CHRISTIAN STATEHOOD IN THE AGE OF PROTEST

From the Fall of Constantinople to Peter the Great (1453-1700)

 

 

Vladimir Moss
CONTENTS

 

Introduction…………………………………………………………3

 

Part I. The Age of Protest (1453-1589)

 

1. The West: The Assault on the Church…….………………..………5

1492 and the Jews - The Lure of Freedom – Humanism - Rationalism – Luther, Müntzer and Charles V - Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More – The Counter-Reformation and Spanish Absolutism – Protestant Democratism: Calvin and Browne – The Church of England

 

2. The East: The Riurik Tsars…………………….……………..……….44

The Path to the Third Rome – The Heresy of the Judaisers – Russian Caesaropapism and its Critics – Ivan the Terrible: (1) The Orthodox Tsar – Ivan the Terrible: (2) The Bloodthirsty Tyrant - St. Philip of Moscow

 

Part II. The Age of Revanche (1589-1700)

 

3. The West: The Assault on the Monarchy…………………………75

Holland: the First Capitalist State - The Anglican Monarchy - The Old Testament in the New World - The English Revolution – The Killing of the King – John Milton - Hobbes’ Leviathan – Locke’s Theory of the Social Contract - A Critique of Social Contract Theory - French Absolutism – The Forerunners of the Enlightenment - The Idea of Religious Toleration - Capitalism and the Jews - Protestantism and the Scientific Outlook – Sir Isaac Newton

 

4. The East: Patriarchal Russia………….………………………….…140

The Moscow Patriarchate – Poles, Cossacks and Jews – Orthodoxy and the Unia - Boris Godunov - The Time of Troubles – The Hereditary Principle – Tsar, Patriarch and People –The Schism of the Old Believers – Patriarch Nicon of Moscow – The Swansong of the Moscow Patriarchate – From Holy Rus’ to Great Russia

 


FOREWORD

 

     This book is designed as a successor to my previous book, The Ideal of Christian Statehood, which studied the theory and practice of Christian Statehood in the ancient and medieval worlds, until the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. The present volume aims to take this story on into the early modern period, through the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation and the early anti-monarchical revolutions, to the threshold of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. As in the earlier book, I have found it useful to construct my narrative in pairs of chapters, with one chapter in each pair describing developments in the Catholic and Protestant West, and the other – in the Orthodox East. The chapters on the West describe the gradual dissolution of the “symphonic” ideal of Christian statehood, and its replacement by pagan democratic, on the one hand, and absolutist models, on the other, under the impact of Humanism, Protestantism and Rationalism. The chapters on the East describe the resurrection of the ideal in Muscovite Russia, until the abolition of the patriarchate under Peter the Great.

 

October 22 / November 4, 2002.

Kazan Icon of the Most Holy Mother of God.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART I. THE AGE OF PROTEST (1453-1589)


1. THE WEST: THE ASSAULT ON THE CHURCH

 

As free, and not using your liberty

As a cloak of maliciousness,

 But as the servants of God.

I Peter 2.16.

 

A Christian man is a perfectly free lord, subject to none [of the princes of the Church].

Martin Luther.

 

A Christian man is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all [of the princes of this world].

Martin Luther.

 

 

     With the fall of New Rome in 1453, and the re-acquaintance of the West with the political ideas of antiquity during the Renaissance, the way was open for the development of a completely new theory of politics, a theory based, not on theology and the order ordained by God, but on nature, especially fallen human nature, with the aim of creating a new order that would satisfy the demands of that nature. Of course, the Christian (in the broad sense of that word) understanding of politics did not disappear overnight; and the new era was distinguished both by fervent attempts to justify revolutionary and democratic forms of government on the basis of Holy Scripture and by the explicitly religious and anti-democratic theory known as the Divine Right of Kings. Nevertheless, the general tendency, which began in the Renaissance (if not in the 13th century) and has continued to develop vigorously until the modern day, has been to disconnect politics from religion – or, at any rate, from the Christian religion – with enormous consequences for the theory and practice of government.

 

 

1492 and the Jews

 

     If the fall of Constantinople in 1453 marked the end of the ancient and medieval worlds, then the events that took place simultaneously in Spain in 1492 may be said to mark the beginning of the modern world. As Karen Armstrong writes: “In 1492, three very important things happened in Spain. The events were experienced as extraordinary at the time, but with hindsight we can see that they were characteristic of the new society that was, slowly and painfully, coming to birth in Western Europe during the lat-fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. These years saw the development of our modern Western culture, so 1492 also throws light on some of our own preoccupations and dilemmas. The first of these events occurred on January 2, when the armies of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, the Catholic monarchs whose marriage had recently united the old Iberian kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, conquered the city-state of Granada. With deep emotion, the crowd watched the Christian banner raised ceremonially upon the city walls and, as the news broke, bells pealed triumphantly all over Europe, for Granada was the last Muslim stronghold in Christendom [more accurately: Western Christendom]. The Crusades against Islam in the Middle East had failed, but at least the Muslims had been flushed out of Europe. In 1499, the Muslim inhabitants of Spain were given the option of conversion to Christianity or deportation, after which, for a few centuries, Europe would become Muslim-free. The second event of this momentous year happened on March 31, when Ferdinand and Isabella signed the Edict of Expulsion, designed to rid Spain of its Jews, who were given the chance of baptism or deportation. Many Jews were so attached to ‘al-Andalus’ (as the old Muslim kingdom had been called) that they converted to Christianity and remained in Spain, but about 80,000 Jews crossed the border into Portugal, while 50,000 fled to the new Muslim Ottoman empire, where they were given a warm welcome. The third event concerned one of the people who had been present at the Christian occupation of Granada. In August, Christopher Columbus, a protégé of Ferdinand and Isabella, sailed from Spain to find a new trade route to India but discovered the Americas instead.”[1]

 

     If the conquest of Granada and the voyage of Christopher Columbus signified the new power, self-confidence and global reach of Western civilization, the expulsion of the Jews rather signified its ultimate future failure. For the Jews who were expelled – called the Sephardic Jews after their word for Spain, “Sefarad” – spread throughout the West, bringing with them ideas and influences that were to be of enormous importance in the development of the West and in the eventual destruction of its Christian character. These influences can be divided into three kinds: those deriving from the Talmud, those deriving from the Cabbala, and those deriving from the adoption by Jewish conversos (those forcibly converted to Christianity, but never really believing in it) of Western rationalism and scepticism about religion in general.

 

     (i) The Talmud. Now the Jews were an “alien, apparently indigestible element in society”; they were “always and everywhere in society and in the state, but never properly of either one or the other”.[2] The reasons given for this alienation of the Jews in the course of history have basically been of two diametrically opposing kinds. According to the Christians and those who are called by the Jews “anti-semites”, the Jews were alien because they wanted to be alien, because their law, the Talmud, which has only the most strained and tangential relationship to God’s revelation in the Old Testament, ordered them to be alien and hostile to all non-Jews, whom they exploited through their money-lending activities and against whose political authorities they very often rebelled. In other words, Christian anti-semitism was the regrettable but fully understandable consequence of Jewish anti-Gentilism. The Jewish and pro-semitic view, on the other hand, it was the Christians who imposed this alienation upon the Jews, forcing them to live in ghettoes, to take up money-lending as a profession, to rebel out of self-defence.

 

     Be that as it may, it is indisputable that almost every society that received the Jews felt compelled to expel them after a time. Thus as a result of their political intrigues, they were expelled from “the market of Chalcis”, the Jewish quarter of Constantinople, by the Emperors Theodosius II and Justin II. Then, in 1040, the Muslims expelled them from Mesopotamia, which had been their homeland for many generations, the seat of their government-in-exile and the place where the Babylonian Talmud, the real “Bible” of Judaism, received its finished form. Then Great Prince Vladimir Monomakh expelled them from Russia in the twelfth century. In 1290 they were expelled from England, in 1306 from France, in 1349 from Saxony, in 1360 from Hungary, in 1370 from Belgium, in 1380 from Bohemia, in 1480 from Austria, in 1444 from the Netherlands; in 1492 from Spain, in 1495 from Lithuania, in 1497 from Portugal, in 1498 from Salzburg, Wurtemburg and Nuremburg, in 1540 from Sardinia and Naples, and in 1551 from Bavaria.

 

     Even earlier than the expulsion of the Jews themselves came the banning and destruction of their evil anti-Christian and anti-Gentile books, especially the Talmud. Thus “the struggle with the Talmud,” writes Platonov, “began as early as the reign of the emperor Justinian in 556. He permitted the Jews to read only the Bible in the synagogue, but strictly forbade the Mishna. The Byzantine emperors were unconditional opponents of the Talmud, forbidding the Talmud on their territory. In this policy the Russian sovereigns followed the Byzantine emperors. Right until the end of the 17th century the import of the Talmud into Russia was forbidden under pain of death.

 

     “The tradition of the non-allowance of the Talmud onto the territory of Christian states was broken after the falling away of the Western church from Orthodoxy and the strengthening of papism. The mercenary Roman popes and cardinals for the sake of gain often entered into agreements with the Jews and looked through their fingers at the widespread distribution of the Talmud in Europe. Nevertheless, amidst the Roman popes there were found those who tried to fight with this ‘book worthy of being cursed’, from the reading of which ‘every kind of evil flows’.

 

     “Popes Gregory IX in 1230 and Innocent IV in 1244 ordered all Talmudic books to be burned. In England in 1272 during the expulsion of the Jews searches for copies of the Talmud were carried out in their homes and they were handed over to be burned…”[3]

 

     (ii) The Cabbala. Nesta Webster writes: “The modern Jewish Cabala presents a dual aspect – theoretical and practical; the former concerned with theosophical speculations, the latter with magical practices. It would be impossible here to give an idea of Cabalistic theosophy with its extraordinary imaginings on the Sephiroths, the attributes and functions of good and bad angels, dissertations on the nature of demons, and minute details on the appearance of God under the name of the Ancient of Ancients, from whose head 400,000 worlds receive the light. ‘The length of this face from the top of the head is three hundred and seventy times ten thousand worlds. It is called the “Long Face”, for such is the name of the Ancient of Ancients.’ The description of the hair and beard alone belonging to this gigantic countenance occupies a large place in the Zoharic treatise, Idra Raba.

 

     “According to the Cabala, every letter in the Scriptures contains a mystery only to be solved by the initiated. By means of this system of interpretation passages of the Old Testament are shown to bear meanings totally unapparent to the ordinary reader. Thus the Zohar explains that Noah was lamed for life by the bite of a lion whilst he was in the ark, the adventures of Jonah inside the whale are related with an extraordinary wealth of imagination, whilst the beautiful story of Elisha and the Shunamite woman is travestied in the most grotesque manner.

 

     “In the practical Cabala this method of ‘decoding’ is reduced to a theurgic or magical system in which the healing of diseases plays an important part and is effected by means of the mystical arrangement of numbers and letters, by the pronunciation of the Ineffable Name, by the use of amulets and talismans, or by compounds supposed to contain certain occult properties.

 

     “All these ideas derived from very ancient cults; even the art of working miracles by the use of the Divine Name, which after the appropriation of the Cabbala by the Jews became the particular practice of Jewish miracle-workers, appears to have originated in Chaldea…”[4]

 

     How could this paganism ever have entered Judaism? One may well ask. The prosemite author Paul Johnson writes: “The sages were both fascinated and repelled by this egregious superstition. The anthropomorphism of God’s bodily measurements went against basic Judaic teaching that God is non-created and unknowable. The sages advised Jews to keep their eyes firmly fixed on the law and not to probe dangerous mysteries… But they then proceeded to do just that themselves; and, being elitists, they tended to fall in with the idea of special knowledge conveyed to the elect: ‘The story of creation should not be expounded before two persons, and the chapter on the chariot [Ezekiel 1] before even one person, unless he is a sage, and already has an independent understanding of the matter.’ That was the Talmud; indeed the Talmud and other holy writings contained a good deal of this suspect material…”[5]

 

     In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries a conflict arose between the rationalists, led by Maimonides, who rejected this paganism, and the “mystics”, led by Nahmanides, who accepted it. “Nahmanides,” writes Johnson, “made it possible for kabbalists to pose as the conservatives, tracing the origin of their ideas back to the Bible and Talmud, and upholding the best and most ancient Jewish traditions. It was the rationalists who were the innovators, bringing to the study of the Torah the pagan ideas of the ancient Greeks. In this respect, the campaign against the works of Maimonides could be described as the last squeak of the anti-Hellenists.

 

     “Nahmanides himself never joined the witch-hunt against rationalism – on the contrary, he opposed it – but he made it possible for the kabbalists to escape similar charges of heresy, which in fact would have been much better grounded. For kabbalah not only introduced gnostic concepts which were totally alien to the ethical monotheism of the Bible, it was in a sense a completely different religion: pantheism. Both its cosmogony – its account of how creation was conceived in God’s words – and its theory of divine emanations led to the logical deduction that all things contain a divine element. In the 1280s, a leading Spanish kabbalist, Moses ben Shem Tov of Guadalajar, produced a summa of kabbalistic lore, the Sefer-ha-Zohar, generally known as the Zohar, which became the best-known treatise on the subject. Much of this work is explicitly pantheist: it insists repeatedly that God ‘is everything’ and everything is united in Him, ‘as is known to the mystics’. But if God is everything, and everything is in God, how can God be a single, specific being, non-created and absolutely separate from creation, as orthodox Judaism has always emphatically insisted? There is no answer to this question, except the plain one that Zohar-kabbalah is heresy of the most pernicious kind…”[6]

 

     During the Renaissance, however, the floodgates of Jewish influence were opened and both Jewish and pagan literature became far more available. The influence of Greco-Latin paganism on the West has been well documented and recognized, largely because it came from above, with the official sanction of leaders in both Church and State. The influence of Jewish paganism has been less recognized, largely because it came from below, from the underground, and entered in spite of the resistance (at first) of the powers that be.

 

     Thus to cite just one example: through contact with Jewish bankers interested in art and literature, writes Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “the Florentine Christian philosopher Pico della Mirandola was able to engage in kabbalistic study, making use of the concept of the sefirot in his compositions. He and other Christian humanists believed that the Zohar contained doctrines which support the Christian faith. In this milieu Judah Abravanel composed a Neoplatonic work which had an important impact on Italian humanism.”[7]

 

     However, the Jews themselves were looking for stronger medicine: “after the Spanish disaster,” writes Armstrong, “Kabbalists found that the rational disciplines of philosophy, which had been popular among the Jews of al-Andalus, could not address their pain. Life seemed drained of meaning, and without meaning in their lives, human beings can fall into despair. To make life bearable, the exiles turned to mythos and mysticism…”[8]

 

     The result was a new form of Cabbala invented by an Ashkenazi Jew, Isaac ben Solomon Luria, which incorporated the motif of exile in an exotic new synthesis. “Like most kabbalists,” writes Johnson, “he believed that the actual letters of the Torah, and the numbers which they symbolized, offered means of direct access to God. It is a very potent brew once swallowed. However, Luria also had a cosmic theory which had an immediate direct bearing on belief in the Messiah, and which remains the most influential of all Jewish mystical ideas. The kabbalah listed the various layers of the cosmos. Luria postulated the thought that Jewish miseries were a symptom of the breakdown of the cosmos. Its shattered husks, or klippot, which are vile, none the less contain tiny sparks, tikkim, of the divine light. This imprisoned light is the Exile of the Jews. Even the divine Shekinah itself is part of the trapped light, subject to evil influences. The Jewish people have a dual significance in this broken cosmos, both as symbols and as active agents. As symbols, the injuries inflicted on them by the gentiles show how evil hurts the light. But as agents they have the task of restoring the cosmos. By the strictest observance of the Law, they can release the sparks of light trapped in the cosmic husks. When this restitution has been made, the Exile of the Light will end, the Messiah will come and Redemption will take place.”[9]

 

     The spread of these messianic ideas – according to Armstrong, “by 1650, Lurianic Kabbalah had become a mass movement, the only theological system to win such general acceptance among Jews at this time”[10] - led to the appearance of at least one false messiah. According to Cohn-Sherbok, Shabbatai Zevi was first proclaimed Messiah by his false prophet, Nathan Benjamin Levi, who “then sent letters to Jews throughout the diaspora requesting that they repent and recognize Shabbatai Zevi as their deliverer. According to Nathan, Shabbatai would bring back the lost tribes and inaugurate the period of messianic redemption. After a short period in Jerusalem, Shabbatai travelled to Smyrna, where he encountered fierce opposition from various local rabbis. In response he declared that he was the Anointed of the God of Jacob and criticized those who refused to accept him. This act provoked hysterical response from his followers: a number fell into trances and had visions of him crowned on a royal throne as the King of Israel.

 

     “In 1666 he went to Istanbul, where he was arrested and put into prison. Soon the prison quarters were transformed into a messianic court, and pilgrims from throughout the Jewish world travelled to Constantinople to join in messianic rituals and ascetic activities. Hymns were composed in Shabbatai’s honour and new festivals introduced. The same year Shabbatai met the Polish kabbalist Nehemiah ha-Kohen, who denounced him to the Turkish authorities. When Shabbatai was brought to the Turkish court, he was given the choice between conversion and death. Given this alternative, Shabbatai converted to Islam…”[11]

 

     (iii) The Conversos. The Spanish monarchy of Ferdinand and Isabella had defined itself through its struggles with the Jews. Unable to absorb the new and substantial Jewish population that it inherited after the conquest of Granada, it first forced the Jews into accepting Christianity. Then, finding that this did not prevent riots against the conversos (or marranos, “pigs”, as the “Old Christians” called them), and disturbed by reports that the conversos continued to practice their old faith in secret, the monarchy called in the Inquisition to determine the truth by means of torture. However, this solution was also abandoned in favour of the Edict of Expulsion. “Spanish Jewry was destroyed,” writes Armstrong. About 70,000 Jews converted to Christianity, and stayed on to be plagued by the Inquisition; the remaining 130,000, as we have seen went into exile.”[12]

 

     Some of the conversos who remained in Spain were able to identify wholly with Catholicism – Teresa of Avila is the best-known example. But those who could not, and wanted to practise Judaism in secret, “had no means of learning about Jewish law or ritual practice. In consequence, they had no real allegiance to any faith. Long before secularism, atheism, and religious indifference became common in the rest of Europe, we find instances of these essentially modern attitudes among the Marrano Jews of the Iberian peninsula”.[13]

 

     From Spain many of these conversos migrated to Portugal, and when Portugal also turned against them, to Amsterdam. The most famous Jew to be born in Amsterdam, and one of the first true modernists of history, was Baruch Spinoza. “His parents had lived as Judaizing Marranos in Portugal, and had managed to make the transition to Orthodox Judaism when they arrived in Amsterdam. Spinoza, therefore, had never been hunted or persecuted. He had always lived in liberal Amsterdam, and had access to the intellectual life of the gentile world and the opportunity to practise his faith unmolested. He had received a traditional education at the splendid Keter Torah school, but had also studied modern mathematics, astronomy, and physics. Destined for a life in commerce, Spinoza had seemed devout, but in 1655,… he suddenly stopped attending services in the synagogue and began to voice doubts. He noted that there were contradictions in the biblical text that proved it to be of human not divine origin. He denied the possibility of revelation, and argued that ‘God’ was simply the totality of nature itself. The rabbis eventually, on July 27, 1656, pronounced the sentence of excommunication upon Spinoza, and… Spinoza did not ask to remain in the community. He was glad to go, and became the first person in Europe to live successfully beyond the reach of established religion…

 

     “In his concentration on this world and in his denial of the supernatural, Spinoza became one of the first secularists of Europe. Like many modern people, Spinoza regarded all formal religion with distaste… He dismissed the revealed faiths as a ‘compound of credulity and prejudices’, and ‘a tissue of meaningless mysteries’. He had found ecstasy in the untrammeled use of reason, not by immersing himself in the biblical text… Instead of experiencing it as a revelation of the divine, Spinoza insisted that the Bible be read like any other text. He was one of the first to study the Bible scientifically, examining the historical background, the literary genres, and the question of authorship. He also used the Bible to explore his political ideas. Spinoza was one of the first people in Europe to promote the ideal of a secular, democratic state which would become one of the hallmarks of Western modernity. He argued that once the priests had acquired more power than the kings of Israel, the laws of the state became punitive and restrictive. Originally, the kingdom of Israel had been theocratic but because, in Spinoza’s view, God and the people were one and the same, the voice of the people had been supreme. Once the priests seized control, the voice of God could no longer be heard. But Spinoza was no populist. Like most premodern philosophers, he was an elitist who believed the masses to be incapable of rational thought. They would need some form of religion to give them a modicum of enlightenment, but this religion must be reformed, based not on so-called revealed law but on the natural principles of justice, fraternity, and liberty.”[14]

 

 

The Lure of Freedom

 

     Liberty: this has been the keyword of European civilisation since the Renaissance, and therefore of most of the world today insofar as European civilisation has spread throughout the world. “Imagine,” writes Fernand Braudel, “that it might be possible to assemble the sum total of our knowledge of European history from the fifth century to the present, or perhaps to the eighteenth century, and to record it (if such a recording were conceivable) in an electronic memory. Imagine that the computer was then asked to indicate the one problem which recurred most frequently, in time and space, throughout this lengthy history. Without a doubt, that problem is liberty, or rather liberties. The word liberty is the operative word.

 

     “The very fact that, in the twentieth-century conflict ideologies, the Western world has chosen to call itself ‘the free world’, however mixed its motives, is both fair and appropriate in view of Europe’s history during these many centuries.

 

     “The word liberty has to be understood in all its connotations, including such pejorative senses as in ‘taking liberties’. All liberties, in fact, threaten each other: one limits another, and later succumbs to a further rival. This process has never been peaceful; yet it is one of the secrets that explain Europe’s progress.”[15]

 

     Of course, as we have seen, freedom was an important concept in antiquity: the Greeks defeated the Persians in the name of freedom, and Brutus killed Caesar in the name of freedom. And the revival of its importance in the Renaissance owed much to the general revival of the ideas and values of pagan antiquity caused by the flight of classical scholars from Byzantium to the West. However, there were several other important factors.

 

     First there was the gradual increase in economic freedom. Thus beginning already in the twelfth century we see the rise of free crafts, guilds and lodges (such as the stonemasons’ lodges, which developed into Freemasonry). These first chinks in the prison of feudal servitude appeared in the towns, which consequently began to acquire independent or semi-independent status, especially in North Italy, the Netherlands and Germany.

 

     The liberty of the towns was by no means an unmixed blessing. “Egoistic, vigilant and ferocious, towns were ready to defend their liberties against the rest of the world, often with very great courage and sometimes without any concern for the liberties of the others. Bloodthirsty wars between cities were the forerunner of the national wars to come.”[16]

 

     Now the towns were built on commerce, and commerce was built on the commercial contract. Therefore it is not surprising that the dominant theory of politics developed by town-dwellers came to be the theory of the social contract. Just as the basic form of relationship between men in the Middle Ages had been the feudal one between lord and vassal, which was reflected in the medieval feudal theory of politics (i.e. the pope is the supreme lord, and the princes are his vassals), so the basic form of relationship between men in the early modern period became (although not immediately and by no means everywhere) the more egalitarian one between buyer and seller, which was correspondingly reflected in the more egalitarian and exchange-based theories of the social contract (i.e. the people have entered into a contract with their rulers whereby they buy security in exchange for obedience).

 

     Of course, the idea of the social contract was not invented in the early modern period. As McClelland writes, “it is certainly easy enough to find contract-sounding notions in the political thought of Europe before the Reformation. Socrates himself is supposed to have said that the reason why he did not use the opportunity to escape from the rigour of the Athenian justice which had condemned him was that he had always lived in the city and so had implicitly agreed to abide by its laws. The coronation rituals of medieval kings were shot through with contract notions. Kings received the blessing of Holy Church in return for promising to protect true religion and the Church as its earthly embodiment, received the homage of the barons in return for confirming them in their privileges, and were acclaimed by the people who expected kings to protect them from the wilder vagaries of men and nature. And all oaths of allegiance are to some extent contractual. In this sense feudalism was riddled with contract, but feudal contracts were not free in any real sense because sons always claimed the right to make contract with feudal superiors on the same terms as their fathers… Of course, there is no end to the business of finding contract notions in political thought before the Reformation, but the fact remains that before then contract was never given as the basis for political society (with the great exception of the Jews, of which more later).

 

     “It might also be said that before the Reformation there was never a serious case to be made out for disobedience. This does not mean that everyone before then was always satisfied with the political authority which required their obedience, but it might mean that before the rise of social contract there was always a presumption in favour of obedience. The common law of Christendom was supposed to be binding on all men, rulers and ruled, and being God’s Law, there could never be a case for disobedience. Matters became slightly more complicated, but not much, at the level of political practice. Suppose that the laws which require my obedience imperfectly express God’s Law. How does that affect my duty to obey? At first sight, it might appear that it affects my duty to obey a great deal. I might be tempted to say that human law which imperfectly embodies God’s Law is no law at all. That would be to say that I would obey no ruler except God Himself, and that would turn me into a millenarian, obedient to no-one on earth until Christ and His Saints return to rule for a thousand years. A refusal to obey any earthly law would effectively make me into an anarchist. Besides, what I would be forgetting is that earthly law is, by definition, an imperfect embodiment of God’s Law. No matter how well-intentioned earthly rulers are, no matter how mindful of the Church’s teaching, no matter how saintly the king, all law made or declared by earthly law-givers is going to be, sub specie aeternitatis, bad law. Some laws are better than others, and medieval thinkers had in fact disagreed about how good law which was not God’s Law could be, but none could be wholly good. In these circumstances, the purist would always be in the position of saying that at best he was almost, but not quite, bound by law, so he would be almost, but not quite, bound to obey. Either you obey or you don’t (you can’t almost, but not quite, obey) so you would either be always bound to obey, in which case political obligation would not be a problem, or you would never obey, in which case political obligation is not a problem either. Neither complete acceptance, nor complete rejection is really an attempt to deal with political obligation: either you would always obey or you would never obey, and that would be that.

 

     “Political obligation, then, only becomes a problem – something worth thinking seriously about – when there is a serious case for disobedience in the minds of men who are prepared to obey law, even though law is imperfect, but not that law, or not that law made by him. Law becomes in some sense a matter for negotiation between rulers and subjects; in short, a matter of agreement or contract…”[17]

 

     Of course, the idea that politics was based on a contract between rulers and ruled did not immediately bring political liberalisation in its train. On the contrary, in many countries it elicited a reaction in the opposite direction: absolutism, the idea that the ruler is under no obligations to his people and is above any law, human or Divine. Absolute monarchies ruled throughout our period, not only in Catholic countries such as Spain and France, but even in Protestant countries such as England and Northern Germany, where the collapse of papism enabled the ruler to take control of the Church as well as the State.

 

     The collapse of papal authority in most of northern Europe elicited another important libertarian idea: the idea of religious freedom. This was very closely linked with freedom of the mind and conscience. The seeds of this had already been sown in the scholastic and conciliar movements of the later Middle Ages, and in heretical movements such as the French Albigensians, the English Lollards and the Czech Hussites. But the decisive impulse came in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, as a result of Humanism and the Reformation.

 

     The period under discussion (1453-1700) was an epoch of greatly increasing complexity and variety in European culture. The dominant ideas of medieval Europe had been basically two: Catholicism and Feudalism, as in the earlier period they had been two: Orthodoxy and Autocracy. But any list of the dominant ideas of early modern Europe must include, in addition to these, the various ideas of economic, social, political and religious freedom mentioned above, together with perhaps the most revolutionary idea of all - scientific method.

 

     This extreme cultural richness and diversity explains in part what may appear to be a puzzle to many: why Europe, under the influence of these new libertarian ideas, did not move immediately to more democratic forms of government, but even evolved despotic governments more powerful than any seen in medieval times, such as the England of Elizabeth I, the Spain of Philip II or the France of Louis XIV.

 

     The point is, as K.N. Leontiev has explained, that cultural richness and diversity require a strong autocratic power to hold them together and give them form, as it were. “As long as there are estates, as long as provinces are not similar, as long as education is different in various levels of society, as long as claims are not identical, as long as tribes and religions are not levelled in a general indifferentism, a more or less centralized power is a necessity.”[18] It was the French revolution of 1789 that, by making the status of the bourgeois “middle man” the standard for all, brought in a new, more simplified, but less rich and diverse age, the age of democracy and the common man….

 

 

Humanism

 

     “The Renaissance,” writes Norman Davies, “did not merely refer to the burgeoning interest in classical art and learning, for such a revival had been gathering pace ever since the twelfth century. Nor did it involve either a total rejection of medieval values or a sudden return to the world view of Greece and Rome. Least of all did it involve the conscious abandonment of Christian belief. The term renatio or ‘rebirth’ was a Latin calque for a Greek theological term, palingenesis, used in the sense of ‘spiritual rebirth’ or ‘resurrection from the dead’. The essence of the Renaissance lay not in any sudden rediscovery of classical civilisation but rather in the use which was made of classical models to test the authority underlying conventional taste and wisdom. It is incomprehensible without reference to the depths of disrepute into which the medieval Church, the previous fount of all authority, had fallen. In this the Renaissance was part and parcel of the same movement which resulted in religious reforms. In the longer term, it was the first stage in the evolution which led via the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution to the Enlightenment. It was the spiritual force which cracked the mould of medieval civilisation, setting in motion the long process of disintegration which gradually gave birth to ‘modern Europe’.

 

     “In that process, the Christian religion was not abandoned. But the power of the Church was gradually corralled within the religious sphere: the influence of religion increasingly limited to the realm of private conscience. As a result the speculations of theologians, scientists, and philosophers, the work of artists and writers, and the policies of princes were freed from the control of a Church with monopoly powers and ‘totalitarian’ pretensions. The prime quality of the Renaissance has been defined as ‘independence of mind’. Its ideal was a person who, by mastering all branches of art and thought, need depend on no outside authority for the formation of knowledge, tastes, and beliefs. Such a person was l’uomo universale, the ‘complete man’.

 

     “The principal product of the new thinking lay in a growing conviction that humanity was capable of mastering the world in which it lived. The great Renaissance figures were filled with self-confidence. They felt that God-given ingenuity could, and should, be used to unravel the secrets of God’s universe; and that, by extension, man’s fate on earth could be controlled and improved…

 

     “Humanism is a label given to the wider intellectual movement of which the New Learning was both precursor and catalyst. It was marked by a fundamental shift from the theocratic or God-centred world-view of the Middles Ages to the anthropocentric or man-centred view of the Renaissance. Its manifesto may be seen to have been written by Pico’s treatise On the Dignity of Man[19]; and, in time, it diffused all branches of knowledge and art. It is credited with the concept of human personality, created by a new emphasis on the uniqueness and worth of individuals. It is credited with the birth of history, as the study of the processes of change, and hence of the notion of progress; and it is connected with the stirrings of science – that is, the principle that nothing should be taken as true unless it can be tried and demonstrated. In religious thought, it was a necessary precondition for Protestant emphasis on the individual conscience. In art, it was accompanied by a renewed interest in the human body and in the uniqueness of human faces. In politics it gave emphasis to the idea of the sovereign state as opposed to the community of Christendom, and hence to the beginnings of modern nationality. The sovereign nation-state is the collective counterpart of the autonomous human person.

 

     “Both in its fondness for pagan antiquity and in its insistence on the exercise of man’s critical faculties, Renaissance humanism contradicted the prevailing modes and assumptions of Christian practice. Notwithstanding its intentions, traditionalists believed that it was destructive of religion, and ought to have been restrained. Five hundred years later, when the disintegration of Christendom was far more advanced, it has been seen by many Christian theologians as the source of all the rot…”[20]

 

     Thus the Thomist scholar Étienne Gilson defined Renaissance humanism as the Middle Ages “not plus humanity but minus God”. This definition needs to be heavily qualified. On the one hand, as the Reformers were to point out with vehemence, medieval Christianity in the West was often far from fervent or profound, being corrupt both in doctrine and in works. And on the other hand, the Renaissance led naturally into the era of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which was full of religious passion, moral earnestness and doctrinal enquiry. Nevertheless, in essence one must agree with Braudel’s verdict that humanism’s “acute awareness of humanity’s vast and varied potential prepared the way, in the fullness of time, for all the revolutions of modern times, including atheism”.[21]

 

     Again, Braudel writes: “The intellectual ferment of the Renaissance, and that of the Reformation in so far as it raised the principle of individual interpretation of revealed truth, laid the bases for freedom of conscience. Renaissance humanism preached respect for the greatness of the human being as an individual: it stressed personal intelligence and ability. Virtù, in fifteenth-century Italy, meant not virtue but glory, effectiveness, and power. Intellectually, the ideal was l’uomo universale as described by Leon Battista Alberti – an all-rounder himself. In the seventeenth century, with Descartes, a whole philosophical system stemmed from Cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I exist) – individual thought.  The philosophical importance thus attached to the individual coincided with the abandonment of traditional values…”[22]

 

     The abandonment of traditional values and thinking led to a whole series of demands for other forms of freedom, of which the most important in this context was political freedom. Or, to be more precise – for only the most fanatical advocated freedom from all forms of political restraint – it was the ideal of political equality that emerged as the most powerful passion of the modern world. This expressed itself above all in the movement of anti-monarchism.

 

     Now while, as I shall argue in more detail, this early modern emphasis on freedom and equality was in essence the product of a spirit of antichristian rebellion, it cannot be denied that it contained elements that were Christian in origin, being based on certain Gospel truths which were felt, not without reason, to have been neglected and even trampled upon by the political and ecclesiastical powers of the age. Thus let us take the concept of human rights, which is so central to modern western civilisation. On the one hand, it cannot be denied that the doctrine of human rights is a denial of God’s rights in relation to man. But on the other hand, it was also an affirmation of what man as created by God and in God’s image was felt to be worth. This combination of Christian and anti-Christian elements is what make the history of freedom in modern times so complex and, very often, paradoxical.[23]

 

     Thus the Protestant Reformation protested against undoubted, and extremely important abuses. As Jacques Barzun writes: “The priest, instead of being a teacher, was ignorant; the monk, instead of helping to save the world by his piety, was an idle profiteer; the bishop, instead of supervising the care of souls in his diocese was a politician and a businessman. One of them here or there might be pious and a scholar – he showed that goodness was not impossible. But too often the bishop was a boy of twelve, his influential family having provided early for his future happiness. The system was rotten…”[24]

 

     However, instead of returning to the norm of Christian life from which these were evident deviations and corruptions, western man chose, in effect, to cast off from the shores of Christianity altogether, in fact if not in name. As Burckhardt said in his Judgements on History, the Reformation was an escape from discipline. Reason, not Holy Tradition, became the arbiter of truth and justice - reason, that is, not in the sense of the Divine Logos, “the mind of Christ”, as revealed in the truly confessing Church, “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy 3.15), but fallen human reason, “liberated” now from the “fetters” of tradition, having been absolved by the natural law tradition from all sin.

 

     This dual character of the modern quest for freedom – both Christian protest and antichristian rebellion – has been emphasized by Archbishop Averky of Syracuse. He considered the epoch of the “Renaissance” to be “a reaction to the perverted Christianity of the West” since the fall of the papacy in the eleventh century. But at the same time it “was in essence a denial of Christianity and a return to the ideals of paganism. It proclaimed the cult of a strong, healthy, beautiful human flesh, and to the spirit of Christian humility it opposed the spirit of self-opinion, self-reliance, and the deification of human 'reason'.

 

     "As a protest against perverted Christianity, on the soil of the same humanistic ideal that recognised 'reason' as the highest criterion of life, there appeared in the West a religious movement which received the name of 'Protestantism'. Protestantism with its countless branches of all kinds of sects not only radically distorted the whole teaching of true Christianity, but also rejected the very dogma of the Church, placing man himself as his own highest authority, and even going so far as to deny faith in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the Founder of the Church.

 

     "Puffed-up human pride finally falls completely away from God, and begins boldly to deny even the very existence of God, and man proclaims himself to be as it were a god. Seized with pride, self-opinion and reliance on his own limitless powers, possibilities and capacities, man brought up on the ideals of the 'Renaissance' no longer sees any obligation for himself to strive for the spiritual perfection enjoined by the Gospel, and by a natural progression descends deeper and deeper into the abyss of spiritual fall and moral corruption. Into the foreground there steps the service of the flesh, as a consequence of which spiritual demands are more and more stifled, suppressed and, finally, so as once and for all to finish with the unpleasant voice of conscience which lives in the spirit of man, the spirit itself is declared to be non-existent.

 

     "In this way, there appears 'materialism' - a natural child of 'humanism', a natural and logical development of its idea. The ideal of the full stomach, covered by the raucous 'doctrine' going by the name of 'the ideal of social justice', 'social righteousness', became the highest ideal of humanity which had denied Christ. And this is understandable! The so-called 'social question' could not have taken hold if people had remained faithful to true Christianity incarnate in life.

 

     "On the soil of materialism, in its turn, there naturally grew, as a strictly logical consequence, the doctrines of 'Socialism' and 'Marxism-Communism'. Humanism and materialism, having denied the spiritual principle in man, proclaimed man himself to be a 'god' and legitimised human pride and animal egoism as self-sacrificing, and came to the conclusion that savage struggle should be made the law of human life, on the soil of the constant conflict of interests of egoistical human beings. As a result of this so-called 'struggle for existence', stronger, cleverer, craftier people would naturally begin to constrain and oppress the less strong, less clever and less crafty. The law of Christ, which commands us to bear one another's burdens (Galatians 6.2), and not to please ourselves (Acts 15.29), but to love one's neighbour as oneself (Matthew 22.39), was expelled from life. And so so-called 'social evil' and 'social injustices' began to increase and multiply, together with the 'social ulcers' of society. And since life was made more and more intolerable, as a consequence of the ever-increasing egoism and violence of people towards each other, there was naturally some reason to think about establishing for all a single tolerable and acceptable order of life. Hence 'Socialism', and then its extreme expression, 'Communism', became fashionable doctrines, which promised people deliverance from all 'social injustices' and the establishment on earth of a peaceful and serenely paradisal life, in which everyone would be happy and content. But these teachings determined to cure the ulcers of human society by unsuitable means. They did not see that the evil of contemporary life is rooted in the depths of the human soul which has fallen away from the uniquely salvific Gospel teaching, and naively thought that it would be enough to change the imperfect, in their opinion, structure of political and social life for there to be immediately born on earth prosperity for all, and life would become paradise. For this inevitable, as they affirmed, and beneficial change, the more extreme Socialists, as, for example, the Communists, even proposed violent measures, going so far as the shedding of blood and the physical annihilation of people who did not agree with them. In other words: they thought to conquer evil by evil, this evil being still more bitter and unjust because of their cruelty and mercilessness.

 

     "'The Great French Revolution', which shed whole rivers of human blood, was the first of their attempts. It clearly demonstrated that men are powerless to build their life on earth without God, and to what terrible consequences man is drawn by his apostasy from Christ and His saving teaching."[25]

 

 

Rationalism

 

     Spinoza wrote: “Let everyone believe what seems to him to be consonant with reason”[26], and the most important of the various kinds of freedom proclaimed at the Renaissance was the idea of the freedom and autonomy of the human mind, the belief that the human mind and human reason are autonomous, and do not need to be checked against any higher authority, which is known as Rationalism. Rationalism came in different forms, Jewish, Catholic and Protestant. We have seen the origins of Jewish rationalism. Protestant rationalism was born in the soil of Catholic rationalism, which consisted in placing the mind of one man above the Catholic consciousness of the Church, the Mind of Christ. Protestantism rejected Papism, but did not reject its underlying principle. Thus instead of placing the mind of one man above the Church, it placed the mind of every man, every believer, above it. As Luther himself declared: “In matters of faith each Christian is for himself Pope and Church, and nothing may be decreed or kept that could issue in a threat to faith.”[27] Thus Protestantism, as New Hieromartyr Archbishop Hilarion (Troitsky) puts it, “placed a papal tiara on every German professor and, with its countless number of popes, completely destroyed the concept of the Church, substituting faith with the reason of each separate personality.”[28]

 

     However, Protestant rationalism went further than the Catholic variety, and came close to the Jewish variety, in its rejection of sacraments, and in general in its iconoclastic rejection of the possibility that matter can be sanctified by the Spirit. Icons, relics, holy water and all the symbols and ceremonies of Catholic worship were rejected and destroyed. The sacrament of the Eucharist, according to the Protestants, was not the Body and Blood of Christ, but only a service of remembrance, and there was no such thing as a specially ordained priesthood. One would have expected that the Protestants would at least have held on to the sacredness of the Holy Scriptures, since their whole faith was built on them alone. But Luther reduced the number of canonical books, rejecting the so-called “apocryphal” books of the Old Testament and casting doubt on such New Testament books as the Epistle of James. Moreover, it was from the Protestants (and, as we have seen, the Jews such as Spinoza) that the terribly destructive so-called “Higher Criticism” of the Bible began. No thing was sacred for the Protestants, but only the disembodied mind of the individual believer.

 

     But in order to understand Protestantism we must go beyond the intellectual pride that it inherited from its Papist and Renaissance humanist predecessors to the emotional vacuum that it sought to fill – and filled with some success, although the new wine it proposed to pour into the old bottles of Christendom turned out to be distinctly vinegary. For it was not their protests against the abuses of Papism that made Luther and Calvin such important figures: Wycliff and Hus, Machiavelli and Erasmus and many others had been exposing these abuses long before Luther nailed his theses to the church door in Worms. What distinguished Luther and Calvin was that they were able to offer hungry hearts that no longer believed in the certainties of Holy Tradition or the consolations of Mother Church another kind of certainty – that offered by justification by faith alone, and another consolation – that offered by predestination to salvation. All that was necessary was to say: I believe, and the believer could be sure that he was saved![29]

 

     Thus was Western thought directed along a path of ever-increasing individualism, subjectivism and, eventually, sheer madness, as evidenced by the philosophy of Nietzsche. The first truly modern philosopher Descartes’ axiom, “I think, therefore I am” was only a desiccated, secularised and intellectualised reduction of this primary axiom of Protestantism. The difference between Luther and Descartes was the difference between theological rationalism and philosophical rationalism: the Protestant deduced the certainty of salvation from his personal faith and certain passages of Scripture, while the philosopher derived the certainty of his existence from his personal thought. The one deduction was momentous in its consequences and the other was trivial; the one had an emotional charge and the other had none (or very little); but in other respects they were very similar. Even the apparent advantage of objectivity that citing Scripture brought to Luther’s syllogism was illusory; for it was a cardinal tenet of Protestantism that each individual believer could interpret the meaning of Scripture for himself, which removed the possibility of finding any objective criterion of true faith – “I believe” could mean just about anything that the individual believer wanted it to mean.

 

     Thus philosophical rationalism was born in the soil of Protestant rationalism, and philosophical individualism and subjectivism – in the soil of Protestant individualism and subjectivism. Descartes would have been impossible without Calvin, and Kant – without Luther. Just as Luther allowed the individual believer to define for himself what true faith was, so Kant allowed the individual decision-maker to define for himself what right and wrong was – for the “categorical imperative” was entirely personal and subjective.

 

     L.A. Tikhomirov writes: “According to the Christian understanding, although man is by nature capable of a free existence and free self-determination, he does not have autonomy, nor does he presume to seize it (recognising that he is in the hands of God, and subject to Him), but carries out His commands and follows that mission which is indicated to him by God. To declare oneself autonomous would be equivalent to falling away from obedience to God, to breaking with Him. But if separated Christians were capable of that, it would be almost impossible to incite Christians as a whole to do this for a thousand reasons. Of these the most important is that, in submitting to God, the Christian feels that he is submitting, not to some foreign principle or other, but to that which he recognises to be the Source of his highest capabilities, his Father… The striving for knowledge, which is so powerful in man, is set on a firmer ground precisely when a boundary is clearly delineated between the Divine world, which cannot be known by reason, and the created world, which is accessible to experimental knowledge through the senses. In making this delineation the Christian faith served both exact science and the spiritual life to an identically powerful degree…

 

     “It goes without saying that when the conviction emerged that the autonomy of man is real in some point of his existence, this naturally entrained with it the thought that autonomy is therefore possible and fruitful also in other respects, and this led to the search for new spheres of autonomy with a gradually increasing ‘liberation from God’.

 

     “In this way the original point of ‘liberation from God’ is rationalism, a tendency based on the supposed capacity of reason (ratio) to acquired knowledge of the truth independently of Divine Revelation, by its own efforts. In fact this is a mistake, but it is engendered by the huge power of human reason and its capacity to submit everything to its criticism. And so it seems to man that he can reject everything that is false and find everything that is real and true. The mistake in this self-confidence of reason consists in the fact that in fact it is not the source of the knowledge of facts, which are brought to the attention of man, not by his reason, but by his feelings – both physical and mystical. The real role of reason consists only in operations on the material provided by these perceptions and feelings. If they did not exist, reason would have no possibility of working, it would have not even a spark of knowledge of anything. But this controlling, discursive power is so great that it easily leads man to the illusion of thinking that the reason acquires knowledge independently. This inclination to exaggerate the power of reason has always lived and always will live in man, since the most difficult work of the reason is self-control, the evaluation of the reality of its own work. This self-control not only easily weakens in man, but is deliberately avoided by him, because it leads him to the burdensome consciousness of the limitations and relativity of those of his capacities which by their own character appear to be absolute.

 

     “To the extent that reason’s self-control reveals to him the necessity of searching for the absolute Source of his relative capacities and in this way leads to the search for Divine Revelation, to the same extent the weakening of self-control leads to the false feeling of the human capacity for autonomy in the sphere of cognitive thought.

