (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw Synodal Press, 1931, part III, p. 251 (in
Russian).
[280] Palmer, op. cit., p. 206.
[281] Palmer, op. cit., p. 215.
[282] Leontiev, “Vizantizm i
Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavdom”), Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo (The
East, Russia and Slavdom), Moscow, 1996, p. 104 (in Russian).
[283] That same icon which was to
reappear miraculously on March 2, 1917, at another time of mortal danger for
the State.
[284] 70,000
men fell in one day, the largest death-toll in a single day until the Battle of
the Somme in 1916.
[285] For
details, see Adam Zamoyski’s 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow,
London: HarperCollins, 2004.
[286] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 261.
[287] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 262. This estimate of Kutuzov is supported by Zamoyski, 1812,
op. cit.
[288] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 264-265.
[289] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 269-270, 272.
[290]
Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 666.
[291] Bishop Theophan, Mysli na
kazhdij den’ (Thoughts for every day), p. 461 (in Russian).
[292] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
172.
[293] Hosking, op. cit., p.
137.
[294] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
172-173.
[295] Elagin, “The Life of Countess
Anna Orlova-Chesmenskaya”, The Orthodox Word, 1977, vol. 13, ¹ 6 (77), pp. 240-241.
[296] Zhmakin, “Eres’ esaula
Kotel’nikova” (“The Heresy of Cossack Captain Kotelnikov”), Khristianskoe
Chtenie (Christian Reading), November-December, 1882, pp. 739-745 (in
Russian).
[297] Fr. Georges Florovsky, The
Ways of Russian Theology, Belmont: Nordland, 1979, part I, pp. 202-203.
[298] Palmer, op. cit., pp.
260-261.
[299] Palmer, op. cit., p. 333.
[300] Palmer, op. cit., p. 335.
[301] Palmer, op. cit., pp.
333-334. The mocking attitude of the British to the Holy Alliance is revealed
by the fact that, as Norman Stone writes, “in each of the subsequent Congresses
held at Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822), the British held
strong reservations about the successive expeditions for crushing revolution in
Naples, Greece, and Spain. On the critical issue of the revolt of Spain’s South
American colonies, the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, joined the US
President, James Monroe, in forbidding any sort of European intervention in the
Americas. ‘I called the New World into existence,’ he told the House of Commons
in 1826, ‘to redress the Balance of the Old.’ In effect, he killed the Congress
System stone dead. ‘Things are getting back to a wholesome state,’ he remarked
shortly before his death. ‘Every nation for itself, and God for us all’” (Europe:
A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 763).
[302] Quoted
in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell,
2004, p. 541.
[303] Quoted by Fr. Georges Florovsky,
“Philaret, mitropolit Moskovskij” (“Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow”), in Vera
i Kul’tura (Faith and Culture), St. Petersburg, 2002, p. 265 (in Russian).
[304] Quoted in Metropolitan
Ioann (Snychev), Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ mitropolita Philareta (The Life and
Activity of Metropolitan Philaret), Tula, 1994, p. 121 (in Russian).
[305] Gascoigne,
A Brief History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 218.
[306] Thus Archimandrite (later
Metropolitan) Philaret (Drozdov) wrote in his Conversations between one
testing and one convinced of the Orthodoxy of the Greco-Russian Church (1815)
wrote: “Insofar as the one [the Eastern Church] and the other [the Western
Church] confess Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh, in this respect they
have a common Spirit, which ‘is of God’… Know that, holding to the above-quoted
words of Holy Scripture, I do not dare to call any Church which believes ‘that
Jesus is the Christ’ false” (Philareta Mitropolita Moskovskogo i
Kolomenskogo Tvorenia, op. cit., pp. 402, 408 (in Russian)).
However, in defence of the holy metropolitan, it should be pointed out that in
the above-quoted work he rejected the heresies of papism, and that he never
served with heterodox hierarchs or sought union with the heterodox churches.
And he revered his mentor, Metropolitan Platon of Moscow, who during his
journey to Kiev and other Russian cities in 1804 reproached “the Russian
authorities for following ‘that new-fangled mode of thinking which is called
tolerance’ in their relations with the Jesuits, and blames the Jews for the
impoverishment of the Christian population in the areas in which they are
numerous” (Papmehl, op. cit., p. 81).
[307] Madame de Staël claimed
that “the Poles are the only Europeans who can serve under the banners of
Napoleon without blushing” (Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and
Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p.
199).
[308] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
201.
[309] As Palmer writes, the
Constitutional Charter drawn up by his Polish minister Czartoryski “was a
liberal instrument of government. The Polish nation was promised ‘for all time
to come’ a bi-cameral Diet (Sejm), which would share legislative power
with the Tsar-King, and a separate executive State Council of five ministers
and a number of royal nominees. The Charter guaranteed to the Poles freedom of
worship for the ‘Christian faiths’, freedom of the press, and freedom from
arbitrary arrest; and it also provided for an independent judiciary… The Upper
House, the Senate, was a nominated body, with preference given to the older
aristocracy and the Catholic episcopate; and the right to elect to the Lower
House (in which there were nominated representatives as well as deputies) was
limited to the gentry in the countryside and to property-owners in the towns.
Moreover the Diet met for only one month in every two years and possessed no
right to initiate legislation, being permitted only to discuss laws laid before
it. Neverthless these provisions did at least give the Poles the opportunity of
internal self-government with a system of tariffs and taxation of their own,
and the terms of the Charter were accepted by Alexander with perfect sincerity.
Whatever other at St. Petersburg might feel, the Tsar himself consciously
separated in his mind the ‘Kingdom of Poland’ from the Empire as a whole. On
more than one occasion in the following seven years he gave his advisers the
impression that he was using Poland as a field for constitutional experiments
which might be implemented on a larger scale in Russian proper…” (op. cit.,
pp. 340-341). Moreover, he offered the hope of adding the other Polish lands to
the Kingdom.
[310] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op.
cit., p. 287.
[311] Ridley, The Freemasons, London:
Constable, 1999, pp. 169-170.
[312] Janet M. Hartley, A Social
History of the Russian Empire, 1650-1825, London and New York: Longman,
1999, p. 15.
[313] In 1800, I.G. Friesel, governor
of Vilna, reported: “Having established their own administrative institution,
called Synagogues, Kahals, or associations, the Jews completely separated
themselves from the people and government of the land. As a result, they were
exempt from the operation of the statutes which governed the peoples of the
several estates, and even if special laws were enacted, these remained
unenforced and valueless, because the ecclesiastical and temporal leaders of
the Jews invariably resisted them and were clever enough to find means to evade
them.” (Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1772-1844, New
York, 1970, p. 29; quoted in Hartley, op. cit., pp. 98-99). (V.M.)
[314] Platonov, op. cit., pp.
242, 243-245.
[315] In fact they were not negligible
at all. The Pale of Settlement was exceedingly porous!
[316] The kahal was abolished in
1821 in Poland and in 1844 in the rest of the Russian empire.
[317] Vital, op. cit., pp.
95-96.
[318] Vital, op. cit., p. 105.
As a result, in the whole of the 19th century only 69,400 Jews
converted to Orthodoxy (Vladimir Gubanov (ed.), Nikolai II-ij i novie
mucheniki (Nicholas II and the New Martyrs), St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 698
(in Russian). Gubanov took this figure from the Jewish Encyclopaedia.
[319] Vital, op. cit., pp.
86-87.
[320] Platonov, op. cit., p.
245.
[321] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 278.
[322] I.A. Chistovich, Istoria
perevoda Biblii na russij iazyk (A History of the Translation of the Bible into
Russian), St. Petersburg, 1873, pp. 50-55 (in Russian).
[323] O.A. Platonov, Ternovij
Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow: “Rodnik”, 1998, pp.
262-263 (in Russian).
[324] Two weeks before he died, in
March, 1821, he wrote to the Emperor: “Your Majesty, when this epistle reaches
you, I will no longer be in this world. I have communicated nothing except the
truth to people, especially now, when in my actions I am preparing to give an
account to the Supreme Judge” (Snychev, op. cit., p. 147). (V.M.)
[325] Snychev, op. cit., pp.
148-149.
[326] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 280.
[327]
“In 1822 Prince A.N. Golitsyn became acquainted with Photius and tried to
incline him to his side. The meetings of Prince Golitsyn with Archimandrite
Photius made a great impression on the former, which he noted in his letters to
Countess Orlova. In these letters to Countess Orlova Prince Golitsyn calls
Photius ‘an unusual person’ and recognises that ‘the edifying conversation of
Photius has a power that only the Lord could give’. In one of his letters to
Countess Orlova Prince Golitsyn expresses regret that he cannot enjoy the
conversation of ‘our Chrysostom’ and that he ‘wants to quench my thirst with
pure water drawn up by a pure hand and not by the hand of one who communicates
to others stingily.’
“Prince Golitsyn’s attempt by subtle
flattery to bring Archimandrite to his side was unsuccessful. A rapprochement
and union between Archimandrite Photius, a pure and true zealot of Orthodoxy,
with Prince Golitsyn, an enemy of the faith and the Church, was impossible.
“On April 22, 1822 Archimandrite Photius
went to Petersburg. There his ‘great toil’ began. Every day, according to the
witness of Archimandrite Photius himself, he was called to various people to
talk about the Lord, the Church, the faith, and the salvation of the soul.
Eminent and learned noblemen and noblewomen gathered to hear him talk about the
Lord. But such conversations took place especially in the house of the virgin
Anna, Abba Photius’ daughter, of the noblewoman Daria Derzhavina, and sometimes
in the Tauris palace.
“Without fear or hypocrisy Photius
reproved the enemies of Orthodoxy.
“Once in 1822 Archimandrite Photius began
to reprove Golitsyn, who could not stand it and began to leave the living-room,
but Photius loudly shouted after him: ‘Anathema! Be accursed! Anathema!’
“By this time the Emperor Alexander
himself returned.
“Rumours about the cursing of Prince
Golitsyn had reached the ears of the Emperor, and he demanded that Photius come
and explain himself. At first the Emperor received the fearless reprover
threateningly, but then he changed his wrath for mercy. The Emperor was struck
by the bold speech of the simple monk against the lofty official, who also
happened to be a close friend of the Emperor himself. Photius described
Golitsyn to the Emperor as an atheist, and the Bible Society headed by him - as a nest of faithlessness that threatened
to overthrow the Orthodox Church. At the end of the conversation Photius began
to speak to the Emperor about what was most necessary.
“These are his remarkable words:
“’The enemies of the holy Church and
Kingdom have greatly strengthened themselves; evil faith and temptations are
openly and boldly revealing themselves, they want to create evil secret
societies that are a great harm to the holy Church of Christ and the Kingdom,
but they will not succeed, there is nothing to fear from them, it is necessary
immediately to put an end to the successes of the secret and open enemies in
the capital itself.’
“The Emperor ‘repeatedly kissed the hand that blessed him’ and, when
Photius was leaving, ‘the Tsar fell to his knees before God and, turning to
face Photius, said: ‘Father, lay your hands on my head and say the Lord’s
prayer over me, and forgive and absolve me’. (Ivanov, op. cit.,
pp. 280-282)
[328] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op.
cit., p. 289.
[329] Elagin, op. cit., p. 243.
[330] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 282-283.
[331] This, however, did not stop him
from firmly refusing Golitsyn’s request to distribute a work published by the
Tatarinova group. See Snychev, op. cit., p. 144.
[332] Snychev, op. cit., pp.
160-161.
[333] Florovsky, “Philaret, mitropolit
Moskovskij”, op. cit., p. 272.
[334] Florovsky, “Philaret, mitropolit
Moskovskij”, pp. 273-275. Thus not only did Shishkov ban Philaret’s Catechism:
he ordered the reintroduction of a work, On the Duties of Man and the
Citizen, which had been banned at Philaret’s suggestion in 1819 (Snychev, op.
cit., p. 168).
[335] Snychev, op. cit., p.
181.His patience was rewarded in 1827, when the Holy Synod permitted the
republication of the Catechism after Philaret had turned all the Russian
scriptural quotations back into Slavonic. However, his dream of seeing the
whole Bible translated into Russian was not realised in his lifetime, although
the project was finally approved under Alexander II.
[336] Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia, London
and New York: New York University Press, 1999, p. 25.
[337] Anzulovic, op. cit., p.
42. Friendly relations between Serbian Orthodox hierarchs and Turkish rulers
continued well into the 19th century. Thus Bishop Nikolai
Velimirovic tells the following story: “In the first half of the last [19th]
century, Jeladin Bey ruled over Ochrid. He was a rebel against the Sultan and
an independent governor. At that time the Church was ruled by Metropolitan
Kalinik. Jeladin and Kalinik, although of different faiths, were very good
friends and often visited each other. It happened that Jeladin Bey condemned
twenty-five Christians to death by hanging, and the execution was to take place
on Great Friday. The Metropolitan, deeply distressed by this event, went to
Jeladin and besought him to mitigate the sentence. While they were talking, the
hour of the mid-day meal arrived, and the Bey invited the Metropolitan to eat
with him. A dish of lamb had been prepared for the meal. The Metropolitan
excused himself, as the fast prevented him from remaining to eat, and prepared
to leave. The Bey was angered and said to him: ‘Choose; either you eat with me
and free twenty-five people from hanging, or you refrain and they hang.’ The
Metropolitan crossed himself and sat down to lunch, and Jeladin freed the people
from the death sentence.” (The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham:
Lazarica Press, 1985, part I, January 27, p. 104)
[338] Adrian Fortescue, The
Orthodox Eastern Church, London: Catholic Truth Society, 1920, p. 308.
Originally, the Karlovtsy metropolitanate had jurisdiction over the Romanians
of Hungarian Transylvania. However, in 1864 the authorities allowed the
creation of a separate Romanian Church in Hungary, the metropolitanate of
Hermannstadt (Nagy-Szeben) (Fortescue, op. cit., p. 316). From 1873
there was also a metropolitanate of Cernovtsy with jurisdiction over all the
Orthodox (mainly Serbs and Romanians) in the Austrian lands (Fortescue, op.
cit., pp. 323-325).
Significantly, when the Russian Church in Exile sought refuge in Serbia
in the 1920s, their administration was set up in the former capital of the
Serbian Church’s exile, Karlovtsy.
[339] However, the Serbian pashalik
was made a subject of international law (Elena Kudriavtsev, “Blagie namerenia:
Serbia i russkaia diplomatia v pervoj polovine XIX veka” (“Good Intentions:
Serbia and Russian Diplomacy in the first Half of the 19th
Century”), Rodina (Homeland), ¹10, 2003, p. 52. (V.M.).
[340] Judah, The Serbs, London:
Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 51-52, 52-54.
[341] Fortescue, op. cit., p.
309.
[342] Quotations in Anzulovic, op.
cit., pp. 51-52, 55.
[343] Velimirovic, Religija
Njegoševa (The Religion of Njegoš), p. 166, quoted in Anzulovic, op.
cit., p. 55.
[344] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
318.
[345] Benjamin, Stoikheia tis
Metaphysikis (The Elements of Metaphysics), 1820 (in Greek); quoted in
Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge University Press,
1992, p. 33.
[346] “It is better,” he said, “my
brother, for you to have a Greek school in your village rather than fountains
and rivers, for when your child becomes educated, then he becomes a human
being. The school opens churches; the school opens monasteries.” And to the
people of Parga he said: “Take care to establish without fail a Greek school in
which your children will learn all that you are ignorant of [because] our faith
wasn’t established by ignorant saints, but by wise and educated saints who
interpreted the Holy Scriptures accurately and who enlightened us sufficiently
by inspired teachings” (Nomikos Michale Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ:
Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860, Crestwood,
NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, p. 202).
[347] The Europeans were originally
interested in the ancient monuments. Hence the removal of the Elgin marbles and
the Venus of Milo to London and Paris respectively. However, attitudes were
changed, as Zamoyski points out, “by Lord Byron’s visit to Greece in 1809, whose
fruits were the second canto of Childe Harold, published in 1809, The
Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (1813), and The Siege of Corinth (1816).
More interested in people than in stones, Byron concentrated on depicting the
craggy nobility of the natives. He was also much affected by the notion of a
once great people under alien oppression. The negative picture of the Turks and
their culture – rococo Ottomania had given way to priggish neoclassical
contempt – made the oppression all the crueller to the European imagination, in
which the Turk combined lustfulness with barbarity. The educated European of
1800 was as disgusted by the idea of the ‘terrible’ Turk defiling Greece as his
twelfth-century forebear had been at the idea of Saracens profanating the Holy Land.
And just as the Holy Land called out to Christendom for vengeance and crusade,
so the oppressed Greek land called out for liberation” (op. cit., p.
233). (V.M.)
There is a tradition in Greece that Byron died as an Orthodox Christian…
[348] Clogg, op. cit., pp.
27-28.
[349] Vaporis, op.
cit., p. 337.
[350]
Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece 1821-1853, Cambridge
University Press, 1969, p. 8.
[351] St. Gregory, An Explanation
of the Apostolic Lections. The movement to reject the sacraments of the Latin
and Protestant heretics had been initiated by Patriarch Cyril V in his famous
synodal decree of 1752, and was supported by the monk Auxentios and the Chian
doctor Eustratios Argenti. Cyril was opposed by Patriarchs Paisios and
Callinicus IV, who exiled him to Rhodes.
[352] Michael Binyon writes: “A letter
from Alexander I, signed by Capo d’Istrias, … denounced Yspilanti’s actions as
‘shameful and criminal’, upbraided him for misusing the tsar’s name, struck him
from the Russian army list, and called him to lay down his arms immediately” (Pushkin,
London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 133). By a strange irony, the officer sent by
the Russian government to report on the insurrection was Pestel, the future
leader of the Decembrist rebellion (op. cit., p. 134).
[353] Gavalas, “St. Gregory V,
Patriarch of Constantinople”, Orthodox Life, vol. 28, ¹ 2, March-April, 1978, p. 22.
[354] Clogg, op. cit., p. 35,
footnote.
[355] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
243, 245.
[356]
St. Gregory, op. cit., p. 48.
[357] Adrian Fortescue, The
Orthodox Eastern Church, London: Catholic Truth Society, 1920, p. 313.
[358]
Frazee, op. cit., chs. 7 and 8; Fortescue, op. cit., pp. 313-314.