 

     “It goes without saying that there always have been the seeds of this exaggeration of the powers of reason, that is, the seeds of rationalism, in the Christian world. But historically speaking rationalism was promoted by Descartes. In principle his philosophy did not appear to contradict Christianity in any way. The rationalism of Descartes did not rise up against the truths of the faith, it did not preach any other faith. Descartes himself was personally very religious and even supposed that by his researches he was working for the confirmation of the truths of Christianity.[30] In fact, of course, it was quite the other way round. Descartes’ philosophical system proceeded from the supposition that if man in seeking knowledge had no help from anywhere, - nor, that is, from God, - he would be able to find in himself such axiomatic bases of knowledge, on the assertion of which he could in a mathematical way logically attain to the knowledge of all truth.

 

     L.A. Tikhomirov writes: “As… V.A. Kozhevnikov points out in his study of mangodhood, ‘the Cartesian: “I think, therefore I am” already gave a basis for godmanhood in the sense of human self-affirmation.’ In fact, in that all-encompassing doubt, which was permitted by Descartes before this affirmation, all knowledge that does not depend on the reasoning subject is rejected, and it is admitted that if a man had no help from anyone or anything, his mind would manage with its own resources to learn the truth. ‘The isolation and self-sufficiency of the thinking person is put as the head of the corner of the temple of philosophical wisdom.’ With such a terminus a quo, ‘the purely subjective attainment of the truth, remarks V. Kozhevnikov, ‘becomes the sole confirmation of existence itself. The existent is confirmed on the basis of the conceivable, the real – on the intellectual… The purely human, and the solely human, acquires its basis and justification in the purely human mind. The whole evolution of the new philosophical thinking from Descartes to Kant revolves unfolds under the conscious or unnoticed, but irresistible attraction in this direction.’[31]

 

     “The first step of the Reformation,” writes V.A. Zhukovsky, “decided the fate of the European world: instead of the historical abuses of ecclesiastical power, it destroyed the spiritual, so far untouched, power of the Church herself; it incited the democratic mind to rebel against her being above judgement; in allowing revelation to be checked, it shook the faith, and with the faith everything holy. This holiness was substituted by the pagan wisdom of the ancients; the spirit of contradiction was born; the revolt against all authority, Divine as well as human, began. This revolt went along two paths: on the first – the destruction of the authority of the Church produced rationalism (the rejection of the Divinity of Christ), whence came… atheism (the rejection of the existence of God); and on the other – the concept of autocratic power as proceeding from God gave way to the concept of the social contract. Thence came the concept of the autocracy of the people, whose first step is representative democracy, second step – democracy, and third step – socialism and communism. Perhaps there is also a fourth and final step: the destruction of the family, and in consequence of this the exaltation of humanity, liberated from every obligation that might in any way limit its personal independence, to the dignity of completely free cattle. And so two paths: on the one hand, the autocracy of the human mind and the annihilation of the Kingdom of God; on the other – the dominion of each and every one, and the annihilation of society.”[32]

 

     In case these consequences seem far-fetched, and not to follow naturally from their causes, it will be worth briefly looking at a characteristically Renaissance literary genre, the Utopias – specifically, Thomas More’s Utopia, Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, and Francis Bacon’s The New Atlantis. Each of these contain astonishingly modern visions of society – thoroughly secular, this-worldly visions. Thus Barzun writes: “To make existence better, which for these three Humanists means not more godly, but happier, each drives at a main goal. More wants justice through democratic equality; Bacon wants progress through scientific research; Campanello wants permanent peace, health, and plenty through rational thought, brotherly love, and eugenics. All agree on a principle that the West adopted late: everybody must work.”[33]

 

     The problem for all secular utopias is how to control the fallen nature of man. From the Christian point of view there is only one solution: the acceptance of the true Christian faith and its incarnation in life. But the Utopians thought differently: “The great argument used to sustain right conduct is: ‘Live according to Nature. Nature is never wrong and we err by forgetting it.’ Nature here replaces God’s commandments, but although Nature is His handiwork, His commandments are a good deal cleaner than Her dictates…

 

     “If we ask what the eutopian legacy has been it may be summed up in five points: social equality is more humane than hierarchy… Next, everybody must work and earn his living or his honors. Then, rulers should be chosen by the people: it fosters a more willing obedience. In addition, marriage and divorce need accomodation to actual experience: adultery is not the sole cause of hopeless disunion. Finally, the existing order is not fixed forever by divine fiat and doomed to be evil by original sin. Clear thought and strong wills can improve the human lot. Humanism takes it for granted that this worldly aim is legitimate…”[34]

 

 

Luther, Müntzer and Charles V

 

     However, all these far-reaching consequences took their origin in the rebellion against the Church, to which we now return…

 

     Almost from the beginning, there were significant differences between the Protestant Reformers in the degree and thoroughness of their rejection of the old ways. The most important differences were between the Lutherans and the Calvinists. With regard to the vital question of the sources of the faith, for example, both parties rejected Tradition and held to Sola Scriptura. But while the Lutherans taught that a custom was godly if it was not contrary to the Bible, the Calvinists went further and asserted that only that which was explicitly taught by the Bible was godly. A little later, the Anglicans, in the person of Richard Hooker, took a slightly different, but ultimately no less rationalist line: that was godly which was in accordance with the Bible and natural law.

 

     Closely related to the question of the sources of the faith was that of the Church. Since the Protestants rejected the authority of the papist church, and paid no attention to the claims of the Orthodox Church, they were logically committed to the thesis that the historical Church had perished, and that they were recreating it. Apostolic succession was not necessary – the people could take the place of the Apostles, since there were no true successors of the apostles left.

 

     In practice, the conservative Protestants – the Lutherans and the Anglicans – held on to bishops, priests and the semblance of apostolic succession. And yet, in the last analysis it was the democratic assembly of believers, not the bishop standing in an unbroken chain of succession from the apostles, who bestowed the priesthood upon the candidates. Thus Luther wrote: “The only thing left is either to let the Church of God perish without the Word or to allow the propriety of a church meeting to cast its votes and choose from its own resources one or as many as are necessary and suitable and commend and confirm these to the whole community by prayer and the laying-on of hands. These should then be recognised and honoured as lawful bishops and ministers of the Word, in the assured faith that God Himself is the Author of what the common consent of the faithful has so performed – of those, that is, who accept and confess the Gospel…”[35]

 

     The Calvinists were more thorough-going in their rejection of apostolic succession. Calvin himself was not a priest and the Calvinists were so averse to the traditional notion of the priesthood that they dropped the word “priest” in favour of the less sacramental-, more democratic-sounding “presbyter” and “elder”.

 

     In his treatises, On the Liberty of the Christian (1520) and On Temporal Authority (1523), Luther made a very sharp distinction between the spiritual and the temporal, the Kingdom of God and the kingdom of man. As Dagron interprets his thought: “the Christian, being at the same time part of the spiritual kingdom and of the temporal kingdom is at the same time absolutely free and absolutely enslaved. If God has instituted two kingdoms, it is because only a very small élite of true Christians participate in His Kingdom; the great mass needs the ‘temporal sword’ and must submit to in accordance with the teaching of Paul (Romans 13.1: ‘there is no authority that is not of God’) and of Peter (I Peter 2.13: ‘Submit yourselves to every human authority’). But if the temporal princes hold their power from God and they are often Christian, they cannot pretend to ‘govern in a Christian manner’ and in accordance with the Gospel. ‘It is impossible for a Christian kingdom to extend throughout the world, and even over a single country.’ No accommodation is possible between a religion that is conceived as above all personal and a State defined as above all repressive; and Luther is ironic about the temporal sovereigns ‘who arrogate to themselves the right to sit on the throne of God, to rule the consciences and the faith and to… guide the Holy Spirit over the pews of the school’, as also about the popes or bishops ‘become temporal princes’ and pretending to be invested with a ‘power’ and not with a simple ‘function’. This radical distinction between the temporal and the spiritual did not, therefore, lead to the recognition of two powers, ‘since all the Christians truly belong to the ecclesiastical state’ and there is no reason to deny Christian princes the ‘titles of priest and bishop’.“[36]

 

     Luther’s principles were tested in the 1520s, when Thomas Müntzer led a German Peasants’ War against all authorities. The only authority for him was the people. Matheson writes: “He addressed his lords and masters as ‘brothers’, if, that is, they were willing to listen to him. They are part of his general audience, on the same level as everyone else… Everything has to come out into the open, to be witnessed by the common people. Worship has to be intelligible, not some ‘mumbo-jumbo’ that no one could understand. The holy Gospel has to be pulled out from under the bed where it has languished for four hundred years. Preaching and teaching and judgement can no longer be a hole-and-corner affair, for God has given power and judgement to the common people. In the Eucharist, for example, the consecration of the elements is to be ‘performed not just by one person but by the whole gathered congregation’. He encourages popular participation in the election of clergy. In the Peasants’ War a kind of crude popular justice was executed ‘in the ring’. ‘Nothing without the consent of the people’; their visible presence as audience is the guarantor of justice… The audience of the poor is not beholden to prince or priest. Liturgies are no longer subject to the approval of synods. A liberating Gospel, taking the lid off corruption and exploitation, is bound to be polemical, and doomed to meet persecution. ‘Hole-in-the-corner’ judgements by courts and universities have to be replaced by accountability to the elect throughout the world.”[37]

 

     Luther supported the State against the revolutionaries; he wrote an appeal “Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants”, quoting Romans 11 on obedience to secular authorities, and his call on the authorities to destroy the peasants led to the massacre or exile of some 30,000 families. But, like all revolutionaries who do not go all the way, he was accused of inconsistency at best, and betrayal at worst, by the more radical-minded. Thus Müntzer called him “Dr. Liar”.[38]

 

     In truth, however, Luther had no alternative. If he had relied solely on the power of his word and the hands of the simple people, his Reformation would have been quickly crushed by the troops of the Catholic Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who rejected his call to rise up against the pope on behalf of “the glorious Teutonic people”. It was the Protestant Princes of Germany that saved Luther. In any case, if there were no sacramental, hierarchical priesthood, and all the laity were in fact priests, the Prince as the senior layman was bound to take the leading role in the Church. For, as Luther’s favourite apostle in his favourite epistle says, the Prince “beareth not the sword in vain; for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13.4).

 

     The problem was, however, that in relying on the power of “the godly prince”, and in the absence of an established church structure with its own independent source of authority, Lutheranism tended to give him excessive power in church life. “According to the teaching of Luther,” writes Tikhomirov, “the Church consists of completely equal members, with no difference of hierarchical gifts of grace. Episcopal power belongs to it collectively. The grace of the priesthood belongs to each Christian. Ecclesiastical power belongs to the same society to which State power also belongs, so that if it entrusts this power to the Prince, it transfers to him episcopal rights, too. The Prince becomes the possessor both of political and of ecclesiastical power. ‘In the Protestant state,’ writes Professor Suvorov, ‘both ecclesiastical and state power must belong to the prince, the master of the territory (Landsherr) who is at the same time the master of religion – Cuius est regio – ejus religio’.”[39]

 

     Now the Protestant Princes were aided in their struggle by a fortunate concatenation of events. On the one hand, the Emperor Charles was suddenly faced with a very powerful enemy without – the Turks at the peak of their power under Suleiman the Magnificent – as well as by rebellions from within, in Italy and the Netherlands. And on the other, the other major Catholic monarch, Francis I of France, decided to intrigue against him, making common cause with the German Protestant Princes and Suleiman himself. To make matters still worse for the Catholics, Charles was at war also with the Pope in Rome. Nor did he do the Catholic cause any good by the manner in which his generals waged that war. Thus on May 6, 1527, his troops “entered Rome and wreaked such havoc within the city that the details were not forgotten for a hundred years. Old men were disembowelled and young men castrated, women raped and tortured, children tossed onto the points of swords before being butchered. The corpse of Pope Julius II was dragged from its ornate tomb and paraded through the streets.”[40] Nearly half the population was killed….

 

 

Henry VIII and Sir Thomas More

 

     But no “Catholic” monarch did more damage to Catholicism than the English King Henry VIII, the founder of the Anglican Church. By one of the great ironies of history, Henry had been awarded the title “Defender of the Faith” by Pope Leo X for writing a defence of the seven sacraments against Luther. Luther responded with a scathing, scatological attack on the king, at which point one of the most complex, gifted and, in the end, heroic figures of post-Orthodox western history, came on to the scene – Thomas More.

 

     At the king’s command, More composed a reply to Luther that was to match Luther’s language to such an extent that one eighteenth-century divine called it “the greatest heap of nasty language that was ever put together”.[41] However, More was no unprincipled courtier with a gift for diatribe, and his Catholicism was much deeper and sincerer than the king’s. As Lord Chancellor he invested great energy into protecting the realm from Lutherans, and even – contrary to the principle of religious toleration he had proclaimed in his youthful work, Utopia – burned a few of them at the stake.[42] He also believed passionately in the king’s divine right to rule, and did everything in his power to prevent the revolutionary rhetoric that was causing such chaos in Germany from crossing the Channel.

 

     For “Thomas More,” writes his biographer Peter Ackroyd, “was one who needed pillars and the security of an ordered world; he spoke and argued as a lawyer, but in the Responsio he also introduced the concept of law as the defence against disorder and chaos. ‘Una est ecclesia Christi’, he wrote, and that one church is guided by the workings of the Holy Spirit; it is the manifest, visible and historic faith of ‘the common knowen catholic church’ whose sacraments and beliefs are derived not only from scripture but also from the unwritten traditions transmitted by generation to generation.

 

     “What is that Luther wrote? ‘Hic sto. Hic maneo. Hic glorior. Hic triumpho.’ Here I stand, Here I remain. Here I glory. Here I triumph. It does not matter to me if a thousand Augustines or Cyprians stand against me. It is one of the great moments of Protestant affirmation and became a primary text for the ‘individualism’ and ‘subjectivism’ of post-Reformation culture, but to More it was ‘furor’ or simple madness. Only a lunatic, a drunkard, could express himself in such a fashion. More invoked, instead, the authority of the apostles and the church fathers, the historical identity and unity of the Catholic Church, as well as the powerful tradition of its teachings guided by the authority of Christ. Where Luther would characteristically write ‘I think thus’, or ‘I believe thus’, More would reply with ‘God has revealed thus’ or ‘ The Holy Spirit has taught thus’. His was a church of order and ritual in which the precepts of historical authority were enshrined. All this Luther despised and rejected. He possessed the authentic voice of the free and separate conscience and somehow found the power to stand against the world he had inherited. He was attacking the king and the Pope, but more importantly he was dismissing the inherited customs and traditional beliefs of the Church itself, which he condemned as ‘scandala’. He was assaulting the whole medieval order of which More was a part…

 

     “More moved easily within any institution or hierarchy to which he became attached; Luther was seized by violent fits of remorse and panic fear in any fixed or formal environment. It is hard to imagine More screaming out ‘Non sum!’ during the Mass. More obeyed and maintained all the precepts of the law; Luther wished to expel law altogether from the spiritual life. More believed in the communion of the faithful, living and dead, while Luther affirmed the unique significance of the individual calling towards God. More believed in the traditional role of miracles; Luther saw visions…”[43]

 

     However, More would feel called upon to defend the Church and the law not only against Luther, but also against his Catholic king when he tried to get his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled in spite of the Pope’s resistance. English Lutherans such as Tyndale and Fish wanted the king to take control over the Church, as the Lutheran princes were doing in Germany, in order to root out the corruption of the clergy. But More, while repeatedly emphasising the power and authority of the king, would not accept any attack on the priesthood. He believed that this attack “was a partially concealed attempt to introduce Lutheran heresies within the kingdom, so that the wreckage of the clergy would be followed by the destruction of the Mass and the sacraments. And what then would follow but the riot and warfare which had already afflicted Germany? The seizure of church lands would be succeeded by the theft of other property, and the assault upon the Church would encourage an attack upon all forms of authority…”[44]

 

     The struggle moved into a critical phase with the king’s dismissal, in 1529, of the Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Wolsey, who, though a prince of the church, had preferred serving his secular prince, as he recognised in the famous words: “If I had served God as diligently as I have done the king, He would not have given me over in my grey hairs.”

 

     The king now quickly moved to subdue parliament and the Church to his will. The Church under Archbishop Warham duly surrendered[45] – that is, it accepted the king’s adulterous second marriage and, through the Act of Supremacy, accepted that the king was the supreme head of the English Church on earth at the expense of all papal jurisdiction. But Thomas More, who had already resigned his post after the Church surrendered, refused to sign the Act and was executed…

 

     Thomas More’s defence of the Church’s independence against Henry VIII is reminiscent of Thomas Beckett’s similar defence of the Church against Henry II in the twelfth century. And the immediate upshot was the same: the execution of the Church’s champion by the king. In the long run, however, the result was different: whereas Thomas Beckett was vindicated, not only by his veneration as a martyr but also by the first article of Magna Carta, which asserted the independence of the Church from State power, Thomas More’s death has not been followed by any resurgence of the Church’s influence in the affairs of England…

 

     Though More was a faithful member of the papist church, he cannot be said to have died for papal infallibility. He was, after all, a friend of Erasmus, that scathing critic of the papacy, and the emphasis in his writings is less on papal authority than on “the general counsel of Christendom”[46]. His main argument was “that if a parliamentary statute offends against the law of God it is ‘insufficient’, and cannot be imposed upon any Christian subject”.[47] His last public request, uttered on the scaffold, was that the people should earnestly pray for the King, “that it might please God to give him good counsel, protesting that he died the King’s good servant but God’s first.”[48] Thus he died for what, in an Orthodox country, would have been called the symphony of powers, that the Church should be supreme in the spiritual sphere as the king was supreme in the political sphere. He foresaw that giving the king supremacy over the Church would lead not only to the suppression of the Church but its eventual replacement by a new religion altogether. Indeed, he saw it as opening the way to the Antichrist – and he was not far from the truth…

 

 

The Counter-Reformation and Spanish Absolutism

 

     The increased individualism introduced by the Renaissance and the Reformation was accompanied, paradoxically, by an increased power of the State. Now the power of the State in western society had been increasing since at least the middle of the fourteenth century. It had been growing through a mixture of (i) wars of liberation from foreign despotism – as when France freed herself from the Anglo-Norman kings, (ii) the resolution of internal conflicts leading to a territorial increase and consolidation of the State – as when the Wars of the Roses came to an end in England, and the union of Isabella and Ferdinand united Castile and Aragon in Spain, and (iii) a gradual weakening of the major trans-national power, the papacy. Nation-states became consolidated by drawing clear boundaries between each other, on the one hand, and between themselves and the papacy, on the other.

 

     The papacy, however, was not finished yet; and from the mid-sixteenth century, having recovered from the shock of the Reformation, it undertook a thorough reformation of its own that restored it to the front rank of the absolutist states. With the powerful aid of the Spanish kings and the Spanish-led Jesuit order, it expanded its power swiftly and ruthlessly eastwards and westwards – eastwards into Orthodox Eastern Europe, India and the Far East, and westwards into the New World of the Americas. This successful coalition between the Vatican and Spain then stimulated the development of similarly absolutist or semi-absolutist States fighting under the banner of the Reformation, such as England.

 

     The union between Spain and the Vatican was symbolised above all by the notorious Inquisition, “the first institution of united Spain”[49], which, while officially an ecclesiastical institution against heresy, served the desire of the Spanish state for uniformity within its dominions so well that “henceforth treason and heresy were virtually indistinguishable"[50].

 

     As we have seen, Columbus’ discovery of America opened a new world to the Spanish conquerors who followed him. Their conquests brought them vast wealth and power, making Spain, for a century or so, the most powerful state in the world. Central and South America now came under the dominion of a despotism hardly less cruel than the pagan despotisms that had preceded it.

 

     “The cruelty of the Spaniards [in the New World], writes Kamen, “was incontrovertible; it was pitiless, barbaric and never brought under control by the colonial regime”.[51] Thus the South-American empire of the Incas, which before the Spanish conquest numbered some seven million people, within 50 years after the conquest had been reduced to two million. The decimation of the Mexican empire of the Aztecs was hardly less horrifying. And if many of the victims fell to European diseases such as smallpox introduced by the conquerors rather than to war and execution, the cruelty of the Christians was nevertheless exceptional. Thus in 1546, when 15 colonists in the Yucatan were killed by the Mayas, the Spaniards responded by enslaving 2000 Maya men, hanging their women and burning six of their priests.

 

     This may have been historical justice for the child-sacrifice practiced over centuries by the pagan empires. But it also witnessed to the dehumanizing effect of centuries of papal propaganda justifying the extermination of heretics and in general all non-Catholics. Christianity had changed the morals of men by teaching them to see in every man the image of God and therefore an object of love and respect. The “Christianity” of Roman Catholicism turned the clock back by teaching Catholics to treat other classes of men as in effect subhuman.

 

     Sixteenth-century Spain recalled the ancient pagan despotisms not only in her cruelty and the absolutism of her institutions, but also in her enormous wealth and self-confidence. “The serenity and splendour of the Spanish throne,” writes the Catholic author Hilaire Belloc, “the magnificence of its externals, expressed in ritual, in every detail of comportment, still more in architecture, profoundly affected the mind of Europe: and rightly so; they remain to-day to astonish us. I may be thought extravagant if I say that the Escorial, that huge block of dark granite unearthly proportioned, is a parallel to the Pyramids… At any rate there is nothing else in Europe which so presents the eternal and the simple combined… But the Escorial is not a mere symbol, still less a façade; it is the very soul of the imperial name. It could only have been raised and inhabited by kings who were believed by themselves to be, and were believed by others to be, the chief on earth.”[52]

 

     And yet the dominions of Spain, according to the papist theory, were merely leased to it, as it were, by the Pope, who was recognised by all the Catholic kings as their true lord and master. Nor was this just theory. In 1494 the Pope arbitrated in a dispute between Spain and Portugal and gave Brazil to the Portuguese. And the Spanish accepted his decision.

 

     The theory was elaborated by the New World missionary Bartolomé de las Casas, who wrote in 1552: “The Roman pontiff, vicar of Jesus Christ, whose divine authority extends over all the kingdoms of heaven and earth[53], could justly invest the kings of Castile and Leon with the supreme and sovereign empire and dominion over the entire realm of the Indies, making them emperors over many kings… If the vicar of Christ were to see that this was not advantageous for the spiritual well-being of Christianity, he could without doubt, by the same divine authority, annul or abolish the office of emperor of the Indies, or he could transfer it to another place, as one Pope did when he transferred the imperial crown from the Greeks to the Germans [at the coronation of Charlemagne in 800]. With the same authority, the Apostolic See could prohibit, under penalty of excommunication, all other Christian kings from going to the Indies without the permission and authorisation of the kings of Castile. If they do the contrary, they sin mortally and incur excommunication.

 

     “The kings of Castile and León are true princes, sovereign and universal lords and emperors over many kings. The rights over all that great empire and the universal jurisdiction over all the Indies belong to them by the authority, concession and donation of the said Holy Apostolic See and thus by divine authority. This and no other is the juridical basis upon which all their title is founded and established…”[54]

 

     Thus the Counter-Reformation sought to re-establish the full power of the papacy over secular rulers that the Reformation had undermined. We see this in the Council of Trent (1545-1563) which, as Dagron writes, “tried to unite that which Luther had tried to separate. Both in the Council and around it attempts were made rather to bring the two powers into union with each other than to separate them. The politics of the concordats aimed to find a difficult compromise between religious universalism and the national churches. But the Jesuits supported the thesis of the pope’s “indirect authority” in political affairs.”[55]

 

 

Catholic Rationalism

 

     However, it was precisely at this time, the height of the Counter-Reformation, that the idea of natural law, which had been introduced into Catholic thought by Aquinas, became influential. Thus Las Casas writes: “Among the infidels who have distant kingdoms that have never heard the tidings of Christ or received the faith, there are true kings and princes. Their sovereignty, dignity, and royal pre-eminence derive from natural law and the law of nations… Therefore, with the coming of Jesus Christ to such domains, their honours, royal pre-eminence, and so on, do not disappear either in fact or in right. The opinion contrary to that of the preceding proposition is erroneous and most pernicious. He who persistently defends it will fall into formal heresy…”[56]

 

     In this context, it is significant that Sir Thomas More should have located his Utopia on an imaginary island modelled, in part, on the Spanish West Indies. In the first part of this work, More outlines the corruption of early sixteenth century England, whose fundamental cause, in his opinion, was the misuse of private property. In the second part he presents the opposite, an ideal (but distinctly communist) society in which “tyranny and luxury have been abolished, private property is unknown, and manual labour is looked upon as the sole occupation profitable to the state.”[57]

 

     But if natural law, in the interpretation of the Dominican Las Casas, decreed that the pagan kings of the Indies were true kings, in the interpretation of the Spanish Jesuit Juan de Mariana, it was the justification for rebellion against corrupt Christian kings. This led him to write that the assassination of the French King Henry III was “an eternal honour to France”. But such seditious thinking could not be tolerated; so the Jesuits forced Mariana to remove this phrase from his book, and after the assassination of Henry IV in 1610, copies of his book were publicly burned in Paris.

 

     The thoughts of this servant of absolutism were indeed dangerous for absolute monarchs. Thus De Mariana wrote: “How will respect for princes (and what is government without this?) remain constant, if the people are persuaded that it is right for the subjects to punish the sins of the rulers? The tranquillity of the commonwealth will often be disturbed with pretended as well as real reasons. And when a revolt takes place every sort of calamity strikes, with one section of the populace armed against another part. If anyone does not think these evils must be avoided by every means, he would be heartless, wanting in the universal common-sense of mankind. Thus they argue who protect the interests of the tyrant.

 

     “The protectors of the people have no fewer and lesser arguments. Assuredly the republic, whence the regal power has its source, can call a king into court, when circumstances require and, if he persists in senseless conduct, it can strip him of his principate.

 

     “For the commonwealth did not transfer the rights to rule into the hands of a prince to such a degree that it has not reserved a greater power to itself; for we see that in the matters of laying taxes and making permanent laws the state has made the reservation that except with its consent no change can be made. We do not here discuss how this agreement ought to be effected. But nevertheless, only with the desire of the people are new imposts ordered and new laws made; and, what is more, the rights to rule, though hereditary, are settled by the agreement of the people on a successor…”[58]

 

     De Mariana was not the only Catholic – or even Jesuit – to think such heretical thoughts. It is Suarez, according to Belloc, who “stands at the origin of that political theory which has coloured all modern times. He it was who, completing the work of his contemporary and fellow Jesuit, Bellarmine, restated in the most lucid and conclusive fashion the fundamental doctrine that Governments derive their authority, under God, from the community…”[59] So the political consequences of rationalism were being felt even in the citadels of what is usually considered to be the anti-rationalist camp, the Catholic Counter-Reformation. For rationalism began, not with Luther in the sixteenth century, but with Pope Gregory VII in the eleventh, when he placed his “I” against the mind of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. Thus the Catholics could not hope to defeat Protestant rationalism before they had succeeded in uprooting their own.

 

 

Protestant Democratism: Calvin and Browne

 

     The radically new Protestant ideas of Church administration, writes McClelland, “could only have radical effects on men’s attitudes to the running of the state. On a very simple level, it could be argued that what applied to Church government should apply straightforwardly to the state’s government on the principle of a fortiori (the greater should contain the lesser). If the government of the community which means most to Christian people should be governed according to the reflection and choice of its members, then why should the government of the state, an inferior institution by comparison, not be governed in the same way too?”[60]

 

     The Protestant Reformation impacted political thought not only through the democratism of its ideas of Church government, but also by the very fact that it caused people to doubt whether their rulers had the true faith. “Reformed political theory… still thought the law served good and godly ends. The social peace, which only obedience to duly constituted authority could provide, was always going to be pleasing in God’s sight. What was no longer so clear was that God intended us to obey that prince and those laws. How could God be saying anything very clear about political obligation when Christendom was split into two warring halves, one Catholic and one Protestant? In these circumstances it is no surprise that thoughtful men began to wonder whether it really was true that the laws under which they lived were instances of a universal law as it applies to particulars. That very general unease was sharpened by the very particular problem of what was to be done if you remained a Catholic when your prince became a Protestant, or if you became a Protestant and your prince remained a Catholic. The implied covenant of the coronation stated clearly that the prince agreed to preserve true religion, and, in an age when men felt obliged to believe that any religion other than their own was false, the fact that your prince’s religion was not your own showed prima facie that the original contract to preserve true religion had been broken. It followed that a new contract could be made, perhaps with a new prince, to preserve true religion, as in the case of John Knox and the Scottish Covenanter movement to oust the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots in favour of a Protestant king.”[61]

 

     Protestantism had two distinct models of Church-State relations. The first, adopted by Luther, and before him by Wycliff, was that of realpolitik: the king was supreme, as being the only power capable of resisting the Pope, and in fact took the place of the Pope in many ways. The other, adopted by Calvin, was more democratic: the people are the supreme power in both Church and. State. This difference of approach is one reason for the alternation between absolutism and democratism in several of the Protestant countries of Western Europe.

 

     Luther did not attach an absolute authority to the Prince. As he wrote: “When a prince is in the wrong, are his people bound to follow him then too? I answer, No, for it is no one’s duty to do wrong; we ought to obey God who desires the right, rather than men.”[62] In practice, however, he refused to sanction revolution; and it is rather in the Calvinist tendency in Protestantism that we must seek the ancestors of the modern revolutionary movement.

 

     Calvin aimed at a greater independence for the Church from the State than existed in the Lutheran States. “The Church,” he wrote, “does not assume what is proper to the magistrate: nor can the magistrate execute what is carried out by the Church.”[63] And although he himself acquired the nickname “Pope of Geneva”, his Geneva, as Eric G. Jay writes, “was not a theocracy which subordinated the temporal to the spiritual power. That this has been so commonly assumed is a measure of the success he achieved (after much initial opposition) in securing the co-operation of the Genevan magistrates and the consistory.”[64]

 

     At the same time, it was not always easy to see where the Church ended and the State began in Calvin’s Geneva. Thus Owen Chadwick writes: “Where authority existed among the Protestant Churches, apart from the personal authority of individual men of stature, it rested with the prince or the city magistrate. Calvin believed that in organising the Church at Geneva he must organise it in imitation of the primitive Church, and thereby reassert the independence of the Church and the divine authority of its ministers… [However,] the boundaries between the jurisdiction of Church and State… were not easy to define in Geneva… The consistory [the Church authority] gave its opinions on the bank rate, on the level of interest for war loans, on exports and imports, on speeding the law courts, on the cost of living and the shortage of candles. On the other hand the council [the State authority], even during Calvin’s last years, may be found supervising the clergy and performing other functions which logic would have allotted to the consistory. The council was not backward in protesting against overlong sermons, or against pastors who neglected to visit the homes of the people; they examined the proclamations by the pastors even if the proclamations called the city to a general fast, sanctioned the dates for days of public penitence, agreed or refused to lend pastors to other churches, provided for the housing and stipend of the pastors, licensed the printing of theological books.”[65]

 

     State power protected the Calvinists from the ferocity of the Papists in several States – the England of Elizabeth I, and the France of Henry IV, for example. And yet Calvinists had an alarming tendency to come out against the state, splintering off into ever more extreme movements of an apocalyptic nature that advocated political as well as religious revolution, and were accompanied by moral excesses directly contrary to the strait-laced image of traditional Protestantism. The most famous example of this was the Anabaptist revolution in Münster.

 

     Chadwick describes what happened: “At the end of 1533 the Anabaptist group at Münster in Westphalia, under the leadership of a former Lutheran minister Bernard Rothmann, gained control of the city council. Early in 1534 a Dutch prophet and ex-innkeeper named John of Leyden appeared in Münster, believing that he was called to make the city the new Jerusalem. On 9 February 1534 his party seized the city hall. By 2 March all who refused to be baptized were banished, and it was proclaimed a city of refuge for the oppressed. Though the Bishop of Münster collected an army and began the siege of his city, an attempted coup within the walls was brutally suppressed, and John of Leyden was proclaimed King of New Zion, wore vestments as his royal robes, and held his court and throne in the market-place. Laws were decreed to establish a community of goods, and the Old Testament was adduced to permit polygamy. Bernard Rothmann, once a man of sense, once the friend of Melanchthon, took nine wives.

 

     “They now believed that they had been given the duty and the power of exterminating the ungodly. The world would perish, and only Münster would be saved. Rothmann issued a public incitement to world rebellion: ‘Dear brethren, arm yourselves for the battle, not only with the humble weapons of the apostles for suffering, but also with the glorious armour of David for vengeance… in God’s strength, and help to annihilate the ungodly.’ And ex-soldier named John of Feelen slipped out of the city, carrying copies of this proclamation into the Netherlands, and planned sudden coups in the Dutch cities. On a night in February 1535 a group of men and women ran naked and unarmed through the streets of Amsterdam shouting: ‘Woe! Woe! The wrath of God falls on this city.’ On 30 March 1535 John of Geelen with 300 Anabaptists, men and women, stormed an old monastery in Friesland, fortified it, made sallies to conquer the province, and were only winkled out after bombardment by heavy cannon. On the night of 10 May 1535 John of Geelen with a band of some thirty men attacked the city hall of Amsterdam during a municipal banquet, and the burgomaster and several citizens were killed. At last, on 25 June 1535, the gates of Münster were opened by sane men within the walls, and the bishop’s army entered the city…”[66]

 

     The Anabaptist revolution in Münster came exactly a century after the destruction of the Taborite revolution in Bohemia, which it closely imitated. The Taborites and Anabaptists were in effect communists, and this fact shows that there is a blood-red thread linking the revolutionary movements of late medieval Catholicism, early Protestantism and twentieth-century militant atheism. Thus T.L. Frazier writes: “The Taborites set about constructing a theocratic society in their territory in southern Bohemia. In theory, there was to be no human authority, for all were brothers and sisters. Of course, the theory was ‘modified’ somewhat to allow for the necessity of government. The older brothers obviously needed to look after their younger siblings. It was also supposed to be a classless society, and a primitive version of communism was attempted. Private property, rents, taxes, and dues were abolished. Peasants from all over Bohemia and Moravia sold all their worldly possessions to contribute to the common purse. In the first part of 1420, chests were set up by the Taborite clergy in which the people were expected to deposit all their money. But here, too, reality, didn’t always conform to theory. The leadership concentrated so much on common ownership that they took no thought of motivating people to produce anything.

 

     “Rather than construct a functioning economy for their newly established Kingdom of God, the Taborites turned to simple banditry whenever the communal chests were empty. As the people of God, they reasoned, they had a right to all of God’s wealth found on the earth. Conversely, those who were not of the people of God, that is, all who were not Taborites, had no claim to the resources of the earth. Thus raids on the property of non-Taborites were rationalized and became common.

 

     “According to Taborite plans, after all of Bohemia was subjected to Taborite control, the purification of the rest of the world would follow through conquest and domination. This belief was deeply engrained in the Taborite movement. Norman Cohn writes: ‘As late as 1434 we find a speaker at a Taborite assembly declaring that, however unfavorable the circumstances might be at present, the moment would soon come when the Elect must arise and exterminate their enemies – the lords in the first place, and then any of their own people who were of doubtful loyalty or usefulness.’”[67]

 

     The immediate effect of the revolution in Münster, coming so soon after the similar madness of Thomas Münzter and the Germans’ Peasant War, was to strengthen the argument for the intervention of the strong hand of the State to cool and control religious passions, if necessary by violent means. However, the longer-term lesson to be drawn from it was that the Protestant Reformation, by undermining the authority of the Church, had also, albeit unwittingly, undermined that of the State. For even if the more moderate Protestants accepted and exalted the authority of “the godly Prince”, the more extreme Protestants felt no obligation to obey any earthly authority, but rather created their own church-cum-state communities recognising no authority except Christ’s alone.

 

     Thus the Englishman Henry Barrow (executed in 1593) wrote: “The true planted and rightly established Church of Christ is a company of faithful people, separated from the unbelievers and heathen of the land, gathered in the name of Christ, Whom they truly worship and readily obey as their only King, Priest, and Prophet, and joined together as members of one body, ordered and governed by such offices and laws as Christ, in His last will and testament, hath thereunto ordained…”[68]

 

     As often as not the more extreme Protestants were persecuted by the lawful authorities, as the Huguenots were in 16th century France. So they felt no obligation to obey them, and if they obeyed authorities of their own choosing, this was an entirely voluntary, non-binding commitment. Thus the founder of the Calvinist sect of the Congregationalists, Robert Browne, wrote in 1582: “The Lord’s people is of the willing sorte. It is conscience, not the power of man, that will drive us to seek the Lord’s Kingdom. Therefore it belongeth not to the magistrate to compel religion, to plant churches by power, and to force a submission to ecclesiastical government by laws and penalties.”[69] Again he wrote: "True Christians unite into societies of believers which submit, by means of a voluntary agreement with God, to the dominion of God the Saviour, and keep the Divine law in sacred communion."

 

     These “Separatists” (as Jay calls them) went under different names in different countries. In England they were called Independents or Congregationalists or Puritans. Each community was completely independent: in faith, in worship, in the election of clergy. They were united by faith and friendship alone. Since the clergy had no sacramental functions and were elected by laymen, they had no real authority over their congregations.

 

 

The Church of England

 

     In 1531, Henry VIII was accepted by the Church of England as her “supreme Protector, only and supreme Lord, and, as far as the law of Christ allows, even supreme Head”. Three years later, the Act of Supremacy accorded him the title “only supreme head in earth of the Church of England” and removed the saving qualification: “as far as the law of Christ allows”. The only palliative to this extreme caesaropapism lay in the fact that formally speaking Parliament had bestowed this right, so Parliament could in theory take it away. But Parliament was also, of course, a secular institution.

 

     Now the Protestantism of Henry VIII was of the most conservative, Catholic kind. For while he wanted a divorce from his wife, which necessitated separation from an unwilling Pope, he remained a Catholic in his personal beliefs and by no means wanted to allow the anti-authoritarian views of the Protestants, especially the Calvinist Protestants, into his kingdom. For, as the Scottish Calvinist John Knox was threateningly to say, “Jehu killed two Kings at God’s commandment…”

 

     Henry’s solution was a kind of Catholicism without the Pope (and one or two other things), but not a real Reformation in the continental sense insofar as, in the words of Ralf Dahrendorf, “a falling out with the Pope is not the same as a true Reformation”.[70] In its origin, therefore, the English Reformation was not a religious event at all, but a political manoeuvre to give the English king more freedom to satisfy his carnal lusts. And the English Church and religion has retained a profoundly political, this-worldly stamp ever since.[71]

 

     “At first glance,” writes Bernard, “Henry’s policies seem confused and uncertain; on closer examination they are better described as deliberately ambiguous. For Henry knew what he wanted well enough and was sufficient of a politician to know when and how and when to compromise. He grasped that among churchmen and, increasingly, among the educated laity, religious convictions were polarising. If he were to win acceptance for the break with Rome and the royal supremacy, the pope would have to be denounced, but if radical religious changes were to be enforced, or even if they were simply to be advocated from the pulpits, he risked provoking serious rebellions like the Pilgrimage of Grace. For all the extravagant claims of the Act of Six Articles that it would abolish diversity of opinions, Henry more realistically aimed at steering a path between the extremes.”[72]

 

     “Nor was the Elizabethan religious settlement [the Act of Uniformity in 1559 and the Thirty-Nine Articles in 1571] unequivocally protestant. Elizabeth would have preferred something closer to her father’s catholicism, without the pope and without egregious superstition… Henry VIII and Elizabeth.. saw the monarch as in control of the church, appointing bishops, determining doctrine and liturgy, and capable even of suspending an archbishop from exercising his power, a view perhaps symbolised by the placing of royal arms inside parish churches. At the heart of this monarchical view of the church lay a desire that was essentially political…; a desire for comprehensiveness, for a church that would embrace all their subjects. Religious uniformity was natural in itself; religious dissensions wrecked social harmony and political peace. Continental experiences – from the peasants’ war of 1525 through the French wars of religion to the Thirty Years’ War – reinforced English rulers’ fears of the disastrous consequences of religious divisions, and their success, until 1642, in sparing their realm from such horrors further strengthened their conviction of the efficacy of the policy…”[73]

 

     “My argument is that Henry VIII, Elizabeth, James I and Charles I placed secular and political considerations of order above purely ecclesiastical and theological considerations…, and that from the start, from the 1530s, rulers faced limitations because some of their subjects were papists and some of their subjects wanted further reformation. Given the fact of religious difference, given that rulers knew that their subjects, especially the more educated, were divided, sometimes in response to theological debates European rather than just national in scope, a measure of compromise and ambiguity, particularly on points of doctrine or of local liturgical practice, was deliberately fostered.”[74]

 

     “Larger cracks can be papered over than one might supposed. But in extraordinary circumstances, if contradictions with which men have long deliberately or unconsciously lived can no longer be accommodated or overlooked, if a monarchical church is faced by urgent demands for unambiguous, uncompromising decisions of divisive questions, then the ensuing collapse can be violent. When Englishmen ultimately turned to war in 1642, those differences of religion that the monarchical church had striven to contain but to which it was always vulnerable proved to be the most embittering determinant of men’s allegiance.”[75]

 

     By making the King, and later Parliament, the supreme arbiter of faith and morals, the Act of Supremacy infused the English Church – and through it the whole English people – with the habit and ability to compromise, to seek and unfailingly find some middle way between opposing opinions. This ability, while desirable in political matters, is extremely harmful, even fatal, in questions of religious truth, where, as St. Mark of Ephesus pointed out, there can be no middle way between truth and falsehood. The via media was imposed upon the Church because it had been chosen by the King, who, for political and personal reasons, wanted some compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. It meant that henceforth the Anglican Church represented not one faith, but an uneasy compromise between two, with the king as the arbiter and supreme judge over both of them.

 

     Now “if the State, as law and authority,” writes Tikhomirov, “departs from its connection with a definite confession, that is, comes out from under the influence of the religious confession on religious politics, it becomes the general judge of all confessions and submits religion to itself. All relations between various confessions, and their rights, must evidently be decided by the State that is outside them, being governed exclusively by its own ideas about justice and the good of society and the State. In this connection it obviously has the complete right and every opportunity to be repressive in all cases in which, in its opinion, the interests of the confession contradict civil and political interests. Thus the situation emerges in which the State can influence the confessions, but cannot and must not be influenced by them. Such a State is already unable to be governed in relation to the confessions by any religious considerations, for not one of the confessions constitutes for it a lawful authority, whereas the opinions of financiers, economists, medics, administrators, colonels, etc. constitute its lawful consultants, so that in all spheres of the construction of the people’s life the State will be governed by considerations drawn precisely from these sources.

 

     “In such an order there can be no religious freedom for anyone. Perhaps – and this is doubtful – there can be equal rights for the confessions. But freedom and equality of rights are not the same thing. Equality of rights can also consist of a general lack of rights. The State can, [for example,] on the basis of cultural and medical considerations, take measures against circumcision and forbid fasting; to avoid disorders or on the basis of sanitary considerations it can forbid pilgrimages to holy places or to venerated relics; on the basis of military demands it can forbid all forms of monasticism among Christians, Buddhists, Muslims. The services themselves can be found to be harmful hypnotisations of the people not only in public, but also in private prayer. In general, there are no bounds to the State’s prohibitory measures in relation to religions if it is placed outside them, as their general judge…”[76]

 

     However, if Henry had confined himself to the Act of Supremacy, England might have remained an essentially Catholic country, with the very real possibility of reversion to full Papism after Henry’s death. But then, in 1536, came the Dissolution of the Monasteries. This had three very important consequences: (i) it destroyed the economic power of the Church; (ii) it vastly increased the wealth of the landed aristocrats who eventually took over most of the monastic lands, and (iii) it undermined the sacredness of property and therefore law and order in general.

 

     As Professor Christopher Hill writes: “The long-term outcome of the [English] Reformation was the opposite of that intended by the Machiavellians who introduced it. Charles I’s Secretary of State, the near-papist Windebanke, pointed out to the representative of the Pope in England the historical irony of the situation. ‘Henry VIII committed such sacrilege by profaning so many ecclesiastical benefices in order to give their goods to those who, being so rewarded, might stand firmly for the king in the lower house; and now the king’s greatest enemies are those who are enriched by these benefices… O the great judgements of God!’ The overthrow of papal authority by Henry VIII thus looks forward to the civil war and the execution of Charles I. The royal supremacy yielded place to the sovereignty of Parliament and then to demands for the sovereignty of the people. The plunder of the Church by the landed ruling class stimulated the development of capitalism in England. The attack on Church property by the rich led to a questioning of property rights in general…”[77]

 

     Thus “men learnt that church property was not sacrosanct, that traditional ecclesiastical institutions could disappear without the world coming to an end; that laymen could remodel not only the economic and political structures of the Church but also its doctrine – if they possessed political power. Protestant theology undermined the uniquely sacred character of the priest, and elevated the self-respect of the congregation. This helped men to question a divine right to tithes, the more so when tithes were paid to lay impropriators. Preaching became more important than the sacraments; and so men came to wonder what right non-preaching ministers, or absentees, had to be paid by their congregations. It took a long time to follow out these new lines of thought to their logical conclusions; but ultimately they led men very far indeed. By spreading ideas of sectarian voluntarism they prepared the way for the Revolution of 1640, and trained its more radical leaders.

 

     “In the Revolution episcopacy was abolished, bishops’ and cathedral lands confiscated, the payment of tithes challenged. The radicals rejected not only Henry VIII’s episcopal hierarchy but the whole idea of a state church. ‘O the great judgements of God!’ Windebanke had exclaimed when contemplating the paradoxical outcome of the Henrician Reformation. Henry VIII had denied the supremacy of the Pope; he had confiscated church property; and he had allowed the Scriptures to be translated into English. These challenges to the authoritarianism, to the wealth and to the propaganda monopoly of the Church opened doors wider than was perhaps intended. A century later the authority first of King, then of Parliament, was challenged in the name of the people; the social justification of all private property was called into question; and speculation about the nature of the state and the rights of the people went to lengths which ultimately terrified the victorious Parliamentarians into recalling King, House of Lords, and bishops to help them to maintain law and order.”[78]

 

     Until the death of Henry, the English Reformation had been a mainly politico-economic affair that affected only a small section of the population. But in the reigns of Edward VI and Mary, religious passions came to the fore, polarising the people between sharply opposed alternatives, and “martyrs” were made on both sides of the conflict. During the reign of Edward, when Calvinists took over the reins of government, the dissolution of the monasteries assumed such large proportions and such brutal destructiveness as finally to arouse the indignation of large parts of the population, who remained essentially Catholic in their sympathies. And then, during the reign of Mary, a Catholic married to King Philip of Spain who was determined to stamp out Calvinism, a persecution of Calvinists got under way that had the good fortune (from a Calvinist point of view) of finding a talented chronicler in the shape of John Foxe.

 

     Foxe’s Book of Martyrs has been called “the third Testament of the English Church”[79], so influential was its gory descriptions of the burning and disembowelling of leading Calvinists on future generations. As Chadwick writes: “The steadfastness of the victims, from Ridley and Latimer downwards, baptized the English Reformation in blood and drove into English minds the fatal association of ecclesiastical tyranny with the See of Rome… Five years before, the Protestant cause was identified with church robbery, destruction, irreverence, religious anarchy. It was now beginning to be identified with virtue, honesty, and loyal English resistance to a half-foreign government.”[80]

 

     Thus the still small number of Calvinists found themselves, at the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, with both money (from the dissolution of the monasteries) and national sentiment (from the fact that foreigners incited the persecution) on their side. Their advantage was greatly strengthened by two events that finally ensured the victory of the English Reformation.

 

     The first was Pope Pius V’s Bull Regnans in Caelis (1570): “He that reigns in the highest, to Whom has been given all power in heaven and earth, entrusted the government of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church (outside which there is no salvation) to one man alone on the earth, namely to Peter, the chief of the Apostles, and to Peter’s successor, the Roman pontiff, in fullness of power. This one man He set up as chief over all nations, and all kingdoms, to pluck up, destroy, scatter, dispose, plant and build…We declare … Elizabeth to be a heretic and an abettor of heretics, and those that cleave to her in the aforesaid matters to have incurred the sentence of anathema, and to be cut off from the unity of Christ’s body.… We declare her to be deprived of her pretended right to the aforesaid realm, and from dominion, dignity and privilege whatsoever. And the nobles, subjects and peoples of the said realm, and all others who have taken an oath of any kind to her we declare to be absolved for ever from such oath and from all dues of dominion, fidelity and obedience… And we enjoin and forbid all… to obey her and her admonitions, commands, and laws. All who disobey our command we involve in the same sentence of anathema.”[81]

 

     This decree immediately placed all English Catholics who recognised the Pope’s  authority into the category of political traitors as well as ecclesiastical heretics. The failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588 removed their last chance of redemption. Although there is evidence that Queen Elizabeth shared the Catholic sympathies of her father, she did not have the power to resist her Calvinist advisors, especially the Cecils, father and son. From this time, therefore, the decatholicisation of the country proceeded apace with no significant opposition...[82]


2. THE RIURIK TSARS

 

The sceptre of the Orthodox kingdom will fall from the weakening hands of the Byzantine emperors, since they will not have proved able to achieve the symphony of Church and State. Therefore the Lord in His Providence will send a third God-chosen people to take the place of the chosen, but spiritually decrepit people of the Greeks.

Greek Prophecy of the Eighth or Ninth Century.[83]

 

Be on your guard and attend, O pious tsar, for all the Christian kingdoms have been reduced to yours alone. For two Romes have fallen, and the third stands,

And a fourth there will not be. For your Christian kingdom will not be given to another, according to the great Theologian.

Elder Philotheus of Pskov.

 

What is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge bishops, taking to himself a power which has not been given him by God?… This is apostasy from God.

Patriarch Nicon of Moscow.

 

 

     With the fall of the New Rome of Constantinople in 1453, apocalyptic thoughts again began to arise in the Orthodox world, as they had after the fall of the Old Rome. For if the empire was no more, was not the end of the world nigh? Some even began to give a date - 1492, the 6000th year since the creation of the world…

 

 

The Path to the Third Rome

 

     But would there perhaps be a Third Rome to take the place of the Second Rome, thereby prolonging the existence of the world and earthly Christendom?

 

     Let us remind ourselves of the eschatological idea on which the idea of the translatio imperii rested. According to this idea, Rome in its various successions and reincarnations will exist to the end of the world – or at least, to the time of the Antichrist. As Michael Nazarov writes: “This conviction is often reflected in the patristic tradition (it was shared by Saints: Hippolytus of Rome, John Chrysostom, Blessed Theodoret, Blessed Jerome, Cyril of Jerusalem and others). On this basis [the fifteenth-century] Elder Philotheus [of Pskov] wrote: ‘the Roman [Romejskoye] kingdom is indestructible, for the Lord was enrolled into the Roman [Rimskuyu] power’ (that is, he was enrolled among the inhabitants at the census in the time of the Emperor Augustus). Here Philotheus distinguishes between the indestructible ‘Roman [Romejskoye] kingdom’, whose successor was now Rus’, and Roman [Rimskoj] power, which had gone into the past.”[84]

 

     Nevertheless, even if the idea that Roman [Romejskoye] power would last until the end of the world was accepted, it did not follow that Russia was that power now, after the Fall of Constantinople. Such an idea was very bold. St. Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire from Old Rome to New Rome had also been bold - but that step, though radical and fraught with enormous consequences, nevertheless had not involved going beyond the bounds of the existing empire, and had been undertaken by the legitimate emperor himself. Again, the Serbs and Bulgarians had each in their time sought to capture New Rome and make it the capital of a Slavic-Greek kingdom – but this, again, had not involved moving the empire itself, as opposed to changing its dominant nation. The Frankish idea of the translatio imperii from New Rome to Aachen had involved both changing the dominant nation and taking the capital beyond the bounds of the existing empire – and had been rejected by the Greeks as heretical, largely on the grounds that it involved setting up a second, rival empire, where there could only be one true one.

 

     But the one, true empire was now in the hands of the Ottoman Turks. Could it be – a horrific idea, but one that had to be considered - that the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople was the new Roman emperor! After all, there had been pagans and heretics and persecutors of the Church on the throne, so why not a Muslim? And that was precisely the view of the Cretan historian George Trapezuntios, who in 1466 said to the conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmet II: "Nobody doubts that you are the Roman emperor. He who is the lawful ruler in the capital of the empire and in Constantinople is the emperor, while Constantinople is the capital of the Roman empire. And he who remains as emperor of the Romans is also the emperor of the whole world."[85]

 

     However, the Ottoman Sultans could not be compared even with the heretical Roman emperors of the past, such as the iconoclasts Leo and Constantine Copronymus. The latter had at least claimed to be sons of the Church, they had claimed to confess the Orthodox faith and receive the sacraments of the Orthodox Church. But there could be no deception here: the Ottoman Sultans made no pretence at being Orthodox. Therefore at most they could be considered analogous in authority to the pagan emperors of Old Rome, legitimate authorities to whom obedience was due (as long as they did not compel Christians to commit impiety), but no more. So had the clock been turned back? Had the Christian Roman Empire returned to its pre-Christian, pre-Constantinian origins?

 

     No, the clock of Christian history never goes back, never repeats itself. The world could never be the same again after Constantine and the Christian empire of New Rome, which had so profoundly changed the consciousness of all the peoples living in Europe and the Mediterranean basin. So if the Antichrist had not yet come, there was only one alternative: the one, true empire had indeed been translated somewhere - but not unlawfully, to some heretical capital such as Aachen or Old Rome, but lawfully, to some Orthodox nation capable of bringing forth the fruits that the Byzantines were no longer capable of producing.

 

     What could that nation be? With not only the Greeks of Byzantium, but all the traditionally Orthodox peoples of the Balkans and the Near East under the Turkish yoke, the answer to this question could only be found in the north – in the forests of Holy Russia. So began the rise to the status of a world power of the nation and state that, more than any other, has been responsible for the survival of True Christianity into the twenty-first century.

 

     In fact the only real candidate for the role of leadership in the Orthodox world was Russia. Only the Russians could be that “third God-chosen people” of the prophecy. Only they were able to re-express the Christian ideal of the symphony of powers on a stronger, more popular base – as a symphony, in effect, of three powers – Church, State and People - rather than two.

 

     For the Russians had the advantage over the Romans and the Greeks that they were converted to the faith as a single people, with their existing social organisation intact, and not, as in Rome, as an amalgam of different peoples whose indigenous social structures had already been smashed by the pagan imperial power. Thus whereas in Rome, as Tikhomirov writes, “the Christians did not constitute a social body”, and “their only organisation was the Church”[86], in the sense that it was not whole peoples or classes but individuals from many different peoples and classes that joined the Church, in Russia the whole of the richly layered and variegated, but at the same time socially and politically coherent society came to the Church at one time and was baptised together…

 

     The 600-year history of Russia from her baptism under St. Vladimir in 988 until the official proclamation of the Russian Empire as the Orthodox Empire by the Ecumenical Patriarchs Joachim (in 1561) and Jeremiah II (in 1588) presents a very striking and instructive illustration of the Lord's words: "the last shall be first" (Matthew 20.16). For most of this period Russia was the most populous and flourishing nation in the Orthodox commonwealth of nations. The beauty of her churches and the piety of her people amazed all comers. Thus at one time the famous Kiev-Caves Lavra contained more than fifty monks capable of casting out demons. And the monastic missionary movement inspired by St. Sergius of Radonezh in the fourteenth century came to be called "the Northern Thebaid" because of the resemblance of its piety to those of the Egyptian Thebaid (over 100 of Sergius' disciples were canonised). And yet during the whole of this period the Russian Church remained no more than a junior metropolitan district of the Constantinopolitan patriarchate! Unlike the much smaller Serbian and Bulgarian Churches, the Russian Church never sought autocephaly, and even when the Byzantine empire had contracted to a very small area around the capital city, the Russian Grand-Princes looked up to the emperors in Constantinople as to their fathers or elder brothers (the emperors called them “nephews”)[87].       

 

      This voluntary self-limitation and national humility on the part of the princes and people brought many blessings to Russia. First and most important, it implanted Orthodoxy in all its purity into the hearts of the people with no admixture of heterodoxy.[88] Secondly, the fact that the metropolitan of the Russian Church was appointed by Constantinople gave him the ability to arbitrate in the frequent quarrels between the Russian princes in the Kievan period, thus preserving the spiritual unity of the Russian nation that had been achieved under St. Vladimir. And thirdly, it ensured the survival and resurrection of Russia as a single Orthodox nation even after the Mongols had destroyed Kiev and subdued most of Russia in the 1240s.

 

     The Russians retained their loyalty to the Ecumenical Patriarchate and Byzantine emperor until the very last moment – that is, until both emperor and patriarch betrayed the Orthodox faith at the Council of Florence in 1438-39. Even after the patriarchate’s betrayal of Orthodoxy at Florence, the Russians did not immediately break their canonical dependence on the patriarch. And even after the election of St. Jonah to the metropolitanate, the Great Prince’s letter to the patriarch shows an amazing restraint and humility, speaking only of a “disagreement” between the two Churches, and stressing that St. Jonah had received the metropolitanate without asking the blessing of the patriarch, but in accordance with the canons, only out of extreme necessity – the patriarch’s blessing would again be asked once they were assured that he adhered to “the ancient piety”.[89]

 

     Since the Russian Great Prince was now the only independent Orthodox ruler[90], and was supported by an independent Church, he had a better claim than any other to inherit the throne of the Roman Emperors and therefore call himself “Tsar” (from “Caesar”, the Russian equivalent of the Greek Basileus). [91] The title had been floated already before the fall of Constantinople: in 1447-48 Simeon of Suzdal had called Great Prince Basil Vasilyevich “faithful and Christ-loving and truly Orthodox… White Tsar”.[92] And St. Jonah wrote to Prince Alexander of Kiev that Basil was imitating his “ancestors” – the holy Emperor Constantine and the Great-Prince Vladimir.[93] The Russian Great Princes’ claim was further strengthened by the marriage of Great Prince Ivan Vasilyevich to the last surviving heir of the Paleologan line, Sophia, in 1472. It was on this basis that a letter of the Venetian Senate accorded Ivan the imperial title.[94]

 

     However, there were many weighty reasons militating against the Great Prince assuming such a title at this time. The first was the traditional respect of the Russians for their elder brothers in Byzantium. This respect would gradually wane as the Russians gradually became convinced that Byzantium had fallen because of its sins against the faith, and this diminished respect was one of the main reasons for the Old Believer schism in the seventeenth century, as we shall see. Nevertheless, in the fifteenth century it was still strong. And there was no question that in the consciousness of the Russian people the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch was required for such a major step as the assumption of the role of Orthodox emperor by the Russian Great Prince.

 

     Secondly, there was the difficult problem of the status of the Russian metropolitan. In 1451 the uniate Patriarch Gregory Mammas of Constantinople had fled to Rome, where he consecrated Gregory Bolgarin, a former deacon of Isidore’s, as metropolitan of Kiev in opposition to St. Jonah. This was justified by the Latins not only on the grounds that there was no communion between themselves and the Orthodox of Muscovy, and the Pope had called St. Jonah “the schismatic monk Jonah, son of iniquity”, but also because a large part of the Russian population was now living within the domain of King Casimir of Poland-Lithuania, who was a Roman Catholic. Thus the fall of the Greek Church into uniatism led directly to a schism in the Orthodox Russian Church, which had the former consequence that the Russian Great Prince could not count on the obedience even of all the Russian people – hardly a strong position from which to be proclaimed emperor of all the Orthodox Christians! Moreover, even when both Gregory Bolgarin and the later Patriarchs of Constantinople beginning with Gennadius Scholarius returned to Orthodoxy (the unia was officially and synodically renounced in Constantinople in 1480), the schism continued in the Russian lands, with one metropolitan, that of Kiev, under the jurisdiction of Constantinople, and the other, that of Moscow, independent of Constantinople.[95] The Greeks argued that, now that the unia had been renounced, the Russian Church of the independent Muscovite kingdom should return into obedience to the Ecumenical Patriarchate. But would have meant the subjection of the free Russian Church living under a free and Orthodox sovereign to a metropolitan living under a hostile Roman Catholic king a patriarch living under a hostile Muslim sultan!

 

     Thirdly, before the Russian Great Prince could assume the title of Tsar, or Emperor, he had to reunite all the Russian lands under his dominion, and then, if possible, all the lands of the Orthodox East. This point can be better appreciated if it is remembered that when the Emperor Constantine transferred the capital of the empire from Old Rome to the New Rome of Constantinople, he was already the undisputed ruler of the whole of the Roman empire, in which the great majority of Orthodox Christians lived. The Russian Great Prince, by contrast, was ruler only of one northern section of the Orthodox lands, which included none of the traditional territories of the Roman empire, and not even “the mother of Russian cities”, the ancient capital of Kiev.

 

     Moreover, there were other Russian princes with claims to be “the new Constantine”, “the saviour of Orthodoxy” – “for instance,” writes Meyendorff, “the prince Boris of Tver, who had also sent a representative to the council [of Florence] and now, after rejecting the Lating faith, was said by one polemicist to deserve an imperial diadem. Furthermore, in Novgorod, under Archbishop Gennadius (1484-1509), there appeared a curious Russian variation on the Donation of Constantine, the Legend of the White Cowl. According to the Legend, the while cowl (klobuk; Gr. epikalimaukon) was donated by Constantine the Great to pope Sylvester following his baptism; the last Orthodox pope, foreseeing Rome’s fall into heresy, sent the cowl for safe-keeping to patriarch Philotheus of Constantinople, who eventually (also foreseeing the betrayal of Florence), sent the precious relic to the archbishop of Novgorod. Thus, not only Moscow, but also Tver and Novgorod, were somehow claiming to be the heirs of ‘Rome’, the center of the true Christian faith…”[96]

 

     It was in this Novgorodian legend dating to 1490 that the first use of the expression “the third Rome” is encountered: “The old Rome has lost its glory and has lapsed from the Christian faith out of pride and self-will. In the new Rome, which is in Constantinople, the Christian faith will also perish through the violence of the sons of Hagar. But in the third Rome, that stands in the Russian land, the grace of the Holy Spirit shall shine out. And know well, Philotheus, that all Christian lands shall come together in the one Russian kingdom for the sake of the true faith.”[97]

 

     At about the same time the same theme was eagerly taken up by Metropolitan Zosima, who was later condemned as Judaiser. Ya.S. Lurye writes: “The first attempts to think through the new situation that arose after the break with the patriarch were undertaken by people with very independent ideological positions. The idea of ‘Moscow – the new city of Constantine’ was put forward by Zosima, who was linked with the heretical movement [of the Judaisers] at the end of the 15th century; Zosima boldly referred the New Testament prophecy, ‘the first shall be last, and the last first’ to the Greeks and the Russians…[98]

 

     A generation later, Elder Philotheus of Pskov took up the theme, writing to the Pskov delegate of Great Prince Basil, Munechin: “I would like to say a few words about the existing Orthodox empire of our most illustrious, exalted ruler. He is the only emperor on all the earth over the Christians, the governor of the holy, divine throne of the holy, ecumenical, apostolic Church which in place of the Churches of Rome and Constantinople is in the city of Moscow, protected by God, in the holy and glorious Dormition church of the most pure Mother of God. It alone shines over the whole earth more radiantly than the sun. For know well, those who love Christ and those who love God, that all Christian empires will perish and give way to the one kingdom of our ruler, in accord with the books of the prophet [Daniel 7.14], which is the Russian empire. For two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will never be a fourth.”[99]

 

     However, thus far Moscow was only an embryonic Third Rome: several tasks needed to be carried out before the embryo could become a man. The first task was that of becoming truly independent rulers – independent, that is, of their Tatar overlords. This aim was more or less achieved by 1480, when Moscow first refused to give tribute to the Horde. Of course, the Tatars did not take this lying down, and they continued to be a threat to the Russian State until well into the eighteenth century. But being under threat from a State is not the same as being in subjection to it. By the end of the fifteenth century Muscovy was a fully independent State for the first time in her history, and for this reason alone the Great Princes had the right to call themselves “tsar”, that is, “autocrat”.

 

     Their second task was the gathering of the Russian lands, the building up of a national kingdom uniting all the Russias, which involved at least three major stages: (i) the uniting of the free Russian princedoms under Moscow, (ii) the final liberation of the Eastern and Southern Russian lands from the Tatar-Mongol-Turkish yoke, and (iii) the liberation of the Western Russian lands from the Catholic yoke of Poland-Lithuania. Steady progress towards these ends was made throughout the sixteenth century until the major crisis of “The Time of Troubles”, which shook the Russian State to its foundation. Progress was resumed after the enthronement of the first Romanov tsar in 1613. The gathering of the Russian lands was finally accomplished in 1915, when Tsar Nicholas II conquered Galicia from the Catholic Austrians.

 

     Their third task was the gathering of the Orthodox lands, including the Greek and Semitic lands of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Muscovite State first turned its attention seriously to this aim under the Grecophile Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nicon. At this moment, however, the Muscovite autocracy suffered its most severe crisis and was transformed into the “Orthodox absolutism” of Peter the Great, whose ideal was rather the First Rome of the Caesars and Augusti.

 

     During the reign of Tsar Alexander II the idea of Moscow the Third Rome began to be revived, and Orthodox Christians again began to see this as the role that Divine Providence had entrusted to Russia.[100] The wars waged by Russia for the liberation of Bulgaria in 1877-78 and Serbia in 1914-17 can be seen as prefiguring the full realization of that role. But then came the revolution, in which the Third International represented a grotesque parody of the noble ideal of the Third Rome, an ideal that has yet to be realised in its fullness….

 

    

The Heresy of the Judaisers

 

     The greatest internal threat to the Muscovite kingdom in this period was provided by the heresy of the Judaisers. Since this heresy is sometimes considered to be the spiritual ancestor of the Russian revolution, it is worth pausing to examine its roots and history in detail.

 

     Russia first came into conflict with the Jews in the form of the Khazars, a Turkic people inhabiting the Volga basin whose leaders had converted to Judaism in about 679, thus becoming “the thirteenth tribe” of Israel. In 965-969 Russian pagan armies under Great Prince Syatoslav destroyed the Khazar capital at Itel. His victory proved impermanent, but it propelled the Khazars to begin their migration towards Western Russia, where they were joined, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, by large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews fleeing persecution in Italy, Provence and Germany.[101] From this time the Jewish community in Poland and the Russian territories under Polish dominion in Ukraine and Belorussia began to multiply rapidly…

 

     The Hungarian Jew Arthur Koestler writes that the Khazars were branching out "long before the destruction of the Khazar state by the Mongols - as the ancient Hebrew nation had started branching into the Diaspora long before the destruction of Jerusalem. Ethnically, the Semitic tribes on the waters of the Jordan and the Turko-Khazar tribes on the Volga were of course 'miles apart', but they had at least two important formative factors in common. Each lived at a focal junction where the great trade routes connecting east and west, north and south intersect; a circumstance which predisposed them to become nations of traders, of enterprising travellers, or 'rootless cosmopolitans' - as hostile propaganda has unaffectionately labelled them. But at the same time their exclusive religion fostered a tendency to keep to themselves and stick together, to establish their own communities with their own places of worship, schools, residential quarters and ghettoes (originally self-imposed) in whatever town or country they settled. This rare combination of wanderlust and ghetto-mentality, reinforced by Messianic hopes and chosen-race pride, both ancient Israelites and medieval Khazars shared - even though the latter traced their descent not to Shem but to Japheth."[102]

 

     The Russian princes placed restrictions on the Jews and their money-lending practices. Vladimir Monomakh even expelled them from the country. However, they crept back in, and according to Platonov, the Jews Anbal and Ofrem Moizovich played a leading part in the murder of Andrew of Bogolyubovo in the twelfth century. Platonov writes: “The transformation of Russia into the spiritual centre of Christian civilisation almost exactly coincided in time with the establishment of a secret Jewish Talmudic centre in the West Russian lands, which were occupied at that time by Poland and Lithuania. Although the entrance of Jews into Russia was cut off by a temporary frontier, their gradual secret assault on the stronghold of the Christian world was realised inexorably through the appearance of various Jewish heretical movements.” [103]

 

     The most important of these movements was the heresy of the Judaisers, when "the whole Russian Church," as General Nechvolodov writes, "had at her head a Judaizer, and the immediate entourage of the sovereign, those whom he loved, were also Judaizers."[104]

 

     The roots of the heresy of the Judaisers, writes a publication of the Moscow Patriarchate, "go deeper than is usually imagined. The part played by national elements in the heresy, which exploded like epidemics onto medieval Europe, has not yet been sufficiently clarified. The acts of the inquisition demonstrate that most of the sects were Judeo-Christian in character with a more or less pronounced Manichaean colouring. The flourishing of the Albigensian heresy in France has been directly linked by historians with the rise of Jewish influence in that country. The heresy of the Templars, 'the knights of the Temple', who were condemned in 1314, was linked with esoterical Judaism and blasphemy against Christ...

 

    "Judaisers were also known in the Orthodox East. In Salonica in the first third of the 14th century 'there existed a heretical Judaising society in the heart of the Greek population' which had an influence on 'the Bulgarian Judaisers of the 40s and 50s of the same century'. In 1354 a debate took place in Gallipoli between the famous theologian and hierarch of the Eastern Church Gregory Palamas, on the one hand, and the Turks and the Chionians, i.e the Judaisers, on the other. In 1360 a council meeting in Turnovo, the then capital of the Bulgarian patriarchate, condemned both the opponents of Hesychasm (the Barlaamites) and those who philosophise from the Jewish heresies.

 

     "The successes of the heresy in Russia could be attributed to the same cause as its success in France in the 14th century. Jews streamed into the young state of the Ottomans from the whole of Western Europe.[105] Thereafter they were able to penetrate without hindrance into the Genoan colonies of the Crimea and the Azov sea, and into the region of what had been Khazaria, where the Jewish sect of the Karaites had a large influence; for they had many adherents in the Crimea and Lithuania and were closely linked with Palestine. As the inscriptions on the Jewish cemetery of Chuft-Kale show, colonies of Karaites existed in the Crimea from the 2nd to the 18th centuries. The Karaites were brought to Lithuania by Prince Vitovt, the hero of the battle of Grunwald (1410) and great-grandfather of Ivan III Vasilievich. From there they spread throughout Western Russia.

 

     "... One has to admit that the beginning of the polemic between the Orthodox and the heretics was made, not in Byzantium, but in Russia. Besides, the polemic began... in the time of Metropolitan Peter (+1326), the founder of the Muscovite ecclesiastical centre. In the life of St. Peter it is mentioned among his other exploits for the good of the Russian Church that he 'overcame the heretic Seit in debate and anathematised him.’ The hypothesis concerning the Karaite origin of the 'Judaisers' allows us to see in Seit a Karaite preacher.

 

     "... The heresy did not disappear but smouldered under a facade of church life in certain circles of the Orthodox urban population, and the Russian church, under the leadership of her hierarchs, raised herself to an unceasing battle with the false teachings. The landmarks of this battle were: Metropolitan Peter's victory over Seit in debate (between 1312 and 1326), the unmasking and condemnation of the strigolniki in Novgorod in the time of Metropolitan Alexis (1370s), the overcoming of this heresy in the time of Metropolitan Photius (+1431), and of the heresy of the Judaisers - in the time of Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod (+1505) and St. Joseph of Volotsk (+1515).

 

     "'From the time of the holy Prince Vladimir, the Baptizer of Rus', who rejected the solicitations of the Khazar Rabbis, wrote St. Joseph of Volotsk, 'the great Russian land has for 500 years remained in the Orthodox Faith, until the enemy of salvation, the devil, introduced the foul Jew to Great Novgorod. On St. Michael's day, 1470, there arrived from Kiev in the suite of Prince Michael Olelkovich, who had been invited by the veche [the Novgorodian parliament], 'the Jew Scharia' and 'Zachariah, prince of Taman. Later the Lithuanian Rabbis Joseph Smoilo Skaryavei and Moses Khanush also arrived.

 

     "The heresy began to spread quickly. However, 'in the strict sense of the word this was not merely heresy, but complete apostasy from the Christian faith and the acceptance of the Jewish faith. Using the weaknesses of certain clerics, Scharia and his assistants began to instil distrust of the Church hierarchy into the faint-hearted, inclining them to rebellion against spiritual authority, tempting them with 'self-rule', the personal choice of each person in the spheres of faith and salvation, inciting the deceived to renounce their Mother-Church, blaspheme against the holy icons[106] and reject veneration of the saints - the foundations of popular morality - and, finally, to a complete denial of the saving Sacraments and dogmas of Orthodoxy concerning the Holy Trinity and the Incarnation. So they went so far as to conduct a Jewish war against God and the substitution of Christ the Saviour by the false messiah and antichrist.

 

     "The false teaching spread in secret. Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod first heard about the heresy in 1487; four members of a secret society, while abusing each other in a drunken frenzy, revealed the existence of the heresy in front of some Orthodox. The zealous archpastor quickly conducted an investigation and with sorrow became convinced that not only Novgorod, but also the very capital of Russian Orthodoxy, Moscow, was threatened. In September 1487 he sent Metropolitan Gerontius in Moscow the records of the whole investigation in the original. Igumen Joseph (Sanin) of the Dormition monastery of Volotsk, who had an unassailable reputation in Russian society at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries, also spoke out against the heresy.

 

     "But the battle with the heresy turned out to be no simple matter, for the heretics had enlisted the support of powerful people in Moscow. Great Prince Ivan III, who had been deceived by the Judaisers, invited them to Moscow, and made the two leading heretics protopriests - one in the Dormition, and the other in the Archangels cathedrals in the Kremlin. Some of those close to the Tsar, such as Theodore Kurytsyn, who headed the government, and whose brother became the heretics' leader, were co-opted into the heresy. The Great Prince's bride, Helen Voloshanka, was converted to Judaism. In 1483 a correspondence between Ivan III and the heresiarch Scharia himself was established through diplomatic channels between Moscow and Bakhchisarai. Finally, the heretic Zosima was raised to the see of the great hierarchs of Moscow Peter, Alexis and Jonah.

 

     "The struggle between Archbishop Gennadius and St. Joseph, on the one hand, and the opponents of Orthodoxy, on the other, lasted for nineteen years.

 

     "In 1479 St. Joseph founded the monastery of the Dormition in Volokolamsk. There he wrote his major theological works, including 'The Enlightener', which brought him the reputation of a great father and teacher of the Russian Church. His fiery epistles against the heretics were widely distributed. The labours of Igumen Joseph of Volotsk and St. Gennadius, archbishop of Novgorod, were crowned with success. In 1494 the heretic Zosima was removed from the metropolitan see, and in 1502-1504 councils were assembled which condemned the most evil and impenitent heretics."[107]

 

     So the decade beginning in 1492, the predicted end of the world according to many calculations, proved to be rather the end of the world in a different sense. In Russia, as in Spain, the most powerful states of Eastern and Western Christendom respectively, it marked the end of direct Jewish influence over Christian society. It was not until the twentieth century that Jewish power raised its head again in Russia, and the heresy of the Judaizers again triumphed at the highest level of the Russian Church.[108]

 

 

Russian Caesaropapism and its Critics

 

     The Judaising heresy gave the Russians a great fright; it was even seen as a sign of the coming of the Antichrist. After all, it had penetrated both to the royal court and to the highest hierarchical see in the land at precisely the end of the sixth millenium of world history. The immediate result of this was a major strengthening of the Great Prince’s power.

 

     For churchmen now saw in the monarchical power the major bulwark against heresy, more important even than the metropolitanate, which, for the second time in little more than fifty years (the first time was at the council of Florence) had betrayed Orthodoxy. Thus Archbishop Gennadius of Novgorod wrote to Bishop Niphon of Suzdal: “You go to the Metropolitan and ask him to intercede with his majesty the Great Prince, that he cleanse the Church of God from heresy. Again, St. Joseph wrote: «The Tsar is by nature like all men, but in power he is similar to the Supreme God. And just as God wishes to save all people, so the Tsar much from preserve everything that is subject to his power from all harm, both spiritual and bodily».[109]

 

     According to St. Joseph, as Zyzykin interprets him, the defence of the truth “is placed on the tsar alone, for in his eyes it is in the monarchical power that the will of God is reflected; he is God’s deputy. The tsar is not only the servant of God, chosen by God and placed by Him on his throne, but he is also the representative of God, immeasurably exalted above [ordinary] people: he is like them only in accordance with his human nature, but in his power he is like God. From the point of view of the aim, the manifestations of monarchical power are analogous to those of Divine power. Just as the All-Highest wishes that all men be saved, so the tsar must keep those entrusted to his care from spiritual and bodily harm. For his fulfilment and non-fulfilment of his duty the tsar is responsible only before God. His power cannot be placed beside any other power on earth. And Joseph applies the words of Chrysostom to the tsars: ‘Hear, O kings and princes, your dominion is given you from God, you are the servants of God; it is for this reason that He placed you as pastor and guard over His people to protect His flock unharmed from wolves…’ The tsar must revenge Christ on the heretics, otherwise he will have to give an account at the terrible judgement. He must send them to prison or tortures and submit them to death. Heretical agreements are for Joseph worse than robbery and theft, than murder or fornication or adultery. Those who pretended to repent of their Judaism after the Council of 1490 deceived many, and the tsar was responsible for that before God. The spread and fall of heresy is the cause of the fall and destruction of a great kingdom; it is analogous to state disturbances and coups. ‘The great kingdoms of the Armenians, Ethiopians and Romans, who fell away from the Catholic and Apostolic Church and from the Orthodox Christian faith perished evilly because of the negligence of the Orthodox kings and hierarchs of those times, and these kings and hierarchs will be condemned at the terrible judgement of Christ for this negligence.’ In 1511 Joseph persuaded Basil III to apply his power against the heretics in the same way that he had previously spoken with the father against the Novgorod Judaisers, so that they should not destroy the whole of Orthodox Christianity. It was on the soil of the struggle with heresy that the duty of the Russian Great Prince to defend the faith was revealed. If in Byzantium the kings’ encroachment on the teaching authority of the Church stands to the fore, in Rus’ we encounter first of all the striving to ascribe to the tsar Archpastoral rights in the realisation of Christianity in life.

 

     “Joseph gave a very broad interpretation to the range of the tsar’s rights, extending them to all spheres of life, to everything ecclesiastical and monastic. He did not think twice about bringing Archbishop Serapion of Novgorod to trial before the tsar for banning him for leaving his jurisdiction, although the tsar had permitted it.[110] For Joseph the tsar’s power was unlimited already by virtue of its origin alone. For him the tsar was not only the head of the state, but also the supreme protector of the Church. He had, besides, a leadership role in relation to all ecclesiastical institutions; not one side of ecclesiastical life was exempt from it; the circle of his concerns included Church rites and Church discipline, and the whole ecclesiastical-juridical order. The tsar establishes the rules of ecclesiastical order and entrusts to bishops and nobles the task of seeing to their fulfilment, threatening the disobedient with hierarchical bans and punishments. One can have resort to the tsar’s court, according to Joseph, against all ecclesiastics and monastics. This theory would have been the exact restoration of ancient caesaropapism in Russian colours if Joseph had not limited the king in principle by the observance of the Church canons. In this exaltation of the tsar we see a reflection of the Byzantine theory of the 14th century, which, while recognising the priority of the canon over the law, nevertheless exalted the emperor to the first place even in Church affairs.”[111]

 

     Hieromonk Ioann (Kologrivov) writes: “Although Joseph considered the power of the Church to be higher than that of the sovereign in theory, in practice he extended the latter over the Church also. For him the Tsar was the head both of the State and of the Church – the supreme preserver and defender of the faith and the Church. The sovereign’s concern for the Church was revealed particularly in the fact that he was always “Christ’s avenger on the heretics. Lack of zeal for the good of the Church constituted, in the eyes of Joseph, one of the most serious crimes the sovereign could be guilty of, ànd it brought the wrath of God upon the whole country. In the single person of the sovereign Joseph thereby united both spiritual and secular power. He, and not Peter the Great, must be considered to be the founder of “State Orthodoxy” in Russia. A little later Ivan the Terrible, basing himself on the teaching of the abbot of Volokolamsk, acquired the opportunity to decclare that the Tsar was “called to save the souls of his subjects”.[112] 

 

     However, that St. Joseph was far from ascribing absolute power to the tsar is evident from the following: “The holy apostles speak as follows about kings and hierarchs who do not care for, and worry about, their subjects: a dishonourable king who does not care for his subjects is not a king, but a torturer; while an evil bishop who does not care for his flock is not a pastor, but a wolf.”[113]

 

     St. Joseph’s theory of Church-State relations lays great – perhaps too great - responsibility on the tsar as the representative of God on earth, and little – probably too little – emphasis on the bishop’s duty to reprove an erring tsar. An attempt to restore the balance was not slow to appear. In a Council in 1503 a debate took place between the so-called “possessors” and “non-possessors”, that is, between those who, like St. Joseph, wished the monasteries to own vast landed estates with which to support the poor and the State and the education of clergy, and those who, like the hermit St. Nilus of Sora, preached the monastic ideal of non-possessiveness. St. Nilus and his disciples wanted the dissolution of the vast land holdings not only because they contradicted the spirit and the letter of monastic vows, but also because this would liberate the clergy, as Zyzykin writes, “from dependence on the secular government and would raise the Hierarchy to the position of being the completely independent religious-moral power of the people, before which the despotic tendencies of the tsars would bow.”[114] St. Nilus also opposed the use of violence against the Judaisers, thus re-emphasising the Orthodox tradition of non-violence at a time when the persecution of heretics was becoming accepted throughout the Christian world.[115]

 

     The dispute over monastery lands was closely related to the Judaizing heresy. Hieromonk John (Kologrivov) writes: “In the 16th century about a third of all the tilled agricultural land in the country belonged to them [the monasteries]. Some monasteries owned not only villages and settlements, but towns and whole districts. In parallel with this, a moral decline was continuing in the monasteries, a decline which assumed alarming proportions in the same 16th century. All those who took a serious attitude to the monastic calling could not fail to be conscious of the crying contradiction between the monastic vows and the real situation. Already St. Theodosius (+1074) had been a principled opponent of this right of monasteries to possess land, and, in the words of Nestor, made concessions only ‘because of the weakness of faith of those around him’. The same views were held by St. Sergius (+1396), St. Cyril of Belozersk, St. Dionysius of Glushitsk, Blessed Paul of Obnora and others. At that time, in the 14th and 15th centuries, the people were already beginning with embarrassment to take account of the strangeness of the situation that had arisen. When the strigolniki arose in Pskov, people began to point to them as examples for monks: look, they said, these people do not steal and do not gather riches. Society’s attitude to monastic riches became more and more hostile: sometimes even princes allowed themselves to appropriate monastic possessions, and when the people rebelled they did not miss the opportunity to rob them. A little later, the Judaizers, while not rebelling directly against monastic property, quite simply totally rejected monasticism itself. That was the religious and moral aspect of the question, which was evident to all. Besides this there were others: the economic aspect of the matter, the interests of the State, and, finally, the interests of the monks themselves. The latter were usually subjected to verbal attacks, hatred and derision precisely because of their wealth and because of the greed with which they collected it.”[116]

 

     Although St. Joseph won this argument, the Council retained its freedom of speech in relation to the tsar, declaring that he could not transgress the Church canons which anathematised encroachments on Church property.[117] Moreover, St. Nilus and his disciples showed a quite different attitude to the tsar’s power from St. Joseph. In particular, “they drew attention to the conditions under which the tsar’s will in the administration of the kingdom could be considered as the expression of the will of God. They drew attention not only to the necessity of counsellors to make up the inevitable deficiencies of limited human nature, but also to the necessity of ‘spiritual correctness’. Thus Prince Bassian did not exalt the personality of the tsar like Joseph. He did not compare the tsar to God, he did not liken him to the Highest King, but dwelt on the faults inherent in the bearers of royal power which caused misfortunes to the State.”[118]

 

     The boldness of St. Nilus and Monk Bassian in relation to the secular powers was firmly in the tradition, not only of the fourth-century Fathers, but also of the early Trans-Volga monks, such as St. Cyril of Beloozersk. Thus in 1427 St. Cyril wrote to Prince Andrew of Mozhaisk that he “should abstain from drunkenness and give alms according to your means; for, my lord, you are unable to fast and are lax in praying, and thus, alms, in their place, will make up for your deficiency”. He even gave political advice, as in this letter to Grand Prince Basil I: “We have heard, my lord great prince, that there is trouble between you and your friends, the princes of Suzdal. You, my lord, insist on your right and they on theirs; for this reason great bloodshed in inflicted on Christians. But consider closely, my lord, what are their rightful claims against you, and then humbly make concessions; and insofar as you are right toward them for that stand firm, my lord, as justice says. And if they begin to ask pardon, my lord, you should, my lord, grant them what they deserve, for I have heard, my lord, that until today they have been oppressed by you and that is, my lord, why they went to war. And you, my lord, for God’s sake show your love and grace that they should not perish in error amid the Tatar realms and should not die there. For, my lord, no kingdom or principality, nor any other power can rescue us from God’s impartial judgement.”[119]

 

    At this time when the influence of Byzantium was declining in Russia, the Lord sent an Athonite monk to Russia to remind the Russians of the best Byzantine tradition in Church-State relations - St. Maximus the Greek.

 

     St. Maximus “complained that among the pastors of his time there was ‘no Samuel’, ‘a Priest of the Most High who stood up boldly in opposition to the criminal Saul’, that there were ‘no zealots like Elijah and Elisha who were not ashamed in the face of the most lawlessly violent kings of Samaria; there is no Ambrose the wonderful, the Hierarch of God, who did not fear the loftiness of the kingdom of Theodosius the Great; no Basil the Great, whose most wise teachings caused the persecutor (of the Church) Valens to fear; no Great John of the golden tongue, who reproached the money-loving usurer Empress Eudocia’. In accordance with Byzantine conceptions, Maximus the Greek looked on the priesthood and the kingdom as the two greatest gifts given by the most High Divine Goodness to man, as two powers on whose agreement in action depended the happiness of mankind. Among the duties laid upon the representatives of the Church, he mentioned that they must by their most wise advice and strategems of every kind.. always correct the royal sceptres for the better, so that they should be alien to any fawning before secular power and should exert a restraining, moderating influence upon it. Maximus spoke of the superiority of the spiritual power over the secular…”[120]

 

     St. Maximus was in favour as long as Metropolitan Barlaam, a follower of St. Nilus of Sora, was in power. But when Barlaam was uncanonically removed by the Great Prince Basil III  and replaced by Metropolitan Daniel, a disciple of St. Joseph of Volotsk, his woes began…

 

     For a while the Great Prince  continued to protect him, even when he rebuked the vices of the nobility, the clergy and the people and supported the position of the non-possessors against the metropolitan. However, his enemies found the excuse they were looking for when the Grand Prince, with the blessing of Metropolitan Daniel, put away his wife Solomonia for her barrenness and married Elena Glinskaya (Solomonia was forcibly tonsured in Suzdal and was later canonised under her monastic name of Sophia). Then St. Maximus wrote him an extensive work: Instructive chapters for right-believing rulers, which began: “O most devout Tsar, he is honoured as a true ruler who seeks to establish the life of his subjects in righteousness and justice, and endeavours always to overcome the lusts and dumb passions of his soul. For he who is overcome by them is not the living image of the Heavenly Master, but only an anthropomorphic likeness of dumb nature.”[121]

 

     The saint was to suffer many years in prison because of his boldness. But he had admirers and supporters both within and outside Russia. Thus Patriarch Mark of Jerusalem, wrote prophetically to the Great Prince: “If you do this wicked thing, you will have an evil son. Your estate will become prey to terrors and tears. Rivers of blood will flow; the heads of the mighty will fall; your cities will be devoured by flames.”[122] The prophecy was fulfilled with exactitude in the reign of his son, Ivan IV, better known as “the Terrible”.

 

     St. Maximus was released from prison only many years later. But he continued his bold preaching in the face of the Princes. Thus he refused to bless a pilgrimage of Tsar Ivan, saying that he should look after the widows and orphans of those killed at Kazan instead. And he threatened that if he did not, his newborn son Demetrius would die. Ivan ignored his advice, and Demetrius died…

    

     Fr. Gregory (Lurye) dates the beginning of the fall of the Russian Church into “Sergianism”, that is, captivity to the State to the time of Metropolitan Daniel and Great Prince Basil:Still earlier they should have excommunicated – not even Ivan IV, but his father Basil III for his adulterous ‘marriage’, which gave Russia Ivan the Terrible. Then we wouldnt have had Peter I. Thats what they did in such cases in Byzantium…”[123]

 

     However, it should be noted that St. Maximus never broke communion with Daniel, and was restored to favour under his successor, Metropolitan Macarius. Moreover, as we shall see, caesaropapism was by no means the rule in the Russian Church from then onward. This episode must therefore be considered unfortunate, but not “the beginning of the end”…

 

 

Ivan the Terrible: (1) The Orthodox Tsar

 

     A major step forward in Russia’s path towards becoming fully the Third Rome was made in the reign of Ivan the Terrible. His coronation, on January 16, 1547, gave him an increased authority in the eyes of the Orthodox world. His grandfather, Grand Prince Ivan III, had married the niece of the last Byzantine Emperor, Sophia Palaeologus, and had occasionally called himself Tsar of All Russia. Then, on February 4, 1498, he had crowned his grandson Demetrius according to the rite established for the rank of Caesar in the Byzantine court, using the crown known as the Cap of Vladimir Monomakh, which the latter was believed to have received five centuries earlier from the Byzantine Emperor Constantine IX. But Demetrius had died before he could succeed to throne and be crowned as Tsar. The decisive step was taken by Ivan when he was crowned and anointed Tsar of All Russia with the Cap of Vladimir Monomakh and according to a rite established by the Metropolitan.

 

     At first, the Ecumenical Patriarch Joasaph said that this act “has no validity, since not only does a Metropolitan not have the right to crown, but not even every Patriarch, but only the two Patriarchs: the Roman and Constantinopolitan”. However, he went on to say that he granted Ivan the right to call himself Tsar and suggested that he have the coronation repeated by Metropolitan Joasaph, the patriarchal exarch, who would bring a gramota to Moscow. But not only was Ivan not crowned again: he refused to ask the blessing of Metropolitan Joasaph, saying that he had kissed the cross of the Lithuanian Catholic king on his way to Moscow through Lithuania. It was only in September, 1562 that Ivan received a gramota from the Patriarch confirming his title of Tsar. Indeed, he significantly called him “our Tsar”, ascribing to him authority over “Orthodox Christians in the entire universe”, and applying to him the same epithets, “pious, God-crowned and Christ-loving” as had been applied to the Byzantine Emperors.[124] This was an important advance in Ivan’s status in the eyes of the Orthodox world.

 

     In view of the fearsome reputation Ivan has acquired, not without reason, in the historical consciousness of mankind, it is worth reminding ourselves of the great achievements of the first half of his reign. He vastly increased the territory of the Muscovite kingdom, neutralising the Tatar threat and bringing Kazan and the whole of the Volga under Orthodox control; he subdued Novgorod; he began the exploration of Siberia; he strengthened the army and local administration; he introduced the Zemskie Sobory, “Councils of the Land”, in which he sought the advice of different classes of the people; he subdued the boyars who had nearly destroyed the monarchy in his childhood; he rejected Jesuit attempts to bring Russia into communion with Rome; he convened Church Councils that condemned heresies (e.g. the Arianism of Bashkin) and removed many abuses in ecclesiastical and monastic life. Even the Tsar’s fiercest critic, Prince Andrew Kurbsky, had to admit that he had formerly been ”radiant in Orthodoxy”.