On this period of Greek Church history, see the series of articles being
published in Agios
Agathangelos Esfigmenites (St. Agathangelos of Esphigmenou) under
the title "To atheon dogma tou oikoumenismou, Prodromos tou
Antikhristou" (“The Atheist Dogma of Ecumenism, Forerunner of the
Antichrist”) (in Greek).
[359] Especially St. Macarius of
Corinth (1731-1805), St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809), St.
Nicephorus of Chios (1750-1821) and St. Arsenius of Paros (1800-1877).
[360]
Constantine Cavarnos, St. Macarios of Corinth, Belmont, Mass.: Institute
for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies,
1972, pp. 17,18.
[361] Cavarnos, op.
cit., p. 21.
[362] Cavarnos, op.
cit., pp. 22-23.
[363] Cavarnos, op.
cit., p. 27.
[364] Walicki, op. cit., pp.
58, 59, 60.
[365] Walicki, op. cit., p. 61.
[366] Walicki, op. cit., p. 67.
[367] Walicki, op. cit., pp.
62-63.
[368] Benita Eisler, Byron,
London: Penguin books, 1999, p. 753.
[369] Platonov, op. cit., p.
265. Lebedev describes this incident as follows: once “a young officer came up
to his and, taking off his cap, asked for his blessing. The always meek and
quiet elder Seraphim was suddenly filled with such anger as nobody had ever
seen in him. He began to shout loudly at the officer and cursed him. The
unfortunate one, struck as if by thunder, went away, swaying from the shock and
forgetting to put on his cap… An involuntary witness of the event had been a
young monk who had brought Elder Seraphim some food. ‘Did you see?’ the elder
asked him. ‘I saw,’ replied the monk. The elder pointed at the source, which he
had so carefully tended: ‘Look!’ The monk glanced and saw that the source of
grace-filled water, which had healed many sick people, and which was always
clean and transparent, this time had become completely disturbed. ‘That’s how
these gentlemen want to disturb Russia,’ said St. Seraphim. Soon Russia learned
of the plot and the attempt at rebellion of the ‘Decembrists’ (the officer was
one of them)…” (op. cit., p. 295).
[370] “Some soldiers, standing on
Senate square and shouting, at their commanders’ behest: ‘Constantine!
Constitution!’ sincerely understood by ‘Constitution’ the wife of
Constantine” (Lebedev, op. cit., p. 316).
[371] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
318.
[372] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 307-308.
[373] Yu.K. Begunov, A.D. Stepanov,
K.Yu. Dushenov (eds.), Tajna Bezzakonia (The Mystery of Iniquity), St.
Petersburg, 2000, pp. 61-64 (in Russian).
[374] St. Seraphim, quoted by
Protopriest Victor Potapov, "God is betrayed by silence" (in
Russian). See also Literaturnaya Ucheba, January-February, 1991, pp.
131-134 (in Russian).
[375] Stone, Europe: A History, London:
Pimlico, 1997, p. 768.
[376]
Metternich, in J.L. Talmon, Romanticism and Revolt: Europe 1815-1848, London:
Thames & Hudson, 1967, p. 35.
[377] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital
(1848-1875), London: Abacus, 1975, p. 39.
[378] Southey,
in Talmon, op. cit., pp. 9-10.
[379] Blake, in Jacques Barzun, From
Dawn to Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2001op. cit., p. 470.
[380] This is not to say that
Romanticism influenced only the political left. On the contrary, as M.S.
Anderson writes, “the distinguishing feature of a romantic was not that his
conclusions were revolutionary or reactionary, progressive or conservative, but
that he reached them by an essentially non-rational and subjective route.
Romanticism was a mould in which any idea might be shaped, a palette from which
it might be coloured. It did not depend on any specific idea or even any
specific emotion but was rather something which pervaded life itself, something
which could always be recognized though never defined. No political or social
ideology escaped the romantic influence” (The Ascendancy of Europe,
1815-1914, Harlow: Longman, 1985, p. 343).
[381] Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness:
Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1999, p. 256.
[382] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, “Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov”, 1877, London: Cassell, p. 939.
[383] Benita Eisler, Byron,
London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 13.
[384] Barzun, op. cit., pp.
473-474.
[385] Berlin, “The Essence of European
Romanticism”, in The Power of Ideas, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000,
pp. 202-203.
[386] In fact, when the Nicene Creed
calls God the Creator of the universe, the word used for “Creator” is
“poietes”, from which we get the word “poet”. (V.M.)
[387] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 255.
[388] Zamoyski, op. cit., p.
257.
[389] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
257-262.
[390] De
Tocqueville, in Cohen
& Major, op. cit., p. 553. Again he said that “the July revolution
was carried out by the people, but the middle class which had touched it off
and led it, was the chief beneficiary” (Cohen & Major, op. cit. p.
556).
[391] Tsar Nicholas, in M.J. Cohen and
John Major (eds.), History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 551.
[392] Lebedev, Velikorossia, St.
Petersburg, 1999, p. 326 (in Russian).
[393] Chopin, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 551.
[394] Mickiewicz, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 551.
[395] Chopin also blamed the French.
For “Lafayette moved heaven and earth to make France go to war in support of
Poland, but he could not move Louis Philippe. He formed a committee to help the
Poles, with the participation of Victor Hugo and a string of artists and
heroes” (Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 278). (V.M.)
[396] The passage continues: “And
three days have already passed; the first ending with the first fall of Warsaw;
the second day with the second fall of Warsaw; and the third day cometh but it
shall have no end. As at the resurrection of Christ the sacrifice of blood
ceased upon the earth, so at the resurrection of the Polish Nation shall war
cease in Christendom.” “This,” comments Neal Ascherson, “was the extraordinary
doctrine of Messianism, the identification of the Polish nation as the
collective reincarnation of Christ. Messianism steadily gained strength over
the next century-and-a-half. History saw to that” (Black Sea, London: Vintage,
1995, p. 160). (V. M.)
[397] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp.
284-287.
[398] Van der
Kiste, The Romanovs: 1818-1959, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999, p. 35.
[399] Guizot, in Mark Almond, Revolution,
London: De Agostini, 1996, p. 92.
[400] As Guizot said in December,
1830: “the spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit
radically opposed to liberty” (in Almond, op. cit., 1996, p. 95).
[401] Guizot, in Almond, op. cit.,
1996, p. 93.
[402] Guizot, in Cohen and Major, op.
cit., p. 552.
[403] As he said in a speech from the
throne in January, 1831: “We seek to hold to the juste milieu [golden
mean] equally distant from the excesses of popular power and the abuses of
royal authority” (in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 552).
[404] Rose, Nihilism, Fr.
Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1994, pp. 28-30.
[405] Davies, Europe,
op. cit., p. 802.
[406] Smith,
in Robert Harvey, Global
Disorder, London:
Robinson, 2003, p. 392.
[407] Roberts, History of the
World, Oxford: Helicon, 1996, pp. 571-573.
[408] A.N. Wilson, The Victorians, London:
Arrow Books, 2003, p. 60.
[409] Trevelyan, in Harvey, op.
cit., p. 268.
[410] Millman, in A.N. Wilson, The
Victorians, London: Arrow Books, 2003, p. 12.
[411] Gray, False Dawn: The
Delusions of Global Capitalism, London: Granta Books, 1998, pp. 9-11.
[412]
Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, London: Abacus, 1992, pp. 230-232.
[413] K. Popper, The Open Society
and its Enemies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, volume II, p.
200.
[414] Ferguson, Empire: How Britain
Made The Modern World, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 253.
[415] Wilson, op. cit., p. 80.
[416] Wilson, op. cit., p. 76.
[417] Wilson, op. cit., pp.
82-83.
[418] Ferguson, op. cit, pp.
xxi-xxii.
[419] Ferguson, op. cit., pp.
xxiii-xxiv.
[420] Ferguson, op. cit., p.
13.
[421] Ferguson, op. cit.,
chapter 6.
[422] De Tocqueville, Democracy in
America, New York: Fontana, 1968, vol. I, pp. 305-306.
[423] De
Tocqueville, op. cit., in Barzun, op. cit., p. 538.
[424] De
Tocequeville, On the Effects of Future Democratization, 1840, in Barzun,
op. cit., p. 539.
[425] De
Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 306-307.
[426] De
Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 307-308.
[427] De
Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 309-310.
[428] De
Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 311- 313.
[429] Barzun, op. cit., p. 529.
[430] Mill, On Liberty, London:
Penguin Classics, 1974, pp. 68-69.
[431] Mill, On Liberty, p. 69.
[432] Mill, On Liberty, p. 69.
[433] Dostoyevsky described how a Member
of Parliament, Sir Edward Watkins, welcomed Don Carlos to England: “Of course,
he himself knew that the newly arrived guest was the leading actor in a bloody
and fratricidal war; but by meeting him he thereby satisfied his patriotic
pride and served England to the utmost of his ability. Extending his hand to a
blood-stained tyrant, in the name of England, and as a member of of Parliament,
he told him, as it were: ‘You are a despot, a tyrant, and yet you came to the
land of freedom to seek refuge in it. This could have been expected: England
receives everybody and is not afraid to give refuge to anyone: entreé
et sortie libres. Be welcome’” (The Diary of a Writer, 1876, London:
Cassell, part I, trans. Boris Brasol, pp. 262-263).