 

     It was this “radiance in Orthodoxy” and respect for the Church that prevented Ivan from becoming, in the first half of his reign, an absolutist ruler in the sense that he admitted no power higher than his own. This is illustrated by his behaviour in the famous Stoglav Church Council of 1551, which was conducted by the Tsar putting forward questions to which the hierarchy replied. The hierarchy was quite happy to support the tsar in extirpating certain abuses within the Church, but when the tsar raised the question of the sequestration of Church lands for the sake of the strengthening of the State, the hierarchs showed their independence and refused. The tsar sufficiently respected the independence of the hierarchy to yield to its will on this matter, and in general the sixteenth-century Councils were true images of sobornost’. As Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov) writes: “At most of the Councils there were present, besides the hierarchs, the superiors of the monasteries – archimandrites, igumens, builders, also protopriests, priests, monks and the lower clergy generally. Often his Majesty himself was present, sometimes with his children, brothers and with all the boyars… It goes without saying that the right to vote at the Councils belonged first of all to the metropolitan and the other hierarchs… But it was offered to other clergy present at the Councils to express their opinions. There voice could even have a dominant significance at the Council, as, for example, the voice of St. Joseph of Volokolamsk at the Councils of 1503-1504… The conciliar decisions and decrees, were signed only by the hierarchs, others – by lower clergy: archimandrites and igumens. And they were confirmed by the agreement of his Majesty…”[125]

 

     All this went together with a consciously worked out programme and ideology worked out, in part, by the tsar himself, and partly by advisors such as Ivan Semenovich Peresvetov, a minor nobleman from Lithuania who had served in the Ottoman empire. At the base of this programme there remained the concept of Moscow as the Third Rome. Thus in 1540 Elder Philotheus of Pskov wrote to the young tsar, who was not yet of age, that the “woman clothed with the sun” of Revelation 12 was the Church, which fled from the Old Rome to the New Rome of Constantinople, and thence, after the fall of Constantinople, to the third Rome “in the new, great Russia”. And the master of the third Rome, in both its political and ecclesiastical spheres, was the tsar: “Alone on earth the Orthodox, great Russian tsar steers the Church of Christ as Noah in the ark was saved from the flood, and he establishes the Orthodox faith.”

 

     Ya.S. Lurye writes: “The idea that Russia was the only country in the world that had kept the true faith was very majestic, but also very responsible. If the truth was concentrated with us, and the whole of the surrounding world had spiritually ‘collapsed’, then in constructing their State the Russians had to go along a completely individual path, and rely on the experience of others only to a very limited degree – and rely on it as negative experience.

 

     “The complexities linked with such an ideological position were very clearly revealed in the work of the writer to whom it was entrusted, at the very beginning of the reign of Ivan IV, to express words that might at first glance appear to be a kind of programme of this reign. Turning to the history of the fall of Constantinople and the victory of Mehmet the Sultan over the Greeks, Peresvetov explained these events in terms of the ‘meekness’ of the Greek Emperor Constantine: ‘It is not possible to be an emperor without being threatening; as a horse without a bridle, so is an empire without threatenings’. And he foretold to the young tsar: ‘You are a threatening and wise sovereign; you will bring the sinful to repentance and install justice and truth in your kingdom.’ It is important to note that ‘justice’ in this programme was no less important than ‘threatening’; the ‘meekness’ of the Greek Emperor consisted in the fact that he ceded power to the ‘nobles’, and they had enslaved the people.”[126]

 

     “Peresvetov,” writes Sir Geoffrey Hosking, “was almost certainly right. The Ottomans owed the creation of their empire at least in large part to reforms which weakened the native Turkish nobles who had previously formed the backbone of its tribal confederacies. Those nobles had been supplanted at the Ottoman court by Christian youths recruited from the Balkans and converted to Islam under the devshirme system. They furnished both the Janissaries, the elite corps of the army, and the principal civilian advisors. The Sultan required all his military and governmental leaders, whatever their provenance, to accept the status of his personal slaves, in order to separate them forcibly from their kinship loyalties. The conquered city of Constantinople was used for the same purpose: to give his new elite a power base remote from the native grazing lands of the Turkish nobles.

 

     “Such a system had obvious attractions for a Muscovite ruler also building an empire on vulnerable territories on the frontier between Christianity and Islam, and also struggling to free himself from aristocratic clans. Peresvetov did not go as far as his Ottoman model, and refrained from recommending slavery; but he did propose that the army should be recruited and trained by the state and paid for directly out of the treasury. This would ensure that individual regiments could not become instruments of baronial feuding. He favoured a service nobility promoted on the basis of merit and achievement, but he did not envisage serfdom as a means of providing them with their livelihood: in so far as he considered the matter at all, he assumed they would be salaried out of tax revenues.

 

     “Peresvetov’s importance was that he offered a vision of a state able to mobilize the resources of its peoples and lands equitably and efficiently. He was one of the first European theorists of monarchical absolutism resting on the rule of law. He believed that a consistent law code should be published, and that its provisions should be guided by the concept of pravda (which in Russian means both truth and justice): it would be the task of the ‘wise and severe monarch’ to discern and uphold this principle, without favour to the privileged and powerful.

 

     “In the early years of his reign we can see Ivan endeavouring to implement, in his own way, some of Peresvetov’s ideas, especially where they would enhance the strength and efficiency of the monarchy. At the same time he was trying to reach out beyond the fractious boyars and courtiers to make contact with the local elites of town and countryside and bind them into a more cohesive system of rule. Together with his Chosen Council, an ad hoc grouping of boyars, clergymen and service nobles personally chosen by him, he tried to make a start towards removing the ‘sovereign’s affairs’ (gosudarevo delo) from the private whims of the boyars and their agents, and bringing them under the control of himself in alliance with the ‘land’ (zemlia).”[127]

 

     The tsar started putting this programme into effect in the decade 1547-1556, which was also the decade of his great victories over the Tatars of Kazan and Astrakhan. However, things began to go wrong from 1558, when he began a campaign against the Livonian Knights that was to prove expensive and unsuccessful. Then, in 1560, his beloved first wife, Anastasia, died – killed, as he suspected (and modern scientific research has confirmed) by the boyars.

 

     Still more serious, the tsar’s pravda began to lose its ‘justice’ element. Lurye writes: “Not only the free-thinkers of that time, such as the heretic Matthew Bashkin or Peresvetov, but also the publicists of a conservatively ecclesiastical orientation (Hermolaus Erasmus, Maximus the Greek, Vassian Patrikeev, and partly even Joseph of Volotsk) considered it their duty to direct attention to the serious situation of one or another group of peasants and suggest some measures for the betterment of their life. But Tsar Ivan Vasilyevich was not in the slightest interested in this subject, while any freethinking ideas – such as Peresvetov’s preference of ‘justice’ to ‘faith’were perceived by him as heresy, to which the tsar, who prided himself on his religious orthodoxy, related with hostility…

 

     “The particularity of Ivan the Terrible’s ideological position consisted in the fact that the idea of the new State incarnating the right faith, which had ‘collapsed’ in the whole of the rest of the world, was completely freed in him from all freethinking and social-reformatory traits and became the official ideology of the already-existing ‘true Orthodox Christian autocracy’. The main task, therefore, became not reforms in the State, but its defence from all the anti-state forces which were ‘corrupting’ the country ‘with disorders and civil disturbances’. Sharing Peresvetov’s hostility to the ‘nobles’, the tsar drew one important conclusion from it: the unfitting and ‘traitrous’ had to be replaced by new people…”[128]

 

 

Ivan the Terrible: (2) The Bloodthirsty Tyrant

 

     So what threat did the boyars really pose? Before answering this question, it should be pointed out that in Russia, unlike most West European countries, the Great Prince or Tsar was not seen as simply the most powerful member of the noble class, but as standing above all the classes, including the nobility. Therefore the lower classes as often as not looked to the Great Prince or Tsar to protect them from the nobility, and often intervened to raise him to power or protect him from attempted coups by the nobility. There are many examples of this in Russian history, from the time of Andrew of Bogolyubovo to the Time of Troubles to the Decembrist conspiracy in 1825. Thus Pokrovsky wrote of the failed Decembrist conspiracy: “The autocracy was saved by the Russian peasant in a guard’s uniform”.[129] And in fact the tsars, when allowed to rule with truly autocratic authority, were much better for the peasants than the nobles, passing laws that surpassed contemporary European practice in their humaneness.[130]

 

     Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that sixteenth-century Russia was in many ways a less free State than 11th- or even 14th-century Russia. The reason for this lay in the task imposed by Divine Providence on Russia – that is, the task of defending the last independent outpost of Orthodoxy in the world, which required, in the context of the threat posed by resurgent Counter-Reformation Catholicism, an ever-increasing centralisation and militarisation of society, and therefore great sacrifices from all classes of the population. However, of all these classes, the boyars were the least inclined to be reconciled to this situation…

 

     The freest class was probably the servitors of the Church. As we have seen, Ivan respected the Church, and did not in general try to impose his will on her. And yet he liked to emphasise that the Church had no business interfering in affairs of State, constantly bringing the argument round to the quasi-absolute power of the tsar – and the insubordination of the boyars: “Remember, when God delivered the Jews from slavery, did he place above them a priest or many rulers? No, he placed above them a single tsar – Moses, while the affairs of the priesthood he ordered should be conducted, not by him, but by his brother Aaron, forbidding Aaron to be occupied with worldly matters. But when Aaron occupied himself with worldly affairs, he drew the people away from God. Do you see that it is not fitting for priests to do the work of tsars! Also, when Dathan and Abiron wanted to seize power, remember how they were punished for this by their destruction, to which destruction they led many sons of Israel? You, boyars, are worthy of the same!”[131]

 

     The lower classes – that is, the peasants, shopkeepers and artisans, who paid taxes and services to the tsar and his servitors - were increasingly chained to the land which they worked. For in the century 1550-1650, in order to prevent them from simply disappearing into the woods or fleeing to the steppes in the south, the tsars gradually enserfed them. They were not technically slaves (slaves do not pay taxes); but a combination of political and economic factors (e.g. peasant indebtedness to landlords, landlords’ liability for collecting peasants’ taxes, the enormous demand for manpower as the state’s territory expanded) bonded them to the land; and the hereditary nature of social status in Muscovite Russia meant that they had little hope of rising up the social ladder.

 

     However, it was the boyars who lost most from the increasing power of the tsar. In medieval Russia, they had been theoretically free to join other princes; but by the 1550s there were no independent Russian princes – Orthodox princes, at any rate – outside Moscow. Moreover, their lands, or votchiny, were now held conditionally on serving the Muscovite Grand Prince, and if they failed to serve him, their lands were theoretically forfeit.

 

     The boyars traditionally served in the army or the administration; but state administration, being historically simply an extension of the prince’s private domain, was completely controlled by him. Until the reforms of the 1550s-1560s, there was almost no local self-government. Moreover, from the 1550s the power of the tsar was enormously increased by his immense conquests in both East and West – the former Kazan and Astrakhan khanates in the East, and Novgorod in the West, which became part of the monarchy’s patrimony.

 

     However, the boyars were still a potential problem through their clannish rivalries and habits of freedom. For Ivan, the independent power of the boyars, which may have been a matter of course in the western kingdoms, was incompatible with his conception of the Russian autocracy. As he wrote to the rebellious boyar, Prince Kurbsky in 1564: “What can one say of the godless peoples? There, you know, the kings do not have control of their kingdoms, but rule as is indicated to them by their subjects. But from the beginning it is the Russian autocrats who have controlled their own state, and not their boyars and grandees!”[132] For Ivan was not in the least swayed by the ideology of democracy, being, as he wrote, “humble Ioann, Tsar and Great Prince of All Russia, by God’s will, and not by the multimutinous will of man…”

 

     Kurbsky, in his defence of the boyar class, relied mainly on the personal valour of “the best of the mighty ones of Israel”. In reply, Ivan pointed out that personal qualities do not help if there is no correct “structures”: “As a tree cannot flower if its roots dry up, so here: if there are no good structures in the kingdom, courage will not be revealed in war. But you, without paying attention to structures, are glorified only with courage”.

 

     The idea that there can be more than one power in the State is Manichaeism, according to Ivan: “[The Manichaeans] taught the corrupt doctrine that Christ possesses only the heavens, while the earth is ruled independently by men, and the nether regions by the devil. But I believe that Christ possesses all: the heavens, the earth and the nether regions, and everything in the heavens, on the earth and in the nether regions subsists by His will, the counsel of the Father and the consent of the Holy Spirit”. And since the tsar is anointed of God, he rules in God’s place, and can concede no part of what is in fact God’s power to anyone else.

 

     When, crazed by grief and suspicion at his wife’s death, Ivan resolved finally to do away with the boyars, he resolved on the following strategem. He designated the boyars’ lands as oprichnina, that is, his personal realm, and ordered the oprichniki, that is, a kind of secret police body sworn to obey him alone, to enter the boyars’ lands and to kill, rape and pillage at will. They carried out unbridled terror and torture on tens of thousands of the population, and were rewarded with the expropriated lands of the men they had murdered. 

 

     By the end of his reign the boyars’ economic power had been in part destroyed, and a new class, the dvoriane, had taken their place. This term originally denoted domestic servitors, both freemen and slaves, who were employed by the appanage princes to administer their estates. Ivan now gave them titles previously reserved for the boyars, and lands in various parts of the country. However, these lands were pomestia, not votchiny – that is, they were not hereditary possessions and remained the legal property of the tsar, and could be taken back from the servitors if they fai led to render satisfactory service.

 

     Ivan justified his cruel suppression of the boyars through the scriptural doctrine of submission to the secular power: “See and understand: he who resists the power resists God; and he who resists God is called an apostate, and that is the worst sin. You know, this is said of every power, even of a power acquired by blood and war. But remember what was said above, that we have not seized the throne from anyone. He who resists such a power resists God even more!”[133]

 

     The tsar’s power does not come from the people, but from God, by succession from the first Christian autocrat of Russia, St. Vladimir. He is therefore answerable, not to the people, but to God alone. And the people, being “not godless”, recognises this. Kurbsky, however, by his rebellion against the tsar has rebelled against God and so “destroyed his soul”.[134]

 

     And so many, submitting humbly to the tsar’s unjust decrees, received the crown of life in an innocent death. There was no organised mass movement against his power in the Russian land. Even when he expressed a desire to resign his power, the people – completely sincerely, it seems, - begged him to return.[135]

 

     This fact has elicited the amazement – and sneers – of foreign historians, who have sought for special explanations, whether in the supposedly masochistic capacity for suffering of the Russian people or in the absolutist politics that were almost universal in Europe at that time. But if the Russians were patient in the reign of Ivan the Terrible, they were much less patient in later reigns, as we shall see; so the masochist explanation is implausible. And if the sixteenth century did see the acme of several cruel and absolutist monarchies – from that of the Spanish kings in the West to that of the Turkish Sultans in the East – they differed in important ways from the Russian monarchy. For not only was Ivan’s kingship not absolutist in the strict sense, as we have seen: his cruelties were of a different kind, too, being based not at all, as were those of the European and Turkish rulers, on religious grounds, but rather on personal suspiciousness, and were almost exclusively directed against his own people rather than foreigners. “Do not leave us!” they cried; “we do not want a Tsar other than him that has been given to us by God.”

 

     An English historian writes: “In other words, they would remain loyal to Ivan and obey him, whatever he did – because he was God on earth. Any attempt to kill him would be, for those who believed in his divinity, as unthinkable as trying to kill God. This insect-like obedience was the result of the centuries-old indoctrination by the Church, reinforced by brute force and the constant fear of punishment.”[136]

 

     This interpretation represents a fundamental misunderstanding of the attitude of the Orthodox Church and the Russian people of this time to their Tsars. The people were well aware that their tsars were men, and not gods. Why, then, did they not resist Ivan? Partly out of fear. Partly because, as we have seen, the Russian peasants and townsfolk saw in the tsar their protector against the depradations of the boyars. But partly, and most significantly, because they saw in his cruelties, not violations of their “human rights”, in the manner of the modern dissidents, but the just recompense for their sins – the sins of the dynasty (for example, the unlawful marriage of Ivan’s father), and the sins of the people.

 

     For according to Orthodox teaching, even if a ruler is unjust or cruel, he must be obeyed as long as he provides that freedom from anarchy, that minimum of law and order, that is the definition of God-established political authority (Romans 13.1-6). Thus St. Irenaeus of Lyons writes: “Some rulers are given by God with a view to the improvement and benefit of their subjects and the preservation of justice; others are given with a view to producing fear, punishment and reproof; yet others are given with a view to displaying mockery, insult and pride – in each case in accordance with the deserts of the subjects. Thus… God’s judgement falls equally on all men.”[137] Again, St. Isidore of Pelusium writes that the evil ruler “has been allowed to spew out this evil, like Pharaoh, and, in such an instance, to carry out extreme punishment or to chastise those for whom great cruelty is required, as when the king of Babylon chastised the Jews.”[138]

 

     But there is line beyond which an evil ruler ceases to be a ruler and becomes an anti-ruler, an unlawful tyrant, who is not to be obeyed. Thus the Jews were commanded by God through the Prophet Jeremiah to submit to the king of Babylon, evil though he was; whereas they were commanded through another prophet, Moses, to resist and flee from the Egyptian Pharaoh. For in the one case the authority, though evil, was still an authority, which it was beneficial to obey; whereas in the other case the authority was in fact an anti-authority, obedience to which would have taken the people further away from God.

 

     Tsar Ivan was an evil man, but a true authority. The fact that the people revered and obeyed him as the anointed of God did not mean that they were not aware that many of his deeds were evil and inspired by the devil. But by obeying him in his capacity as the anointed of God, they believed that they ascended from the earthly kingdom to the Heavenly, while by patiently enduring his demonic assaults on them they believed that they received the forgiveness of their sins and thereby escaped the torments of hell, so far exceeding the worst torments that any earthly ruler could subject them to.

 

     As Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna writes: “If a Russian person of the 14th-16th centuries had been asked why he with complete forgetfulness of self served his Tsar and his State, and why he considered it his ineluctable duty to serve them in this way, then every Russian person, or in any case the overwhelming majority of them, would have replied that they served in this way in order to provide for themselves and for their children the possibility of living without hindrance in accordance with the rules of Christianity, that is, the Orthodox laws and customs, so as not to submit to a heterodox state power or one that was indifferent to good and evil. No extra-ecclesiastical, secular or lay aims, such as state glory, national pride, territorial size or a guaranteed life of freedom, etc., would have been placed as an aim of state life by a Russian person of the 14th-16th centuries; and if he sometimes did, then in any case he would in no way have been inclined to live or die for it.

 

     “At the head of life, not in a political sense, but in their capacity as generally recognized spiritual leaders of society, stood the saints, and amongst them in particular Saints Sergius of Radonezh and Cyril of Belozersk, and the hierarchs Peter and Alexis, metropolitans of all Russia.

 

     “It is in the unbroken unity with them of the whole of the Russian people of the 14th-16th centuries that we find the key to an understanding of the formula “Holy Rus’”. Rus’ was never holy in the sense that the whole or a significant part of its people were holy. But holiness was the only ideal for everyone. The Russian man of that time knew no other ideal. He did not know the ideals of culture, good education and heroism as ideals separate from holiness. All these separate ideals were included for him in the single, all-embracing ideal – holiness. But culture, heroism and the other virtues were valuable only when they were sanctified by holiness. Not being saints themselves, but often being very sinful, the Russian people of that time repented of their sins, felt compunction and, in confessing their unity with their contemporary and past saints, they recognised their infinite superiority over themselves, and asked for their prayers for themselves…”[139]

 

     It was this ideal of holiness that made Russia great and led so many millions of her children into the Heavenly Kingdom; it was the undermining of this attitude, from the second half of the seventeenth century onwards, that led to the Russian revolution, the disappearance of Holy Russia in the godless Soviet Union, and the descent of still more millions of her former children into the jaws of hell…

 

     Having said that, the Orthodox tradition of obedience to legitimate authorities goes hand in hand with the tradition of protest against untruth and unrighteousness. And in this respect there was some truth in Prince Kurbsky’s lament over the state of Russia in Ivan’s reign: “The authority which comes from God devises unprecedented pains of death for the virtuous. The clergy – we will not judge them, far be that from us, but bewail their wretchedness – are ashamed to bear witness to God before the tsar; rather they endorse the sin. They do not make themselves advocates of widows and orphans, the poor, the oppressed and the prisoners, but grab villages and churches and riches for themselves. Where is Elijah, who was concerned for the blood of Naboth and confronted the king? Where are the host of prophets who gave the unjust kings proof of their guilt? Who speaks now without being embarrassed by the words of Holy Scripture and gives his soul as a ransom for his brothers? I do not know one. Who will extinguish the fire that is blazing in our land? No one. Really, our hope is still only with God…”[140]

 

 

St. Philip of Moscow

 

     And yet there was one who opposed the unrighteousness of the tsar. The terror did not pass without opposition of a spiritual, if not of a physical nature. Thus accusers in the tradition of St. John Chrysostom and St. Ambrose of Milan appeared in the form of the fools-for-Christ Basil the Blessed and Nicholas Salos, and, especially, the Metropolitan of Moscow, St. Philip.

 

     St. Philip’s ideas about the nature of tsarist power did not differ substantially from those of his predecessors. The tsar was complete master in his kingdom, and deserved the obedience of all, including churchmen, as long as he confessed the Orthodox faith. But he was bound by the ecclesiastical canons when acting in the ecclesiastical sphere.

 

     However, it was not clear, according to this Josephite theory, to what extent the tsar was also bound in the personal, moral sphere and could rightly be rebuked by the metropolitan for personal sins. St. Philip was notable for his combination, as it were, of the theories of St. Joseph with the practice of SS. Nilus and Maximus, recognising the supremacy of the tsar while rebuking him for his personal sins. For this boldness he received the crown of martyrdom…

 

     As a young man he had heard the words of the Saviour: “No man can serve two masters”. Deeply struck by them, he resolved to leave the world and become a monk.[141] Later, as metropolitan, at the height of the terror, he would put those words into practice, saying to the Tsar: “Sovereign, I cannot obey your command more than that of God.”[142]

 

     Again he said: “Ruling tsar, you have been vested by God with the highest rank, and for that reasons you should honour God above all. But the sceptre of earthly power was given to so that you should foster justice among men and rule over them lawfully. By nature you are like every man, as by power you are like God. It is fitting for you, as a mortal, not to become arrogant, and as the image of God, not to become angry, for only he can justly be called a ruler who has control over himself and does not work for his shameful passions, but conquers them with the aid of his mind. Was it ever heard that the pious emperors disturbed their own dominion? Not only among your ancestors, but also among those of other races, nothing of the sort has ever been heard.” [143]

 

     When the tsar angrily asked what business he had interfering in royal affairs, Philip replied: “By the grace of God, the election of the Holy Synod and your will, I am a pastor of the Church of Christ. You and I must care for the piety and peace of the Orthodox Christian kingdom.”

 

     When the tsar ordered him to keep silence, Philip replied: “Silence is not fitting now; it would increase sin and destruction. If we carry out the will of men, what answer will we have on the day of Christ’s Coming? The Lord said: “Love one another. Greater love hath no man than that a man should lay down his life for his friends. If you abide in My love, you will be My disciples indeed.”

 

     On another occasion he said to the tsar: “The Tatars have a law and justice, but do not. Throughout the world, transgressors who ask for clemency find it with the authorities, but in Russia there is not even clemency for the innocent and the righteous… Fear the judgement of God, your Majesty. How many innocent people are suffering! We, sovereign, offer to God the bloodless sacrifice, while behind the altar the innocent blood of Christians is flowing! Robberies and murders are being carried out in the name of the Tsar…. What is our faith for? I do not sorrow for those who, in shedding their innocent blood, have been counted worthy of the lot of the saints; I suffer for your wretched soul: although you are honoured as the image of God, nevertheless, you are a man made of dust, and the Lord will require everything at your hands”.

 

     However, even if the tsar had agreed that his victims were martyrs, he would not have considered this a reason for not obeying him. As he wrote to Kurbsky: “If you are just and pious, why do you not permit yourself to accept suffering from me, your stubborn master, and so inherit the crown of life?…”[144]

 

     Betrayed by his fellow-hierarchs, Philip was about to resign the metropolitanate, and said to the tsar: “It is better to die as an innocent martyr that to tolerate horrors and lawlessnesses silently in the rank of metropolitan. I leave you my metropolitan’s staff and mantia. But you all, hierarchs and servers of the altar, feed the flock of Christ faithfully; prepare to give your reply and fear the Heavenly King more than the earthly…”

 

     The tsar refused to accept his resignation, and after being imprisoned and escaped the appetite of a hungry bear who had been sent to devour him, on December 23, 1569 the holy metropolitan was suffocated to death by the tsar’s servant. Metropolitan Philip saved the honour of the Russian episcopate in Ivan’s reign as Metropolitan Arsenius of Rostov was to save it in the reign of Catherine the Great…

 

     Michael Cherniavksy has pointed to the tension, and ultimate incompatibility, between two images of the kingship in the reign of Ivan the Terrible: that of the basileus and that of the khan – that is, of the Orthodox autocrat and of the pagan despot. “If the image of the basileus stood for the Orthodox and pious ruler, leading his Christian people towards salvation, then the image of the khan was perhaps preserved in the idea of the Russian ruler as the conqueror of Russia and of its people, responsible to no one. If the basileus signified the holy tsar, the ‘most gentle’ (tishaishii) tsar in spiritual union with his flock, then the khan, perhaps, stood for the absolutist secularised state, arbitrary through its separation from its subjects.”[145]

 

     If there was indeed something of eastern absolutism as well as purely Orthodox autocracy in Ivan’s rule, then this would explain why, only a few years after his death, Russia descended into civil war and the Time of Troubles. For eastern absolutism, unlike Orthodox autocracy, is a system that can command the fear and obedience, but not the love of the people, and is therefore unstable in essence. Hence the need to resist to it – but not out of considerations of democracy or the rights of man, but simply out of considerations of Christian love and justice. An Orthodox tsar has no authority higher than him in the secular sphere. And yet the Gospel is higher than everybody, and will judge everybody on the Day of Judgement; and in reminding Ivan of this both St. Philip and Kurbsky were doing both him and the State a true service…

 

     A service rejected by Ivan to his own detriment. For at the very end of his life, he destroyed even his reputation as a defender of Orthodoxy by encroaching on Church lands and delving into astrology. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion, therefore, that Ivan the Terrible was indeed terrible in his impiety, and must be numbered among the evil tyrants and persecutors of the Church.

 

     If we compare Ivan with another great and terrible tsar, Peter I, we see striking similarities. Both tsars were completely legitimate, anointed rulers. Both suffered much from relatives in their childhood; both killed their own sons and showed streaks of pathological cruelty and blasphemy. Both were great warriors who defeated Russia’s enemies and expanded the bounds of the kingdom. Both began by honouring the Church; both ended by attempting to bend the Church completely to their will.

 

     There is one very important difference, however. While Ivan never attempted to justify his encroachment on the rights of the Church theoretically, Peter (or his servant, Theophanes Prokopovich) did just that. The result was that Ivan’s caesaropapism disappeared after his death, whereas Peter’s, as we shall see, lasted for another 200 years…


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART II. THE AGE OF REVANCHE (1589-1700)

 

 


 

3. THE WEST: THE ASSAULT ON THE MONARCHY

 

The powers that be have been instituted by God. Therefore he who resists the authorities resist what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement.

Romans 13.1-2.

 

It is lawful and hath been held so through all ages

 for anyone who has the power to call to account a Tyrant or wicked King,

 and after due conviction to depose and put him to death.

John Milton, The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates.

 

Temporal and spiritual are two words brought into the world make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign… A man cannot obey two masters…Seeing there are no men no earth whose bodies are spiritual, there can be no spiritual commonwealth among men that are yet in the flesh.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan.

 

 

     The transition from rebellion against the Church to rebellion against all authorities was inevitable. If Luther tried to resist it, it was nevertheless implicit in his teaching; and the more consistent Calvinists were less afraid to cross the Rubicon by ascribing all authority to the plebs. As Jacques Barzun writes, “if a purer religion, close to the one depicted in the gospel, was attainable by getting rid of superiors in the church, a better social and economic life, close to the life depicted in the gospels, would follow from getting rid of social and political superiors.”[146]

 

     Nevertheless, there was something of a recovery of traditional Christian forms of government in the seventeenth century. In Russia, the autocracy recovered after the devastations wrought by Ivan the Terrible and the Time of Troubles. France recovered from her civil wars with a stable Catholic absolutist monarchy. Monarchs still ruled everywhere, even in formally Calvinist countries such as England and Holland. At the same time the acid of anti-monarchism did not cease to eat away at the foundations of states. While the English Revolution did not succeed in finally abolishing the monarchy, it undoubtedly weakened it – and scattered the seeds of liberalism into absolutist France and elsewhere. Even in Russia there was the serious rebellion of the Old Believers with their “theocratic democratism”, not unlike the contemporary self-governing communities of the American Puritans…

 

     It was the appearance of relatively homogeneous nation-states, with their need for a unifying symbol and centre of power, that saved monarchism for the time being. Only Germany and Italy, still bogged down in a multitude of feudal principalities, escaped the trend towards the monarchical nation-state. Their time would come after the next wave of anti-monarchism had swept away the last stronghold of Catholic absolutism in the French Revolution…

 

 

Holland: the First Capitalist State

 

     The age began with a long-drawn-out struggle for national freedom that prefigured many such struggles in the future. The Dutch Revolution, while less influential than the English in terms of political ideas and influence on the future history of Europe, was nevertheless extremely significant in that it constituted the beginning of the fall of the greatest monarchical power of the age, the Spanish Empire.[147] “The Revolt of the Netherlands,” writes Norman Davies, “which began in 1566 and ended in 1648, constituted a long-running drama which spanned the transition from the supremacy of the Habsburgs to that of France. At the outset, the seventeen provinces of the imperial Burgundian Circle that were transferred to Spanish rule in 1551 presented a mosaic of local privileges and cultural divisions. The feudal aristocracy of the countryside constrasted sharply with the wealthy burghers and fishermen of the coastal towns. The francophone and predominantly Catholic Walloons of Hainault, Namur, and Liège contrasted with the Dutch-speaking and increasingly Calvinist population of Holland, Zeeland, and Utrecht. The central provinces of Flanders and Brabant lay across the main religious and linguistic divide. Over 200 cities controlled perhaps 50 per cent of Europe’s trade, bringing Spain seven times more in taxes than the bullion of the Indies. Certainly, in the initial stages of Spanish rule, the threat to provincial liberties and to the nobles’ control of Church benefices gave greater cause for popular offence than the threat of activating the Inquisition…

 

     “Under the regency of Margaret of Parma, 1559-67, discontent came to a head over a scheme for ecclesiastical reform. Three protesters – William the Silent, Prince of Orange (1533-84), Lamoral, Count of Egmont, and Philip Montmorency, Count of Horn – petitioned the King with the Regent’s permission. They were ridiculed as Geuzen, les Gueux, ‘the Beggars’, and in 1565, in the Edict of Segovia, Philip indicated his refusal to authorize change. Following further petitions for reform, and a meeting in 1566 of confederated nobles at St. Trond, which demanded religious toleration, there occurred a serious outbreak of rioting and religious desecrations. The action of the confederates in helping the Regent to quell the disorders did not deter Philip from ordering general repression. Under the regency of the Duke of Alva, 1567-73, a Council of Tumults, the notorious Bloedbraad or ‘Blood-Council’ was set up to try the King’s opponents. Egmont and Horn were beheaded in the square at Brussels, their severed heads sent to Madrid in a box. William of Orange escaped to lead the continuing fight. With the whole population of the Netherlands condemned to death as heretics by the Church, the south rebelled as well as the north. The ‘Sea Beggars’ attacked shipping. Haarlem, besieged, capitulated. Spanish garrisons spread fire and plunder. Thousands perished from random arrests, mock trials, and casual violence.

 

     “Under the governorships of Don Luis de Requesens, Grand Commander of Castile 1573-6, and of Don John of Austria 1576-8 reconciliation was attempted but failed. Leyden, besieged, survived. The sack of Antwerp during the Spanish Fury of 1576 hardened resistance. Under the regency of the Duke of Parma 1578-92, the split became irreversible. By the Union of Arras (1578) ten southern provinces accepted Spanish terms and recovered their liberties. By the Union of Utrecht (1579) the seven northern provinces resolved to fight for their independence. Thereafter, there was unremitting war…”[148]

 

     “In 1581,” writes Almond, “the states of the Union of Utrecht formally abjured their loyalty to Philip II [of Spain]. They denied his divine right to rule. He had betrayed his trust: ‘It is well known to all that if a prince is appointed by God over the land, it is to protect them from harm, even as a shepherd to the guardianship of his flock. The subjects are not created by God for the sake of the prince but rather the prince is established for his subjects’ sake for without them he would not be a prince. Should he violate the laws, he is to be forsaken by his meanest subjects, and to be no longer recognised as prince.’ These were revolutionary sentiments in the sixteenth century, and for some time to come. Even their authors preferred to avoid becoming a republic and looked around for an alternative monarch who would satisfy their demands…”[149]

 

     Nevertheless, the new State was anything but conventional in form. As Davies writes, “its constitution (1584) ensured that the governments of the seven provinces remained separated from a federal council of state at the Hague. The latter was chaired by an executive Stadholder, whose office was generally held, together with the offices of Captain-General and Admiral-General, by the House of Orange… Despite its peculiar, decentralised constitution, [the Netherlands] had every reason to regard itself as the first modern state.”[150]

 

     “The Dutch Republic of the ‘United Provinces of the Netherlands’ – misleadingly known to the English as Holland – was the wonder of seventeenth-century Europe. It succeeded for the same reasons that its would-be Spanish masters failed: throughout the eighty years of its painful birth, its disposable resources were actually growing. Having resisted the greatest military power of the day, it then became a major maritime power in its own right. Its sturdy burgher society widely practised the virtues of prudent management, democracy, and toleration. Its engineers, bankers, and sailors were justly famed… The Dutch Republic rapidly became a haven for religious dissidents, for capitalists, for philosophers, and for painters.”[151]

 

     The creation of the Dutch Republic was the first political creation of Calvinist Protestantism, and as such showed both the strengths and the weaknesses of such a state. Its strengths have been enumerated. Its main weakness was that at the root of its power lay “the root of all evil” – money. Holland was the first “commercial society”, whose aim, as McClelland writes, is “the creation of wealth”. Its attitude to the state, therefore, was that it “had better stop trying to interfere with the serious business of making money.”[152]

 

     In this connection, it is worth examining the theory, put forward by the German social scientist Max Weber, of a direct link between Protestantism, especially Calvinism, and those attitudes and kinds of working habit that are conducive to capitalism. As Belloc writes, following Weber: “If we ask what it was in Calvin’s doctrine, apart from the opportunities of its moment and its effect against the clergy, which gave it so much power, the answer is, I think, that it provided an awful object of worship and that it appealed at the same time to a powerful human appetite which Catholicism [and Orthodoxy] opposes. The novel object of worship was an Implacable God: the appetite was the love of money… A Philosophy which denied good works and derided abnegation let it [the love of money] loose in all its violence.”[153]

 

     Weber’s theory, writes Landes, postulates “that Protestantism – more specifically, its Calvinist branches – promoted the rise of modern capitalism.. not by easing or abolishing those aspects of the Roman faith that had deterred or hindered free economic activity (the prohibition of usury, for example); nor by encouraging, let alone inventing, the pursuit of wealth; but by defining and sanctioning an ethic of everyday behavior that conduced to business success.

 

     “Calvinistic Protestantism, said Weber, did this initially by affirming the doctrine of predestination. This held that one could not gain salvation by faith or deeds; that question had been decided for everyone from the beginning of time, and nothing could alter one’s fate.

 

     “Such a belief could easily have encouraged a fatalistic attitude. If behavior and faith make no difference, why not live it up? Why be good? Because, according to Calvinism, goodness was a plausible sign of election. Anyone could be chosen, but it was only reasonable to suppose that most of those chosen would show by their character and ways the quality of their souls and the nature of their destiny. This implicit reassurance was a powerful incentive to proper thoughts and behavior. As the Englishwoman Elizabeth Walker wrote her grandson in 1689, alluding to one of the less important but more important signs of grace, ‘All cleanly people are not good, but there are few good people but are cleanly.’ And while hard belief in predestination did not last more than a generation or two (it is not the kind of dogma that has lasting appeal), it was eventually converted into a secular code of behavior: hard work, honesty, seriousness, the thrifty use of money and time (both lent us by God). ‘Time is short,’ admonished the Puritan divine Richard Baxter (1615-1691), ‘and work is long’.

 

     “All of these values help business and capital accumulation, but Weber stressed that the good Calvinist did not aim at riches. (He might easily believe, however, that honest riches are a sign of divine favor.) Europe did not have to wait for the Protestant Reformation to find people who wanted to be rich. Weber’s point is that Protestantism produced a new kind of businessman, a different kind of person, one who aimed to live and work a certain way. It was the way that mattered, and riches were at best a by-product.

 

     “A good Calvinist would say, that was what was wrong with Spain: easy riches, unearned wealth. Compare the Protestant and Catholic attitudes towards gambling in the early modern period. Both condemned it, but Catholics condemned it because one might (would) lose, and no responsible person would jeopardize his well-being and that of others in that manner. The Protestants, on the other hand, condemned because one might win, and that would be bad for character. It was only much later that the Protestant ethic degenerated into a set of maxims for material success and smug, smarmy sermons on the virtues of wealth…

 

     “It is fair to say that most historians today would look upon the Weber thesis as implausible and unacceptable; it had its moment and it is gone.

 

     “I do not agree. Not on the empirical level, where records show that Protestant merchants and manufacturers played a leading role in trade, banking, and industry. In manufacturing centers (fabriques) in France and western Germany, Protestants were typically the employers, Catholics the employed. In Switzerland, the Protestant cantons were the centers of export manufacturing industry (watches, machinery, textiles) the Catholic ones were primarily agricultural. In England, which by the end of the sixteenth century was overwhelmingly Protestant, the Dissenters (read Calvinists) were disproportionately active and influential in the factories and forges of the nascent Industrial Revolution.

 

      “Nor on the theoretical. The heart of the matter lay indeed in the making of a new kind of man – rational, ordered, diligent, productive. These virtues, while not new, were hardly commonplace. Protestantism generalized them among its adherents, who judged one another by conformity to these standards. This is a story in itself,  one that Weber did surprisingly little with: the role of group pressure and mutual scrutiny in assuring performance – everybody looking at everyone else and minding one another’s business.

 

     “Two special characteristics of the Protestants reflect and confirm this link. The first was the stress on instruction and literacy, for girls as well as boys. This was a product of Bible reading. Good Protestants were expected to read the holy scriptures for themselves. (By way of contrast, Catholics were catechized but did not have to read, and they were explicitly discouraged from reading the Bible.) The result: greater literacy and a larger pool of candidates for advanced schooling; also greater assurance of continuity of literacy from generation to generation. Literate mothers matter.

 

     “The second was the importance accorded to time. Here we have what the sociologist would call unobtrusive evidence: the making and buying of clocks and watches. Even in Catholic areas such as France and Bavaria, most clockmakers were Protestant; and the use of these instruments of time measurement and their diffusion to rural areas was far more advanced in Britain and Holland than in Catholic countries. Nothing testifies so much as time sensibility to the ‘urbanization’ of rural society, with all that that implies for rapid diffusion of values and tastes…

 

     “Add to this the growing need for fixed capital (equipment and plant) in the industrial sector. This made continuity crucial – for the sake of continued maintenance and improvement and the accumulation of knowledge and experience. These manufacturing enterprises were very different in this regard from mercantile ones, which often took the form of ad hoc mobilizations of capital and labor, brought together for a voyage or venture and subsequently dissolved.”[154]

 

     If Protestantism encouraged capitalism, capitalism in turn encouraged democracy. For, as Ian Buruma writes, “there is a link between business interests – or at least the freedom to trade – and liberal, even democratic, politics. Money tends to even things out, is egalitarian and blind to race or creed. As Voltaire said about the London stock exchange: Muslims, Christians and Jews trade as equals, and bankrupts are the only infidels. Trade can flourish if property is protected by laws. That means protection from the state, as well as from other individuals.”[155]

 

 

The Anglican Monarchy

 

     England under the Tudors achieved a degree of stability and greatness amidst the extreme religious instability of the time under the “Virgin Queen”, Elizabeth I. Now Susan Doran has shown that Elizabeth’s overriding preoccupation in her correspondence on religious topics was the assertion of royal supremacy. Thus in her letters to James VI of Scotland (later James I of England), she lashes out “against Presbyterians and Jesuits alike for their separate attacks on royal authority and power.” Doran claims that Elizabeth’s views had their roots in a Christian Platonism according to which earthly rule was a reflection of the Divine harmony and order, and that consequently “diversity, variety, contention and vain love of singularity, either in our ministers or in the people, must need provoke the pleasure of Almighty God.”[156]

 

     Elizabeth’s position as head of both Church and State was necessitated by the constant threat of civil war between Catholics and Calvinists. It is instructive to compare her position with that of the almost exactly contemporary Moghul Emperor Akbar, who had to avert a similar threat of civil war between Hindus and Muslims. Sir A.C. Lyall writes: “[Akbar] instituted a kind of metaphysical society, over which he presided in person, and in which he delighted in pitting against each other Persian mystics, Hindu pantheists, Christian missionaries and orthodox Mohammedans. He even assumed by public edict the spiritual headship of his empire, and declared himself the first appellate judge of ecclesiastical questions. ‘Any opposition,’ said the edict, ‘on the part of subjects to such orders passed by His Majesty shall involve damnation in the world to come, and loss of religion and property in this life.’ The liturgy of the Divine Faith, as it was named, was a sort of Iranian sun-worship, embodying eclectic doctrines and the principle of universal tolerance. We may be reminded that the Roman Emperor Julian adopted, like Akbar, the sun as the image of all-pervading dignity; and that he also asserted pontifical authority. In each instance the new theosophy disappeared at the death of its promulgator; for great religious revolutions are never inaugurated by temporal authority, but invariably begin among the people. Nothing, however, could demonstrate more clearly the strength of Akbar’s government than the fact that he could take upon himself spiritual supremacy, and proclaim with impunity doctrines that subverted the fundamental law and the primary teaching of Islam. In not other Mohammedan kingdom could the sovereign have attempted such an enterprise without imminent peril to his throne. Akbar’s political object was to provide some common ground upon which Hindus and Mohammedans might be brought nearer to religious unity; though it is hardly necessary to add that no such modus vivendi has at any time been discovered.”[157]

 

     Elizabeth’s task was hardly less difficult, and the attempt to contain the pressures of conflicting religions under an absolutist monarch collapsed within forty years of her death. However, she made a valiant attempt, clothing and obscuring the Calvinist, and therefore anti-monarchical, creed of the State in a purely Catholic monarchical pomp and ritualism. Thus while the 39 articles of the Anglican Creed admitted only two sacraments, baptism and the eucharist (the latter interpreted in a distinctly Protestant sense), and rejected the sacrament of the priesthood, room was somehow found for a sacramental mystique of the monarchy, as in Shakespeare’s Richard II (III, ii, 54-7):

 

Not all the water in the rough rude sea

Can wash the balm off from an anointed king;

The breath of worldly men cannot depose

The deputy elected by the Lord.

 

and Hamlet (IV, v, 123-4):

 

There’s such a divinity doth hedge a king

That treason can but peep to what it would…

 

     It is worth pondering why the monarchy could continue to exert such a mystical attraction in a nation which was well on the way to ejecting all mysticism from its political and ecclesiastical life. Part of the answer must lie in the upsurge of patriotism which accompanied the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, whose focus became the supposedly virgin Queen Elizabeth. Another part must lie in the nostalgia for the past that was so rapidly being destroyed, a past in which the figure of the anointed king played such an important role. Even today, when democratism appears to have finally triumphed, the monarchy remains popular in England. And at the heart of the democracy, Westminster Abbey, there still lies the body of the most holy of the Orthodox kings of England, Edward the Confessor, like a rose among thorns. It is as if the English people, even while leading the way into the new democratic age, subconsciously feel that they have lost something vitally important, and cling to the holy corpse with despairing tenacity, refusing to believe that the soul has finally departed.

 

     Thus even such a convinced democrat as C.S. Lewis could write of the monarchy as “the channel through which all the vital elements of citizenship - loyalty, the consecration of secular life, the hierarchical principle, splendour, ceremony, continuity - still trickle down to irrigate the dustbowl of modern economic Statecraft".[158] And even today, hysteria can seize a whole nation on the death of a princess, for little other reason than that she was a princess. Thus monarchism is something deeply rooted with the human psyche which we attempt to uproot at our peril…

 

     Most recently, Roger Scruton has spoken of the English monarchy as “the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere. Not being elected by popular vote, the monarch cannot be understood as representing the views only of the present generation. He or she is born into the position, and also passes it on to a legally defined successor. The monarch is in a real sense the voice of history, and the very accidental[159] way in which the office is acquired emphasises the grounds of the monarch’s legitimacy, in the history of a place and a culture. This is not to say that kings and queens cannot be mad, irrational, self-interested or unwise. It is to say, rather, that they owe their authority and their influence precisely to the fact that they speak for something other than the present desires of present voters, something vital to the continuity and community which the act of voting assumes. Hence, if they are heard at all, they are head as limiting the deomocratic process, in just the way that it must be limited if it is to issue in reasonable legislation. It was in such a way that the English conceived their Queen, in the sunset days of Queen Victoria. The sovereign was an ordinary person, transfigured by a peculiar enchantment which represented not political power but the mysterious authority of an ancient ‘law of the land’. When the monarch betrays that law – as, in the opinion of many, the Stuarts betrayed it – a great social and spiritual unrest seizes the common conscience, unrest of a kind that could never attend the misdemeanours of an elected president, or even the betrayal of trust by a political party.”[160]

 

     Chadwick writes: “Something about an English king distinguished him from the godly prince of Germany or Sweden. While everyone agreed that a lawful ruler was called of God, and that obedience was a Christian duty, it would not have been so natural for a Lutheran to write that a divinity doth hedge a king. Offspring of an ancient line, crowned with the anointing of medieval ritual, he retained an aura of mystique which neither Renaissance nor Reformation at once dispelled. It is curious to find the Catholic king of France touching the scrofulous to heal them until a few years before the French Revolution. It is much more curious to find the Protestant sovereigns of England, from Elizabeth to James II, continuing to perform the same ritual cures, and to note that the last reigning sovereign to touch was Queen Anne in 1714… King James I had been educated in Scotland, undertook the duty reluctantly, and began his first rite by preaching a sermon against superstition. But this reluctance faded, and Charles I had no qualms. The supernatural aura of the anointed head was long in dying, and must be reckoned with when judging the unusual English forms of the divine right.”[161]

 

     Another factor that preserved for the Anglican kings – for the time being – a certain mystical aura was the critical role that the kings played, as we have noted, in preserving the balance between the Catholic and Calvinist tendencies in English religion. For as William Pitt the Elder said in 1760, the English had “a Calvinist creed, a Popish liturgy, and an Arminian clergy.”[162] This unnatural combination could only be held together by ascribing to the monarchy a mystical aura that raised it above all factions and maintained peace betweeen them.

 

     The importance of this order, of which the king was the corner-stone, was beautifully put by Shakespeare in Troilus and Cressida (I, 3, 109):

 

Take but degree away, untune that string,

And hark what discord follows! Each thing melts

In mere oppugnancy: the bounded waters

Should lift their bosoms higher than the shores,

And make a sop of all this solid globe;

Strength should be lord of imbecility,

And the rude son should strike his father dead;

Force should be right; or, rather, right and wrong –

Between whose endless jar justice resides –

Should lose their names, and so should justice too.

 

     Elizabeth’s successor, James I, also believed in hierarchy and the order of being, and considered that “equality is the mother of confusion and an enemy of the Unity which is the Mother of Order”.[163] At the same time he acknowledged that there is an important distinction between an autocrat, who, in King James’ words, “acknowledges himself ordained for his people”, and a tyrant, who “thinks his people ordained for him, a prey to his passions and inordinate appetites.” Although a king was “a little God to sit on this throne and rule over other men”, he nevertheless had to provide a good example to his subjects”.[164]

 

     But from the accession to the throne of James’ son, Charles I, the power of the monarchy went into steep decline. For as Charles, under the influence of his Catholic wife, while not formally abandoning the via media, leaned further to the right, the Protestant landowners, fattened from the proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries, became increasingly self-confident and assertive. They were determined never to let this wealth slip from their hands, whether through a Catholic restoration returning their lands to the Church or through allowing the king the right to tax their money from them…

 

 

The Old Testament in the New World

 

     The United States of America was founded on strictly religious principles, the principles of Calvinism. Its founders, fleeing persecution at the hands of the Anglican State Church in England, found in New England almost ideal conditions in which to put their doctrine of “theocratic democratism” into practice. These conditions were described in the famous book by the early nineteenth-century political theorist Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America:-

 

     “There was a strong family likeness between all the English colonies as they came to birth. All, from the beginning, seemed destined to let freedom grow, not the aristocratic freedom of their motherland, but a middle-class and democratic freedom of which the world’s history had not previously provided a complete example…

 

     “All the immigrants who came to settle on the shores of New England belonged to the well-to-do classes at home. From the start, when they came together on American soil, they presented the unusual phenomenon of a society in which there were no great lords, no common people, and, one may almost say, no rich or poor. In proportion to their numbers, these men had a greater share of accomplishments than could be found in any European nation now. All, perhaps without a single exception, had received a fairly advanced education, and several had made a European reputation by their talents and their knowledge. The other colonies [including the southern English colonies such as Virginia] had been founded by unattached adventurers, whereas the immigrants to New England brought with them wonderful elements of order and morality; they came with their wives and children to the wilds. But what distinguished them from all others was the very aim of their enterprise. No necessity forced them to leave their country; they gave up a desirable social position and assured means of livelihood; nor was their object in going to the New World to better their position or accumulate wealth; they tore themselves away from home comforts in obedience to a purely intellectual craving; in facing the inevitable sufferings of exile they hoped for the triumph of an idea.

 

     “The immigrants, or as they so well called themselves, the Pilgrims, belonged to that English sect whose austere principles had led them to be called Puritans. Puritanism was not just a religious doctrine; in many respects it shared the most democratic and republican theories. That was the element which had aroused its most dangerous adversaries. Persecuted by the home government, and with strict principles offended by the everyday ways of the society in which they lived, the Puritans sought a land so barbarous and neglected by the world that there at last they might be able to live in their own way and pray to God in freedom.”[165]

 

     In the imagination of the Pilgrims, their colonisation of America was like Joshua’s conquest of the Promised Land. Just as the Canaanites had to be driven out before the sons of God in the Old Testament, so did the Red Indians before the sons of God in the New. Thus one New England meeting agreed:

 

1.      The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof. Voted.

2.      The Lord may give the earth or any part of it to His chosen people. Voted.

3.      We are His chosen people. Voted.[166]

 

     And just as Church and State were organically one in Joshua’s Israel, so it was in the Pilgrim Fathers’ America. Thus de Tocqueville writes: “Puritanism… was almost as much a political theory as a religious doctrine. No sooner had the immigrants landed on that inhospitable coast described by Nathaniel Morton than they made it their first care to organise themselves as a society. They immediately passed an act which stated:

 

     “’We whose names are underwritten … having undertaken for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and the honour of our king and country a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil body politic, for our better ordering and preservation, and furtherance of the ends aforesaid: and by virtue hereof, do enact, constitute, and frame such just and equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and officers, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the general good of the colony, unto which we promise all due submission and obedience.’”[167]

 

     This act of 1620 was the nearest practical incarnation, before or since, of the idea of the social contract that became such a dominant political idea in the English-speaking countries. It was made possible by the great distance of the new colony from the English king, and by the system adopted by the Crown whereby “a number of immigrants were given the right to form a political society under the patronage of the motherland and allowed to govern themselves in any way not contrary to her laws.”[168] Also, of course, the experiment was carried out in a new world, where neither the weight of historical institutions, such as feudalism and the official Church, nor great differences in wealth or limitations of space or the pressure of external enemies, hindered the development of a society that was unique in the degree of its democratism and egalitarianism.

 

     But this is not to say, of course, that the Pilgrims came to America with their minds a complete tabula rasa politically speaking. In 1648, at a synod in Cambridge, Mass., they set out their ideas about authority in quite sophisticated terms: “This Government of the church is a mixed Government…. In respect of Christ, the Head and King of the church, and the Sovereign power residing in Him, and exercised by Him, it is a Monarchy. In respect of the body, or Brotherhood of the church, and power granted unto them, it resembles a Democracy. In respect of the Presbytery (i.e. the Elders) and power committed to them, it is an Aristocracy” (X, 3).”[169]

 

     The “theocratic democratism” of the Puritan communities became the basis of the federal structure of the United States of America. They claimed that this system corresponded to the practice of the early Church, and especially to the structure of ancient Israel, with its distrust of all monarchical power. For God had allowed Samuel to anoint the first king, Saul, only on sufferance, and the prophets are full of denunciations of the evil deeds of the kings.

 

     This claim was supported by A.P. Lopukhin: "On examining the structure of the Mosaic State, one is involuntarily struck by its similarity to the organisation of the state structure in the United States of Northern America." "The tribes in their administrative independence correspond exactly to the states, each of which is a democratic republic." The Senate and Congress "correspond exactly to the two higher groups of representatives in the Mosaic State - the 12 and 70 elders." "After settling in Palestine, the Israelites first (in the time of the Judges) established a union republic, in which the independence of the separate tribes was carried through to the extent of independent states."[170]

 

     However, it needs to be said, first, that although ancient Israel was indeed a theocracy, as such it was an embryonic form, not of the State, but of the Church; for only the Church can be said to have God alone as its Head. The confusion between Church and State was possible in the case of ancient Israel, which represents a very early, embryonic and unrepeatable stage in the history of the people of God. But in the New Testament period, the difference, if not always complete separation, between Church and State is an indisputable fact. Christ recognised it - hence His famous words about giving to God what is God's and to Caesar what is Caesar's. Caesar was a king, and neither Christ nor the Apostles either deny or criticise that fact. For all their instructions were directed towards the creation of the Church, the Kingdom which is not of this world and which follows quite different laws from those which obtain in this age.

 

     Secondly, the Church is a democracy. It is a Kingdom, the Kingdom of God on earth; and even if we abstract God's Kingship from a consideration of its structure, the element of monarchical hierarchy is very pronounced. For just as the 12 and 70 elders of the Mosaic Church were not elected by the people, but were appointed by Moses, so the 12 and 70 Apostles of the New Testament Church were not elected by the believers, but were appointed by Christ Himself. And even though the successors of the Apostles, the Bishops, are in principle elected, it is not their election which makes them bishops, but their consecration by other bishops - a function that cannot be performed by laymen.

 

     Indeed, if one examines the structure of the Orthodox Church since apostolic times, it resembles the federal structure of the Presbyterians or United States only in not having a single head on earth; for each diocese is like a mini-kingdom, and each bishop is like a king, being a regent of the King of heaven. And this is God's appointed order for the Church in both the Old and New Testaments. Nor do the Biblical words about the royal priesthood of all Christians (I Peter 2.9) provide a sound basis for Protestant democratism. For, as Berdyaev writes: "This [universal royal priesthood] by no means implies a denial of the significance of the hierarchical principle in history, as various sectarians would have it. One can come to the universal royal priesthood only by the hierarchical path of the Church. Indeed, the Kingdom of God itself is hierarchical. And the universal royal priesthood is not a denial of the hierarchical structure of existence."[171]

 

     Be that as it may, the Puritan colonies of New England represent a striking attempt to reproduce the theocratic structure of Israelite society in the time of the Old Testament Judges. Moreover, the laws of this society were taken almost entirely from the Mosaic law. Thus in 1650 the little state of Connecticut drew up a code of laws, which begins: “If any man after legal conviction shall have or worship any other God but the Lord God, he shall be put to death.”

 

     De Tocqueville continues: “There follow ten or twelve provisions of the same sort taken word for word from Deuteronomy, Exodus, or Leviticus. “Blasphemy, sorcery, adultery, and rape are punished by death; a son who outrages his parents is subject to the same penalty. Thus the legislation of a rough, half-civilised people was transported into the midst of an educated society with gentle mores; as a result the death penalty has never been more frequently prescribed by the laws or more seldom carried out.

 

    “The framers of these penal codes were especially concerned with the maintenance of good behaviour and sound mores in society, so they constantly invaded the sphere of conscience, and there was hardly a sin not subject to the magistrate’s censure. The reader will have noticed the severity of the penalties for adultery and rape. Simple intercourse between unmarried persons was likewise harshly repressed. The judge had discretion to impose a fine or a whipping or to order the offenders to marry. If the records of the old courts of New Haven are to be trusted, prosecutions of this sort were not uncommon; under the date May 1, 1660, we find a sentence imposing a fine and reprimand on a girl accused of uttering some indiscreet words and letting herself be kissed. The code of 1650 is full of preventive regulations. Idleness and drunkenness are severely punished. Innkeepers may give each customer only a certain quantity of wine; simple lying, if it could do harm, is subject to a fine or a whipping. In other places the lawgivers, completely forgetting the great principle of religious liberty which they themselves claimed in Europe, enforced attendance at divine service by threat of fines and went so far as to impose severe penalties, and often the death penalty, on Christians who chose to worship God with a ritual other than their own. Finally, sometimes the passion for regulation which possessed them led them to interfere in matters completely unworthy of such attention. Hence there is a clause in the same code forbidding the use of tobacco. We must not forget that these ridiculous and tyrannical laws were not imposed from outside – they were voted by the free agreement of all the interested parties themselves – and that their mores were even more austere and puritanical than their laws. In 1649 an association was solemnly formed in Boston to check the worldly luxury of long hair…

 

     “Clearly they had a higher and more comprehensive conception of the duties of society towards its members than had the lawgivers of Europe at that time…”[172]

 

     And consequently “tolerance” was not, for the Puritans, that queen among virtues that it has become in the contemporary West. Thus in 1645 Thomas Shepard of Newtown (Cambridge) said to Hugh Peter of Salem (where the famous witches’ trial took place): “Toleration of all upon pretence of conscience – I thank God my soul abhors it. The godly in former times never fought for the liberty of consciences by pleading for liberty for all.”[173]

 

     Under the influence of the European Enlightenment, America was to move away from its “democratic totalitarian” beginnings to complete separation of Church and State and liberty of conscience. In other words, it moved, in the language of Sir Isaiah Berlin, from a society whose slogan was “freedom to” to a society whose slogan was “freedom from”. However, it is as well to remember to what extremes of repression the notion of religious liberty can lead when that religion is the revolutionary one of Calvinism…

 

     Let us now return to that society from which the Pilgrim Fathers fled, and which displayed the richest variety of conflicting religio-political conceptions.

 

 

The English Revolution

 

     The English revolution - “that grand crisis of morals, religion and government”, as Coleridge called it[174] - was, together with the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution of 1917, the most important event of modern European history. Like the later revolutions, if not to the same degree, it replaced a mild and moral monarch with a bloody and immoral anarchy. Like them, too, it elicited a very broad range of arguments on the fundamental questions of the origin and nature of the State and its relationship to the Church, parliament and people. With the single exception of the Orthodox symphony of powers – which, however, received a powerful contemporary advocate in the person of Patriarch Nicon of Moscow (see next chapter) – the pros and cons of all the major forms of government were exhaustively discussed.

 

     “Taking everything together,” wrote Guizot, “the English revolution was essentially political; it was brought about in the midst of a religious people and in a religious age; religious thoughts and passions were its instruments; but its chief design and definite aim were political, were devoted to liberty, and the abolition of all absolute power.”[175]

 

     What Guizot meant is illustrated by the words of the revolutionary John Lilburne, clothing his communist political programme in religious quotations: “Christ doth not choose many rich, nor many wise, but the fools, idiots, base and contempible poor men and women in the esteem of the world.”[176]

 

     The English revolution was not a revolution in the sense that it completely destroyed the old forms, being a violent and irreversible overthrow of the existing system. Rather, it was a “revolution” in the older sense of a cyclical movement; for it brought things back to the status quo ante formally, if not essentially. Thus in the space of two generations, from 1642 to 1688, England underwent successively: an Anglican monarchy, a Calvinist parliamentocracy, the beginnings of a communist revolution, a military dictatorship, the restoration of the Anglican monarchy, a Catholic absolute monarchy, and the second restoration of the Anglican (now constitutional) monarchy.

 

     The English revolution illustrated the fact that, to misquote Dostoyevsky: “If the king does not exist, everything is permitted.” In a remarkably short space of time the initiative passed from the king and the aristocracy to the propertied gentry to the army to the army agitators, until the slide to the extreme left was halted by force – the force of Cromwell’s military dictatorship. The eventual winners were the landowning aristocracy, who succeeded in muzzling the power of the king, on the one hand, and suppressing the revolutionary commoners, on the other.

 

     Let us examine the two main sets of ideas that the revolution threw up: the Divine Right of Kings, on the one hand, and the sovereignty of the people, on the other.

 

     Now we have seen that the first century or so of the Protestant Reformation witnessed a strengthening of monarchical power. This had happened for different reasons in different countries: on the continent because the Protestants had looked to the Princes to protect them against the Catholic powers, and because the rising class of the bourgeoisie wanted some protection against the anti-mercantile aristocracy[177], in England because the king himself had initiated the break with Rome for his own personal and political ends.[178] But Protestantism of both the Lutheran and Calvinist varieties contained within itself the seeds of the overthrow of all authority, both religious and political; it threatened bishops as well as Popes, kings as well as bishops. Luther’s doctrine of the priesthood of all believers directly attacked the special authority of bishops and priests; but indirectly it attacked the power of kings, too, insofar as they were perceived as receiving their authority from God via the priesthood in the sacrament of royal anointing. Calvin’s doctrine of the elect’s absolute assurance of salvation, and of the supremacy of conscience over law, was as much a threat to the laws of the kings as it was to the doctrines of the bishops. Moreover, the Calvinist doctrine contained a frightening corollary which was rarely expressed in so many words but was about to be expressed in many actions: the conviction, namely, that just as the elect had absolute assurance of their own salvation, they had similar assurance of their opponents’ damnation, and could therefore dispose of them with the ruthlessness that befitted the knowledge of their worthlessness. Transposed onto a more secular soil and into a less godly age, this belief would justify the elimination of whole classes and peoples supposedly doomed to extinction by the ruthless and irresistible onward march of history…

 

     In England, the Stuart kings, being conscious of at least some of these consequences of the State’s officially Calvinist doctrine, began to move to the religious and political “right” at the same time as their subjects began to fan out, as it were, to the left. In international affairs, they became less unambiguously supportive of their brethren in the Protestant International, and more supportive of their fellow monarchs’ authority, whether they were Catholic or Protestant (after the Restoration, James II received subsidies from the ultramontane Louis XIV). In internal affairs, they began to act more by fiat, consulting less with parliament and other elected assemblies, and began to develop the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings.

 

     According to this theory, kings, having their authority from God, and having no authority higher than themselves on earth, cannot be convicted of wrongdoing in the political (as opposed to the personal) sphere. As Shakespeare puts it in Richard II:

 

And shall the figure of God’s majesty,

His captain, steward, deputy elect,

Anointed, crowned, planted many years,

Be judged by subject and inferior breath?

 

     The principle that the king can do no wrong is “a logical inference,” writes Barzun, “from sovereignty itself: the ultimate source of law cannot be charged with making a wrong law or giving a wrong command. Modern democracies follow the same logic when they given their lawmakers immunity for anything said or done in the exercise of their duty; they are members of the sovereign power. Constitutions, it is true, limit lawmaking; but the sovereign people can change the constitution. There is no appeal against the acts of the sovereign unless the sovereign allows, as when it is provided that citizens can sue the state.

 

     “Of course, the monarch can do wrong in another sense – in a couple of senses. He can add up a sum and get a wrong total and he can commit a wrongful act morally speaking – cheating at cards or killing his brother. To make clear this distinction between sovereign and human being, theorists developed quite early the doctrine that ‘the king has two bodies’; as a man he is fallible, as king he is not. Similarly in elective governments, a distinction is made between the civil servant acting in his official capacity and as a private citizen…”[179]

 

     The first Stuart King, James I of England and VI of Scotland, wrote two books on the Divine Right of Kings, Basilikon Doron (The Royal Gift) and The True Law of Free Monarchies, in which the most important word was “free” (i.e. free from all limitations). He argued: just as God is the Father of mankind, “so the style of Pater patriae was ever, and is commonly applied to Kings.”[180] As such, the King does not merely represent his people: he embodies them – which is why in his edicts he says We, not I.[181]

 

     In its fully developed form, writes Ashton, “the patriarchal theory of royal authority was to prove a powerful argument both against the idea that government originated in a political contract between ruler and ruled and against the far more influential notion that representative government and the limitations which it placed on the royal exercise of power were immemorial features of the constitution…. Just as kings were little Gods, so were fathers little monarchs. He who does not honour the king, maintained Thomas Jordan, cannot truly honour his own parents, as the fifth commandment bids him. So, in his speech on the scaffold in February, 1649, the royalist Lord Capel affirmed ‘very confidently that I do die here… for obeying that fifth commandment given by God himself.’.. ‘For this subordination of children is the foundation of all regal authority, by the ordination of God himself.’”[182]

 

     The best known defence of the Divine Right of Kings was Sir Robert Filmer’s Patriarchia or the Natural Power of Kings, which was written during Cromwell’s dictatorship, and published in 1680, during the Restoration of the Monarchy under Charles II. His thinking was based on the idea that Adam was the first father and king of the whole human race. “He believed,” writes Western, “that God had given the sovereignty of the world to Adam and that it had passed by hereditary descent, through the sons of Noah and the heads of the nations into which mankind was divided at the Confusion of Tongues, to all the modern rulers of the world. Adam was the father of all mankind and so all other men were bound to obey him: this plenary power has passed to his successors.”[183]

 

     The problem with this view, according to John Locke in his First Treatise of Civil Government (1681), as interpreted by McClelland, is that “the book of Genesis does not actually say that God gave the world to Adam to rule; Adam is never referred to as king.” However, this is not a powerful objection, because, even if the word “king” is not used, God does say to Adam that he is to have “dominion over… every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1.28). But “Locke then goes on to say: suppose we concede, for which there is no biblical evidence, that Adam really was king by God’s appointment. That still leaves the awkward fact that Genesis makes no mention of the kingly rights of the sons of Adam; there is simply no reference to the right of hereditary succession. Locke then goes on to say: suppose we concede both Adam’s title to kingship and the title of the sons of Adam, for neither of which there is biblical evidence, how does that help kings now to establish their titles by Divine Right? Despite the biblical concern with genealogy, the line of Adam’s posterity has become hopelessly scrambled. How can any king at the present time seriously claim that he is in the line of direct descent from Adam?… Because the genealogy since Adam is scrambled, it is perfectly possible that all the present kings are usurpers, or all the kings except one. Perhaps somewhere the real, direct descendant of Adam is alive and living in obscurity, cheated of his birthright to universal monarchy by those pretending to call themselves kings in the present world.”[184]

 

     However, shorn of its dependence on the idea that Adam was the first king, Filmer’s essential idea, that kingship, like fatherhood, is natural and therefore Divine in origin, is not so easily refuted. The people, on the other hand, “are not born free by nature” and “there never was any such thing as an independent multitude, who at first had a natural right to a community [of goods]”.

 

     As Harold Nicolson writes: “‘This conceit of original freedom’, as he said, was ‘the only ground’ on which thinkers from ‘the heathen philosophers’ down to Hobbes had built the idea that governments were created by the deliberate choice of free men. He believed on the contrary, as an early opponent put it, that ‘the rise and right of government’ was natural and native, not voluntary and conventional’. Subjects therefore could not have a right to overturn a government because the original bargain had not been kept. There were absurdities and dangers in the opposing view. ‘Was a general meeting of a whole kingdom ever known for the election of a Prince? Was there any example of it ever found in the world?’ Some sort of majority decision, or the assumption that a few men are allowed to decide for the rest, are in fact the only ways in which government by the people can be supposed to have been either initiated or carried on. But both are as inconsistent as monarchy with the idea that men are naturally free. ‘If it be true that men are by nature free-born and not to be governed without their own consents and that self-preservation is to be regarded in the first place, it is not lawful for any government but self-government to be in the world… To pretend that a major part, or the silent consent of any part, may be interpreted to bind the whole people, is both unreasonable and unnatural; it is against all reason for men to bind others, where it is against nature for men to bind themselves. Men that boast so much of natural freedom are not willing to consider how contradictory and destructive the power of a major part is to the natural liberty of the whole people.’ The claims of representative assemblies to embody the will of the people are attacked on these lines, in a manner recalling Rousseau. Filmer also points out that large assemblies cannot really do business and so assemblies delegate power to a few of their number: ‘hereby it comes to pass that public debates which are imagined to be referred to a general assembly of a kingdom, are contracted into a particular or private assembly’. In short ‘Those governments that seem to be popular are kinds of petty monarchies’ and ‘It is a false and improper speech to say that a whole multitude, senate, council, or any multitude whatsoever doth govern where the major part only rules; because many of the multitude that are so assembled… are governed against and contrary to their wills.’”[185]

 

     The Royalist position was well summed up in an address presented to King Charles II by the elders of Cambridge University in 1681: “We still believe and maintain that our Kings derive not their title from the people, but from God; that to Him only they are accountable; that it belongs not to subjects either to create or censure, but to honour and obey their sovereign, who comes to be so by a fundamental hereditary right of succession, which no religion, no law, no fault or forfeiture can alter or diminish.”[186]

 

     However, the theory of the Divine Right of Kings was dealt a fatal blow in 1688, when the Catholic King James II was forced to flee and the Dutch Protestant William III took power in the “Glorious Revolution” (or “Glorious Compromise”, as Barzun puts it) that replaced Catholic absolutism with Protestant constitutional monarchy.[187]

 

     If the Divine Right of Kings was dealt a fatal blow by the English Revolution, the same cannot be said of the anti-monarchical doctrines that the revolution threw up. For, while defeated in England, they entered the subconsciousness of European thought, emerging into consciousness again at the time of the French revolution. The most important doctrine was that of the Levellers, a religio-political sect that had an important influence on Cromwell’s New Model Army.

 

     “The Levellers,” write Downing and Millman, “were so called because they insisted that since all men were equal before God so should they be equal before the law. They were never a political party in the modern sense, but they put forward a number of Leveller programmes. On the basis of these programmes, the Levellers gained support and allies, particularly in London where most of their activities were centred. They were able to raise thousands of signatures for their petitions and thousands turned out for their demonstrations; their support ranged from religious radicals to craftsmen, small masters and shopkeepers. In the same tradition as many religious radicals, they appealed for freedom of religious belief. In pamphlets and petitions they demanded liberty of conscience, the disestablishment of the Church and the abolition of compulsory tithes. As time went on, their outlook became more secular[188] with demands for legal reforms and for equal application of the laws, the end of imprisonment for debt, the abolition of trade monopolies and the end of press censorship. They appealed to many people who had expected and hoped that the end of the war [the first Civil War, which ended in 1646] would herald a new order but instead were faced with high taxes, economic depression and a Parliament which abused its powers.

 

     “The truly revolutionary programme of the Levellers emerged from their attack on the unrepresentativeness of England’s constitution. They looked back to the period when the Norman conquerors had imposed their tyrannical laws on the people of England and looked forward to a new order in which the sovereignty of the people was central and when representative institutions were democratically elected. The alliance with the army was not as strange as might first appear, for the army had entered the arena of national politics and their claim that they were ‘not a mere mercenary army’ but defenders of the people’s liberties clearly had resonances with the Levellers. In the heady mixture of radical ideas, stirred by unrest among the soldiers for the delay in the settlement of their grievances, the Levellers drew up their challenge to the commanders of the army. In October 1647 in The Case of the Army Truly Stated, they strongly argued for actions to be taken speedily to redress the soldiers’ grievances. From the specifics relating to the army the Case moved on a more general attack on Parliament and demands for long-term constitutional reforms. Fairfax, the Commander-in-Chief of the New Model Army, knew that if he was to retain unity he must respond quickly. A General Council was summoned to a meeting at Putney church in London on 28 October 1647. These discussions, now famous as the Putney Debates, have become historically significant because they attempted to provide a new constitution for England. At the centre of these debates on democracy was another Leveller manifesto, The Agreement of the People, jointly drafter by civilian and army Levellers…

 

     The Agreement called for the same freedoms as the other Leveller manifestos but went further in its claims for the rights of the people within a new constitutional and democratic framework. The basic principle of the new constitution was that it was to be subscribed by the people who would elect a representative parliament, answerable only to the people and not to the King nor the House of Lords. ‘Therefore these things in the Agreement, the people are to claim as their native right and price of their blood, which you obliged absolutely to procure for them. And these being the foundation of freedom, it is necessary that they should be settled unalterably, which can be done by no means but this Agreement with the people.’ Controls on parliamentary power would be effected by biennial Parliaments and the decentralization of power from central government to local authorities, also democratically elected. To achieve this, an extension of the franchise was imperative; althought the Levellers were accused of speaking for ‘hobnayles, clouted shoes and leather aprons’, they did not argue for universal suffrage – servants, apprentices, beggars and women (the latter never even mentioned) were excluded. To twentieth-century eyes, this is a remarkable omission but the Levellers wanted the vote for those who were truly independent and the argument against giving it to servants, apprentices and women was that their vote could too easily by influenced by their ‘masters’. Even so, the Levellers programme was too radical to be acceptable to Cromwell and the other army grandees and neither side was prepared to make concessions…

 

     “…A return to fighting did not halt the progress of the radical impulse which during the 1640s and 50s opened up the possibility of a fundamental overturning of seventeenth-century society. During 1648 the Agreement of the People continued to be discussed and a compromise reached. Some reforms recommended by the Levellers were adopted by the government of the new republic, the Commonwealth, which abolished the House of Lords and the monarchy the following year. The failure to concede the more fundamental reforms was greeted by [the Levellers’ leaders] Lilburne, Walwyn and Overton with a series of pamphlets denouncing the new government as hypocritical and despotic. They were all arrested and imprisoned in the Tower. Cromwell, recognizing their threat to the stability of the new Parliament, warned ‘if you do not break them, they will break you’.”[189]

 

     Another revolutionary sect was the Diggers, who followed in the communist traditions of the Bohemian Taborites and German and Dutch Anabaptists. “In April 1649,” write Downing and Millman, “a group of poor men and women collected on the common on St. George’s Hill in Surrey and began to dig up the land and form a squatter community. Led by the charismatic George Winstanley their actions symbolized the assumption of ownership of common land. Winstanley believed in universal salvation and in what we would now call communist theories, that all property should be held in common. His visions of common ownership, rather than private property, also extended to equality between the sexes. Drawing on a theory of natural rights, Winstanley also quoted the Bible to support his arguments. Rejecting the traditional teachings of the Church, his was a visionary form of spirituality.

 

     “The Digger colony on St. George’s Hill was not unique; there were others in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Gloucestershire and Nottinghamshire, as well as in other parts of the country. The Diggers of ‘True Levellers’ produced specific demands that confiscated Church, Crown and Royalists’ lands be turned over to the poor. Set out in The Law of Freedom, Winstanley challenged existing property relations in the name of true Christian freedom and put forward his hopes for a communist Utopia. Earlier had had written: ‘they had resovled to work and eat together, making the earth a common treasury, doth join hands with Christ to lift up the creation from bondage, and restores all things from the curse.’ Almost inevitably, the Digger colonies failed, some harassed by local residents, others by local justices. However, their ideas lay in their ideas and their actions…

 

     “One group, known as the Ranters, pushed toleration to the limit. In no way a sect nor an organized congretation, this loose group of individuals provoked fear and hostility quite out of proportion to their numbers. As individuals they were undeniably provocative; taking their belief in the individual’s personal relationship with God to its extreme, they broke with all traditions and moral constraints. By the standards of their day they appeared sexually and socially immoral….

 

     “Mainstream Protestantism was, however, to face its biggest challenge from the Quakers. The Quakers of the seventeenth century had little in common with the Friends of today, known for their pacifism and quietism. The Quakers originated in the north of England and found adherents among farmers and artisans as well as the poor. Like the Diggers, they believed in universal salvation and the notion of Christ within the individual. Their success in evangelising is proved by the numbers of converst: in 1652 they numbered about 500, by 1657 there were perhaps 50,000. Their leaders were often flamboyant and aggressive in their beliefs; Quakers also demanded religious freedom alongside calls for social reforms. They were to be found disrupting services in the ‘steeplehouses’, their name for parish churches. They refused to pay tithes and challenged the authority of local magistrates. Their belief in equality of all men in the sight of God led them to eschew traditional forms of deference; they refused ‘hat-honour’, the removing of hats in front of figures of authority. Equality also meant that large numbers of women were attracted to the Quaker faith and shared in the preaching and dissemination of the Quaker faith. The trial of James Nayler was significant not just in the brutality of Nayler’s punishment but because it focused the confusion around the idea of liberty of ‘godly conscience’. The Quaker menace brought a return to an established order with an attempt to impose compulsory religious worship on Sundays. But the national church was split irrevocably…”[190]

 

 

The Killing of the King

 

     The climax of the English revolution was, of course, the trial and beheading of King Charles I in 1649, the first ideologically motivated and judicially executed regicide in history. Before then, kings had been killed in abundance, and many Popes since Gregory VII had presumed to depose kings on the basis of their priestly power to bind and loose. But Charles I was not deposed by any Church or Pope; he was not the victim of a simple coup; he was charged with treason against the State by his subjects, laymen like himself.

 

     Treason by a king rather than against him?! The idea was paradoxical in the extreme. As Christopher Hill writes: “high treason was a personal offence, a breach of personal loyalty to the King: the idea that the King himself might be a traitor to the realm was novel”.[191] The king himself articulated the paradoxicality of the revolution during his trial, declaring: “A King cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth.” And it was a feeling of revulsion against this paradox, this overturning of the natural order, together with the manifest failure to establish a stable order to replace the monarchy, that finally sealed the fate of the revolution.

 

     As a supposedly Shakespearean addition to the play Sir Thomas More put it:

 

For to the king God hath his office lent

Of dread of justice, power and command,

Hath bid him rule and willed you to obey;

And to add ampler majesty to this,

He hath not only lent the king his figure,

His throne and sword, but given him his own name,

Calls him a god on earth. What do you, then,

Rising ‘gainst him that God himself installs

But rise ‘gainst God?[192]

 

     Charles had pointed out at his trial that the king was the guarantor of his people’s liberties: “But it is not my case alone – it is the freedom and the liberty of the people of England. And do you pretend what you will, I will stand for their liberties – for if a power without law may make laws, may alter the fundamental laws of the kingdom, I do not know what subject can be sure of his life, or of anything that he calls his own. Therefore, when that I came here I did expect particular reasons to know by what law, what authority, you did proceed against me here… My reasons why – in conscience and the duty I owe to God first and my people next, for the preservation of their lives, liberties and estates – I conceive I cannot answer this till I be satisfied of the legality of it.”[193]

 

     And yet once a new idea has been expressed and acted upon in all sincerity, it becomes less paradoxical, less unnatural for succeeding generations. It enters the bloodstream, as it were, of human thought, no longer warred against – or warred against less fiercely – by the blood’s antibodies, the censorship of public opinion. Parricide was the central theme of the most famous of ancient Greek tragedies, Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex: regicide has been the real-life tragedy of our time.

 

     Traditionally – since Magna Carta, at any rate – it had been the aristocrats who reined in tyrannical kings; and when King Charles was brought to trial in January, 1649, the parallel with Magna Carta was uppermost in his judges’ minds. Thus the court’s first meeting was held in the Painted Chamber at the Palace of Westminster where the nobles traditionally put on their robes. For, writes Sean Kelsey, “the revolution was portrayed as a new chapter in the history of that aristocratic constitutionalism which had long sustained English traditions of resistance to royal authority. In the course of proceedings, John Bradshaw, Lord President of the High Court of Justice, recalled the ‘Barons’ Wars’, ’when the nobility of the land did stand up for the liberty and property of the subject and would not suffer the kings that did invade to play the tyrant freely… But.. if they [the peers] do forbear to do their duty now and are not so mindful of their own honour and the kingdom’s good as the barons of England of old were, certainly the Commons of England will not be so unmindful of what is for their preservation and for their safety.’”[194]

 

     But this looking over the shoulder to the Commons was the psychological essence of the matter. Unlike the barons in 1215, the Parliamentarians in 1649 were already a “rump”, purged by the army’s radical lower ranks; and this rump knew that if they did not do what the army wanted, they would be swept away. For the revolution cannot stop half way: once legitimacy has been removed from the king by the lords, it will not remain with the lords, but must pass on to the Commons, and from the Commons to the people. And to the lowest of the people at that; for, as Denzill Holles, once a leading opponent of the king, wrote in 1649: “The meanest of men, the basest and vilest of the nation, the lowest of the people have got power into their hands; trampled upon the crown; baffled and misused the Parliament; violated the laws; destroyed or suppressed the nobility and gentry of the kingdom.”[195]

 

     Almost too late did the gentry leader of the Revolution, Oliver Cromwell, realise that he could not give in to the demands of the Levellers, who wanted to “level” society to its lowest common denominator. In May, 1649, only four months after executing the king, he executed some mutinous soldiers who sympathised with the Levellers. And four years later was forced to dissolve Parliament and seize supreme power himself (although he refused the title of King, preferring that of “Protector”).

 

     Earlier, just after his victory over the King at Naseby in 1645, he had declared: “God hath put the sword in the Parliament’s hands, - for the terror of evil-doers, and the praise of them that do well. If any plead exemption from that, - he knows not the Gospel”. But when anarchy threatened, he found an exemption: “Necessity hath no law,” he said to the dismissed representatives of the people. Napoleon had a similar rationale when he dismissed the Directory and the elected deputies in 1799[196], and Lenin when he dismissed the Constituent Assembly in 1918. “Necessity” in one age becomes the “revolutionary morality” – that is, exemption from the rules of morality - of the next.

 

     At the same time, it must be admitted that Cromwell to some extent restrained the full power of the English revolution. As Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) of New York writes: “It bore within itself as an embryo all the typically destructive traits of subsequent revolutions; but the religious sources of this movement, the iron hand of Oliver Cromwell, and the immemorial good sense of the English people, restrained this stormy element, preventing it from achieving its full growth.[197] Thenceforth, however, the social spirit of Europe has been infected with the bacterium of revolution.”[198]

 

 

John Milton

 

     Another revolutionary leader from the gentry was the poet John Milton. He set himself the task of justifying the revolution (Engels called him “the first defender of regicide”) in theological terms. For unlike the later revolutions, the English revolution was still seen as needing justification in terms of Holy Scripture, insofar as “at different times, in different places, Emperor and Anarchist alike may find it convenient to appeal to Holy Writ”. [199]

 

     Milton began, in his Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, with a firm rejection of the Divine Right of Kings. In fact, Charles I was to be identified with the Antichrist, and in overthrowing him the English people had chosen God as their King. Moreover, it was now the duty of the English to spread their revolution overseas (Cromwell had begun the process in Scotland and Ireland in 1649-51), for the saints in England had been “the first to overcome those European kings which receive their power not from God but from the Beast”.[200]

 

     “No man who knows aught,” wrote Milton, “can be so stupid as to deny that all men naturally were born free”. Kings and magistrates are but “deputies and commissioners of the people”. “To take away from the people the right of choosing government takes away all liberty”. Milton attributed the dominance of bishops and kings to the Norman Conquest, and he bewailed men’s readiness “with the fair words and promises of an old exasperated foe… to be stroked and tamed again into the wonted and well-pleasing state of their true Norman villeinage.”[201]  Far better for him than the traditional Christian virtues of humility and obedience was Satan’s adamantine pride in Paradise Lost (262-263):

 

To reign is worth ambition though in hell:

Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven…

 

     Of course, the “inconstant, irrational and image-doting rabble”, cannot have the rule; the better part – i.e. the gentry, people like Milton himself – must act on their behalf. This does raise the problem, as Filmer argued against Milton, that even if we accept that “the sounder, the better and the uprighter part have the power of the people… how shall we know, or who shall judge, who they can be?” But Milton brushed this problem aside.[202]

 

     Within a week of the king’s execution, Eikon Basilike was published by the royalists, being supposedly the work of Charles himself. This enormously popular defence of the monarchy was countered by the argument that the veneration of the king was idolatry. “Every King is an image of God,” wrote N.O. Brown. “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image. Revolutionary republicanism seeks to abolish effigy and show.”[203]

 

     Milton countered Eikon Basilike with his Eikonklastes, in which the destruction of the icon of the king was seen as the logical consequence of the earlier iconoclasm of the English Reformation. Hill explains: “An ikon was an image. Images of saints and martyrs had been cleared out of English churches at the Reformation, on the ground that the common people had worshipped them. Protestantism, and especially Calvinism, was austerely monotheistic, and encouraged lay believers to reject any form of idolatry. This ‘desacralisation of the universe’ in the long run was its main contribution to the rise of modern science.”[204] Thus did the anti-papist, anti-monastic and anti-images iconoclasm of the English Reformation and the Tudor monarchs reap its fruits in the anti-monarchist iconoclasm of the English Revolution.

 

     And yet, writes Hill, “as the millenium failed to arrive and taxation was not reduced, as division and feuds rent the revolutionaries, so the image of his sacred majesty loomed larger over the quarrelsome, unsatisfactory scene… The mass of ordinary people came to long for a return to ‘normality’, to the known, the familiar, the traditional. Victims of scrofula who could afford it went abroad to be touched by the king [Charles II] over the water: after 1660 he was back, sacred and symbolic. Eikonoklastes was burnt by the common hangman together with The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates… The men of property in 1659-60 longed for ‘a king with plenty of holy oil about him’…”[205]

 

     The men of property may have wanted a king with plenty of holy oil about him. And yet his holiness was a secondary consideration. Their first priority was that he should suppress the revolutionaries, preserve order and let them make money in peace. A Divine Right ruler did not fit the bill because he might choose to touch their financial interests, as Charles I’s demand for money to conduct his wars had touched them. A constitutional ruler was the answer – that is, a ruler who would rule within certain limitations, limitations imposed by the men of property and agreed in a legal constitution.

 

 

Hobbes’ Leviathan

 

     However, the working out of such a constitution necessitated a new theory of politics, a theory that depended for its legitimacy less on God’s or the Church’s blessing from above than on its satisfaction of human needs pressing from below. This divorce between political theory and theology, which became commonplace after the English revolution, actually began much earlier, with Machiavelli’s Il Principe (1513). Machiavelli’s was the first handbook of what has been called Realpolitik, that is, politics conducted without any guiding principle except the pursuit and maintenance of power. “A prince who desires to maintain his position,” he wrote, “must learn to be good or not as needs may require.” “War should be the only study of a prince. He should look upon peace as a breathing space which.. gives him the means to execute military plans.”[206] “It is not necessary for a prince to have all the above-mentioned qualities [the conventional virtues], but it is very necessary to seem to have them.” Above all, he said, a prince should seem to be religious.[207]

 

      In his other important work, the Discourses, Machiavelli anticipated a very important doctrine of later philosophical liberalism – the doctrine of checks and balances. Since men are selfish and self-interested by nature, the only way to achieve a minimum of order, enabling as many men as possible to fulfil as many of their interests as possible, is to set them in reciprocal balance against each other. Thus princes, nobles and people should all have a part in the Constitution; “then these three powers will keep each other reciprocally in check.”[208]

 

     But it was Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651) which, drawing on the experience of the English revolution, developed and systematised this amoral approach to politics. Almost all contemporary theorists, whether monarchist or revolutionary, agreed that all power was from God and was legitimate only if sanctioned by God, differing only in their estimate of which power, the king’s or the people’s, was the final arbiter of conflicts. But Hobbes derived his theory of sovereignty from reason and “the principles of Nature only”, from a social contract between men in which God had no part.

 

     Hobbes began from what he called the State of Nature, which, he believed, was WAR, a state devoid of civilisation in which every man’s hand was raised against his neighbour, and in which the life of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”[209] Thus “to seek peace and ensure it”, men got together and handed over their rights to one of their number, who thereafter possessed unlimited power over them. The State was therefore a Leviathan, “a monster composed of men” headed by a sovereign answerable to no man or law.

 

     But why should the sovereign’s power be unlimited in this way? “Since the sovereign,” explains Roger Scruton, “would be the creation of the contract, he could not also be party to it: he stands above the social contract, and can therefore disregard its terms, provided he enforces them against all others. That is why, Hobbes thought, it was so difficult to specify the obligations of the sovereign, and comparatively easy to specify the obligations of the citizen” [210] Here, then, we find the Divine Right of Kings in secular garb.

 

     And yet were not men free and equal in the beginning? Yes, but the burden of that liberty was too great for men to bear (Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor was to say something similar). For, as McClelland explains, intepreting Hobbes: “if everyone has that same equal and unlimited liberty to do as he pleases in pursuit of the literally selfish end of self-preservation, then without law every man is a menace to every other man. Far from being an original endowment for which men should be grateful, the unlimited liberty of the Right of Nature is a millstone round men’s necks, of which they would be wise to unburden themselves at the first opportunity.”[211] And they did, by giving up their rights to the sovereign, who, however, retained all of his.

 

     The lack of accountability of the sovereign is regrettable, but a necessity; and “necessity”, as Cromwell – clearly Hobbes’ first model of the sovereign - said: “hath no law…” Or rather, the sovereign’s will is the law, so it makes no sense to accuse the sovereign of acting unlawfully. “It follows from this that a Sovereign may never justly be put to death by his subjects because they would be punishing the Sovereign for their own act, and no principle of jurisprudence could ever conceivably justify punishing another for what one did oneself.”[212]

 

     Hobbes defined liberty negatively, as the absence of impediments to motion. Subjects are free when the laws do not interfere with them – that is, when the sovereign law-giver voluntarily concedes them some liberty of action. However, liberty is not a right, and subjects have no right to rebel against their sovereign for any reason except self-preservation (for that is the very purpose of the social contract). Thus subjects have the right to refuse military service – a right that no modern democratic government would concede to them. And they have the right to refuse to obey a sovereign who cannot protect them against their enemies.[213]

 

     “Hobbes’s Leviathan,” continues McClelland, “is certainly not the blueprint for universal monarchy that it is sometimes taken to be. Quite the reverse. Leviathan contains a very clear explanation of why supra-national organisations like the League of Nations or the UN are bound to fail in their avowed purpose of keeping the international peace, or even in their intention to provide some measure of international co-operation which is different from traditional alliances between states for traditional foreign policy ends. For Hobbes, there is no peace without law, and there can be no law without a Sovereign whose command law is. Hobbes is absolutely insistent that individuals in the State of Nature cannot make law by agreement; all they can do by contract is to choose a Sovereign. What applies to individuals in the State of Nature also applies to sovereigns in their State of Nature in relation to each other. The only way there could be a guarantee of international peace would be if all the sovereigns of the earth, or an overwhelming majority of them, were voluntarily to give up the right of national self-defence to some kind of super-sovereign whose word would be law to all the nations of the earth. This the various nations of the earth have been notoriously reluctant to do. They have tried to make international law by agreement, but that has never stopped war. They have tried to make international law by agreement, but that has never stopped war. Hobbes could have told them why: covenants without the sword are but breath, without any power to bind a man at all. No all-powerful international Sovereign, then no international peace.”[214]

 

     Now Bertrand Russell criticised Hobbes on the grounds that while his model of the absolutist state decreased anarchy and destructiveness within states, it increased it between states. “So long as there is international anarchy, it is by no means clear that increase of efficiency in the separate States is in the interest of mankind, since it increases the ferocity and destructiveness of war. Every argument that he adduces in favour of government, in so far as it is valid at all, is valid in favour of international government. So long as national States exist and fight each other, only inefficiency can preserve the human race.”[215]

 

      However, Russell’s criticism fails to take into account the fact that Hobbes’ argument is not about absolutism as such, but about sovereignty, and that the sovereign, in his theory, “can be one man, a few, or many men. He knows his ancient political theory well enough (he made a famous translation of Thucydides) to know that states are either monarchies, aristocracies or democracies…. He thinks that the sovereignty which is exercised by a Sovereign is the same sovereignty, no matter how that sovereignty is in fact constituted. The sovereignty which is exercised by a Sovereign people, as at ancient Athens or republican Rome, does not change its nature as sovereignty just because it is democratic. Democratic sovereignty properly understood would have the same attributes as the sovereignty of an absolute monarch.”[216]

 

     The logic of Hobbes’ theory for international relations – either an international sovereign government or continued war – may be unpalatable, but it was not refuted by Russell. It may be that democratic governments are inherently less “efficient” or warlike than absolutist ones. But the reason for that would not be that they are less sovereign, but that they pursue different aims (peaceful moneymaking as opposed to world domination, for example).