[434] Mill, On Liberty, p. 77.
[435] Mill, On Liberty, p. 79.
[436] Mill, On Liberty, p. 81.
[437] Mill, On Liberty, p. 84.
[438] Mill, On Liberty, p. 91.
[439] Mill, On Liberty, p. 96.
[440] Snyder, “War is Peace”, Prospect,
November, 2004, p. 33.
[441] Himmelfarth, in Mill, On
Liberty, p. 40.
[442] Himmelfarth, in Mill, On
Liberty, p. 41.
[443] Devlin, in Jonathan Wolff, An
Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1996, p.
141.
[444] Wolff, op. cit., pp.
140-141.
[445] Mill, On Liberty, p. 127.
[446] J.M. Roberts, The Penguin
History of Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 382.
[447] Wilson, op. cit., p. 53.
[448] Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831).
[449] Ferguson, op. cit., p.
296.
[450] Khomiakov, First Letter to
William Palmer, in W.J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, London:
Rivington, Percival& Co., 1895, p. 6. Cf. the Fourth Letter: “An almost
boundless Individualism is the characteristic feature of Germany, and
particularly of Prussia. Here in Berlin it would be difficult to find one
single point of faith, or even one feeling, which could be considered as a link
of true spiritual communion in the Christian meaning of the word. Even the
desire for harmony seems to be extinguished, and that predominance of
individualism, that spiritual solitude among the ever-busy crowd, send to the
heart a feeling of dreariness and desolation…. Still the earnestness of the
German mind in all intellectual researches is not quite so disheartening as the
frivolous and self-conceited gaiety of homeless and thoughtless France.”
(Birkbeck, op. cit., pp. 77-78).
[451] Khomiakov, Sixth Letter to
William Palmer, in Birkbeck, op. cit., p. 99.
[452] Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life, London: Macmillan, 1987, p. 145.
[453] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, London: Cassell, trans. Boris Brasol, vol. I, pp.
265-266.
[454] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, op. cit., p. 266.
[455]
Hobsbawm, op. cit., pp. 54-55.
[456] Berlin, Karl Marx, London:
Fontana, 195, pp. 32-33. Owen also wanted to abolish the family….
[457] Barzun, op. cit., pp.
527-528.
[458] Talmon, op. cit., pp.
58-65.
[459] Wilson, To the Finland Station,
London: Phoenix, 2004, pp. 84-85.
[460] Stone, op. cit., p. 790.
[461] Hieromonk Damascene
(Christensen), Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Writings, Platina,
Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2003, p. 623.
[462] Wilson, op. cit., p. 89.
These early socialists, in spite of their materialist bent of mind, were
peculiarly susceptible to quasi-religious visions. Thus Saint-Simon had visions
of Charlemagne, and it was revealed to him “in a vision that it was Newton and
not the Pope whom God had elected to sit beside Him and to transmit to humanity
His purposes” (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83). As for Owen, “he came in his
last days to believe that all the magnanimous souls he had known, Shelley,
Thomas Jefferson, Channing, the Duke of Kent… - all those who when living had
listened to him with sympathy, of whom he had felt that they had really shared
his vision, and who were lost to him now through death – he came to believe
that they were returning from the other world, to make appointments with him
and keep them, to talk to him and reassure him” (Wilson, op. cit., p.
97).
[463] Cf. Owen’s words: “Every day
will make it more and more evident that the character of man is, without a
single exception, always formed for him; that it may be, and is, chiefly
created by his predecessors: that they give him, or may give him, his ideas and
habits, which are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man,
therefore, never did, nor is it possible he ever can, form his own character”
(in M.S. Anderson, The Ascendancy of Europe, 1815-1914, London: Longman,
1985, p. 341). (V.M.)
[464] Talmon, op. cit., pp.
68-71.
[465] Sir Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx,
London: Fontana Press, 1995, pp. 82-83.
[466] Wilson, op. cit., pp.
29-30, 31.
[467] Richard Wurmbrand, Was Karl
Marx a Satanist?, Diane Books (USA), 1976.
[468] Wilson, op. cit., p. 122.
[469] Wilson, op. cit., pp.
118-119.
[470] Wilson, op. cit., p. 152.
[471] Feuerbach, in Frederick Copleston,
A History of Philosophy, vol. 7, part II: Schopenhauer to Nietzsche,
Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1965, p. 63.
[472] Berlin, op. cit., pp.
106-107.
[473] Fr.
Michael Azkoul, Anti-Christianity: The New Atheism, Montreal: Monastery
Press, 1984, p. 34.
[474] Azkoul, op cit., pp.
77-78.
[475] Barzun, op. cit., pp.
508-509.
[476] And a
nonsensically self-contradictory one. Thus Popper writes: “Hegel… teaches that
everything is in flux, even essences. Essences and Ideas and Spirits develop;
and their development is, of course, self-moving and dialectical… History, as
he sees it, is the thought process of the ‘Absolute Spirit’ or ‘World Spirit’.
It is the manifestation of this Spirit. It is a kind of huge dialectical
syllogism; reasoned out, as it were, by Providence. The syllogism is the plan
which Providence follows; and the logical conclusion arrived at it’s the end
which Providence pursues – the perfection of the world. ‘The only thought,’
Hegel writes in his Philosophy of History, ‘with which Philosophy
approaches History, is the simple conception of Reason; it is the doctrine that
Reason is the Sovereign of the World, and that the History of the World,
therefore, presents us with a rational process. This conviction and
intuition is… no hypothesis in the domain of Philosophy. It is there proven…
that Reason… is Substance; as well as Infinite Power;… Infinite
Matter…; Infinite Form…; Infinite Energy… That this “Idea” or
“Reason” is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely Powerful
Essence; that it reveals itself in the World, and that in that World
nothing else is revealed but this and its honour and glory – this is a thesis
which, as we have said, has been proved in Philosophy, and is here regarded as
demonstrated.’ This gush does not carry us far…” (op. cit., pp. 46, 47)
[477] Scruton,
Modern Philosophy, London : Arrow, 1997, pp. 463-464.
[478] Trilling, “The Honest Soul and
the Disintegrated Consciousness”, in Sincerity and Authenticity, London:
Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 35-38.
[479] However, he did say that America
was “the final embodiment of the Absolute Idea, beyond which no further
development would be possible” (in Stone, op. cit., p. 790). (V.M.)
[480] “’The deeds of Great Men, of the
Personalities of World History,… must not be brought into collision with
irrelevant moral claims. The Litany of private virtues, of modesty,
humility, philanthropy, and forbearance, must not be raised against them.
The History of the World can, in principle, entirely ignore the circle within
which morality… lies’.” (Popper, op. cit., pp. 67-68) (V.M.)
[481] Mann, The
History of Germany since 1789, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 46-48. Cf.
Popper: “We see that Hegel replaces the liberal elements in nationalism, not
only by a Platonic-Prussian worship of the state, but also by a worship of
history of historical success. (Frederick William had been successful against
Napoleon.)” (op. cit., p. 58)
[482] “And after a eulogy of Prussia,
the government of which, Hegel assures us, ‘rests with the official world,
whose apex is the personal decision of the Monarch; for a final decision is, as
shown above, an absolute necessity’, Hegel reaches the crowning conclusion of
his work: ‘This is the point,’ he says, ‘which consciousness has attained, and
these are the principal phases of of that form in which Freedom has realized
itself; for the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea
of Freedom… That the History of the World… is the realization of Spirit, this
is the true Theodicy, the justification of God in History… What has happened
and is happening… is essentially His Work…’
“I ask whether I was not justified when I said that Hegel presents us
with an apology for God and Prussia at the same time, and whether it is not
clear that the state which Hegel commands us to worship as the Divine Idea on
earth is not simply Frederick William’s Prussia from 1800 to 1830.” (Popper, op.
cit., pp. 48-49). (V.M.)
[483] “’The Nation State is Spirit in
its substantive rationality and immediate actuality,’ he writes; ‘it is
therefore the absolute power on earth…The State is the Spirit of the People
itself. The actual State is animated by this spirit, in all its particular
affairs, its Wars, and its Institutions… The self-consciousness of one
particular Nation is the vehicle for the… development of the collective spirit;…
in it, the Spirit of the Time invests its Will. Against this Will, the other
national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World.’”
(Popper, op. cit., p. 58).
[484] Hegel goes on: “We must
therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and
consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is infinitely harder
to grasp the Essence of the State… The State is the march of God through the
world…. The State must be comprehended as an organism… To the complete State belongs,
essentially, consciousness and thought. The State knows what it wills… The
State is real; and… true reality is necessary. What is real is eternally
necessary… The State… exists for its own sake… The State is the actually
existing, realized moral life.” (in Popper, op. cit., p. 31).
[485] Russell, A History of Western
Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, pp. 763-764, 765-769. It is true
that, as Barzun says: “What intelligent German who remembered 200 years of
helplessness would want a weak [state]? In Hegel’s day, the state created by
the Prussian awakening was less than 20 years old and must not be allowed to
droop again.” (op. cit., p. 508). But while this reflection helps us to
understand Hegel’s theory of the state from a psychological point of view, it
in no way helps us to justify it from a moral point of view.
[486] Copleston, A History of
Philosophy, op. cit., vol. 7, part I: Fichte to Hegel, pp. 255-256.