 

     A more serious criticism of Hobbes’ theory is that it is based on an invalid theory of human nature, which is more social and cooperative, less viciously egoistic, than he makes it out to be. In the next century the 3rd Earl of Shaftesbury would ask: had not the author of Leviathan “forgot to mention Kindness, Friendship, Sociableness, Love of Company and Converse, Natural affection, or anything of this kind?”[217]

 

     We shall come to this criticism in the next section, on Locke. Before that, however, it is worth emphasising what appears to the present writer to be the permanent truth of Hobbes’ theory of international relations, which has particular relevance to the modern arguments about the sovereignty of, for example, member-states of the European Union or the United Nations – the truth, namely that sovereignty is an absolute, not a relative concept.

 

     This truth can be clearly seen if we compare the political sovereignty of states to the free will of individual human beings. A person either has free will or he does not. His will may be weak, it may be constrained by external circumstances or illness; but as long as the person is a person he must be acknowledged to have free will. In the same way, a state – be it monarchical, aristocratic or democratic – either has sovereignty or it does not. Its sovereignty can be constrained or weakened by other states or external circumstances; but it cannot be “pooled” or diluted as long as it remains a state worthy of the name. The proof that a state is sovereign is its ability to wage wars; for the act of waging war is the act of enforcing a command upon another state or of saying “no” to another’s state’s command.

 

     Another very important consequence of Hobbes’ theory is his refusal of any share in power to the Church. “Where others,” writes A.L. Smith, “reserved a coordinate or even superior share of Divine Right to another body, the Church, Hobbes will have no such dualism; no man can serve two masters, the civil sovereign is also the supreme pastor”. This follows from the fact that Leviathan is “our mortal God”, and that “there must be in every State a sovereign power, illimitable, indivisible, unalienable; that the attempt to separate it, to set it up against itself, to create a ‘balance of powers’ or a ‘mixed government’, is chimerical”.[218] “Even Henry VIII is a pale shadow beside the spiritual supremacy in which the Leviathan is enthroned. There are only two positions in history which rise to this height; the position of a Caliph, the viceregent of Allah, with the book on his knees that contains all law as well as all religion and all morals; and the position of the Greek poliV where heresy was treason where the State gods and no other gods were the citizens’ gods, and the citizen must accept the State’s standard of virtue.”[219]

 

     Hobbes’ theory, while admired on the continent, elicited horror and loathing in England (Leviathan was burned at Oxford in 1683). One reason was its implicit amoralism and irreligion, which was unacceptable in a country that, for all its recent rebelliousness against Church and State, was still deeply religious. For Hobbes “had made short work of the ‘power ecclesiastical’, he had identified bishops with elders, and reduced their office to teaching, referred their appointment to the civil sovereign, and left their sustenance to voluntary contributions. All dogmas, except that of the Divinity of our Lord, he had declared unessential; the idea of life in another world than this earth, and the idea of a kingdom of God in opposition to earthly kingdoms, he had rejected. His analysis of good and evil into appetite and aversion, seemed to sap the foundations of morality. Above all, his caustic humour, his malicious insinuations, were still harder to bear. His whole tone and manner provoked more resentment than even his matter.”[220]

 

     Another problem with Leviathan was its perceived support for absolutism. Actually, Hobbes’ sovereign need not have been only one man theoretically, he was arguing only that there could be only one sovereign power in a State, not that that sovereign power had to be a king or dictator, as opposed to an aristocratic clique or the people as a whole. However, it was obvious that the theory tended towards absolutism. But absolutism, as well as being behind the times philosophically - for “even before the Reformation,” as Russell writes, “theologians tended to believe in setting limits to kingly power”[221] – was unsatisfactory to the capitalist landowning class in another, more important way: it threatened to deprive them of their complete control of their property. Of course, an absolutist government is not necessarily opposed to the interests of capital; it may allow the capitalists to enrich themselves, while retaining political power for itself. But it would clearly make more sense to install from the beginning a constitutional monarch more favourable to landed interests. Only the real sovereign now would be, not the monarch (since he is bound by a constitution imposed by others), but a capitalist landowning oligarchy meeting in parliament.

 

 

Locke’s Theory of the Social Contract

 

     This end was achieved de facto by the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688, which overthrew the Catholic absolutism of James II and brought to power the Protestant constitutional monarchy of William III. Its de jure justification was worked out by John Locke, who set out to prove that James had broken some kind of agreement with the people, and so had been rightly overthrown, whereas William was abiding by its terms and so should be obeyed. What was needed was to retain the theory of the social contract (for Filmer’s patriarchalism forged “chains for all mankind” by justifying absolutist monarchies), but rework it so as to bring the monarch within the contract (impossible according to Hobbes), make parliament the real sovereign, and bring God back into the picture, if only for decency’s sake.

 

     Like Hobbes, Locke began his argument by positing an original State of Nature in which all men were equal and free. But, unlike Hobbes, he considered that this original state was not one of total anarchy and vicious egoism - might is not right, but of some social cohesion, with men “living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth”. “Though this (State of Nature) be a state of liberty,” he wrote, “yet it is not a state of licence.”[222]

 

     For, in addition to the State of Nature, Locke also posited a “Law of Nature” inspired by “the infinitely wise Maker” and identifiable with “reason”, which instructed men not to infringe on the freedom of other men. Thus “the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it, which obliges every one; and reason, which is that law, teaches all mankind, who will but consult it, that being all equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.”[223]

 

     In the State of Nature every man owns the land that he tills and the product of that labour: “Though the earth, and all inferior Creatures be common to all Men, yet every Man has a Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself. The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property”.[224]

 

     The critical words here are “property” and “possessions”. For Locke’s second aim, after the justification of the overthrow of James II and enthronment of William III, was to make sure that the constitutional monarchy was in the hands of the men of property, the aristocratic landowning class. And so those who signed the original social contract, in his view, were not all the men of the kingdom, but those who had substantial property and therefore the right to vote for members of parliament in elections. For “the great and chief end of men uniting into commonwealths,” he wrote, “is the preservation of their property.”[225]

 

     The Natural Rights, as Locke calls them, are based on God’s own word. For, writes McClelland, interpreting Locke, He “means us to live at his pleasure, not another’s, therefore no-one may kill me (except in self-defence, which includes war); God commands me to labour in order to sustain and live my life, therefore I have the right to the liberty to do so; and God must mean what I take out of mere nature to be mine, therefore a natural right to property originates in the command to labour: the land I plough, and its fruits are mine. Man, being made in God’s image and therefore endowed with natural reason, could easily work out that this was so, and they have Holy Writ to help them.

 

     “Men’s natural reason also tells them two other very important things. First, it tells each man that all other men have the same rights as he. All rights have duties attached to them (a right without a corresponding duty, or set of duties, is a privilege, not a right, a sinecure for instance, which carries with it the right to a salary without the duty to work for it). Rational men are capable of working this out for themselves, and they easily recognise that claiming Natural Rights requires that they respect the exercise of those same rights in others, and it is this reciprocity which makes the State of Nature social. If everybody recognises naturally that Natural Rights are universal or they cease to be natural, then plainly this implies that men could live together without government. That is what Locke really means when he says that the State of Nature is a state of liberty, not licence.

 

     “However, the State of Nature is still the state of fallen man. Sinful men, alas, will sometimes invade the Natural Rights of others. From this it follows that men have another Natural Right, the right of judgement (and punishment) when they think their Natural Rights have been violated by others. This right is not a substantive right, a right to something; rather it is an energising right, or a right which gives life to the other Natural Rights. Rights are useless unless there is a right to judge when rights have been violated, and so the right to judgement completes the package of Natural Rights.”[226]

 

     The purpose of the state is to protect Natural Rights. It follows that “society is natural while the state is artificial. Human nature being composed as it is of certain Natural Rights which rational men recognise that they and others possess, society arises spontaneously. It follows that, because society is prior to the state, both logically and as a matter of history, it is up to society to decide what the state shall be like, and not the state which shall decided what society shall be like. This insistence [on] the separation of society from the state, and a society’s priority over the state, was to become the bedrock of the doctrine which came to be known as liberalism. Put another way, Locke thinks that what the state is like is a matter (within limits) of rational reflection and choice, but society is a given about which men have no choice. Society is what God meant it to be, capitalist and naturally harmonious, except that in the real world societies tend to become a bit ragged at the edges. Offences against Natural and positive law, murder, theft, fraud and riot for instance, happen from time to time, and men need the special agency of the state to cope with them.”[227]

 

     The social contract consists in men giving up “to the state their right to judgement when their Natural Rights have been violated. Of course, a Natural Right being God’s gift, part of what it is to be a human being, it is impossible to alienate it completely. At the moment of contract, Locke’s men give up the absolute minimum for the maximum gain: they entrust the state with their right to judgement on the condition that the state uses the right to judge when Natural  Rights have been violated in order to allow men to enjoy their other Natural Rights, to life, liberty and property, more abundantly.

 

      “…. Men are capable of making a collective agreement with their rulers in the State of Nature, either in the very beginning or in some future, imaginable emergency when government has collapsed. In Locke’s account of the matter it is easy to see when and why government would in fact collapse: when it violates, or is seen to violate, enough [of] men’s Natural Rights for them justifiably to rebel by taking back to themselves the right of judgement because government has betrayed its trust and misused it. Men therefore have a right of rebellion, and perhaps even a moral duty to rebel, if government begins to frustrate God’s purpose for the world. The moment for rebellion happens when enough men are prepared to repudiate their contract with their rulers and fall back on the original contract of society. In all events, the Lockian Sovereign is party to the contract to set up government. The king is king on terms.”[228]

 

     Locke was scornful of Hobbes’ idea that despotism was necessary to preserve peace. To think that men should seek a peaceful life by surrendering all their power (and property) to an absolute sovereign, he wrote, “is to think that Men are so foolish that they take care to avoid what Mischiefs may be done them by Pole-Cats, or Foxes, but are content, nay think it Safety, to be devoured by Lions.”[229] Therefore government should not be concentrated in the hands of one man or institution; it should be composed of a legislative power – parliament, elected every few years by the property-owning people, and an executive power – the monarchy. The executive and legislative powers must be kept separate, as a check on each other, to prevent the abuse of power.

 

     Locke’s disciple in the next century, Montesquieu, developed this idea in his famous Spirit of the Laws. “Constant experience shows us that every man invested with power is apt to abuse it, and to carry his authority as far as it will go… To prevent this abuse, it is necessary from the very nature of things that power should be a check to power. A government may be so constituted, as no man shall be compelled to do things to which the law does not oblige him, nor forced to abstain from things which the law permits.”[230] Thus in order to preserve liberty, said Montesquieu, it is necessary to separate and balance the three arms of government, the executive, the legislative and the judicial.

 

     The monarchy is necessary, according to Locke, because only such a power can make laws valid and effective. But the king is not above the laws passed by parliament, and is to that extent subject to parliament. If the king transgresses the laws by, for example, failing to summon the legislative at the proper times, or by setting up “his own arbitrary authority in place of the laws”, then he can be resisted by force. Thus the king can reign, but he cannot really rule, in Locke’s system. As Smith puts it, “Locke put government in its proper position as a trustee for the ends for which society exists; now a trustee has great discretionary powers and great freedom from interference, but is also held strictly accountable, and under a properly drawn deed nothing is simpler than the appointment of new trustees. For after all, the ultimate trust remains in the people, in Locke’s words; and this is the sovereign people, the irrevocable depository of all powers.”[231]

 

     Even the legislative power of parliament, “though its enactments superseded the unwritten law of nature, could not be ‘absolutely arbitrary over the lives and fortunes of the people’. It was bound to rule by ‘promulgating standing laws’ and not ‘extemporary arbitrary decrees’. It could not take away any man’s property without his own consent, though Locke regarded taxation by a representative assembly as conforming to this principle.”[232]

 

     This would appear to allow the people to rebel not only against the king, but also against parliament. The problem is: where to draw the line? In other words, when is the use of force against the government just and lawful? When “estates, liberties, lives are in danger, and perhaps religion too”, was Locke’s answer. For “the end of government is the good of mankind, and which is best for mankind, that the people should always exposed to the boundless will of tyranny or that the rulers should be sometimes liable to be opposed? Upon the forfeiture of their rulers, [power] reverts to the society and the people have a right to act as supreme and place it in a new form or new hands, as they think good.”[233] In other words, if the people feel that their Natural Rights have been violated by king or parliament, then in theory they should be able to declare the contract broken and take power back from their representatives – by force, if need be. For “the Community may be said in this respect to be always the Supreme Power”.[234]

 

     Thus if the prince seeks to “enslave, or destroy them”, the people are entitled to “appeal to heaven”. But “since Heaven does not make explicit pronouncements,” writes Russell, “this means, in effect, that a decision can only be reached by fighting, since it is assumed that Heaven will give the victory to the better cause. Some such view is essential to any doctrine that divides governmental power.”[235]

 

     But the experience of the English revolution and Locke’s own conservative instincts led him to countenance revolution only in extreme cases.  Otherwise the right to rebel would “lay a perpetual foundation for disorder”. “Great mistakes in the ruling part… will be born by the People without muting or murmur”, and recourse would be had to force only after “a long trains of Abuses, Prevarications, and Artifices”. For “people are not so easily got out of their old forms as some are apt to suggest”.[236] “’Overturning the constitution and frame of any just government’ is ‘the greatest crime a man is capable of’, but ‘either ruler or subject’ who forcibly invades ‘the rights of either prince or people’ is guilty of it. ‘Whosoever uses force without right, as everyone does in society who does it without law, puts himself into a state of war with those against whom he so uses it… every one has a right to defend himself and to resist the aggressor.’”[237]

 

     So what is the place Locke ascribes to religion in State and society? “Religion is a man’s private concern, his belief is part of himself, and he is the sole judge of the means to his own salvation. Persecution only creates hypocrites, while free opinion is the best guarantee of truth. Most ceremonies are indifferent; Christianity is simple; it is only theologians who have encrusted it with dogma. Sacerdotalism, ritual, orthodoxy, do not constitute Christianity if they are divorced from charity. Our attempts to express the truth of religion must always be imperfect and relative, and cannot amount to certainty… Church and State can be united if the Church is made broad enough and simple enough, and the State accepts the Christian basis. Thus religion and morality might be reunited, sectarianism would disappear with sacerdotalism; the Church would become the nation organised for goodness…”[238]

 

     Such lukewarmness would hardly have satisfied a truly religious nation; but from 1688 England rapidly ceased to be religious. In general, Locke’s system represents an uneasy compromise between older, religious ways of thinking and the new rationalism. On the one hand, he wanted the authority that an established church and an anointed king gives in order to protect property and prevent the revolution that had so nearly destroyed everything a generation before. On the other hand, he wanted to give the people the right to overthrow a tyrant. But it is clearly the secular interests of his class, rather than religious feeling or theology, that motivates his thinking.

 

    

A Critique of Social Contract Theory

 

     “In all its forms,” writes Roger Scruton, “the social contract enshrines a fundamental liberal principle, namely, that, deep down, our obligations are self-created and self-imposed. I cannot be bound by the law, or legitimately constrained by the sovereign, if I never chose to be under the obligation to obey. Legitimacy is conferred by the citizen, and not by the sovereign, still less by the sovereign’s usurping ancestors. If we cannot discover a contract to be bound by the law, then the law is not binding.”[239] As Walicki puts it: “The argument that society was founded on reason and self-interest could of course be used to sanction rebellion against any forms of social relations that could not prove their rationality or utility.”[240] As a perfectly natural consequence, therefore, the rationalisation of politics represented by social contract theory led to that terrible triumph of irrationality, the French revolution…

 

     A basic objection to social contract theory put forward by Hegel is that this original premise, that “our obligations are self-created and self-imposed”, is false. We do not choose the family we are born in, or the state to which we belong, and yet both family and state impose undeniable obligations on us. Of course, we can rebel against such obligations; the son can choose to say that he owes nothing to his father. And yet he would not even exist without his father; and without his father’s nurture and education he would not even be capable of making choices. Thus we are “hereditary bondsmen”, to use Byron’s phrase. In this sense we live in a cycle of freedom and necessity: the free choices of our ancestors limit our own freedom, while our choices limit those of our children. The idea of a social contract entered into in a single generation is therefore not only a historical myth (as many social contract theorists concede); it is also a dangerous myth. It is a myth that distorts the very nature of society, which cannot be conceived as existing except over several generations.

 

     But if society exists over several generations, all generations should be taken into account in drawing up the contract. Why should only one generation’s interests be respected? For, as Scruton continues, interpreting the thought of Edmund Burke, “the social contract prejudices the interests of those who are not alive to take part in it: the dead and the unborn. Yet they too have a claim, maybe an indefinite claim, on the resources and institutions over which the living so selfishly contend. To imagine society as a contract among its living members, is to offer no rights to those who go before and after. But when we neglect those absent souls, we neglect everything that endows law with its authority, and which guarantees our own survival. We should therefore see the social order as a partnership, in which the dead and the unborn are included with the living.”[241]

 

     “Every people,” writes Tikhomirov, “is, first of all, a certain historical whole, a long row of consecutive generations, living over hundreds or thousands of years in a common life handed down by inheritance. In this form a people, a nation, is a certain socially organic phenomenon with more or less clearly expressed laws of inner development… But political intriguers and the democratic tendency does not look at a people in this form, as a historical, socially organic phenomenon, but simply in the form of a sum of the individual inhabitants of the country. This is the second point of view, which looks on a nation as a simple association of people united into a state because they wanted that, living according to laws which they like, and arbitrarily changing the laws of their life together when it occurs to them.”[242]

 

     Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow criticised social contract theory as follows: “It is obligatory, say the wise men of this world, to submit to social authorities on the basis of a social contract, by which people were united into society, by a general agreement founding government and submission to it for the general good. If they think that it is impossible to found society otherwise than on a social contract, - then why is it that the societies of the bees and ants are not founded on it? And is it not right that those who break open honeycombs and destroy ant-hills should be entrusted with finding in them… a charter of bees and ants? And until such a thing is done, nothing prevents us from thinking that bees and ants create their societies, not by contract, but by nature, by an idea of community implanted in their nature, which the Creator of the world willed to be realised even at the lowest level of His creatures. What if an example of the creation of a human society by nature were found? What, then, is the use of the fantasy of a social contract? No one can argue against the fact that the original form of society is the society of the family. Thus does not the child obey the mother, and the mother have power over the child, not because they have contracted between themselves that she should feed him at the breast, and that he should shout as little as possible when he is swaddled? What if the mother should suggest too harsh conditions to the child? Will not the inventors of the social contract tell him to go to another mother and make a contract with her about his upbringing? The application of the social contract in this case is as fitting as it is fitting in other cases for every person, from the child to the old man, from the first to the last. Every human contract can have force only when it is entered into with consciousness and good will. Are there many people in society who have heard of the social contract? And of those few who have heard of it, are there many who have a clear conception of it? Ask, I will not say the simple citizen, but the wise man of contracts: when and how did he enter into the social contract? When he was an adult? But who defined this time? And was he outside society before he became an adult? By means of birth? This is excellent. I like this thought, and I congratulate every Russian that he was able – I don’t know whether it was from his parents or from Russia herself, - to agree that he be born in powerful Russia… The only thing that we must worry about is that neither he who was born nor his parents thought about this contract in their time, and so does not referring to it mean fabricating it? And consequently is not better, as well as simpler, both in submission and in other relationships towards society, to study the rights and obligations of a real birth instead of an invented contract – that pipe-dream of social life, which, being recounted at the wrong time, has produced and continues to produce material woes for human society. ‘Transgressors have told me fables, but they are not like Thy law, O Lord’ (Psalm 118.85).”[243]

 

     In spite of these contradictions, social contract theory has remained the dominant model of society in Anglo-Saxon countries. Thus probably the most influential contemporary work of political philosophy, John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, is in essence a variation on Lockean social contract theory with one or two original twists. One of these is the idea that people enter into the social contract from a so-called “original position” in which they are covered with a “veil of ignorance”. That is, “they are denied knowledge of everything which makes them who they are: their class, skills, age, gender, sexuality, religious views and conceptions of the good life. Rawls argues that the principles which these people would choose to regulate their relations with one another are definitive of justice… The veil of ignorance is meant to ensure that our views on justice are not distorted by our own interests. 'If a man knew that he was wealthy, he might find it rational to advance the principle that various taxes for welfare measures be counted unjust; if he knew that he was poor, he would most likely propose the contrary principle…’”[244]

 

     This theory escapes the objection that people entering into a social contract are simply choosing their self-interest. It does this by completely abstracting from the concrete human being with his concrete desires and interests. Thus not only is the original social contract a historical myth in the strictest sense of the word: those who enter into it are not even human beings!

 

     Particularly to be noted is the idea that such abstract “human beings” must be postulated to have no religious views – because Rawls champions the abstract idea of human rights as against all “perfectionist” or communitarian theories “which look to the state to advance a common value system… Rawls contends that the state should remain neutral between different conceptions of how to live, simply safeguarding the freedoms which allow us to live according to our own conception of what makes it valuable.”[245] Rawls’ teacher Locke had argued that religion was a private matter, and that people should be allowed as far as possible to mind their own business; but he drew the line at Catholics and atheists. Rawls goes further in making the State completely value-free (we are tempted to say: value-less) – and Catholics and atheists are equally welcome!

 

     Thus social contract theory, while not explicitly anti-religious, actually leads, in its modern variants, to the purest secularism: the original social contract must be postulated to be between irreligious people and to lead to a state that is strictly irreligious, relegating religion entirely to the private sphere. But such a state will be accepted only by a society for which religion has ceased to be the primary focus of life, and has become merely one “interest” or “need” among many others. Such a society was England after the English revolution. 

 

 

French Absolutism

 

     So far in this chapter we have reviewed the rise of liberalism in the countries of Northern Europe and North America. For this was the wave of the future, and these ideas would in time conquer almost the whole world. However, the seventeenth century was, in political and cultural terms, the century of France; so it is to the more conservative society of France that we now turn.

    

     If we compare the English monarchy in the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries with the French one in the same period, we see a striking contrast. In England a powerful monarchy becomes apparently stronger and stronger, defeating the most powerful despotism of the day in the Spanish Armada, only to be gradually overcome by the wealthier classes and reduced, finally, to the position of symbolic head of an essentially aristocratic society. The vital changes here, as we have seen, were the rejection of the papacy and the dissolution of the monasteries, which caused both the temporary increase in the monarchy’s power and its longer term descent into impotence, especially after Charles I’s loss of the power of taxation.

 

     In France, on the other hand, the reverse takes place: a weak monarchy besieged by a semi-independent nobility within and the united Hapsburg domains of Germany, Italy and Spain from without, gradually recovers to reach a pinnacle of fame and power under the sun king, Louis XIV. The vital factors here were: (i) the retention of Catholicism as the official religion, (ii) the monarchy’s retention, in accordance with its Concordat with the Vatican, of control of the Church’s appointments and lands, and (iii), last but not least, the monarchy’s retention of the power of general taxation.

 

     Both countries had consolidated their internal unity by the end of the period, but in different ways that gave to each the complex character of the modern nation-state. In England, the monarchy, after first taking alternate sides in the religious conflict, eventually (from 1688) firmly adopted the Anglican middle ground. In France, on the other hand, the monarchy took the Catholic side (Paris, as Henry IV said when he converted to Catholicism, was worth a mass), from which it did not waver until the revolution of 1789. In England, while the Protestant aristocracy first persecuted and then tolerated the diminished and tamed Catholic minority, the latter’s eventual absorption within the State left a permanently traditionalist stamp on the English national character. In France, on the other hand, while the Catholic monarchy first tolerated and then expelled the Protestant (Huguenot) minority, the latter’s cultural heritage left a permanent rationalist stamp on the French national character.

 

     The problems of keeping the nation-state together when it is being torn apart by religious passions was discussed in Jean Bodin’s Six Books on the Republic (1576). Bodin was one of the earliest apologists of the absolutist monarchy in modern times. He believed that such a monarchy was necessary in France to balance the claims of the nobles and the Huguenots in the interests of the state as a whole. He allowed only one check on monarchy – the Estates General, an assembly representing clergy, nobles and commoners which met irregularly to vote new taxes and of which he was the secretary in 1576. Ironically, it was the Estates General that brought down the monarchy in 1789…

 

     “Bodin,” writes McClelland, “is probably the first important political thinker to offer what is recognisably a modern theory of sovereignty, and in essence this theory is very simple: a well-ordered state needs an absolute and legitimate sovereign centre. Bodin’s motives for saying that are much more intelligible than his arguments. We can see that the France of the sixteenth century civil wars, those wars being based on differences of religious opinion, needed a strengthening of the monarchy if France was to survive as a political community. By harking back to Aristotelian precedents, Bodin took the theory of sovereignty out of Divine Right theology and tied it to a view of what a political community needed in its own best interest. Bodin is impeccably classical in his recognition that states are typically destroyed by faction, and the fact that these factions are religious factions does not alter this truth at all… Bodin’s defence of sovereignty is really a defence of rule against faction. He defends the division of Christendom’s individual kingdoms into Protestant and Catholic as an accomplished fact. The problem is then how it can ever be that a realm divided into contending religious factions, each of which would coerce the other if it could, could possibly live at peace with itself and prosper…

 

     “For all his Aristotelianism, Bodin recognises that the ancient city-state cannot be identified with the sixteenth-century realm of France. That is why the state’s law must be supreme over other potentially competing systems of law, whether law means manners, morals, customs, or the law which defines minority or local privilege… Sovereignty is absolute and undivided. All surviving law-bound corporations – religious bodies, municipalities, commercial companies and guilds – owe their rights and privileges to the sovereign. It follows, therefore, that estates and parliaments exist only to advise the sovereign, and it also follows that the sovereign cannot be bound to take their advice… Bodin was anti-feudal where competing jurisdictions got in the way of the exercise of sovereignty. Far from thinking that the king’s position was at the head of a hierarchy whose justification was the hierarchy itself, Bodin looked at the matter from the top down, and attempted to show that all subordinate authorities derived from the supreme sovereign.”[246]

 

     The same tendency to place the interests of the nation-state above those of the faith is discernible in the career of the greatest French statesman of the period, and the architect of her rise to pre-eminence in Europe, Cardinal Richelieu. What would have been more natural than for a powerful and sincerely believing Catholic Churchman such as Richelieu to work, in concert with the great Catholic Hapsburg power of Spain and Germany, for the triumph of Counter-Reformation Catholicism in Europe? But that would have meant subordinating the interests of the French monarchy to those of the Hapsburgs. And this Richelieu was not prepared to do. For “he had no zeal,” writes Belloc, “such as had so many men of his time, for the triumph of Catholicism; he did not consider Europe as a battlefield between tradition and revolution in doctrine and philosophy. He considered the conflict between them mainly as one by the right manipulation of which the interests of the French monarchy might be advanced. It is probable that he hardly understood, he certainly never yielded to, the instinctive feeling [of] all around him – that unless French policy were whole-heartedly Catholic in that critical moment 1620-40, Europe would never be reunited. He presumably thought the ultimate reunion of Europe, that is, the ultimate triumph of Catholicism, certain, and would not, to accelerate it, sacrifice one detail of his policy. He abandoned, and at last combated, the effort to restore Catholicism throughout Europe. He devoted himself to the consolidation and aggrandisement of the nation he governed. Hence toleration at home and alliance with Protestantism abroad against the Catholic Powers. Hence his nickname of ‘the Cardinal of the Huguenots’. Hence the worship by those who accept the new religion of Nationalism and have forgotten, or think impossible, the idea of [Roman Catholic] Christendom.”[247]

 

     Thus just as the idea of natural law preached by the Jesuits Las Casas and De Mariana, Suarez and Bellarmine, was the worm in the apple of the theology of Catholic Absolutism, so the nationalism so successfully practised by Cardinal Richelieu was the blow that finally put paid to the politics of Catholic Absolutism. Already the attempts by Francis I to limit the power of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in the middle of the sixteenth century had injured Catholic unity in the vital first stage of the struggle with Protestantism. Now, when Catholicism had reorganized itself at the Council of Trent and was back on the offensive in Germany especially, it was Richelieu’s anti-Catholic diplomacy, driving a nationalist wedge into the united internationalist offensive of the Hapsburg Catholic monarchs against the Protestant princes, that guaranteed the survival of German Protestantism. As the Pope said on hearing of his death: “If there be a God, the Cardinal de Richelieu will have much to answer for. If there be none, why, he lived a successful life.”[248]

 

     The fruit of Bodin’s theories and Richelieu’s politics was the reign of the Sun King, Louis XIV, a true despot in that, like every despot, he tried to gain control of two forces: the Church and the nobility. Like Ivan the Terrible in Russia, Louis had only partial success in relation to the Church. But he tamed the nobility – by means of tactics that were notably more subtle than Ivan’s.

 

     “The position of the French nobility,” writes Ridley, “had greatly changed during the previous hundred years. In the sixteenth century the great noble houses of Guise and Bourbon, with their power bases in eastern and south-west France, had torn the kingdom apart by thirty years of civil war; and the fighting between the nobility had started up again in the days of the Fronde, when Louis XIV was a child. But when he came of age, and established his absolute royal authority, he destroyed the political power of the nobles by bribing them to renounce it. He encouraged them to come to his court at Versailles, to hold honorific and well-paid sinecure offices – to carve for the King at dinner, or to attend his petit levé when he dressed in the morning, and hand him his shirt, his coat and his wig. He hoped that when the nobles were not engaged in these duties at court, they would be staying in their great mansions in Paris. He wished to prevent them as far as possible from living on their lands in the country, where they could enrol their tenants in a private army and begin a new civil war.

 

     “The King governed France through middle-class civil servants, who were mostly lawyers. The provincial Parlements had limited powers, most of which were judicial rather than legislative; but the King could veto all their decrees. The government was administered by the intendants, who had absolute authority in their districts, and were subject only to the directives of their superiors, the surintendants, who were themselves subject only to the King’s Council, where the King presided in person, and might either accept or reject the advice given to him by his councillors.

 

     “The nobles had the privilege of having their seigneurial courts in which they exercised a civil and a criminal jurisdiction over their tenants; but the presiding judges in the seigneurial courts were the same middle-class lawyers who presided in the King’s courts, which could on appeal override the decisions of the seigneurial courts.”[249]

 

     As for the lower nobility, their energies were channelled into army service, in accordance with their medieval conception of themselves as the warrior class. War therefore became a constant feature of Louis’ reign, together with the crippling burden of taxation that war brings. But this did not disturb the nobility, who paid no taxes. Thus “the nobility developed a growing confidence that their needs were best served within rather than against the state. This compact would survive for as long as the élites remained sure that the monarchy was protecting their vital interests.”[250]

 

     The other major estate of the land that needed to be controlled was the Church. Here Louis had two aims: to make the Catholic Church in France a national, Gallican Church under his dominion, and not the Pope’s; and to destroy the protected state within the state that the Edict of Nantes (1594) had created for the Protestant Huguenots. In this way he would have “one faith, one king, one law”.

 

     “For thirty years,” writes Norman Davies, “Louis was a true Gallican – packing the French bishoprics with the relatives of his ministers, authorising the Declaration of the Four Articles (1682), and provoking in 1687-8 an open rupture with the Papacy. The Four Articles, the purest formulation of Gallican doctrine, were ordered to be taught in all the seminaries and faculties of France:

 

1.      The authority of the Holy See is limited to spiritual matters.

2.      The decisions of Church Councils are superior to those of the Pope.

3.      Gallican customs are independent of Rome.

4.      The Pope is not infallible, except by consent of the universal Church.

 

But then, distressed by his isolation from the Catholic powers, Louis turned tail. In 1693 he retracted the Four Articles, and for the rest of his life gave unstinting support to the ultramontane [extreme papist] faction…

 

     “In his policy towards the Protestants, Louis passed from passive discrimination through petty harassment to violent persecution… [In 1685] the King revoked the [Nantes] edict of toleration. Bishop Bossuet awarded him the epithet of the ‘New Constantine’. Up to a million of France’s most worthy citizens were forced to submit or to flee amidst a veritable reign of terror…”[251]

 

     Absolutism reached its height under Louis XIV, who famously stated: “I am the State”,  L’état, c’est moi. His most determined opponent, the Dutch King William, said that Louis’ aim in Europe was to establish “a universal monarch and a universal religion”.[252]

 

     Louis’ philosophy was followed by his successor, Louis XV, who said: “It is in my person alone that sovereign power resides… It is from me alone that my courts derive their authority; and the plenitude of this authority, which they exercise only in my name, remains always in me… It is to me alone that legislative power belongs, without any dependence and without any division… The whole public order emanates from me, and the rights and interests of the nation… are necessarily joined with mine and rest only in my hands.”[253]

 

     The difference between Orthodox autocracy and Catholic (or any other kind of) absolutism is that while the former welcomes and profits from the existence of independent institutions, such as the Church, and institutions with limited powers of self-government, such as provincial administrations or guilds, the latter distrusts all other power bases and tries to destroy them. The result is that, as the absolutism weakens (as weaken it must), institutions spring up to fill the power vacuum which are necessarily opposed to the absolutist power and try to weaken it further, leading to violent revolution. The art of true monarchical government consists, not in ruling without support from other institutions (for that is impossible in the long run), but in ruling with their support and with their full and voluntary recognition of the supremacy of the monarchy. Moreover, the supremacy of the monarchy must be recognised de jure, and not merely de facto. When the majority of the people ceases to believe that their monarch has the right to rule them, or when he believes that his right to rule is limited by nothing except his own will, then his regime is doomed, whatever the external trappings of its power.

 

     As Guizot writes: “By the very fact that this government had no other principle than absolute power, and reposed upon no other base than this, its decline became sudden and well merited. What France, under Louis XIV, essentially wanted, was political institutions and forces, independent, subsisting of themselves, and, in a word, capable of spontaneous action… The ancient French institutions, if they merited that name, no longer existed: Louis XIV completed their ruin. He took no care to endeavour to replace them by new institutions, they would have cramped him, and he did not choose to be cramped. All that appeared conspicuous at that period was will, and the action of central power. The government of Louis XIV was a great fact, a fact powerful and splendid, but without roots… No system can exist except by means of institutions. When absolute power has endured, it has been supported by true institutions, sometimes by the division of society into strongly distinct castes, sometimes by a system of religious institutions. Under the reign of Louis XIV institutions were wanting to power as well as to liberty… Thus we see the government helping on its own decay. It was not Louis XIV alone who was becoming aged and weak at the end of his reign: it was the whole absolute power. Pure monarchy was as much worn out in 1712 as was the monarch himself: and the evil was so much the more grave, as Louis XIV had abolished political morals as well as political institutions.”[254]

 

     This view of the importance of independent institutions, and especially of the Church, is quite compatible with true monarchism, according to which sovereign power in the State abides in the monarch alone. It must be sharply distinguished from the view that sovereignty belongs to the people. This latter view became potent only with the Protestant and liberal revolutions; and French absolutism fell only after the ideas at the root of these revolutions had been popularised and developed by the philosophes of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

 

 

The Forerunners of the Enlightenment

 

     But the basic ideas of the philosophes were already in vogue. Especially their attacks on Holy Scripture. Thus if Protestantism began the process of Biblical criticism, it was the Dutch Jew Spinoza who, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), argued that it was necessary to approach the Bible in a scientific spirit, treating it as a natural phenomenon like any other.

 

     Seventeenth-century continental rationalism also anticipated the eighteenth in political ideas – and without any influence from Locke. Thus F.F. Willert writes: “Natural equality, nature and her law, which is prior and superior to all civil enactments, the Social Contract and the indefeasible sovereignty of the people – all these were conceptions familiar to jurists and publicists and even to politicians before the eighteenth century. That which is characteristic of the French authors of that period is their faith in reason, and their conviction that, since all this is amiss is due to imperfect institutions, all would speedily come right were those imperfections remedied. This delusion was encouraged by the influence of the classics, with their exaggerated faith in the power of the legislator. If Lycurgus, by imposing a few rules of life, could turn men into Spartans, it must be comparatively easy to turn Frenchmen into men. It was not yet a commonplace that we ourselves, our characters, prejudices, and habits, as well as the laws and institutions under which we live, are the result of a long process of evolution. When this truth is half recognised, as it is by Rousseau himself, who holds that the work done by Calvin in Geneva is impossible in a larger State, the conclusion drawn is that things must go on as they are, and that only partial palliatives are possible. The idea of progress, of gradual emelioration, is never suggested, except by Turgot in a prize essay; and, although Utopias are not wanting, no writer before the Revolution made any systematic attempt to forecast the probably future of society, the direction in which it would advance.

 

     “We should far exceed our limits were we to attempt to trace the history of the idea of nature, her rights, and her law, from the Sophistic antithesis of nature and convention, from the doctrine of the Stoics, popularised by Cicero and applied by the Roman lawyers, through the writings of the theologians and jurists of the Middle Ages down to the days of Grotius and Selden. But it must not be forgotten that many of what are called the principles of 1789 were recognised and used as convenient weapons against the authority of the Crown during the sixteenth century both by Catholics and Huguenots; by none more emphatically than by the priest Boucher and the Jesuit Mariana.[255]

 

     “Men, said Boucher, are by nature free. The people choose their prince and confer upon him their sovereignty; but they who delegate their authority remain the superiors of their representative. Civil law gives the ward a remedy against an unjust guardian; the King is the guardian and patron of his people and may be deposed if he oppresses them. It is the duty of subjects to resist a prince who violates God’s law, the theological equivalent for the philosopher’s Law of Nature. Mariana, in his celebrated apology for tyrannicide, also asserts that the derived authority of the prince is subordinated to the popular sovereignty; for we cannot suppose that all the members of the State would voluntarily have stripped themselves of their rights and have handed themselves over unconditionally to the good-will of an individual.

 

     “Such doctrines, advanced by the apologists of intolerance and persecution, the partisans of Spain, and the enemies of national independence, were not attractive to the majority of Frenchmen. Weary of civil strife and anarchy, of political and theological controversy, disgusted by the selfish and unpatriotic intrigues of princes and nobles, the people were led by a sound instinct to rally round the monarchy, the centre and the symbol of national life. This conservatism is conspicuous in the writings of that genius who more perhaps than any other undermined in France the foundations of belief. Montaigne (1533-93) drew from his conviction, that human reason cannot attain to truth, and that every argument may be met by another equally cogent, the practical conclusion that to make reason arbiter in social and political questions must lead to anarchy, and that therefore a wise man will not by innovations weaken all laws and institutions. It is better, he says, to endure a bad law than by altering it to impair the authority of habit. The evils of change, the miseries of revolution, are indisputable; the advantages of this or that form of government are debateable. Why encounter a most certain evil for the sake of a most doubtful good?

 

     “But, while Montaigne’s belief that truth is unattainable led him also to deprecate any attack on the doctrines of the Church, of which he believed the effects to be wholesome, he again and again suggested a destructive criticism of those doctrines and placed the most deadly arms in the hands of others, who like Voltaire, believed their effects to be evil. The ‘Libertines’, as they were called, Epicurean free-thinkers and sceptics, avowed followers of Montaigne, one of the best known and last of whom was Saint-Évremond (1613c.-1703), the friend of Ninon de l’Enclos, continued the tradition of incredulity during the seventeenth century. They held faith to be the negation of reason and that we should follow our natural impulses and instincts. Rightly consulted and understood our nature is a law to itself. But it was from Bayle (1646-1706), and not from them, that Voltaire and the other assailants of orthodoxy and tradition borrowed their most effective weapons.

 

     “There may, at first sight, appear to be but little of the spirit of the eighteenth century in Bayle’s writings. Like Montaigne he rejects the authority of reason, in which alone the ‘philosophers’ believed; and unlike Montaigne, who holds that if little better than animals we are little worse, and as prone to virtue as to vice, he maintains with Pascal that man’s nature is essentially evil. Virtue is a perpetual struggle of will against natural instincts; and the history of civilisation is, according to him, the history of man’s successful efforts to overcome and rise above his nature. As for a golden age, that, he asserts, must be sought,not prior to civil society, but prior to creation; for then, and then only, pain and sorrow, moral and physical evil, were unknown.

 

     “In politics, moreover, Bayle was a timid conservative, wholly averse from revolutionary principles. Yet his Dictionary was the storehouse from which the philosophers of the following generation derived their method and no small part of their ideas and their facts. The irreverent banter or ironical reverence with which the most solemn subjects are treated, the skill with which the reader is insensibly led to the conviction that he is far less certain about things than he imagined, the insidious suggestion that, although all reason is against such a creed, it is perhaps as well to believe in God, in Providence, and in immortality – if you are fool enough – all this in Bayle breathes the very spirit of ‘philosophism’. The method of the Encyclopédie as described by Diderot is the method of Bayle’s Dictionary. ‘Articles dealing with respectable prejudices must expound them deferentially; the edifice of clay must be shattered by referring the reader to other articles in which the opposite truths are established on sound principles. This method of enlightening the reader has an immediate influence on those who are quick of apprehension, an indirect and latent influence on all.’ It was from Bayle that writers, anxious not to give too sudden a shock to prejudice or to avoid consequences unpleasant to themselves, learnt the art of suggesting the most extreme conclusions from seemingly innocent premises. Yet one liberal principle was openly advocated by the cautious and conservative Bayle – that of toleration. His Commentaire philosophique sur le Compelle Intrare was published in 1685, three years before Locke’s Letters on Toleration. Free thought is, he argues, a natural right, since neither religious creeds nor philosophic theory admit of demonstration, but are matters of conjecture. Nor is it dangerous to allow one to exercise this right, for even an atheist is not necessarily a bad citizen. Society could exist without religion…”[256]

 

 

The Idea of Religious Toleration

 

     The idea of religious toleration propounded by Locke and Bayle appeared as the era of the wars of religion was coming to an end. Of course, some relaxation of religious persecution was only to be expected, when in Germany, for example, as a result of the Thirty Years War, between a third and a half of the population lay dead.[257] No society can continue to take such losses without disappearing altogether.

 

     Believers on both sides of the conflict were exhausted. They longed for a rest from religious passions and the opportunity to rebuild their shattered economies in peace. It was as a result of this cooling of religious passions, and rekindling of commercial ones, that the idea of religious toleration was born.

 

     Or rather, reborn. For even the fiercest of ancient despotisms of the past had gone through phases of religious toleration – for example, the Roman empire in the late third century. And the first Christian emperor, St. Constantine the Great, who is unjustly blamed by many Protestants for introducing Christian intolerance into the State, declared: “It is one thing to undertake the contest for immortality voluntarily, another to compel others to do it likewise through fear of punishment.”[258]

 

     Non-violence to the persons of heretics combined with mercilessness to the heresies themselves was especially emphasised by St. John Chrysostom, who wrote: “Christians above all men are forbidden to correct the stumblings of sinners by force… It is necessary to make a man better not by force but by persuasion. We neither have authority granted us by law to restrain sinners, nor, if it were, should we know how to use it, since God gives the crown to those who are kept from evil, not by force, but by choice.”[259] Again, Hieromonk Patapios writes: “As we can see from the many occurrences of the phrase ‘stop the mouths of the heretics’ in his writings, St. John showed not the slightest indulgence towards false teachings; indeed, much of his life as a preacher was devoted to combatting such heretics as the Eunomians, the Judaizers, and the Manichaeans. However, he was resolutely opposed to the use of violence by the authorities to subdue heretics. And it is this reservation of his that must be carefully understood, if one is to grasp what may seem to be a contradictory view of heretics. He knew from pastoral experience that heretics were far more likely to be turned aside from their errors by prayer: ‘And if you pray for the Heathens, you ought of course to pray for Heretics also, for we are to pray for all men, and not to persecute. And this is good also for another reason, as we are partakers of the same nature, and God commands and accepts benevolence towards one another’ (Homilies on the First Epistle to St. Timothy, 7). Near the end of this homily on the dangers of anathematizing others, he says that ‘we must anathematize heretical doctrines and refute impious teachings, from whomsoever we have received them, but show mercy to the men who advocate them and pray for their salvation.’ In other words, we must love the heretic, but hate the heresy.”[260]

 

     The first manifesto in favour of toleration was penned by Sir Thomas More. This may seem paradoxical, for More, as we have seen, was a martyr for papal supremacy, burned a few heretics himself, and wrote a blueprint for a communist state in his Utopia. However, Utopia contains the following interesting argument in favour of toleration: “For King Utopus, even at the first beginning hearing that the inhabitants of the land were before his coming thither at continual dissension and strife among themselves for their religions, perceiving also that this common dissension (whiles every several sect took several parts in fighting for his country) was the only occasion of his conquest over them all, as soon as he had gotten the victory, first of all made a decree that it should be lawful for every man to favour and follow what religion he would, and that he might do the best he could to bring other to his opinion, so that he did it peaceably, gently, quietly, and soberly, without hasty and contentious rebuking and inveighing against others. If he could not by fair and gentle speech induce them unto his opinion, yet he should use no kind of violence, and refrain from displeasant and seditious words. To him that would vehemently and fervently in this cause strive and contend was decreed banishment or bondage.

 

     “This law did King Utopus make, not only for the maintenance of peace, which he saw through continual contention and mortal hatred utterly extinguished, but also because he thought this decree should make for the furtherance of religion… Furthermore, though there be one religion which alone is true, and all other vain and superstitious, yet did he well foresee (so that the matter were handled with reason and sober modesty) that the truth of its own power would at the last issue out and come to light. But if contention and debate in that behalf should continually be used, as the worst men be most obstinate and stubborn and in their evil opinion most constant, he perceived that then the best and holiest religion would be trodden underfoot and destroyed by most vain superstitions, even as good corn is by thorns and weeds overgrown and choked.”[261]

 

     More seems to be hovering here between two contrary propositions: that free debate will ultimately lead to the triumph of truth (“the truth of its own power would at the last issue out and come to light”), and that this freedom will used by the worst men for the triumph of heresy (“then the best and holiest religion would be trodden underfoot”). Not only in his time, but for nearly two hundred years thereafter, it would be the second proposition that would be believed by the majority of men. However, the beginning of a politics of toleration can be seen in Germany in 1555, when the bitter struggle between Catholicism and Lutheranism was brought to an end by the Peace of Augsburg, which enshrined the cuius regio eius religio formula: the religion of a country, whether Catholic or Lutheran, was determined by the faith of its ruler. This Peace may not have been much comfort to a Catholic living in a Lutheran state, or to a Lutheran living in a Catholic state, but it least recognised a plurality of religions in Germany as a whole.

 

     Then, after the still bitterer Thirty Years War, the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 modified this framework further to allow Calvinism as a third religious alternative for rulers, acknowledging that “subjects whose religion differs from that of their prince are to have equal rights with his other subjects” (V. 35).[262] As many have recognised, this was a landmark in political history. The goal was no longer unanimity, but unity – or rather, an agreement to “live and let live”…

 

     And yet the idea of religious toleration had not yet penetrated the popular consciousness. As late as 1646 Thomas Edwards wrote: “Religious toleration is the greatest of all evils; it will bring in first scepticism in doctrine and looseness of life, then atheism”.[263] It was the English Revolution and the triumph of Cromwell that finally pushed the idea into the forefront of political debate. For, as Winstanley wrote in The Law of Freedom (1651), Cromwell “became the main stickler for liberty of conscience without any limitation. This toleration became his masterpiece in politics; for it procured him a party that stuck close in all cases of necessity.”[264] Cromwell’s supporter, Milton, produced a whole tract, Areopagitica (1646) in favour of freedom of speech and the abolition of censorship. For “how”, he asked ironically, “shall the licensers themselves be confided in, unlesse we can conferr upon them, or they assume to themselves above all others in the Land, the grace of infallibility and uncorruptedness?”[265]

 

     But, as Barzun writes, “diversity, inside or outside his army, could not be reduced. Cromwell’s toleration was of course not complete – nobody’s has ever been or ought to be: the most tolerant mind cannot tolerate cruelty, the most liberal state punishes incitement to riot or treason. To all but the Catholic minority in England, the church of Rome was intolerable.”[266] Nor was Calvinism an inherently tolerant creed, insofar as “the Calvinist dogma of predestination,” as Porter points out, “had bred ‘enthusiasm’, that awesome, irresistible and unfalsifiable conviction of personal infallibility”.[267]

 

     Religious toleration needed a philosophical justification. This was provided by Hobbes and Locke, especially the latter.

 

     Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651), published during Cromwell’s Protectorate, at first sight seems a recipe for intolerance – indeed, the most complete tyranny of the State over the religious beliefs of its citizens. For religious truth, according to Hobbes, was nothing other than that which the sovereign ruler declared it to be: “An opinion publicly appointed to be taught cannot be heresy; nor the Sovereign Princes that authorise them heretics.”[268] Being in favour of the absolute power of the sovereign, Hobbes was fiercely opposed to the other major power in traditional societies, religion, which he relegated to an instrument of government; so that the power of censorship passed, in his theory, entirely from the Church to the State.

 

     However, Hobbes was not opposed to dissent so long as it did not lead to anarchy, “for such truth as opposeth no man’s profit nor pleasure, is to all men welcome.”[269] In fact, he did not believe in objective Truth, but only in “appetites and aversions, hopes and fears”, and in the power of human reason to regulate them towards the desired end of public and private tranquillity. He was not anti-religious so much as a-religious.

 

     Hobbesean indifference to religion was a step towards its toleration, but it did not go very far. It was Locke, according to Roy Porter, who became the real “high priest of toleration”. “In an essay of 1667, which spelt out the key principles expressed in his later Letters on Toleration, Locke denied the prince’s right to enforce religious orthodoxy, reasoning that the ‘trust, power and authority’ of the civil magistrate were vested in him solely to secure ‘the good preservation and peace of men in that society’. Hence princely powers extended solely to externals, not to faith, which was a matter of conscience. Any state intervention in faith was ‘meddling’.

 

     “To elucidate the limits of those civil powers, Locke divided religious opinions and actions into three. First, there were speculative views and modes of divine worship. These had ‘an absolute and universal right to toleration’, since they did not affect society, being either private or God’s business alone. Second, there were those – beliefs about marriage and divorce, for instance – which impinged upon others and hence were of public concern. These ‘have a title also to toleration, but only so far as they do not tend to the disturbance of the State’. The magistrate might thus prohibit publication of such convictions if they would disturb the public good, but no one ought to be forced to forswear his opinion, for coercion bred hypocrisy. Third, there were actions good or bad in themselves. Respecting these, Locke held that civil rulers should have ‘nothing to do with the good of men’s soul or their concernments in another life’ – it was for God to reward virtue and punish vice, and the magistrate’s job simply to keep the peace. Applying such principles to contemporary realities, Locke advocated toleration, but with limits: Papists should not be tolerated, because their beliefs were ‘absolutely destructive of all governments except the Pope’s’; nor should atheists, since any oaths they took would be in bad faith.[270]

 

     “As a radical Whig in political exile in the Dutch republic, Locke wrote the first Letter on Toleration, which was published, initially in Latin, in 1689. Echoing the 1667 arguments, this denied that Christianity could be furthered by force. Christ was the Prince of Peace, his gospel was love, his means persuasion; persecution could not save souls. Civil and ecclesiastical government had contrary ends; the magistrate’s business lay in securing life, liberty and possessions, whereas faith was about the salvation of souls. A church should be a voluntary society, like a ‘club for claret’; it should be shorn of all sacerdotal pretensions. While Locke’s views were contested – Bishop Stillingfleet, for example, deemed them a ‘Trojan Horse’ – they nevertheless won favour in an age inclined, or resigned, to freedom of thought and expression in general.”[271]

 

     It was ironic, in view of Locke’s lack of tolerance for Catholics, that the first ruler who legislated for tolerance was the Catholic King James II, who bestowed freedom of religion on Catholics, Anglicans and Non-Conformists in his Declaration of Indulgence (1688), declaring: “We cannot but heartily wish, as it will easily be believed, that all the people of our dominions were members of the Catholic Church; yet we humbly thank Almighty God, it is and has of long time been our constant sense and opinion (which upon divers occasions we have declared) that conscience ought not to be constrained nor people forced in matters of mere religion: it has ever been directly contrary to our inclination, as we think it is to the interest of government, which it destroys by spoiling trade, depopulating countries, and discouraging strangers, and finally, that it never obtained the end for which it was employed…”[272]

 

     The generosity shown by James to non-Catholics was not reciprocated by his Protestant successors, who, through the Toleration Act (1689) and Declaration of Indulgence (1690),  reimposed restrictions on the Catholics while removing them from the Protestants. The justification given for this was purely secular: “Some ease to scrupulous consciences in the exercise of religion” was to be granted, since this “united their Majesties’ Protestant subjects in interest and affection…” In other words, tolerance was necessary in order to avoid the possibility of civil war between the Anglicans and the Non-Conformist Protestants.

 

    For, as Porter goes on, “the so-called Toleration Act of 1689 had an eye first and foremost to practical politics, and did not grant toleration. Officially an ‘Act for Exempting their Majesties’ Protestant Subjects, Dissenting from the Church of England, from the Penalties of Certain Laws’, it stated that Trinitarian Protestand Nonconformists who swore the oaths of Supremacy and Allegiance and accepted thirty-six of the Thirty-nine Articles [the official confession of the Anglican Church] could obtain licences as ministers or teachers. Catholics and non-Christians did not enjoy the rights of public worship under the Act – and non-Trinitarians were left subject to the old penal laws. Unitarians, indeed, were further singled out by the Blasphemy Act of 1697, which made it an offence to ‘deny any one of the persons in the holy Trinity to be God’. There was no official Toleration Act for them until 1813, and in Scotland the death penalty could still be imposed – as it was in 1697 – for denying the Trinity.

 

     “Scope for prosecution remained. Ecclesiastical courts still had the power of imprisoning for atheism, blasphemy and heresy (maximum term: six months). Occasional indictments continued under the common law, and Parliament could order books to be burned. Even so, patriots justly proclaimed that England was, alongside the United Provinces, the first nation to have embraced religious toleration – a fact that became a matter of national pride. ‘My island was now peopled, and I thought myself very rich in subjects; and it was a merry reflection which I frequently made, how like a king I looked,’ remarked Defoe’s castaway hero, Robinson Crusoe; ‘we had but three subjects, and they were of different religions. My man Friday was a pagan and a cannibal, and the Spaniard was a Papist: however, I allowed liberty of conscience throughout my dominions’.

 

     “Two developments made toleration a fait accompli: the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695[273], and the fact that England had already been sliced up into sects. It was, quipped Voltaire, a nation of many faiths but only one sauce, a recipe for confessional tranquillity if culinary tedium: ‘If there were only one religion in England, there would be danger of despotism, if there were only two they would cut each other’s throats; but there are thirty, and they live in peace’ [Letters concerning the English Nation].”[274]

 

     The more religious justifications of tolerance offered in, for example, More’s Utopia or Milton’s Areopagitica, were no longer in fashion. In the modern age that was beginning, religious tolerance was advocated, not because it ensured the eventual triumph of the true religion, but because it prevented war.

 

     And war, of course, “spoiled trade”.

 

     “To enlightened minds,” writes Porter, “the past was a nightmare of barbarism and bigotry: fanaticism had precipitated bloody civil war and the axing of Charles Stuart, that man of blood, in 1649. Enlightened opinion repudiated old militancy for modern civility. But how could people adjust to each other? Sectarianism, that sword of the saints which had divided brother from brother, must cease; rudeness had to yield to refinement. Voltaire saw this happening before his very eyes in England’s ‘free and peaceful assemblies’:

 

‘Take a view of the Royal Exchange in London, a place more venerable than many courts of justice, where the representatives of all nations meet for the benefit of mankind. There the Jew, the Mahometan, and the Christian transact together as tho’ they all profess’d the same religion, and give the name of Infidel to none but bankrupts. There the Presbyterian confides in the Anabaptist, and the Churchman depends on the Quaker’s word. And all are satisfied’. [Letters concerning the English Nation].

 

This passage squares with the enlightened belief that commerce would unite those whom creeds rent asunder. Moreover, by depicting men content, and content to be content – differing, but agreeing to differ – the philosophe pointed towards a rethinking of the summum bonum, a shift from God-fearingness to a selfhood more psychologically oriented. The Enlightenment thus translated the ultimate question ‘How can I be saved?’ into the pragmatic ‘How can I be happy?’”[275]

 

 

Capitalism and the Jews

 

     The beginning of English capitalism had been symbolically marked by Cromwell’s invitation to the Jewish bankers of Amsterdam to set up house in London.

 

     Now the Jews have influenced modern Europe through three major channels: economic, religious and political. Economically, the Jews played a decisive part in the development of capitalism in Europe, and in the breaking down of the Christian beliefs and habits which hindered the full emergence of that socio-economic system that now dominates the world. Religiously, Cabbalistic Judaism greatly influenced a whole series of heretical sects and magical practices that flooded Western Europe from the time of the Templars. From the beginning of the eighteenth century these sects and practices began to converge into the movement known as Freemasonry. Politically, from the second half of the eighteenth century the Jews began to harness the economic power they wielded through the banks, and the religious power they wielded through the masonic lodges, to create that vast phenomenon which we shall simply call the Revolution.

 

     Let us consider here the economic influence of the Jews, their part in the rise of capitalism.

 

     Capitalism on the grand scale flourishes only where there is avarice, the love of money, which St. Paul called “the root of all kinds of evil” (I Timothy 6.10). Of course, avarice was not invented by the Jews or the modern capitalists, but has been a trait of fallen man since the beginning. However, in most historical societies, while many men might dream of great wealth, only very few could have a realistic hope of acquiring it. Or rather, those few who had great wealth did not acquire it so much as inherit it. For they were the sons of the great landowning aristocratic families. Most ordinary people, on the other hand, were born as peasants. A peasant might dream of wealth, but his bondage to his landowning master and the necessity of spending all his time tilling the soil and bringing in the harvest, condemned his dreams to remain no more than that - dreams. This was especially the case in the feudal society of the medieval West – and indeed in almost all societies before the sixteenth century, insofar as almost all societies were based on a rural economy.

 

     However, the growth of towns in the Renaissance, and especially the growth of capitalism and banking, made a certain measure of wealth not just a dream, but a real possibility for a rapidly increasing proportion of the population. And it was the Jews who very quickly came to dominate the burgeoning capitalism of the West. The reason for this was that the Talmud has a specific economic doctrine that favours the most ruthless kind of capitalist exploitation. According to Platonov, it “teaches the Jew to consider the property of all non-Jews as ‘gefker’, which means free, belonging to no one. ‘The property of all non-Jews has the same significance as if it had been found in the desert: it belongs to the first who seizes it’. In the Talmud there is a decree according to which open theft and stealing are forbidden, but anything can be acquired by deceit or cunning…

 

     “From this it follows that all the resources and wealth of the non-Jews must belong to representatives of the ‘chosen people’. ‘According to the Talmud,’ wrote the Russian historian S.S. Gromeka, “God gave all the peoples into the hands of the Jews” (Baba-Katta, 38); “the whole of Israel are children of kings; those who offend a Jew offend God himself” (Sikhab 67, 1) and “are subject to execution, as for lèse-majesté” (Sanhedrin 58, 2); pious people of other nations, who are counted worthy of participating in the kingdom of the Messiah, will take the role of slaves to the Jews’ (Sanhedrin 91, 21, 1051). From this point of view, … all the property in the world belongs to the Jews, and the Christians who possess it are only temporary, “unlawful” possessors, usurpers, and this property will be confiscated by the Jews from them sooner or later. When the Jews are exalted above all the other peoples, God will hand over all the nations to the Jews for final extermination.’[276]

 

     “The historian of Judaism I. Lyutostansky cites examples from the ancient editions of the Talmud, which teaches the Jews that it is pleasing to God that they appropriate the property of the goyim. In particular, he expounds the teaching of Samuel that deceiving a goy is not a sin…

 

     “Rabbi Moses said: ‘If a goy makes a mistake in counting, then the Jew, noticing this, must say that he knows nothing about it.’ Rabbi Brentz says: ‘If some Jews, after exhausting themselves by running around all week to deceive Christians in various places, come together at the Sabbath and boast of their deceptions to each other, they say: “We must take the hearts out of the goyim and kill even the best of them.” – of course, if they succeed in doing this.’ Rabbi Moses teaches: ‘Jews sin when they return lost things to apostates and pagans, or anyone who doesn’t reverence the Sabbath.’…

 

     “To attain the final goal laid down in the Talmud for Jews – to become masters of the property of the goyim – one of the best means, in the opinion of the rabbis, is usury. According to the Talmud, ‘God ordered that money be lent to the goyim, but only on interest; consequently, instead of helping them in this way, we must harm them, even if they can be useful for us.’ The tract Baba Metsiya insists on the necessity of lending money on interest and advises Jews to teach their children to lend money on interest, ‘so that they can from childhood taste the sweetness of usury and learn to use it in good time.’”[277]

 

     Now the Old Testament forbids the lending of money for interest to brothers, but allows it to strangers (Exodus 22.25; Levicticus 25.36; Deuteronomy 23.24). This provided the Jews’ practice of usury with a certain justification according to the letter of the law. However, as the above quotations make clear, the Talmud exploited the letter of the law to make it a justification for outright exploitation of the Christians and Muslims.

 

     Paul Johnson, while admitting that some Talmudic texts encouraged exploitation of Gentiles, nevertheless argues that the Jews had no choice: “A midrash on the Deuteronomy text [about usury], probably written by the nationalistic Rabbi Akiva, seemed to say that Jews were obliged to charge interest to foreigners. The fourteenth-century French Jew Levi ben Gershom agreed: it was a positive commandment to burden the gentile with interest ‘because oen should not benefit an idolater… and cause him as much damage as possible without deviating from righteousness’; others took this line. But the most common justification was economic necessity:

 

     “’If we nowadays allow interest to be taken from non-Jews it is because there is no end of the yoke and the burden kings and ministers impose upon us, and everything we take is the minimum for our subsistence; and anyhow we are condemned to live in the midst of the nations and cannot earn our living in any other manner except by money dealings with them; therefore the taking of interest is not to be prohibited.’

 

     “This was the most dangerous argument of all because financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the unpopularity – and so, of course, the pressure – would increase. Thus the Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practised it were excommunicated. But the Christians also imposed the harshest financial burdens on the Jews. The Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending. Rabbi Joseph Colon, who knew both France and Italy in the second half of the fifteenth century, wrote that the Jews of both countries hardly engaged in any other profession..."[278]

 

     Whichever was the original cause – the Talmud’s encouragement of usury as a weapon to exploit the Gentiles, or the Christians’ financial restrictions on the Jews – that fact was it was through usury that the Jews came to dominate the Christians economically.

 

     “Therefore,” writes Platonov, “already in the Middle Ages the Jews, using the Christians’ prejudice against profit, the amassing of wealth and usury, seized many of the most important positions in the trade and industry of Europe. Practising trade and usury and exploiting the simple people, they amassed huge wealth, which allowed them to become the richest stratum of medieval society. The main object of the trade of Jewish merchants was slave-trading. Slaves were acquired mainly in the Slavic lands[279], whence they were exported to Spain and the countries of the East. On the borders between the Germanic and Slavic lands, in Meysen, Magdeburg and Prague, Jewish settlements were formed, which were constantly occupied in the slave trade. In Spain Jewish merchants organized hunts for Andalusian girls, selling them into slavery into the harems of the East. The slave markets of the Crimea were served, as a rule, by Jews. With the opening of America and the penetration into the depths of Africa it was precisely the Jews who became suppliers of black slaves to the New World.

 

     “From commercial operations, the Jews passed to financial ones, to mortgages and usury, often all of these at once. Already from the 15th century very large Jewish fortunes were being formed. We can judge how big their resources were from the fact that in Spain merchants kept almost a whole army of mercenaries who protected their dubious operations – 25,000 horsemen and 20,000 infantry.

 

     “’The great universal historical event,’ wrote the Jewish historian V. Zombardt, author of the book ‘The Jews and Economic Life’, ‘was the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal (1492 and 1497). It must not be forgotten that on the very day that Columbus sailed from Palos to discover America (August 3, 1492), 300,000 Jews were expelled to Navarra, France, Portugal and the East, and that in the years in which Vasco da Gama was discovering the sea route to East India, the Jews were also being expelled from other parts of the Pyrenean peninsula.’ According to Zombardt’s calculations, already in the 15th century the Jews constituted one third of the numbers of the world’s bourgeoisie and capitalists.

 

     “In the 16th to 18th centuries the centre of Jewish economics became Amsterdam, which the Jews called ‘the new, great Jerusalem’…”[280]

 

     Jews also became influential in Germany, in spite of Luther’s strong opposition to Judaism. Thus “in the seventeenth century,” writes Dan Cohn-Sherbok, “the court Jew came to play a crucial role in state affairs. Each royal or princely court had its own Jewish auxiliary. Throughout the country court Jews administered finances, provisioned armies, raised money, provided textile and precious stones to the court… Such court Jews stood at the pinnacle of the social scale, forming an elite class.”[281]

 

     The migration of the Sephardic Jews from Catholic Spain and Portugal to Protestant Holland and England marked the beginning of the ascent of these latter powers to the status of world powers. It may be wondered why such a zealous Christian as Cromwell decided to readmit the Jews to England. The reason, according to R.A. York, was that “quite a strong philo-semitic tendency was developing in English Puritanism at this time. Puritanism encouraged the return to the text of the Bible, in particular to the Old Testament. This in turn encouraged greater interest in the study of Hebrew and the Jews themselves.

 

     “Part of the reason for this interest was proselytising. The Jews had long been resistant to Christianity, but they might be more attracted to a purer, more Judaic form…”[282]

 

     But the main reason was undoubtedly: money. Thus “in Holland,” continues Platonov, “the Jews became key figures in government finance. The significance of the Jewish financial world in this country went beyond its borders, for during the 17th and 18th centuries it was the main reservoir out of which all monarchs drew when they needed money…

 

     “In the course of the 17th and 18th centuries the dominant influence of the Jews became evident also in the sphere of English finance. In England the monetary needs of the ‘Long Parliament’ served as the first impulse towards attracting rich Jews there. Long before Cromwell sanctioned their admittance, many rich Jews had migrated to England, mainly from Spain and Portugal through Amsterdam; in 1643 there was a particularly strong influx of them.[283] Their focus was the house of the Portugese ambassador in London, Antonio de Souza, who was also a marrano [convert from Judaism]. Among them there particularly stood out Antonio Fernando Karvayal, who was equally well-known as a creditor and a supplier; he was, as a matter of fact, the main financier of the British empire. The contingent of rich English Jews increased under the younger Stuarts, especially under Charles II…

 

     “Beginning from the 17th century, the bankers of the Viennese Court were only Jews.[284] The same situation could be observed in many German principalities.

 

     “In France under Louis XIV and XV the leading position in the financial world was occupied by the Jewish banker Samuel Bernard, about whose help to France contemporaries said that ‘his whole merit consisted in the fact that he supported the State, as a string supports that which hangs on it.’”[285]

 

     Jewish power increased during the three great wars of the seventeenth century: the Thirty Years War in Germany, during which Jews supplied both the Catholics and the Protestants; the Austrians’ wars against France and then Turkey, during which Samuel Oppenheimer was the Imperial War Purveyor to the Austrians; and the wars against Louis XIV, when Oppenheimer was again the chief organizer of the finances of the anti-French coalition.[286]

 

     “William of Orange,” notes Johnson, “later William III of England, who led the coalition from 1672 to 1702, was financed and provisioned by a group of Dutch Sephardic Jews operating chiefly from the Hague.”[287]

 

     And yet, as we have seen, Louis XIV was himself served by a Jewish banker. So the Jews profited whichever side won…

 

     Thus, as the well-known Jewish publicist Hannah Arendt writes, with the rise of capitalism, “Jewish banking capital became international. It was united by means of cross-marriages, and a truly international caste arose,” the consciousness of which engendered “a feeling of power and pride”.[288] After centuries of exile, the Jews were back at the heart of the Gentile world, a position they have not surrendered to the present day.

 

     Nor was it only in the East that Jewish money ruled. In the sixteenth century, a French diplomat who lived in Constantinople under Suleyman the Magnificent, Nicolas de Nicolay, wrote: “They now have in their hands the most and greatest traffic of merchandise and ready money that is conducted in all the Levant. The shops and stalls best stocked with all the varieties of goods which can be found in Constantinople are those of the Jews. They also have among them very excellent practitioners of all the arts and manufactures, especially the Marranos not long since banished and expelled from Spain and Portugal who to the great detriment and injury of Christianity have taught the Turks several inventions, artifices and machines of war such as how to make artillery, arquebuses, gunpowerd, cannon-balls and other arms.”[289]

 

     Protected by the Ottoman Turks from the attacks of the Christians, the Constantinopolitan Jews intrigued against the West European States. Thus Joseph Nasi, a banker and entrepreneur, through contacts in western Europe was able, according to Philip Mansel, “to maintain an international network which helped him obtain revenge on Spain and France. It is possible that, from the banks of the Bosphorus, he encouraged the revolt of the Netherlands against Philip II of Spain. An envoy from the rebel leader, the Prince of Orange, came to see him in 1569. The historian Famianus Strada wrote: ‘As regards the Flemings, Miches’s [i.e. Nasi’s] letters and persuasions had no little influence on them.’ However no letters have come to light.”[290]

 

     A more prosemite interpretation is given to Jewish economic success by Paul Johnson, who writes: “The dynamic impulse to national economies, especially in England and the Netherlands, and later in North America and Germany, was provided not only by Calvinists, but by Lutherans, Catholics from north Italy and, not least, by Jews.

 

     “What these moving communities shared was not theology but an unwillingness to live under the state regimentation of religious and moral ideas at the behest of the clerical establishments. All of them repudiated clerical hierarchies, favouring religious government by the congregation and the private conscience. In all these respects the Jews were the most characteristic of the various denominations of emigrants…

 

     “Capitalism, at all its stages of development, has advanced by rationalizing and so improving the chaos of existing methods. The Jews could do this because, while intensely conservative (as a rule) within their own narrow and isolated world, they had no share in or emotional commitment to society as a whole and so could watch its old traditions, methods and institutions being demolished without a pang – could, indeed, play a leading role in the process of destruction. They were thus natural capitalist entrepreneurs…

 

     “It was the unconscious collective instinct of the Jews both to depersonalize finance and to rationalize the general economic process. Any property known to be Jewish, or clearly identifiable as such, was always at risk in medieval and early modern times, especially in the Mediterranean, which ws then the chief international trading area. As the Spanish navy and the Knights of Malta treated Jewish-chartered ships and goods as legitimate booty, fictitious Christian names were used in the paperwork of international transactions, including marine insurance. These developed into impersonal formulae. As well as developing letters of credit, the Jews invented bearer-bonds, another impersonal way of moving money. For an underprivileged community whose property was always under threat, and who might be forced to move at short notice, the emergence of reliable, impersonal paper money, whether bills of exchange or, above all, valid banknotes, was an enormous blessing.

 

     “Hence the whole thrust of Jewish activity in the early modern period was to refine these devices and bring them into universal use. They strongly supported the emergence of the institutions which promoted paper values: the central banks, led by the Bank of England (1694) with its statutory right to issue notes, and the stock exchanges…

 

     “In general, financial innovations which Jews pioneered in the eighteenth century, and which aroused much criticism then, became acceptable in the nineteenth.

 

     “…Jews were in the vanguard in stressing the importance of the selling function… [and] were among the leaders in display, advertising and promotion…

 

     “They aimed for the widest possible market. They appreciated the importance of economies of scale…

 

     “Above all, Jews were more inclined than others in commerce to accept that businesses flourished by serving consumer interests rather than guild interests. The customer was always right. The market was the final judge. These axioms were not necessarily coined by Jews or exclusively observed by Jews, but Jews were quicker than most to apply them.

 

     “Finally, Jews were exceptionally adept at gathering and making use of commercial intelligence. As the market became the dominant factor in all kinds of trading, and as it expanded into a series of global systems, news became of prime importance. This was perhaps the biggest single factor in Jewish trading and financial success…”[291]

 

 

Protestantism and the Scientific Outlook

 

     Perhaps the most important of the new ideas fashioning our modern outlook that became fashionable towards the end of the seventeenth century, was the scientific outlook, or empiricism, which declares that the only reliable way of attaining non-mathematical truth is by inferences from the evidence of the senses. This principle, first proclaimed by Francis Bacon in his Advancement of Learning (1605), rejects the witness of non-empirical sources – for example, God or intuition or so-called “innate ideas”. The reverse process – that is, inferences about God and other non-empirical realities from the evidence of the senses – was admitted by the early empiricists, but rejected by most later ones.[292] Thus in time empiricism became not only a methodological or epistemological, but also an ontological principle, the principle, namely, that reality not only is best discovered by empirical means, but also is empirical, i.e. material, and that non-empirical reality does not exist. By contrast, religion is occupied mainly with non-empirical reality, and makes no radical cleavage between empirical and non-empirical truth, accepting evidence of the senses with regard to the existence and activity of God and the witness of God Himself with regard to the nature of empirically perceived events.

 

     In accordance with this difference in the kinds of truth they seek, there is a difference in the nature and structure of the authority that science (in its more “advanced”, materialist form) and religion rely on. Science relies on the authority of millions of observations that have been incorporated into a vast structure of hypotheses which are taken as “proved” – although in fact no hypothesis can ever be proved beyond every possible doubt, and science advances by the systematic application of doubt to what are thought to be weak points in the hypothetical structure; for, as John Donne said, “new philosophy calls all in doubt”.[293] Religion, on the other hand, relies on no other ultimate authority than the Word of God Himself as communicated either directly to an individual (for example, Moses) or, collectively, to the Church, “the pillar and ground of the Truth” (I Timothy 3.15), which preserves and nurtures the individual revelations. Doubt has no place within the true religion, but only when one is still in the process of seeking it, when different religious systems are still being approached as possible truths – in other words, as hypotheses. Having cleaved to the true religion by faith, however, - and faith is defined as the opposite of doubt, as “the certainty of things not seen” (Hebrews 11.1), - the religious believer advances by the deepening of faith, by ever deeper immersion in the undoubted truths of religion.

 

     When the differences between science and religion are viewed from this perspective, the perspective of Orthodox Christianity, there are seen to be important differences between Catholicism and Protestantism. For from this perspective, Catholicism is more “religious”, and Protestantism – more “scientific”. For Protestantism arose as a protest against, and a doubting of, the revealed truths of the Catholic religion. From an Orthodox point of view, some of these doubts were justified, and some not. But that is not the essential point here. The essential point is that Protestantism arose out of doubt rather than faith, and, like Descartes in philosophy, placed doubt at the head of the corner of its new theology.

 

     How? First, by doubting that there is any organization that is “the pillar and ground of the truth”, any collective vessel of God’s revelation. So where is God’s revelation to be sought? In the visions and words of individual men, the Prophets and Apostles, the Saints and Fathers? Yes; but – and here the corrosive power of doubt enters again – not all that the Church has passed down about these men can be trusted, according to the Protestants. In particular, the inspiration of the post-apostolic Saints and Fathers is to be doubted, as is much of what we are told of the lives even of the Prophets and Apostles. In fact, we can only rely on the Bible – Sola Scriptura. After all, the Bible is objective; everybody can have access to it, can touch it and read it; can analyse and interpret it. In other words, it corresponds to what we would call scientific evidence.

 

     But can we be sure even of the Bible? After all, the text comes to us from the Church, that untrustworthy organization. Can we be sure that Moses wrote Genesis, or Isaiah Isaiah, or John John, or Paul Hebrews? To answer these questions we have to analyze the text, subject it to scientific verification. Then we will find the real text, the text we can really trust, because it is the text of the real author – the author we know (from tradition) to have been inspired.

 

     But suppose we cannot find this real text? Or the real author? And suppose we come to the conclusion that the “real” text of a certain book was written by tens of authors, none of whom was the “inspired” author, spread over hundreds of years? Can we then be sure that it is the Word of God? But if we cannot be sure that the Bible is not the Word of God, how can we be sure of anything?

 

     Thus Protestantism, which begins with the doubting of authority, ends with the loss of truth itself. Or rather, it ends with a scientific truth which dispenses with religious truth, or accepts religious truth only to the extent that it is “confirmed by the findings of science”. It ends by being a branch of the scientific endeavour of systematic doubt, and not a species of religious faith at all.

 

     If we go back to the original error of Protestantism, we will find that it consists in what we may call a false reductionist attitude to Divine Revelation. Revelation is given to us in the Church, “the pillar and ground of the truth”, and consists of two indivisible and mutually interdependent parts – Holy Scripture and Holy Tradition. Scripture and Tradition support each other, and are in turn supported by the Church, which herself rests on the rock of truth witnessed to in Scripture and Tradition. Any attempt to reduce Divine Revelation to one of these elements, any attempt to make one element essential and the other inessential, is doomed to end with the loss of Revelation altogether. The Truth is one irreducible whole.

 

     Where does this false reductionist attitude come from? Vladimir Trostnikov has shown that it goes back as far as the 11th century, to the nominalist thinker Roscelin. Nominalism, which had triumphed over its philosophical rival, universalism, by the 14th century, “gives priority to the particular over the general, the lower over the higher”. As such, it is in essence the forerunner of reductionism, which insists that the simple precedes the complex, and that the complex can always be reduced, both logically and ontologically, to the simple.[294]

 

     Thus the Catholic heresy of nominalism gave birth to the Protestant heresy of reductionism, which reduced the complex spiritual process of the absorption of the truth of God’s revelation in the life of the Church to the unaided rationalist reading and dissection of a single element in that life, the book of the Holy Scriptures. As Trostnikov explains, the assumption – against all the evidence – that reductionism is true has led to a series of concepts which taken together represent a summation of the contemporary world-view: that matter consists of elementary particles which themselves do not consist of anything; that the planets and all the larger objects of the universe arose through the gradual condensation of simple gas; that all living creatures arose out of inorganic matter; that the later forms of social organization and politics arose out of earlier, simpler and less efficient ones; that human consciousness arose from lower phenomena, drives and archetypes; that the government of a State consists of its citizens, who must therefore be considered to be the supreme power.

 

     We see, then, why science, like capitalism, flourished especially in the Protestant countries. Protestantism, according to Landes, “gave a big boost to literacy, spawned dissent and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries, instead of meeting the challenge, responded by closure and censure.”[295]

 

     However, it is misleading to make too great a contrast between science-loving, anti-authoritarian religion and science-hating authoritarian religion. Much confusion has been generated in this respect by Galileo’s trial, in which a Pope who falsely believed that the earth was flat and that the sun circled the earth persecuted Galileo, who believed on empirical evidence that the earth circled the sun. [296] This trial by no means proved the superiority of science to religion, but only the stupidity of a supposedly infallible Pope.

 

     In truth both science and religion depend on authority – that is, the reports of reliable men about what they have seen, touched and heard. And just as false reports can lead to false religion and superstition, so can they produce false science. Moreover, the reports on which both religion and science are based may have an empirical character: the emptiness of a tomb or the touch of a pierced side, on the one hand; the falling of an apple or the bending of a ray of light, on the other. Both seek truth, and both rely on authority. The difference lies, first of all, in the kinds of truth they seek, and secondly, in the nature and structure of the authority they rely on.

 

 

Sir Isaac Newton

 

     Returning to the period under consideration, it is worthy of note that perhaps the greatest scientist of the time - in the view of some, of all time – Sir Isaac Newton, was not a reductionist in the full modern sense. Far from dividing religion and science into separate, hermetically sealed compartments in accordance with the modern scientistic world-view, Newton was, in White’s words, “interested in a synthesis of all knowledge and was a devout seeker of some form of unified theory of the principles of the universe. Along with many intellectuals before him, Newton believed that this synthesis – the fabled prisca sapientia – had once been in the possession of mankind.” [297]

 

     In this respect he was akin in his thinking to Bacon, who declared that science was to be compared to the knowledge of the essence of creatures which Adam had before the fall – “the pure knowledge of nature and universality, a knowledge by the light whereof man did give names unto other creatures in Paradise, as they were brought to him”.[298]

 

     As J.M. Roberts writes, Bacon “seems to have been a visionary, glimpsing not so much what science would discover as what it would become: a faith. ‘The true and lawful end of the sciences’, he wrote, ‘is that human life be enriched by new discoveries and powers.’ Through them could be achieved ‘a restitution  and reinvigorating (in great part) of man to the sovereignty and power… which he had in his first creation.’ This was ambitious indeed – nothing less than the redemption of mankind through organised research; he was here, too, a prophetic figure, precursor of later scientific societies and institutes.”[299]

 

     Of course, there was a large element of hubris in this programme, a hubris that Newton shared: just as Bacon thought that the “pure knowledge of nature and universality” would lead to power (“knowledge is power”, in his famous phrase) and to “the effecting of all things possible”[300], so Newton vaingloriously gave himself the pseudonym “’Jeova Sanctus Unus’ – One Holy God – based upon an anagram of the Latinised verson of his name, Isaacus Neuutonus”.[301] However, the pride of the programme is not the point here. The important point is that the greatest scientist in history refused to see religious truth as sharply segregated from scientific truth, still less that religious truth needed to be “verified” by science.

 

     So far was Newton from segregating the two that he in fact spent – to the puzzlement of his admirers ever since - many years in the study of alchemy and the Holy Scriptures. For “they who search after the Philosophers’ Stone,” he wrote, “[are] by their own rules obliged to strict & religious life. That study [is] fruitful of experiments.”[302]

 

     “A strict and religious life” “fruitful of experiments”?! Considering that no one was more fruitful in scientific experimentation and theorizing than Newton, one might have expected many modern scientists to have followed his advice. But they have not, because, while admiring his science, they have rejected his philosophy of science, preferring instead their own atheist, reductionist scientific outlook.

 

     Newton’s philosophy of science was based on the fact that, as Maynard Keynes said, “He regarded the universe as a cryptogram set by the Almighty”.[303] If the Almighty set the cryptogram, then only one who was pleasing to the Almighty could be expected to understand it. Hence “his belief that the emotional and spiritual state of the individual experimenter was involved intimately with the success or failure of the experiment.”[304] And hence his quoting Hermes Trismegistus: “I had this art and science by the sole inspiration of God who has vouchsafed to reveal it to his servant. Who gives those that know how to use their reason the means of knowing the truth, but is never the cause that any man follows error & falsehood.”[305]

 

     Now if the universe is a cryptogram written by God, there should be no conflict between the universe and that other cryptogram – the prophetic writings of the Old and New Testaments. And so Newton set about studying the Holy Scriptures, especially Ezekiel, Daniel and the Book of Revelation. “He reasoned that because God’s work and God’s word came from the same Creator, then Nature and Scripture were also one and the same. Scripture was a communicable manifestation or interpretation of Nature, and as such could be viewed as a blueprint for life – a key to all meaning.”[306]

 

     In accordance with this principle, Newton set about interpreting the prophecies, concluding, for example, that the Jews would return to reclaim Jerusalem in 1899, that the world would end in 1948 and that the plan of the Temple of Solomon (Ezekiel 40-48) was a paradigm for the entire future of the world.[307] Evidently he was less inspired as an interpreter of Scripture than as a scientist, and we know that he was far from Orthodox in his theology (he was probably an Arian and most likely a Unitarian). However, it is not as a religious thinker that his example is important, but as showing that great scientific achievement, far from being incompatible with religious “fundamentalism” (Newton believed in the literal truth of the Creation story, rejecting the idea that living creatures came into being by chance) and the belief that the true science comes from Divine inspiration, may actually be nourished by it.

 

     But such examples become increasingly rare after Newton’s death. (Perhaps the most famous one is Einstein’s extremely “unscientific” statement that “God does not play with dice”.) For he lived just before the “Age of Enlightenment” began to radically change the way men thought. And it changed it, first of all, by making scientific reasoning and the scientific method the measure of all things.

 

     The difference is illustrated by a remark of Bertrand Russell: "Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century."[308] Michael Polanyi confirms this judgement: "Just as the three centuries following on the calling of the Apostles sufficed to establish Christianity as the state religion of the Roman Empire, so the three centuries after the founding of the Royal Society sufficed for science to establish itself as the supreme intellectual authority of the post-Christian age. 'It is contrary to religion!' - the objection ruled supreme in the seventeenth century. 'It is unscientific!' is its equivalent in the twentieth."[309]

 

     Newton was almost the last man who believed with equal passion in reason and revelation, and sought the answers to his quest equally in both. But after his death, a certain Rubicon in western consciousness was crossed; scientific doubt would no longer be simply one tool among others to probe the mysteries of God’s universe. It would be the tool used to “demonstrate” that the universe is neither mysterious, nor God’s…

 

 


4. THE EAST: PATRIARCHAL RUSSIA

 

He who conquers and keeps My works until the end,

I will give him power over the nations,

And he shall rule them with a rod or iron.

Revelation 2.26-27.

 

In truth, pious tsar, the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and this thought is from God, and will be realised by you. For the Old Rome fell to the Apollinarian heresy, and the Second Rome, Constantinople, is in the possession of the grandsons of the Hagarenes, the godless Turks: but your great Russian kingdom, the Third Rome, has exceeded all in piety. And all the pious kingdoms have been gathered into your kingdom, and you alone under the heavens are named the Christian tsar throughout the inhabited earth for all Christians.

Patriarch Jeremiah II of Constantinople.

 

The main duty of the tsar is to care for the Church, for the dominion of the tsar can never be firmly established and prosperous when his mother, the Church of God, is not strongly established, for the Church of God, most glorious tsar, is thy mother.

Patriarch Nicon of Moscow.

 

The Moscow Patriarchate

 

     In the eyes of the world Russia began her ascent to great-power status in the reign of the talented, but terrible Ivan. In the eyes of the Orthodox, however, Russia became the clear successor to the Empire of New Rome only at the coronation of Ivan’s son, the supposedly half-witted, but pious Theodore Ivanovich. For it was this tsar who was both crowned according to the full Byzantine rite for emperors, receiving communion under both forms within the altar, and had the metropolitanate of Moscow raised to patriarchal status with the blessing of the Eastern Patriarchs.

 

     The opportunity for the exaltation of the Russian Church came in 1589, with the visit to Moscow on an alms-raising trip of the Ecumenical Patriarch Jeremiah II (Trallas).[310] Jeremiah was one of the outstanding hierarchs of this period of the Church's history, one of the few who could justly be said to have been ecumenical in his vision and his activities. In 1583, in a Pan-Orthodox Council which included two other patriarchs, he had anathematised the new calendar which Pope Gregory XIII had introduced in the West and which led to intensified persecution of the Russian Orthodox in Poland-Lithuania.[311] Later, he politely but firmly rejected the confession of the Lutheran Church in a dialogue with Augsburg. And shortly after his trip to Moscow he made an important tour of the beleagured Orthodox in the Western Russian lands, ordaining bishops and blessing the lay brotherhoods.

 

     The raising of the Russian Muscovite Church to the status of a patriarchate was timely for many reasons. First, the Muscovite Church had been de facto autocephalous since the council of Florence nearly 150 years before, and this autocephaly needed to be regularised by a Pan-Orthodox Council Secondly, it was now obvious – and especially after the unia of Brest-Litovsk in 1596 - that Divine Providence had singled out the Church in Muscovy, rather than that in Poland-Lithuania, as the centre and stronghold of Russian Orthodoxy as a whole, and this needed to be emphasised. Thirdly, in the coming “Time of Troubles” the Autocracy would come near to annihilation, and would only be saved by the exceptional authority enjoyed by the Patriarch of Moscow.

 

     The exceptional importance of the Autocracy, not only for Russia but for the whole Orthodox world, and the necessity of preserving its power and authority by all means, had just been highlighted by the terrible plight of the Orthodox Kingdom of Georgia. For, as Ioseliani writes, “oppressed by internal discord, and by the dissensions of ambitious and unsettled princes, Georgia was again exposed to a severe persecution on the part of the Persians. These enemies of the Christian name ceased not to lay their sacrilegious hands on the riches of Iberia. The messengers of King Alexander to Moscow lamented the fearful misfortunes of their country, and represented how the great Shah-Abbas, having endeavoured to leave to himself the protection of the kingdom of Georgia, made in reality the Georgians enemies of the Russian Tzar.

 

     “In the year 1587 King Alexander II, having declared himself a vassal of Russia, sent to Moscow the priests Joachim, Cyril, and others; and, pressed on all sides as he was by the Persians and the Turks, entreated with tears the Russian Tzar Theodore Iohannovitch to take Iberia under his protection, and thus to rescue her from the grasp of infidels. ‘The present disastrous times,’ wrote he, ‘for the Christian faith were foreseen by many men inspired by God. We, brethren of the same faith with the Russians, groan under the hand of wicked men. Thou, crowned head of the Orthodox faith, canst alone save both our lives and our souls. I bow to thee with my face to the earth, with all my people, and we shall be thine forever.’ The Tzar Theodore Iohannovitch having taken Iberia under his protection, busied himself earnestly in rendering her assistance and in works of faith. He sent into Georgia teachers in holy orders for the regulation of Church ceremonies, and painters to decorate the temples with images of saints; and Job, patriarch of all the Russias, addressed to the Georgian king a letter touching the faith. King Alexander humbly replied that the favourable answer of the Tzar had fallen upon him from Heaven, and brought him out of darkness into light; that the clergy of the Russian Church were angels for the clergy of Iberia, buried in ignorance. The Prince Zvenigorod, ambassador to Georgia, promised in the name of Russia the freedom of all Georgia, and the restoration of all her churches and monasteries.”[312]

 

     Because of her own internal and external troubles, Russia was not able to offer significant military aid to Georgia for some time, and the persecution of the Georgian Church continued.[313] Nevertheless, the Russian tsar and patriarch were now in exactly the same relationship with Georgia as the Constantinopolitan emperors and patriarchs had been centuries before. This showed clearly that the Russia had taken the place of Constantinople in God’s Providential Plan for His Church, a fact which the Eastern Patriarchs were now ready to accept. Thus on acceding to the tsar’s request for a patriarchate of Moscow, Patriarch Jeremiah said: “In truth, pious tsar, the Holy Spirit dwells in you, and this thought is from God, and will be realised by you. For the Old Rome fell to the Apollinarian heresy, and the Second Rome, Constantinople, is in the possession of the grandsons of the Hagarenes, the godless Turks: but your great Russian kingdom, the Third Rome, has exceeded all in piety. And all the pious kingdoms have been gathered into your kingdom, and you alone under the heavens are named the Christian tsar throughout the inhabited earth for all Christians.”[314]

 

     The Patriarch’s language here (if it is truly his) is very reminiscent of that of the famous prophecy of Elder Philotheus of Pskov in 1511. In particular, the Patriarch follows the elder in ascribing the fall of Old Rome to “the Apollinarian heresy”. Now the Apollinarian heresy rarely, if ever, figures in lists of the western heresies. And yet the patriarch here indicates that it is the heresy as a result of which the First Rome fell. Some have understood it to mean the Latin practice of using unleavened bread in the Eucharist.