[487] Popper, op. cit., pp.
62-63.
[488] Barzun, op. cit., p. 508.
[489] Popper, op. cit., p. 63.
[490] Wilson, op. cit., p. 143.
[491] Marx, A Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy.
[492] Berlin, op. cit.
[493] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The
Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 7.
[494] Marx and Engels, The
Communist Manifesto, pp. 11-12.
[495] Popper, op. cit., p. 116.
[496] Hobsbawm, The Age of
Revolution, op. cit., pp. 370-371.
[497] As predicted by Count Cavour,
the future architect of a united Italy, in 1846: “If the social order were to
be genuinely menaced, if the great principles on which it rests were to be a
serious risk, then many of the most determined oppositionists, the most
enthusiastic republicans would be, we are convinced, the first to join the
ranks of the conservative party” (in Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op.
cit., p. 28).
[498] Karr, The Wasps, January,
1849, p. 305; in Cohen & Major, op. cit., p. 563.
[499] De Tocqueville , in Almond, op.
cit., p. 98.
[500] Almond, op. cit., pp.
103, 104.
[501] Norman Davies,
Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 823.
[502] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital,
op. cit., p. 25.
[503] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital,
op. cit., pp. 31-32.
[504] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie
Osnovy Istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow,
1997, pp. 463-464 (in Russian).
[505] Jasper Ridley, The
Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 207.
[506] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital,
op. cit., pp. 14-15.
[507] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital,
op. cit., p. 33.
[508] Anderson, The Ascendancy of
Europe, 1815-1914, Harlow: Longman, 1985, pp. 99-100.
[509] Engels’ resentment against these
“reactionary peoples” was summed up as follows: “There is no country in Europe
which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of
peoples… Thse relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course
of history… always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution” (in
Almond, op. cit., p. 111).
[510] This idea could be said to be a
development of one part of Kant’s philosophy, that concerning the moral law.
According to Russell, “Schopenhauer’s system is an adaptation of Kant’s, but
one that emphasizes quite different aspects of the Critique from those
emphasized by Fichte or Hegel. They got rid of the thing-in-itself, and thus
made knowledge metaphysically fundamental. Schopenhauer retained the
thing-in-itself, but identified it with will… Kant had maintained that a study
of the moral law can take us beyond phenomena, and give us knowledge which
sense-perception cannot give; he also maintained that the moral law is
essentially concerned with the will” (op. cit., p. 783).
[511] Copleston, A History of Philosophy,
op. cit., vol. 7, part II, pp. 37-39.
[512] Copleston, op. cit., p.
43.
[513] Copleston, op. cit., pp.
47-48.
[514] Schopenhauer, in Russell, op.
cit., p. 785. Here, perhaps, we see the influence of Buddhism. “In
his study,” notes Russell, “he had a bust of Kant and a bronze Buddha.” (op.
cit., p. 785).
[515] Schopenhauer, in Russell, op.
cit., p. 785.
[516] Copleston, op. cit., pp.
48.
[517] Copleston, op. cit., pp.
48.
[518] Russell, op. cit., p.
752.
[519] Barzun, op. cit., p. 501.
[520] Barzun, op. cit., p. 502.
[521] Barzun, op. cit., p. 571.
[522] Barzun, op. cit., p. 571.
[523] Quammen, “Was Darwin Wrong?”, National
Geographic, November, 2004, p. 9.
[524] Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”, in
The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, New York: Macmillan, 1949.
[525] Wilson writes that Marx’s task
was “to convert the ‘Will’ of German philosophy… this abstraction into a force
in the practical world” (op. cit., p. 126).
[526] Alferov, Pravoslavnoe
Mirovozzrenie i Sovremennoe Estesvoznanie (The Orthodox World-View and the
Contemporary Science of Nature), Moscow: “Palomnik”, 1998, p. 158 (in
Russian)).
[527]Wurmbrand, op. cit., p.
44.
[528] Hieromonk Damascene, in Fr.
Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman
of Alaska Press, 2000, p. 339, note.
[529] Elder Barsonuphius of Optina,
St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000.
[530] Joseph
J. Ellis, Founding Brothers, New York: Vintage Books, 2002, p. 77.
[531] Roberts, History
of the World, Oxford: Helicon, 1992, p. 620.
[532] Buchan,
in Susan-Mary Grant, “For God and Country: Why Men Joined Up for the US Civil
War”, History Today, vol. 50 (7), July, 2000, p. 21.
[533] Stone, Europe, London:
Pimlico, 1997, pp.
812, 813.
[534] See James Ostrowski, “An
Analysis of President Lincoln’s Legal Arguments against Secession”. Paper
delivered at the first-ever academic conference on secession-- "Secession,
State, and Economy", sponsored by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama,
held at the College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina, April 7-9, 1995.
[535] Quoted
in Grant, op. cit., p. 27.
[536] Roberts, op. cit., p.
620.
[537]
Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op. cit., pp. 170-173.
[538] Owen, in Wilson, op. cit.,
p. 89.
[539] Roberts, op. cit., pp.
621-622.
[540]
Robertson, “The Christian Soldier: General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson”, History
Today, vol. 53 (2), February, 2003, pp. 31-32.
[541] Archbishop Averky (Taushev), Rukovodstvo
k izucheniu Sviaschennago Pisania Novago Zaveta (Guide to the Study of the Holy
Scriptures of the New Testament), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity
Monastery, vol. II, pp. 354-355 (in Russian). Italics mine (V. M.).
[542] Ridley, op.
cit., pp. 207-208.
[543] Ridley, op.
cit., p. 209.
[544] According to Alexander Selyanin,
on October 15, 1852, the Masons addressed Napoleon and said: “Guarantee the
happiness of us all and put the emperor’s crown on your noble head” (Tainaia
sila masonstva (The Secret Power of Masonry), St. Petersburg, 1911, p. 82
(in Russian)).
[545]
Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 465.
[546] Davies, op.
cit., pp. 823-824.
[547] Duggan, A Concise History of
Italy, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 143.
[548] Peter de Rosa, Vicars of
Christ, London: Bantam books, 1988, pp. 242-243.
[549] Thierry, quoted by Metropolitan
Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of New York, Besedy s sobstvennym serdtsem
(Conversations with my own heart), in Troitskij Pravoslavnij Russkij
Kalendar’ na 1998 g. (Holy Trinity Orthodox Russian Calendar for 1998), Jordanville:
Holy Trinity Monastery, 1998, p. 62 (in Russian).
[550] Some of these propositions were:
“Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the
light of reason, he shall consider true… In the present day it is no longer
expedient that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the state,
to the exclusion of all other forms of worship… The Roman pontiff can and
should reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and
modern civilization” (De Rosa, op. cit., pp. 146, 245, 246)
[551] “In 1867, with Garibaldi’s small
force in premature action only fifteen miles from the Vatican, the pope, still
defiant, said: ‘Yes, I hear them coming.’ Pointing to the Crucifix: ‘This will
be my artillery’” (De Rosa, op. cit., p. 148).
[552] Popovich, “Reflections on the
Infallibility of European Man”, in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ,
Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994, pp.
104-105. As Archimandrite Charalampos Vasilopoulos writes, “Papism substituted
the God-man Christ with the man Pope! And whereas Christ was incarnate, the
Pope deincarnated him and expelled Him to heaven. He turned the Church into a
worldly kingdom. He made it like an earthly state… He turned the Kingdom of God
in the kingdom of this world.(O Oikoumenismos khoris maska (Ecumenism
unmasked)), Athens, 1988, p. 34 (in Greek). Indeed, although the Pope calls
himself “the vicar of Christ”, we should rather say, writes Nikolaos
Vasileiades, “that the Pope is Christ’s representative on earth and Christ… the
Pope’s representative in heaven” (Orthodoxia kai Papismos en dialogo
(Orthodoxy and Papism in Dialogue)), Athens, 1981, p. 23 (in Greek).
[553] Price, A Concise History of
France, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 188-189.
[554] Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of
Paris, London: Pan Books, 2003, p. 282.
[555] Cf. Victor Hugo’s appeal on
September 9: “It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris
is the city of cities. Paris is the city of men. There has been an Athens,
there has been a Rome, and now there is Paris… Is the nineteenth century to
witness this frightful phenomenon? A nation fallen from polity, to barbarism,
abolishing the city of nations; Germans extinguishing Paris… Can you give this
spectacle to the world” (Horne, op. cit., p. 287).
[556] Price, op. cit., pp.
189-191.
[557] Almond, op. cit., pp.
112-113, 114-115.
[558] Tiutchev, in Sergius and Tamara
Fomin, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow:
Rodnik, 1994, vol. 2, pp. 83 –84 (in Russian).
[559] Bishop Theophan, Sobranie
pisem (Collection of Letters), VII, p. 289, from a sermon uttered on
September 8, 1864.
[560] Nikolai Gogol indeed expressed a
monarchical consciousness, but in rejecting the westernizers’ arguments he went
too far in an absolutist direction. Thus he wrote in 1847: “A State without an
absolute monarch is an orchestra without its conductor… The more deeply one
looks into the workings of our administration, the more one admires the wisdom
of its founders; the more one feels that God Himself, unseen by us, built it
through the hands of the sovereigns. Everything is perfect, everything is
sufficient unto itself. I cannot conceive what use could be found for even one
more official” (Selected Passages from My Correspondence with My Friends;
in Cohen & Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p.
552).
However, Gogol’s conversion to True Orthodoxy late in life was sincere
and deep. As St. Barsanuphius of Optina said in 1909: “Our great writer Gogol
was spiritually reborn under the influence of talks with Elder Macarius, which
took place in this very cell, and a great turning point resulted in him. As a
man of sound nature, not fragmented, he was not capable of compromise. Having
understood that he could not live as he had done previously, he, without
looking back, turned to Christ and strove towards the Heavenly Jerusalem. From
Rome and the holy places which he visited, he wrote letters to his friends, and
these letters comprised an entire book, for which his contemporaries condemned
him. Gogol had not yet begun to live in Christ – hardly had he begun to wish
for this life – and the world, which is at enmity with Christ, raised a
persecution against him and passed a harsh sentence on him, considering him half
crazy” (Victor Afanasiev, Elder Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina, Ca.:
St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, p. 326). (V.M.)
[561] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia
Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp.
307-310 (in Russian).
[562] 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. 316-317 (in Russian).
[563] Lebedev, Velikorossia, St.
Petersburg, 1999, p. 331 (in Russian).
[564] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
319.
[565]
“Orthodoxy as the everyday faith of the Russian people can be respected also by
others, even by non-Christians. This is, so to speak, the inner pledge of the
life of the Russian people, and it is completely possible to respect it and
even make up to it while remaining in the sphere of personal conscience a
complete and irreconcilable opponent of ‘ecclesiastical-dogmatic Orthodoxy’. It
is hardly likely that the government of the 30s of the 19th century
reasoned like that: but it seems undoubted that unconsciously it understood the
matter in this way. It truly represented Orthodoxy as an
ecclesiastical-everyday institution founded a long time ago for the
enlightenment of the people; and as such the people got used to it completely
in the sense of a cult and especially as a ‘teaching on unquestioning obedience
to the civil, God-given authorities’. In this form, truly, Orthodoxy closely
touches the sphere of the State and fits in well into the general picture for
the programme of state education. With Orthodoxy of such a kind, strictly
speaking, anyone can get on, of whatever faith he may be – since he only
recognises the main part of the programme, its root – Autocracy (absolutism,
according to the official understanding, also). This part was obligatory for
absolutely everybody; but the first and third were meant only to serve as a
certain ethnographic colouring for the middle member [of the programme’s
triad]: everyone was obliged to recognise that its essence was Autocracy. Of
what kind? Russian. But the concept of what is Russian falls into two parts:
the Orthodox-Russian and the ethnographic-Russian. Thus for a purely Russian
youth the programme had its complete significance, that is, the first and last
concepts were obligatory only as defining the sole completely essential concept
in it, ‘Autocracy’ (absolutism). Of course, however diluted the concept of
Orthodoxy may be so as to fit into the government’s programme of civil
education, it was, to a large degree, inseparable from the Church’s teaching
and dogma. But in the present case we have to firmly establish the position
that, without in any way rejecting the absolute significance of Orthodoxy as
the expression of the faith and the ethics that flows from that, we are dealing
with it here in a somewhat different sense, as it is placed at the foundation
of civil education, that is, in the sense of its application to civil and
cultural life, which are expressed firstly by the term ‘Autocracy’ and secondly
by the term ‘Nationhood’: and this is because (to repeat) Orthodoxy in the
absolute sense can stand only ‘for itself’ and excludes the possibility of a
union with any state task whatever, and even with any national task. Orthodoxy
is universal, it is far higher than states and peoples; it denies neither
statehood nor nationalities, but it is united with nothing…
“None of these questions were clarified officially; and the Orthodoxy of
Nicholas Pavlovich and Count Uvarov remained the same diffuse concept as the
liberté of the French revolution. It in fact remained at the level only
of a negative concept, as did the concept ‘Nationhood’. Only ‘Autocracy’
received a positive meaning, because, firstly, this is in essence a more
concrete concept than the other two; and then mainly because it was and is a
term clearly understood by those who established the formula. Autocracy for
them is, both theoretically and practically, absolutism. Nobody was mistaken in
this meaning and there were no misunderstandings concerning it: the more so in
that it indeed revealed itself graphically. But Orthodoxy was understood only
as not Roman Catholicism – a very convenient faith from the state’s point of
view; and not Protestantism, which unleashed the undesirable liberty, not only
in the sphere of the faith alone (if you can criticise the faith, then all the
more the rest, also); and not as sectarianism – also a teaching displeasing to
the police. In the same way ‘Nationhood’ did not find a concrete expression of
itself; and in the absence of this it settled on language: the spread of the
Russian language was respected as the spread also of the Russian spirit – its
nationality…” (Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost’ (Orthodoxy, Autocracy
and Nationhood), Minsk: Belaruskaia Gramata, 1997, pp. 13-15 (in Russian).)
[566] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
321.
[567] A.P. Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo
po Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi (Handbook to the History of the Russian
Church) Moscow, 2001, pp. 654-657 (in Russian).
[568] Nicholas entrusted this work to
the Mason Speransky, because his expertise in the subject was unrivalled.
However, above him he placed his former teacher Balugiansky, saying: “See that
he (Speransky) does not get up to the same pranks as in 1810. You will answer
for that to me” (in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 317).
[569] Metropolitan Ioann
(Snychev), Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ mitropolita Philareta (The Life and
Activity of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow), Tula, 1994, p. 238 (in
Russian).
[570] Fr.
Maximus Kozlov, introduction to Filareta mitropolita moskovskogo i kolomenskogo Tvorenia (The
Works of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and Kolomna), Moscow, 1994, pp. 14-15 (in
Russian).
[571] Kozlov, op.
cit., pp. 25-26.
[572] Sergius
and Tamara Fomin, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second
Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 322 (in Russian).
[573] Khomiakov, “Eighth Letter to
William Palmer”, in W.J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church: Containing
a correspondence between Mr. William Palmer, Fellow of Magdalen College,
Oxford, and M. Khomiakoff, in the years 1844-1855, London, 1895, pp.
126-127; Living Orthodoxy, 142, vol. XXIV, no. 4, July-August, 2004, p.
26.
[574] Brianchaninov, “Christians, you
must know Christ!”
[575] Elder Anthony, in Polnoe
Sobranie Tvorenij Sviatitelia Ignatia Brianchaninova (Complete Collection of
the Works of the Holy Hierarch Ignatius Brianchaninov), Moscow, 2001, vol.
II, p. 616 (in Russian).
[576] Metropolitan
Ioann, op. cit., 1994, p. 177.
[577] V. Shokhin, “Svt. Philaret,
mitropolit Moskovskij i ‘shkola veruiushchego razuma’ v russkoj philosophii”
(“Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and the ‘school of believing reason’ in
Russian philosophy”), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of
the Russian Christian Movement), 175, I-1997, p. 97 (in Russian).
[578] “Already in the reign of
Alexander I the hierarch used to submit the thought of the restoration of Local
Councils and the division on the Russian Church into nine metropolitan areas.
At the command of Emperor Alexander he had even composed a project and given it
to the members of the Synod for examnation. But the Synod rejected the project,
declaring: ‘Why this project, and why have you not spoken to us about it?’ ‘I
was ordered [to compose it]’ was all that the hierarch could reply, ‘and
speaking about it is not forbidden’” (Metropolitan Ioann, op. cit., pp.
226). (V.M.)
[579] Florovsky, “Philaret, mitropolit
Moskovskij” (“Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow”), in Vera i Kul’tura (Faith
and Life), St. Petersburg, 2002, pp. 261-264 (in Russian).
[580] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in
Lev Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tservki, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the
Russian Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 24-25 (in
Russian).
[581] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia
(Works), 1848 edition, volume 2, p. 169 (in Russian).
[582] Tsar Alexander III, quoted in
Fomin, S. & Fomin, T. Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia
before the Second Coming),
Sergiev Posad, 1998, third edition, volume I, p. 354 (in Russian).
[583] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit.,
p. 355.
[584] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit.,
volume I, pp. 320-321.
[585] Metropolitan Philaret, “Slovo v
den’ Blagochestivejshego Gosudaria Imperatora Nikolaia Pavlovich”, in Kozlov, op.
cit., pp. 274-275, 277-279.
[586] For example, Chaadaev, according
to Andrej Kompaneets, “attached a great importance to history in his
investigations. Chaadaev was sure: if humanity allowed itself to see in their
true light the causes and consequences of the historical process, then even
nationalities divided up to now ‘would unite for the attainment of an agreed
and general result’. The aim of the philosophy of history is ‘to attain a clear
representation of the general law governing the succession of epochs’, but this
law constituted a certain idea (a moral idea) moving civilisations. But when
this idea is exhausted, the state perishes. Thus, for example, the Roman
Empire, Egypt, Alexandria: ‘these were rotting corpses; they (the barbarians –
A.K.) only scattered their dust in the wind’” (“Vo chto veril Chaadaev?”, http://religion.russ.ru/people/20011206-kompaneets.html)
(in Russian).
[587] Hegel, Lectures on the
Philosophy of History; quoted in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in
Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 175.
[588] Geoffrey Hosking, Russia:
Empire & People, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 270.
[589] The idea that Church regulations
and customs, such as fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, could be dispensed with
was an attitude of the nobility which St. Seraphim of Sarov, in particular,
criticised. He said that he who does not fast is not Orthodox. (V.M.)
[590] Lossky, History of Russian
Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952, p. 48.
[591] Translated in Serena Vitale, Pushkin’s
Button, London: Fourth Estate, 2000, p. 82.
[592] Berlin, “Russian Intellectual
History”, in The Power of Ideas, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, pp.
74-75.
[593] Michael
Binyon, Pushkin, London : HarperCollins, 2002, p. 551.
[594] Pushkin, “To Chaadaev”, quoted
in Walicki, op. cit., p. 81.
[595] Yury Druzhnikov, “O Poetakh i
Okkupantakh”, Russkaia Mysl’, ¹ 4353, February 15-21, 2001, p. 8 (in
Russian).
[596] At the time of the baptism of
Rus’ in 988, Rome was still formally Orthodox and in communion with
Constantinople. Nevertheless, the tendencies that led to the schism in 1054
were already clearly evident and deeply rooted.
[597] For Chaadaev “the supreme
principle” was “unity”, which he saw incarnate in Western Catholic Christendom
– completely forgetting that the West was torn by the division between
Catholicism and Protestantism. See Pushkin’s remark below.
[598] Lepakhin and Zavarzin, “Poet i
Philosoph o Sud’bakh Rossii”, Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia,
¹ 176,
II-III, 1997, pp. 167-196 (in Russian).
[599] Walicki, op. cit., p. 89.
[600] But Byzantium, he notes, was
still in communion with Rome at that time, and “there was a feeling of common
Christian citizenship”. (Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe,
London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 198).
[601] Lossky, op. cit., p. 49.
[602] Walicki, op. cit., pp.
93-94.
[603] Berlin, “The Man who became a
Myth”, in The Power of Ideas, op. cit., pp. 85-87.
[604] V. Sapov, “Gogol, Nikolai
Vasilyevich”, in Russkaia Filosofia: malij entsiklopedicheskij slovar’ (Russian
Philosophy: A Small Encyclopaedic Dictionary), Moscow: Nauka, 1995, pp.
132-133 (in Russian).
[605] Andreev, “Religioznoe litso
Gogolia” (“The Religious Face of Gogol”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox
Way), 1952, pp. 173, 174 (in Russian).
[606] Hosking, op. cit., p.
299.
[607] Andreev, op. cit., p.
175.
[608] Berlin, “A Revolutionary without
Fanaticism”, in The Power of Ideas, op. cit., p. 91.
[609] Herzen, in Lebedev, op. cit.,
p. 333.
[610] Herzen, From the Other Shore,
1849; in Cohen & Major, op. cit., p. 563.
[611] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 341-342.
[612] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 342.
[613] Lossky, History of Russian
Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952, p. 58.
[614] Lossky, op. cit., p. 39.
[615] Roy E. Campbell, “Khomiakov and
Dostoevsky: A Genesis of Ideas”, 1988 (MS).
[616] Lossky, op. cit., p. 40.
[617] Khomiakov, “First Letter to
William Palmer”, in Birkbeck, op. cit., p. 6; Living Orthodoxy, ¹ 138,
vol. XXIII, ¹ 6, November-December, 2003, p. 13.
[618] Khomiakov, The Church is One.
[619]
Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij (Complete Works), Moscow, 1907,
vol. II, 127, 139, 141; quoted in S. Khoruzhij, “Khomiakov i Printsip
Sobornosti” (“Khomiakov and the Principle of Sobornost’”), Vestnik
Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia, ¹¹ 162-163, II-III, 1991,
p. 103 (in Russian).
[620] Khomiakov, The Church is One,
4. Quotations from Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), “Istinnaia Sobornost’” (“True Sobornost’”),
1930; in Tserkov’ i ea Uchenie v Zhizni (The Church and her Teaching in
Life), Montreal: Brotherhood of St. Job of Pochaev, 1964, pp. 112-113 (in
Russian).
[621] Khomiakov, The Church is One,
5. In Grabbe, op. cit., p. 113.
[622] Lossky, op. cit., p. 35.
The epistle continues: “With us neither Patriarchs nor Councils could ever
introduce anything new, because the defender of religion is the very body of
the Church, or the people itself, who wanted their religion to remain forever
unchanged and in accord with the religion of their Fathers.”
[623]
Pomazansky, "Catholicity and Cooperation in the Church", in Selected
Essays, Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1996, p. 50.
[624] Pomazansky, op. cit., p.
49.
[625] St. Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy,
I, P.G. 91, 665-668.
[626] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij, Moscow,
1907, vol. II, pp. 312-313 (in Russian).
[627] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij, vol. II,
p. 313.
[628] Khomiakov, "On the Western
Confessions of Faith", translated by Schmemann, A. (ed.), Ultimate
Questions, New York: Holt, Tinehard & Winston, 1965, p. 49.
[629] Khomiakov, Polnoe
Sobranie Sochinenij, vol. I,
p. 283.
[630] Khoruzhij, op. cit., pp.
97-99.
[631] Chetverikov, Elder Ambrose of
Optina, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1997, pp. 124-125.
[632] Lazareva, “Zhizneopisanie”
(“Biography”), introduction to I.V. Kireevsky, Razum na puti k Istine
(Reason on the Path to Truth), Moscow: “Pravilo very”, 2002, pp. XXXVI-
XXXIX (in Russian).
[633] Kireevsky, “V otvet A.S.
Khomiakovu” (“In Reply to A.S. Khomiakov”), Razum na puti k Istine, Moscow,
2002, pp. 6-12 (in Russian).
[634] Kireevsky, Polnoe sobranie
sochinenij (Complete Works), Moscow, 1911, vol. I, pp. 113, 246; quoted in
Walicki, op. cit., pp. 94, 95.
[635]
Kireevsky, quoted by Fr. Alexey Young, A Man is His Faith: Ivan Kireyevsky
and Orthodox Christianity, London: St. George Information Service, 1980.
[636] Kireevsky, in Young, op. cit.
Cf. St. Maximus the Confessor (Mystagogy, P.G. 91: 665-668): “Men, women
and children, profoundly divided as to race, nation, language, manner of life,
work, knowledge, honour, fortune… are all recreated by the Church in the
Spirit. To all equally she communicates a divine aspect. All receive from her a
unique nature which cannot be broken asunder, a nature which no longer permits
one henceforth to take into consideration the many and profound differences
which are their lot. In that way all are raised up and united in a truly Catholic
manner.”
[637] Kireevsky, “O kharaktere
prosveschenia Evropy i o ego otnoshenii k prosvecheniu Rossii” (“On the
Character of the Enlightenment of Europe and its Relationship to the
Enlightenment of Russia”), in Razum na puti k istine, op. cit.,
pp. 207-209 (in Russian).
[638] Monk
Damascene Christenson, Not of this World: The Life and Teaching of Fr.
Seraphim Rose, Forestville, Ca.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1993, pp.
589-590
[639] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, 1873, London: Cassell, p. 7.
[640] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, 1873, pp. 148-149, 151.
[641] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 337-338.
[642]
Quoted in Andrezj Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 157-58.
[643] Akhsharumov, in Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 323-324.
[644] Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, London: Macmillan, 1987, p. 63.
[645] Dostoyevsky, in Kjetsaa, op.
cit., p. 105.
[646] Fr. Sergius Chetverikov, Elder
Ambrose of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1997, p.
213.
[647] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, 1880.
[648] Dostoyevsky, in K. Mochulsky, Dostoyevsky:
His Life and Work, Princeton, 1967.
[649] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p.
310.
[650] Khomiakov, “Suschnost’ zapadnogo
khristianstva”, Montreal, 1974 (in Russian).
[651] Lossky, op. cit., pp.
35-36.
[652] Alferov, “Ob Uderzhanii i
Simfonii”, http://www.monarhist-spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Dionisy-1.htm,
p. 11 (in Russian).
[653] Kireevsky, “Ob otnoshenii k
tsarskoj vlasti”, in Razum na puti k istine, op. cit., pp. 51-53,
62.
[654] Kireevsky, in L.A. Tikhomirov,
“I.V. Kireevsky”, Kritika Demokratii (A Critique of Democracy), Moscow,
1997, pp. 520-521 (in Russian).
[655] However, this did not prevent
him attacking the Tsar later in life with his withering Epitaph.
[656] Merezhkovsky, Dve tajny russkoj
poezii. Nekrasov i Tiutchev (Two Mysteries of Russian Poetyr. Nekrasov and
Tiutchev), St. Petersburg, 1915 (in Russian).
[657] Tiutchev (1849), in Fomin &
Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 327.
[658] Tiutchev, “Rossia i revoliutsia”
(“Russia and the Revolution”), Politicheskie Stat'i (Political Articles),
Paris: YMCA Press, 1976, pp. 32-36 (in Russian).
[659] Tiutchev, “O tsenzure v Rossii”
(“On Censorship in Russia”) (in Russian).
[660] Lossky, op. cit., pp.
44-45.
[661] Tiutchev, “Nash Vek” (“Our Age”)
(in Russian).
[662] Tiutchev, translated
in Christensen, op. cit., p. 645.
[663] Walicki, op. cit., pp.
96-97.
[664] Walicki, op. cit., pp.
97-98.
[665] Tsimbursky, in Fomin &
Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 327.
[666] Leontiev, Vostok, Rossia i
Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavdom), in Fomin & Fomina, op.
cit., vol. I, pp. 333-334.
[667] Philip Mansel, Constantinople,
London: Penguin, 1995, p. 268.
[668] Royle, Crimea: The Great
Crimean War 1854-1856, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 15, 17.
[669] Royle, op. cit., 19-20.
[670] Royle, op. cit., p. 52.
[671]
Tiutcheva, Pri Dvore Dvukh Imperatorov (At the Court of Two Emperors),
Moscow, 1990, p. 52; in N.Yu. Selischev, “K 150-letiu nachala Krymskoj vojny”
(To the 150th Anniversary of the Crimean War”), Pravoslavnaia
Rus’ (Orthodox Rus’), ¹ 24
(1741), December 15/28, 2003, p. 11 (in Russian).
[672] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie
Sochinenij, Moscow, 1994, vol. II, pp. 74-75; in Selischev, op. cit.,
pp. 10-11.
[673] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 327.
[674] Hieroschemamonk Feofil, Jordanville:
Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970, pp. 108, 111.
[675] As Royle writes, the Russian
forces in this theatre were superior, though numerically inferior. “Fought in
the mountainous areas where Armenia borders Georgia, the advantage should have
been with the Ottoman army. Not only did they have the support of the robber
baron Shamyl, for many years a thorn in the flesh of Russian forces, but as
Humphrey Sandwith, a British doctor in the Ottoman forces observed, ‘Here you
have Turks posted on their own soil in the midst of a Mussulman population. At
the summons of the fiery crescent thousands of warlike tribes will rush to the
standard of Islam.’ Alas, matters did not turn out in that easy way…” (op.
cit., p. 416).
[676] Orlov, in Selischev, op. cit.,
p. 12.
[677] Brianchaninov, Pis’ma
(Letters), Moscow, 2002, pp. 870, 873 (in Russian); in Selischev, op.
cit., p. 13.
[678]
Metropolitan Philaret, in Selischev, op. cit., p. 13.
[679] One of the victims of this
massacre was the great defender of Orthodoxy, Hieromartyr Joseph the Damascene
(http://aaron.org/midwest/Articles/St._Joseph_Of_Damascus_A.htm).
[680] See “Zhitie sviatitelia
Innokentia Khersonskogo” (“The Lifen of the holy Hierarch Innocent of
Cherson”), in Zhitia i Tvorenia Russikh Sviatykh (The Lives and Works of the
Russian Saints), Moscow: Triphonov Pechegskij Monastyr’, “Kovcheg”, 2001,
pp. 701-702 (in Russian).
[681] K. Aksakov, in E.N. Annenkov,
“’Slaviano-Khristianskie’ idealy na fone zapadnoj tsivilizatsii, russkie spory
1840-1850-kh gg.” (“’Slavic-Christian’ ideas against the background of western
civilization, Russia quarrels in the 1840s and 50s”), in V.A. Kotel’nikov
(ed.), Khristianstvo i Russkaia Literatura (Christianity and Russian
Literature), St. Petersburg: “Nauka”, 1996, pp. 143-144 (in Russian). Cf.
Yury Samarin: “We were defeated not by the external forces of the Western
alliance, but by our own internal weakness… Stagnation of thought, depression
of productive forces, the rift between government and people, disunity between
social classes and the enslavement of one of them to another… prevent the
government from deploying all the means available to it and, in emergency, from
being able to count on mobilising the strength of the nation” (“O krepostnom
sostoianii i o perekhode iz nego k grazhdanskoj svobode” (“On serfdom and the
transition from it to civil liberty”), Sochinenia (Works), vol. 2,
Moscow, 1878, pp. 17-20; quoted in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People &
Empire, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 317).
[682] Mansel, op. cit., pp.
265-266.
[683] Mansel, op. cit., p. 269.
[684] Fomin &
Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 331-333.
[685]
Hieromonk Anthony of the Holy Mountain, Ocherki Zhizni i Podvigov Startsa
Ieroskhimonakha Ilariona Gruzina (Sketches of the Life and Struggles of Elder
Hieroschemamonk Hilarion the Georgian), Jordanville, 1985, p. 95 (in
Russian).
[686] Fomin
& Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 338.
[687] Snychev, op. cit., p.
319.
[688] Dobroklonsky, op. cit.,
pp. 702-703. For more on Bishop Ambrose, see S.G. Wurgaft, I.A. Ushakov, Staroobriadchestvo
(Old Ritualism), Moscow: “Tserkov’”, 1996, pp. 18-22 (in Russian).
[689] Snychev, op. cit., p.
359.
[690] Khomiakov, “Third Letter to
William Palmer, in Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, op. cit.,
pp. 67-69, 71; Living Orthodoxy, ¹ 138, vol. XXIII, ¹
6, November-December, 2003, pp. 26-27.
[691] See W.J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church during the
Last Fifty Years, London: Rivington, Percival & co., 1895.
[692] Snychev, op. cit., p.
357.
[693] Lebedev, op. cit., pp.
324, 325.
[694] Lieven, Empire, London:
John Murray, 2000, pp. 212-213.
[695] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
324.
[696] S.M. Kaziev (ed.), Shamil,
Moscow: Ekho Kavkaza, 1997, p. 31 (in Russian).
[697] Kaziev, op. cit.,
p. 53.
[698] Snychev, op. cit., p.
325.
[699] Lieven, op. cit., pp.
213-214. The historian referred to is David Gillard.
[700] Although
Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, during his short period of service as Bishop of
the Caucasus, did his best. See Zhizneopisanie Episkopa Ignatia
Brianchaninova, op. cit. (V.M.)
[701] Lebedev, op. cit., pp.
302-303.
[702] See M.V. Krivosheev, Yu. V.
Krivosheev, Istoria Rossijskoj Imperii, 1861-1894 (A History of the Russian
Empire, 1861-1894), St. Petersburg, 2000, pp. 130-137 (in Russian).
[703] Rose, Nihilism, Forestville,
Ca.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1994, pp. 34-35.
[704] Ivanov, op.
cit., pp. 338-340.
[705] Hosking, op. cit., pp.
317-318.
[706] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p.
363.
[707] Krivosheev and Krivosheev, op.
cit., pp. 10-11.
[708] Archimandrite Konstantin
(Zaitsev), “Velikaia Reforma Osvobozhdenia Krestian. 1861-1961” (“The Great
Reform of the Emancipation of the Serfs. 1861-1961”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The
Orthodox Way), 1961, p. 24 (in Russian).
[709] Krivosheev and Krivosheev, op.
cit., p. 20.
[710] Lebedev, op. cit., pp.
341-342.
[711] Polnoe Zhizneopisanie
Sviatitelia Ignatia Brianchaninova (A Complete Biography of the holy Hierarch
Ignatius Brianchaninov), Moscow, 2002, pp. 317, 319-320 (in Russian).
[712] Polnoe Zhizneopisanie
Sviatitelia Ignatia, pp. 335-336.
[713] Snychev,
op. cit., pp. 342-344 (in Russian).
[714]
Polnoe Zhizneopisanie Sviatitelia Ignatia, p. 357. Ivanov writes: “With
regard to the reforms of Alexander II Dobroliubov wrote a letter to Slavutinsky,
in which he set out his view on the tactics of struggle with the government:
’We must gather together the facts of Russian life… We must call on the readers
to pay heed to what surrounds them, we must prick their eyes with all kinds
of horrors, persecute them, torment them, give them no rest – so that the whole
of this kingdom of dirt may become repulsive to the reader, so that, cut to the
quick, he may jump up and cry out ardently: what kind of slave labour is this!
It would be better to die, I do not want to live any longer in this
maelstrom.’” (op. cit., p. 340)
[715] Metropolitan Philaret, in Bishop
Plato, On the Question of Freedom of Conscience, Kiev, 1902 (in
Russian).
[716] John of Kronstadt, My Life in
Christ, Moscow, 1894 (in Russian).
[717] Victor Afanasyev, Elder
Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, pp.
216, 217.
[718] Solzhenitsyn, op. cit.,
pp. 76-77.
[719] Lebedev, op. cit., pp.
342-343.
[720] Igor Volgin, Poslednij God
Dostoevskogo (Dostoyevsky’s Last Year), Moscow, 1986, pp. 32-33 (in
Russian).
[721] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, January, 1881, London: Cassell, pp. 1032-1033.
[722] Lebedev, op. cit., pp.
343-344.
[723] Ivanov, op.
cit., p. 340.
[724] Lebedev, op. cit., p.
344.
[725] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, 1873, London: Cassell, p. 17.
[726] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a
Writer, 1873, London: Cassell, p. 13.
[727] Dostoyevsky, in Leonid Grossman,
Dostoevsky, London: Allen Lane, 1974, p. 350.
[728] Igor Volgin, Poslednij God
Dostoevskogo (Dostoyevsky’s Last Year), Moscow, 1986, p. 43 (in Russian).
[729] Dostoyevsky, in Volgin, op.
cit., p. 17.
[730] Volgin, op. cit., pp.
17-18.