 

     However, to understand why the patriarch should have spoken of it as the heresy of the West, we need to look for some matching in form, if not in substance, between the Apollinarian and papist heresies. Smirnov's definition of the heresy gives us a clue: "accepting the tripartite composition of human nature - spirit, irrational soul, and body - [Apollinarius] affirmed that in Christ only the body and the soul were human, but His mind was Divine."[315] In other words, Christ did not have a human mind like ours, but this was replaced, according to the Apollinarian schema, by the Divine Logos. A parallel with Papism immediately suggests itself: just as the Divine Logos replaces the human mind in the heretical Apollinarian Christology, so a quasi-Divine, infallible Pope replaces the fully human, and therefore at all times fallible episcopate in the heretical papist ecclesiology.

 

     The root heresy of the West therefore consists in the unlawful exaltation of the mind of the Pope over the other minds of the Church, both clerical and lay, and its quasi-deification to a level equal to that of Christ Himself. From this root heresy proceed all the heresies of the West. Thus the Filioque with its implicit demotion of the Holy Spirit to a level below that of the Father and the Son becomes necessary insofar as the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth Who constantly leads the Church into all truth has now become unnecessary - the Divine Mind of the Pope is quite capable of fulfilling His function. Similarly, the epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit on the Holy Gifts, is also unnecessary - if Christ, the Great High Priest, sanctified the Holy Gifts by His word alone, then His Divine Vicar on earth is surely able to do the same without invoking any other Divinity, especially a merely subordinate one such as the Holy Spirit.

 

     The exaltation of the Russian Church and State to patriarchal and “Third Rome” status respectively shows that, not only in her own eyes, but in the eyes of the whole Orthodox world, Russia was now the chief bastion of the Truth of Christ against the heresies of the West. Russia had been born as a Christian state just as the West was falling away from grace into papism in the eleventh century. Now, in the sixteenth century, as Western papism received a bastard child in the Protestant Reformation, and a second wind in the Catholic Counter-Reformation, Russia was ready to take up leadership of the struggle against both heresies as a fully mature Orthodox nation.

 

     However, at the Pan-Orthodox Council convened by Jeremiah on his return to Constantinople, the Eastern Patriarchs, while confirming the establishment of the Moscow Patriarchate, made it only the fifth in seniority, after the four Greek patriarchates. This was to prove a prudent reservation, for in the century that followed, the Poles briefly conquered Moscow during the “Time of Troubles”, necessitating the continued supervision of the Western and Southern Russian Orthodox by Constantinople. And by the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Russian patriarchate was no more, having been abolished by Peter the Great. 

 

     Nevertheless, the elevation of the head of the Russian Church to the rank of patriarch was to prove providential now, in the early seventeenth century, when the Autocracy in Russia was shaken to its foundations and the patriarchs took the place of the tsars as the leaders of the Russian nation. We witness a similar phenomenon in 1917, when the restoration of the Russian patriarchate to some degree compensated for the fall of the tsardom. In both cases, the patriarchate both filled the gap left by the fall of the state (up to a point) and kept alive the ideals of true Orthodox statehood.

 

 

Poles, Ñossacks and Jews

 

     Just as the Russian State was beginning to recover its former strength, it came into contact again with the Jews.

 

     Paul Johnson writes: “The Russian barrier to further eastern penetration led to intensive Jewish settlement in Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine… By 1575, while the total population [of Poland] had risen to seven million, the number of Jews had jumped to 150,000, and thereafter the rise was still more rapid. In 1503 the Polish monarchy appointed Rabbi Jacob Polak ‘Rabbi of Poland’, and the emergence of a chief rabbinate, backed by the crown, allowed the development of a form of self-government which the Jews had not known since the end of the exilarchate. From 1551 the chief rabbi was elected by the Jews themselves. This was, to be sure, oligarchic rather than democratic rule. The rabbinate had wide powers over law and finances, appointing judges and a great variety of other officials… The royal purpose in devolving power on the Jews was, of course, self-interested. There was a great deal of Polish hostility to the Jews. In Cracow, for instance, where the local merchant class was strong, Jews were usually kept out. The kings found out they could make money out of the Jews by selling to certain cities and towns, such as Warsaw, the privilege de non tolerandis Judaeis. But they could make even more by allowing Jewish communities to grow up, and milking them. The rabbinate and local Jewish councils were primarily tax-raising agencies. Only 30 per cent of what they raised went on welfare and official salaries; all the rest was handed over to the crown in return for protection.

 

     “The association of the rabbinate with communal finance and so with the business affairs of those who had to provide it led the eastern or Ashkenazi Jews to go even further than the early-sixteenth-century Italians in giving halakhic approval to new methods of credit-finance. Polish Jews operating near the frontiers of civilization [!] had links with Jewish family firms in the Netherlands and Germany. A new kind of credit instrument, the mamram, emerged and got rabbinical approval. In 1607 Jewish communities in Poland and Lithuania were also authorized to use heter iskah, an inter-Jewish borrowing system which allowed one Jew to finance another in return for a percentage. This rationalization of the law eventually led even conservative authorities, like the famous Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague, to sanction lending at interest.

 

     “With easy access to credit, Jewish pioneer settlers played a leading part in developing eastern Poland, the interior of Lithuania, and the Ukraine, especially from the 1560s onwards. The population of Western Europe was expanding fast. It needed to import growing quantities of grain. Ambitious Polish landowners, anxious to meet the need, went into partnership with Jewish entrepreneurs to create new wheat-growing areas to supply the market, take the grain down-river to the Baltic ports, and then ship it west. The Polish magnates – Radziwills, Sovieskis, Zamojkis, Ostrogskis, Lubomirskis – owned or conquered the land. The ports were run by German Lutherans. The Dutch Calvinists owned most of the ships. But the Jews did the rest. They not only managed the estates but in some cases held the deeds as pledges in return for working capital. Sometimes they leased the estates themselves. They ran the tolls. They built and ran mills and distilleries. They owned the river boats, taking out the wheat and bringing back in return wine, cloth and luxury goods, which they sold in their shops. They were in soap, glazing, tanning and furs. They created entire villages and townships (shtetls), where they lived in the centre, while peasants (Catholics in Poland and Lithuania, Orthodox in the Ukraine) occupied the suburbs.

 

     “Before 1569 [recte: 1596] when the Union of Brest-Litovsk made the Polish settlement of the Ukraine possible, there were only twenty-four Jewish settlements there with 4,000 inhabitants; by 1648 there were 115, with a numbered population of 51,325, the total being much greater. Most of these places were owned by Polish nobles, absentee-landlords, the Jews acting as middlemen and intermediaries with the peasants – a role fraught with future danger. Often Jews were effectively the magnates too. At the end of the sixteenth century Israel of Zloczew, for instance, leased an entire region of hundreds of square miles from a consortium of nobles to whom he paid the enormous sum of 4,500 zlotys. He sub-let tolls, taverns and mills to his poorer relatives. Jews from all over Europe arrived to take part in this colonizing process. In many settlements they constituted the majority of the inhabitants, so that for the first time outside Palestine they dominated the local culture. But there were important at every level of society and administration. They farmed the taxes and the customs. They advised government. And every Polish magnate had a Jewish counsellor in his castle, keeping the books, writing letters, running the economic show…

 

     “In 1648-49, the Jews of south-eastern Poland and the Ukraine were struck by catastrophe. This episode was of great importance in Jewish history for several reasons… The Thirty Years War had put growing pressure on the food-exporting resources of Poland. It was because of their Polish networks that Jewish contractors to the various armies had been so successful in supplying them. But the chief beneficiaries had been the Polish landlords; and the chief losers had been the Polish and Ukrainian peasants, who had seen an ever-increasing proportion of the crops they raised marketed and sold at huge profit to the ravenous armies. Under the Arenda system, whereby the Polish nobility leased not only land but all fixed assets such as mills, breweries, distilleries, inns and tolls to Jews, in return for fixed payments, the Jews had flourished and their population had grown rapidly. But the system was inherently unstable and unjust. The landlords, absentee and often spendthrift, put continual pressure on the Jews by raising the price each time a lease was renewed; the Jews in turn put pressure on the peasants….

 

     “The Ukrainian peasants finally rose in the late spring of 1648, led by a petty aristocrat called Bogdan Chmielnicki, with the help of Dnieper Cossack and Tartars from the Crimea. His rising was fundamentally aimed at Polish rule and the Catholic church, and many Polish nobles and clergy were among the victims. But the principal animus was directed against Jews, with whom peasants had the most contact, and when it came to the point the Poles always abandoned their Jewish allies to save themselves. Thousands of Jews from villages and shtetls scrambled for safety to the big fortified towns, which turned into death-traps for them. At Tulchin the Polish troops handed over the Jews to the Cossacks in exchange for their own lives; at Tarnopol, the garrison refused to let the Jews in at all. At Bar, the fortress fell and all the Jews were massacred. There was another fierce slaughter at Narol. At Nemirov, the Cossacks got into the fortress by dressing as Poles, ‘and they killed about 6,000 souls in the town’, according to the Jewish chronicle; ‘they drowned several hundreds in the water and by all kinds of cruel torments’. In the synagogue they used the ritual knives to kill Jews, then burned the building down, tore up the sacred books, and trampled them underfoot, and used the leather covers for sandals.”[316]

 

 

Orthodoxy and the Unia

 

     Still more dangerous enemies than the Jews for the beleagured Orthodox population of the western regions were the Jesuits. «At the end of the 16th centuy,” writes Protopriest Peter Smirnov, “the so-called Lithuanian unia took place, or the union of the Orthodox Christians living in the south-western dioceses in separation from the Moscow Patriarchate, with the Roman Catholic Church.

 

     “The reasons for this event, which was so sad for the Orthodox Church and so wretched for the whole of the south-western region were: the lack of stability in the position and administration of the separated dioceses; the intrigues on the part of the Latins and in particular the Jesuits; the betrayal of Orthodoxy by certain bishops who were at that time adminstering the south-western part of the Russian Church.

 

      “With the separation of the south-western dioceses under the authority of a special metropolitan, the question arose: to whom were they to be hierarchically subject? Against the will of the initiators of the separation, the south-western metropolia was subjected to the power of the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the patriarchs, in view of the dangers presented by the Latins, intensified their supervision over the separated dioceses.”[317]

 

     Before continuing with the story in Russia, let us briefly examine the situation of the Patriarchate of Constantinople, under which the great majority of non-Russian Orthodox Christians lived, and which now undertook the leadership in the battle against the unia.

 

     There had been one immediate and major gain from the fall of the Empire in 1453: the conqueror of Constantinople gave the patriarchate into the hands of St. Gennadius Scholarius, a disciple of St. Mark of Ephesus and a firm opponent of the unia. However, in almost every other respect the Christians of the Greek lands and the Balkans suffered greatly from their new rulers. Since the Constantinopolitan patriarch was made both civic and religious leader of all the empire's Orthodox, his throne became the object of political intrigues involving not only Turkish officials, but also Greek merchants, Georgian kings, Romanian princes and, increasingly, Western ambassadors. And since each new patriarch had to pay a large sum, as well as an annual tribute, to the Sublime Porte, this meant that, with rare exceptions, the candidate with the biggest purse won. This in turn led to frequent depositions, even murders, of patriarchs, and the extortion of ever-increasing sums from the already impoverished Christians.[318]

 

     In the towns and villages, conditions also deteriorated. Gradually, more and more churches were converted into mosques; bribes and intrigues were often necessary to keep the few remaining churches in Christian hands, and these usually had to have drab exteriors with no visible domes or crosses. On the whole, Christians were allowed to practise their faith; but all influential positions were restricted to Muslims, and conversion from Islam to Christianity was punishable by death. Many of the martyrs of this period were Orthodox Christians who had, wittingly or unwittingly, become Muslims in their youth, and were then killed for reconverting to the faith of their fathers.[319] The general level of education among the Christians plummeted, and even the most basic books often had to be imported from semi-independent areas such as the Danubian principalities or from Uniate presses in Venice.

 

     It was only to be expected that the West would attempt to benefit from the weakened condition of the Orthodox. The Society of Jesus was founded in 1540 with the specific aim of buttressing the Counter-Reformation papacy, and was soon mounting a formidable war, not only against Protestantism, but also against Orthodoxy. The Jesuits' methods ranged from crude force, which they used with the connivance of the Polish landlords in the West Russian lands, to the subtler weapon of education, which was particularly effective among the sons of Greek families who went to study in the College of Saint Athanasius in Rome or the Jesuit schools of Constantinople. Soon this pressure was producing results: in addition to the unia of Brest-Litovsk, at which five Russian bishops joined Rome, several Antiochian metropolitans apostasized in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nor did the Protestant reformers fail to make gains, especially in Romania.[320]

 

     Amidst all this turmoil, and with the bishops so often wavering in faith or bound by political pressures, it was often left to the lower clergy or the laypeople to take up the banner of Orthodoxy. Thus the unia was fought by hieromonks, such as St. Job of Pochaev, lay theologians such as the Chiot Eustratios Argenti[321], aristocratic landowners such as Prince Constantine Constantinovich Ostrozhsky, and lay brotherhoods such as those which preserved Orthodoxy in uniate-dominated towns such as Lvov and Vilnius for centuries.[322] Many monks wandered around the Orthodox lands strengthening the Christians in the faith of their fathers and receiving martyrdom as their reward, such as the exarch of the Constantinopolitan patriarch Nicephorus, who was killed by the Poles, and St. Athanasius of Brest, who was tortured to death by the Jesuits, and St. Cosmas of Aitolia, who was killed by the Turks in Albania.[323]

 

     The Turks, paradoxically, provided some protection for Orthodox Christians from the depradations of western missionaries in the Balkan lands. And the Muscovite tsars, of course, provided even more in their territories. But the Russian lands from Kiev westwards were largely deprived of protection.

    

     “In such a situation,” continues Smirnov, “the Jesuits appeared in the south-western dioceses and with their usual skill and persistence used all the favourable circumstances to further their ends, that is, to spread the power of the Roman pope. They took into their hands control of the schools, and instilled in the children of the Russian boyars a disgust for the Orthodox clergy and the Russian faith, which they called ‘kholop’ (that is, the faith of the simple people). The fruits of this education were not slow to manifest themselves. The majority of the Russian boyars and princes went over to Latinism. To counter the influence of the Jesuits in many cities brotherhoods were founded. These received important rights from the Eastern Patriarchs. Thus, for example, the Lvov brotherhood had the right to rebuke the bishops themselves for incorrect thinking, and even expel them from the Church. New difficulties appeared, which were skillfully exploited by the Jesuits. They armed the bishops against the brotherhoods and against the patriarchs (the slaves of the Sultans), pointed out the excellent situation of the Catholic bishops, many of whom had seats in the senate, and honours and wealth and power. The Polish government helped the Jesuits in every way, and at their direction offered episcopal sees to such people as might later turn out to be their obedient instruments. Such in particular were Cyril Terletsky, Bishop of Lutsk, and Hypatius Potsey, Bishop of Vladimir-in-Volhynia....

 

     “The immediate excuse for the unia was provided by the following circumstance. Patriarch Jeremiah of Constantinople, during his journey through the south of Russia to Moscow to establish the patriarch, defrocked the Kieven Metropolitan Gnesiphorus for bigamy, and appointed in his place Michael Ragoza, and commanded him to convene a council, by his return, to discuss another bigamist who had been accused of many crimes, Cyril Terletsky. Ìichael Ragoza was a kind person, but weak in character, he did not convene a council inflicted unnecessary delays and expenses on the patriarch. The Patriarch, summoned out of Russia by his own affairs, sent letters of attorney to Ragoza and Bishop Meletius of Vladimir (in Volhynia) for the trial of Teretsky. Both these letters were seized by Cyril, and the affair continued to be dragged out. Meanwhile, Meletius died, and Cyril Terletsky succeeded in presenting the Vladimir see to his friend, Hypatius Potsey. Fearing the appointment of a new trial on himself from the patriarch, Cyril hastened to act in favour of the unia, and made an ally for himself in Hypatius, who was indebted to him.

 

     “In 1593 they openly suggested the unia to the other south-western bishops in order to liberate themselves from the power of the patriarch and the interference of laymen in the affairs of the ecclesiastical administration. In December, 1595 they were already in Rome, kissed the slipper of Pope Clement VIII, recognised the procession of the Holy Spirit from the Son, the supreme authority of the Roman first-priest, the teaching on indulgences and purgatory. The Pope received them with joy, appointed a great festivity in honour of the union that had been achieved, and ordered a coin to be minted. On this coin they portrayed the Pope and a Russian falling at his feet, with the words: «In memory of the reception of the Russians».

 

     The whole affair was carried through, as was the custom of the Jesuits, with various forgeries and deceptions. Thus, for example, they took the signatures of the two bishops on white blanks, supposedly in case there would be unforeseen petitions before the king on behalf of the Orthodox, and meanwhile on these blanks they wrote a petition for the unia. Potsej and Terletsky made such concessions to the Pope in Rome as they had not been authorised to make even by the bishops who thought like them. Terletsky and Potsej had hardly returned from Rome before these forgeries were exposed, which elicited strong indignation against them on the part of some bishops (Gideon of Lvov and Michael of Peremysl) the Orthodox princes (Prince Ostrozhsky) and others.

 

     “At the end of 1596 there was council in Brest in order to come to a decision about the unia, at which, besides the south-western bishops, there were two patriarchal exarchs, Nicephorus from the Constantinopolitan Patriarch and Cyril Lukaris from the Alexandrian. From the very beginning of the council the Orthodox separated themselves from the uniate party and opened special sessions. At the head of the Orthodox stood the exarchs, six bishops and Prince Ostrozhsky. Four bishops were firmly behind the unia, but they were supported by the king. The metropolitan behaved indecisively and did not know where to go until the Jesuits drew over to their side and against Orthodoxy. The supporters of the unia triumphantly read out the Pope’s bull and the act of union. But the Orthodox, from their side, signed a decree: not to obey the metropolitan and the apostate bishops and consider them defrocked; and not to undertake anything in relation to the faith without the consent of the Patriarch of Constantinople.

 

     “From this time there began persecutions against the Orthodox. The uniate bishops removed the Orthodox priests and put uniates in their place. The Orthodox brotherhoods were declared to be mutinous assemblies, and those faithful to Orthodoxy were deprived of posts and oppressed in trade and crafts. The peasants were subjected to all kinds of indignities by their Catholic landlords. The [Orthodox] churches were forcibly turned into uniate ones or were leased out to Jews. The leaseholder had the keys to the church and extracted taxes for every service and need. Ìany of the Orthodos fled from these restrictions to the Cossacks in the steppes, who rose up in defence of the Orthodox faith under the leadership of Nalivaiki. But the Poles overcame them and Nalivaiki was burned to death in a brazen bull. Òhen a fresh rebellion broke out under Taras. But, happily for the Orthodoxy, their wrathful persecutor Sigismund III died. His successor, Vladislav IV, gave the Orthodox Church privileges, with the help of which she strengthened herself for the coming struggle with the uniates and Catholics...

 

     However, although Vladislav was well-disposed towards the Orthodox, the Poles did not obey him and continued to oppress them. The Cossacks several times took up arms, and when they fell into captivity to the Poles, the latter subjected them to terrible tortures. Some were stretched on the wheel, others had their arms and legs broken, others were pierced with spikes and placed on the rack. Children were burned on iron grills before the eyes of their fathers and mothers.”[324]

 

Boris Godunov

 

     The Brest unia made the necessity of a strong autocracy in Moscow more essential than ever. And yet it is from this time, and in particular from the coronation of Boris Godunov on September 1, 1598, that the Muscovite autocracy began to waver. Boris was the first Russian tsar to be crowned and anointed by a full patriarch, and there was no serious resistance to his ascending the throne. But he acted from the beginning as if not quite sure of his position, or as if seeking some confirmation of his position from the lower ranks of society. This was perhaps because he was not a direct descendant of the Rurik dynasty (he was brother-in-law of Tsar Theodore), perhaps because (according to the Chronograph of 1617) the dying Tsar Theodore had pointed to his mother’s nephew, Theodore Nikitch Romanov, the future patriarch, as his successor, perhaps because he had some dark crime on his conscience…

 

     In any case, the extraordinary thing was, as Stephen Graham writes, that “Boris without reading Sir Thomas More – he was still illiterate – and probably without converse on the subject had arrived at the idea of Utopia, the democratic conception of the Golden Age, even interrupting the liturgy of the coronation to proclaim the equality of man. It was a striking interruption of the ceremony. The Cathedral of the Assumption was packed with a mixed assembly such as never could have found place at the coronation of a tsar of the blood royal. There were many nobles there, but cheek by jowl with them merchants, shopkeepers, even beggars. Boris suddenly took the arm of the holy Patriarch in his and declaimed in a loud voice: ‘Oh, holy father Patriarch Job, I call God to witness that during my reign there shall be neither poor man nor beggar in my realm, but I will share all with my fellows, even to the last rag that I wear.’ And in sign he ran his fingers over the jewelled vestments that he wore. There was an unprecedented scene in the cathedral, almost a revolutionary tableau when the common people massed within the precincts broke the disciplined majesty of the scene to applaud the speaker.”[325]

 

     How different was this tsarist democratism from the self-confidence of Ivan the Terrible: “I boast of nothing in my pride; indeed I have no need of pride, for I perform my kingly task and consider no man higher than myself.”[326] And again: “The Russian autocrats have from the beginning had possession of all the kingdoms, and not the boyars and grandees…”[327] And again, this time to the (elected) king of Poland: “We, humble Ivan, tsar and great prince of all Rus’, by the will of God, and not by the stormy will of man…”[328]

 

     And indeed, Ivan the Terrible’s attitude to his own power was much closer to the attitude of the Russian people as a whole than was Boris Godunov’s. For, as St. John Maximovich writes, “the Russian sovereigns were never tsars by the will of the people, but always remained Autocrats by the Mercy of God. They were sovereigns in accordance with the dispensation of God, and not according to the ‘multimutinous’ will of man.”[329]

 

     Sensing that Tsar Boris was not sure of his legitimacy, the people paid more heed to the rumours that he had murdered the Tsarevich Demetrius, the Terrible’s youngest son, in 1591 – which, if true, would certainly have made him a usurper in their eyes. But then came news that a young man claiming to be Demetrius Ivanovich was marching at the head of a Polish army into Russia. If this man was truly Demetrius, then Boris was, of course, innocent of his murder. But paradoxically this only made his position more insecure; for in the eyes of the people the hereditary principle was higher than any other – an illegitimate but living son of Ivan the Terrible was more legitimate for them than Boris, even though he was an intelligent and experienced ruler, the right-hand man of two previous tsars, and fully supported by the Patriarch, who anathematised all the false Demetrius and all those who followed him. Support for Boris collapsed, and in 1605 he died, after which Demetrius, who had promised the Pope to convert Russia to Catholicism, swept to power in Moscow.

 

     How was such sedition against their tsar possible in a people that had patiently put up with the terrible Ivan? Solonevich, points to the importance that the Russian people attached to the legitimacy of their tsars, in sharp contrast to the apparent lack of concern for legitimacy which he claims to find among the Byzantines. “Thus in Byzantium out of 109 reigning emperors 74 ascended onto the throne by means of regicide. This apparently disturbed no one. In Russia in the 14th century Prince Demetrius Shemyaka tried to act on the Byzantine model and overthrow Great Prince Basil Vasilyevich – and suffered a complete defeat. The Church cursed Shemyaka, the boyars turned away from him, the masses did not follow him: the Byzantine methods turned out to be unprofitable. Something of this sort took place with Boris Godunov. The dynasty of the Terrible had disappeared, and Boris Godunov turned out to be his nearest relative. Neither the lawfulness of his election to the kingdom, nor his exceptional abilities as a statesman, can be doubted… With Boris Godunov everything, in essence, was in order, except for one thing: the shade of Tsarevich Demetrius. And the Muscovite oligarchy led by Basil Shuisky found his weakest point – the only weak point in the reign of Godunov: they created a legend about Boris Godunov being the murderer of the lawful heir to the throne. And the shade of Tsarevich Demetrius began to wander across the land… Who in Byzantium would have worried about the fate of a child killed twenty years earlier? There might created right, and might washed away sin. In Rus’ right created might, and sin remained sin.”[330]

 

     Solonevich exaggerates the contrast between Byzantium and Rus’ here. And his remark that “in Muscovite Rus’ there was no regicide at all” can only be accepted if the mob’s murder of Tsar Theodore, son of Godunov, and then of Tsar Basil Shuisky, is not considered regicide. Moreover, the mob’s understanding of legitimacy differed from that of the Church, which supported the legitimacy of Tsars Boris Godunov, Theodore Godunov and Basil Shuisky against the mob’s choice of the first and second false Demetriuses, who very nearly brought about the downfall of the Orthodox Autocracy. Thus the Zemskiy Sobor of 1613 called the mob’s killing of Tsar Basil Shuisky “a common sin of the land, committed out of the envy of the devil” [331]

 

     Nevertheless, the point concerning the importance of legitimacy in Muscovite Russia is well taken and important. “As regards who had to be tsar,” writes St. John Maximovich, “a tsar could hold his own on the throne only if the principle of legitimacy was observed, that is, the elected person was the nearest heir of his predecessor. The legitimate Sovereign was the basis of the state’s prosperity and was demanded by the spirit of the Russian people.”[332] It is this insistence on legitimacy that constitutes the main difference between the Russian and the Byzantine understandings of autocratic power.

 

 

The Time of Troubles

 

     The best representatives of the Russian people, in the persons of the holy Patriarchs Job and Hermogen, stood courageously for those Tsars who had been lawfully anointed by the Church and remained loyal to the Orthodox faith, regardless of their personal virtues or vices. Conversely, they refused to recognise (even at the cost of their sees and their lives) the pretenders to the tsardom who did not satisfy these conditions – again, regardless of their personal qualities. Most of the Russian clergy accepted the first false Demetrius. But “in relation to the second false Demetrius,” writes Fr. Lev Lebedev, “[they] conducted themselves more courageously. Bishops Galacteon of Suzdal and Joseph of Kolomna suffered for their non-acceptance of the usurper. Archbishop Theoctistus of Tver received a martyric death in Tushino. Dressed only in a shirt, the bare-footed Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov, the future patriarch, was brought by the Poles into the camp of the usurper, where he remained in captivity. Seeing such terrible events, Bishop Gennadius of Pskov ‘died of sorrow…’” [333]

 

      There were other champions of the faith: the monks of Holy Trinity – St. Sergius Lavra, who heroically resisted a long Polish siege, and the great chain-bearing hermit, St. Irinarchus of Rostov.

 

     In the life of the latter we read: “Once there came into the elder’s cell a Polish noble, Pan Mikulinsky with other Pans. ‘In whom do you believe?’ he asked. ‘I believe in the Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit!’ ‘And what earthly king do you have?’ The elder replied in a loud voice: ‘I have the Russian Tsar Basil Ioannovich [Shuisky]. I live in Russia, I have a Russian tsar – I have nobody else!’ One of the Pans said: ‘You, elder, are a traitor; you believe neither in our king, nor in [the second false] Demetrius!’ The elder replied: ‘I do not fear your sword, which is corruptible, and I will not betray my faith in the Russian Tsar. If you cut me off for that, then I will suffer it with joy. I have a little blood in me for you, but my Living God has a sword which will cut you off invisibly, without flesh or blood, and He will send your souls into eternal torment!’  And Pan Mikulinsky was amazed at the great faith of the elder…”[334]

 

     The Time of Troubles nearly produced, as Geoffrey Hosking explains, a Russian Magna Carta. “An analogous agreement was mooted in February, 1610 when protagonists of the second pretender switched their support to the Polish crown. They presented King Sigismund with a set of conditions on which they were prepared to accept his son Wladyslaw as Tsar. The first was that the Orthodox faith should remain inviolate. Then came stipulations on the rights of individual estates, for example, not to be punished or to have property confiscated without trial before a properly constituted court, not to be demoted from a high chin [rank] without clear and demonstrable fault. The document implied a state structure in which supreme authority would be shared with a combined boyar assembly and zemskii sobor (duma boiar i vseia zemli), in agreement with which questions of taxes, salaries of service people and the bestowal of patrimonial and service estates would be decided. Such a document might have laid for the basis for a constitutional Muscovite monarchy in personal union with Poland.

 

     “However, it never took effect, since Wladyslaw did not come to claim his throne. Instead, Sigismund declared his intention of doing so himself. This prompted the Patriarch, Hermogen, to issue a stern injunction that the Russian people were not to ‘kiss the cross before a Catholic king’.”[335]

 

     And the authority of the Patriarch was enough to scupper the plans of the Polish king and Russian nobles. For when the Russian nobles brought the document to the Polish headquarters at Smolensk, where a Russian embassy led by Metropolitan Philaret of Rostov had already been for some time, then, as Lebedev writes, “on not seeing the signature of the Patriarch on the document, this embassy recognized it to be unlawful. To this the boyars objected, saying that ‘the patriarch must not interfere in affairs of the land’. And they received the following reply: ‘From the beginning affairs were conducted as follows in our Russian State: if great affairs of State or of the land are begun, then our majesties summoned a council of patriarchs, metropolitans, archbishops and conferred with them. Without their advice nothing was decreed. And our majesties revere the patriarchs with great honour… And before them were the metropolitans. Now we are without majesties, and the patriarch is our leader (that is – the main person in the absence of the tsars! – author’s note). It is now unfitting to confer upon such a great matter without the patriarch… It is now impossible for us to act without patriarchal documents, and only with those of the boyars…’”[336]

 

     Two months later, St. Hermogen was starved to death by the Poles in the Kremlin. However, his appeals had already ignited a national army of liberation led by the nobleman Demetrius Pozharsky (whom St. Irinarchus blessed for his exploit) and the butcher Cosmas Minin from Nizhni Novgorod. In 1612 this army drove the Poles out of Moscow. And so St. Hermogen, who at one time stood almost alone in his refusal to accept a Catholic tsar, saved not only Russian Orthodoxy from Catholicism but also the Russian autocracy from western-style constitutional monarchy.

 

     The history of the 17th and 18th centuries showed without a doubt which was the superior political principle. Thus while Russia went from strength to strength, finally liberating all the Russian lands from the oppressive tyranny of the Polish landlords, Poland grew weaker and weaker under its powerless elective monarchy. Finally, by the end of the eighteenth century it ceased to exist as an independent State…

 

     At the same time local government across the country had shown initiative and responsibility. It was they who rejected foreign candidates for the tsardom and insisted that the tsar be Russian and Orthodox. They were, in Lebedev’s words, “extremely suspicious of both boyars and Cossacks, but nevertheless cooperated with individuals from both categories when that seemed necessary for the common good. The outcome… suggested that Russians identified themselves with strong authority, backed by the Orthodox Church and unrestrained by any charter or covenant, such as might prove divisive and set one social group against another… The zemlia had for the first time constituted itself as a reality, based on elective local government institutions, and had chosen a new master…”[337] Not for the first or last time in Russian history local initiative – in effect, the peasants and smaller townsfolk - had upheld the autocracy, rejecting the ambitions of the aristocratic boyars and the self-will of the freewheeling Cossacks, which groups had shown themselves to be unfaithful to Orthodoxy and the fundamental principles of Russian Statehood during the Time of Troubles.

 

     Thus on February 7, 1613, Michael Romanov was elected tsar by a Zemskij Sobor in Moscow. In recognition of the fact that it was largely the nation’s betrayal of legitimate autocratic authority that had led to the Time of Troubles, the delegates at this Sobor swore eternal loyalty to Michael Romanov and his descendants, calling a curse upon themselves if they should ever break this oath. The curse duly fell upon the people when they renounced the last and greatest of the Romanovs, Tsar-Martyr Nicholas II, in February, 1917…

 

     “The Time of Troubles,” writes Lebedev, “illuminated the profound basis of the interrelationship of ecclesiastical and royal power. This problem was reflected, as if in magnifying glass, in the above-mentioned quarrels of the Russian ambassadors with regard to the absence of Patriarch Hermogen’s signature on the document of the capitulation of Russia. It turns out that both the Russian hierarchs and the best statesmen understood the relationship of the tsar and the patriarch in a truly Christian, communal sense. In the one great Orthodox society of Russia there are two leaders: a spiritual (the patriarch) and a secular (the tsar). They are both responsible for all that takes place in society, but each in his own way: the tsar first of all for civil affairs (although he can also take a very active and honourable part in ecclesiastical affairs when that is necessary), while the patriarch is first of all responsible for ecclesiastical, spiritual affairs (although he can also, when necessary, take a most active part in state affairs). The tsars take counsel with the patriarchs, the patriarchs – with the tsars in all the most important questions. Traditionally the patriarch is an obligatory member of the boyars’ Duma (government). If there is no tsar, then the most important worldly affairs are decided only with the blessing of the patriarch. If in the affair of the establishment of the patriarchate in Russia it was the royal power that was basically active, in the Time of Troubles the royal power itself and the whole of Russia were saved by none other than the Russian patriarchs! Thus the troubles very distinctly demonstrated that the Russian ecclesiastical authorities were not, and did not think of themselves as being, a 'legally obedient’ arm of the State power, as some (A.V. Kartashev) would have it. It can remain and did remain in agreement with the State power in those affairs in which this was possible from an ecclesiastical point of view, and to the extent that this was possible.

 

     “In this question it was important that neither side should try to seize for itself the prerogatives of the other side, that is, should not be a usurper, for usurpation can be understood not only in the narrow sense, but also in the broad sense of the general striving to become that which you are not by law, to assume for yourself those functions which do not belong to you by right. It is amazing that in those days there was no precise juridical, written law (‘right’) concerning the competence and mutual relations of the royal and ecclesiastical powers. Relations were defined by the spiritual logic of things and age-old tradition…”[338]

 

 

The Hereditary Principle

 

     And so, with the enthronement of the first Romanov tsar, the Muscovite kingdom was established on the twin pillars of the Orthodox Faith and Hereditary succession. The requirement of Orthodoxy had been passed down from the Byzantines. Hereditary Succession was not a requirement in Rome or Byzantium (which is one reason why so many Byzantine emperors were assassinated by usurpers)[339]. But in Russia, as in some Western Orthodox autocracies (for example, the Anglo-Saxon), it was felt to be a necessity. Both pillars had been shaken during the Time of Troubles, after the death of the last Ryurik tsar. But Orthodoxy had been restored above all by the holy Patriarchs Job and Hermogenes refusing to recognise a Catholic tsar, and then by the national army of liberation that drove out the Poles. And the Hereditary Principle, already tacitly accepted if mistakenly applied by the people when they followed the false Demetrius, had been affirmed by all the estates of the nation at the Zemskij Sobor in 1613.

 

     Since the hereditary principle is commonly considered to be irrational as placing the government of the State “at the mercy of chance”, it may be worth pausing to consider its significance in Russian Orthodox statehood in the thinking of three Russian writers: I. L. Solonevich, St. John Maximovich and Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow.

 

     First, while it cannot be denied that the Zemskij Sobor of 1613 was in some sense an election, it was by no means a democratic election in the modern sense, but rather a recognition of God’s election of a ruler on the model of the Israelites’ election of Jephtha (Judges 11.11). For, as Solonevich writes, “when, after the Time of Troubles, the question was raised concerning the restoration of the monarchy, there was no hint of an ‘election to the kingdom’. There was a ‘search’ for people who had the greatest hereditary right to the throne. And not an ‘election’ of the more worthy. There were not, and could not be, any ‘merits’ in the young Michael Fyodorovich. But since only the hereditary principle affords the advantage of absolutely indisputability, it was on this that the ‘election’ was based.”[340]

 

     Moreover, after “electing” the first Romanov tsar (whom St. Hermogen had been the first to point to), the people retained no right to depose him or any of his successors. On the contrary, they elected a hereditary dynasty, and specifically bound themselves by an oath to be loyal to that dynasty forever.

 

     St. John Maximovich writes: “What drew the hearts of all to Michael Romanov? He had neither experience of statecraft, nor had he done any service to the state. He was not distinguished by the state wisdom of Boris Godunov or by the eminence of his race, as was Basil Shuisky. He was sixteen years old, and “Misha Romanov”, as he was generally known, had not yet managed to show his worth in anything. But why did the Russian people rest on him, and why with his crowning did all the quarrels and disturbances regarding the royal throne come to an end? The Russian people longed for a lawful, “native” Sovereign, and was convinced that without him there could be no order or peace in Russia. When Boris Godunov and Prince Basil Shuisky were elected, although they had, to a certain degree, rights to the throne through their kinship with the previous tsars, they were not elected by reason of their exclusive rights, but their personalities were taken into account. There was no strict lawful succession in their case. This explained the success of the pretenders. However, it was almost impossible to elect someone as tsar for his qualities. Everyone evaluated the candidates for their point of view. However, the absence of a definite law which would have provided an heir in the case of the cutting off of the line of the Great Princes and Tsars of Moscow made it necessary for the people itself to indicate who they wanted as tsar. The descendants of the appanage princes, although they came from the same race as that of the Moscow Tsars (and never forgot that), were in the eyes of the people simple noblemen, “serfs” of the Moscow sovereigns; their distant kinship with the royal line had already lost its significance. Moreover, it was difficult to establish precisely which of the descendants of St. Vladimir on the male side had the most grounds for being recognised as the closest heir to the defunct royal line. In such circumstances all united in the suggestion that the extinct Royal branch should be continued by the closest relative of the last “native”, lawful Tsar. The closest relatives of Tsar Theodore Ioannovich were his counsins on his mother’s side: Theodore, in monasticism Philaret, and Ivan Nikitich Romanov, both of whom had sons. In that case the throne had to pass to Theodore, as the eldest, but his monasticism and the rank of Metropolitan of Rostov was an obstacle to this. His heir was his only son Michael. Thus the question was no longer about the election of a Tsar, but about the recognition that a definite person had the rights to the throne. The Russian people, tormented by the time of troubles and the lawlessness, welcomed this decision, since it saw that order could be restored only by a lawful “native” Tsar. The people remembered the services of the Romanovs to their homeland, their sufferings for it, the meek Tsaritsa Anastasia Romanova, the firmness of Philaret Nikitich. All this still more strongly attracted the hearts of the people to the announced tsar. But these qualities were possessed also by some other statesmen and sorrowers for Rus’. And this was not the reason for the election of Tsar Michael Romanovich, but the fact that in him Rus’ saw their most lawful and native Sovereign.

 

     “In the acts on the election to the kingdom of Michael Fyodorovich, the idea that he was ascending the throne by virtue of his election by the people was carefully avoided, and it was pointed out that the new Tsar was the elect of God, the direct descendant of the last lawful Sovereign.”[341]

 

     The hereditary tsar’s rule is inviolable. As Metropolitan Philaret writes: “A government that is not fenced about by an inviolability that is venerated religiously by the whole people cannot act with the whole fullness of power or that freedom of zeal that is necessary for the construction and preservation of the public good and security. How can it develop its whole strength in its most beneficial direction, when its power constantly finds itself in an insecure position, struggling with other powers that cut short its actions in as many different directions as are the opinions, prejudices and passions more or less dominant in society? How can it surrender itself to the full force of its zeal, when it must of necessity divide its attentions between care for the prosperity of society and anxiety about its own security? But if the government is so lacking in firmness, then the State is also lacking in firmness. Such a State is like a city built on a volcanic mountain: what significance does its hard earth have when under it is hidden a power that can at any minute turn everything into ruins? Subjects who do not recognise the inviolability of rulers are incited by the hope of licence to achieve licence and predominance, and between the horrors of anarchy and oppression they cannot establish in themselves that obedient freedom which is the focus and soul of public life.”[342]

 

     There are certain laws, like that concerning the hereditary principle itself, which are fundamental, that is, which even the tsar cannot transgress, insofar as they define the very essence of the Orthodox hereditary monarchy. In general, however, the hereditary autocrat is above the law. For, as Solonevich writes: “The fundamental, most fundamental idea of the Russian monarchy was most vividly and clearly expressed by A.S. Pushkin just before the end of his life: ‘There must be one person standing higher than everybody, higher even than the law.’

 

     “In this formulation, ‘one man’, Man is placed in very big letters above the law. This formulation is completely unacceptable for the Roman-European cast of mind, for which the law is everything: dura lex, sed lex. The Russian cast of mind places, man, mankind, the soul higher than the law, giving to the law only that place which it should occupy: the place occupied by traffic rules. Of course, with corresponding punishments for driving on the left side. Man is not for the sabbath, but the sabbath for man. It is not that man is for the fulfilment of the law, but the law is for the preservation of man…

 

     “The whole history of humanity is filled with the struggle of tribes, people, nations, classes, estates, groups, parties, religions and whatever you like. It’s almost as Hobbes put it: ‘War by everyone against everyone’. How are we to find a neutral point of support in this struggle? An arbiter standing above the tribes, nations, peoples, classes, estates, etc.? Uniting the people, classes and religions into a common whole? Submitting the interests of the part to the interests of the whole? And placing moral principles above egoism, which is always characteristic of every group of people pushed forward the summit of public life?”[343]

 

     The idea that the tsar is higher than the law, while remaining subject to the law of God, is also defended by Metropolitan Philaret: “The tsar, rightly understood, is the head and soul of the kingdom. But, you object to me, the soul of the State must be the law. The law is necessary, it is worthy of honour, faithful; but the law in charters and books is a dead letter… The law, which is dead in books, comes to life in acts; and the supreme State actor and exciter and inspirer of the subject actors is the Tsar.”[344]

 

     But if the tsar is above the law, how can he not be a tyrant, insofar as, in the famous words of Lord Acton, “power corrupts, and absolute power absolutely corrupts”?

 

     First, as we have seen, the tsar’s power is not absolute insofar as he is subject to the law of God and the fundamental laws of the kingdom, which the Church is called upon to defend. Secondly, it is not only tsars, but rulers of all kinds that are subject to the temptations of power. Indeed, these temptations may even be worse with democratic rulers; for whereas the tsar stands above all factional interests, an elected president necessarily represents the interests only of his party at the expense of the country as a whole. “Western thought,” writes Solonevich, “sways from the dictatorship of capitalism to the dictatorship of the proletariat , but no representative of this thought has even so much as thought of ‘the dictatorship of conscience’.”[345]

 

     “The distinguishing characteristic of Russian monarchy, which was given to it at its birth, consists in the fact that the Russian monarchy expressed the will not of the most powerful, but the will of the whole nation, religiously given shape by Orthodoxy and politically given shape by the Empire. The will of the nation, religious given shape by Orthodoxy will be ‘the dictatorship of conscience’ Only in this way can we explain the possibility of the manifesto of February 19, 1861 [when Tsar Alexander II freed the peasants]: ‘the dictatorship of conscience’ was able overcome the terribly opposition of the ruling class, and the ruling class proved powerless. We must always have this distinction in mind: the Russian monarchy is the expression of the will, that is: the conscience, of the nation, not the will of the capitalists, which both French Napoleons expressed, or the will of the aristocracy, which all the other monarchies of Europe expressed: the Russian monarchy is the closes approximation to the ideal of monarchy in general. This ideal was never attained by the Russian monarchy – for the well-known reason that no ideal is realisable in our life. In the history of the Russian monarchy, as in the whole of our world, there were periods of decline, of deviation, of failure, but there were also periods of recovery such as world history has never known.”[346]

 

     Now State power, which, like power in the family or the tribe, always has an element of coercion, “is constructed in three ways: by inheritance, by election and by seizure: monarchy [autocracy], republic [democracy], dictatorship [despotism]. In practice all this changes places: the man who seizes power becomes a hereditary monarch (Napoleon I), the elected president becomes the same (Napoleon III), or tries to become it (Oliver Cromwell). The elected ‘chancellor’, Hitler, becomes a seizer of power. But in general these are nevertheless exceptions.

 

     “Both a republic and a dictatorship presuppose a struggle for power – democratic in the first case and necessarily bloody in the second: Stalin – Trotsky, Mussolini-Matteotti, Hitler-Röhm. In a republic, as a rule, the struggle is unbloody. However, even an unbloody struggle is not completely without cost. Aristide Briand, who became French Prime Minister several times, admitted that 95% of his strength was spent on the struggle for power and only five percent on the work of power. And even this five percent was exceptionally short-lived.

 

     “Election and seizure are, so to speak, rationalist methods. Hereditary power is, strictly speaking, the power of chance, indisputable if only because the chance of birth is completely indisputable. You can recognise or not recognise the principle of monarchy in general. But no one can deny the existence of the positive law presenting the right of inheriting the throne to the first son of the reigning monarch. Having recourse to a somewhat crude comparison, this is something like an ace in cards… An ace is an ace. No election, no merit, and consequently no quarrel. Power passes without quarrel and pain: the king is dead, long live the king!”[347]

 

     We may interrupt Solonevich’s argument here to qualify his use of the word “chance”. The fact that a man inherits the throne only because he is the firstborn of his father may be “by chance” from a human point of view. But from the Divine point of view it is election. As Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov writes: “There is no blind chance! God rules the world, and everything that takes place in heaven and beneath the heavens takes place according to the judgement of the All-wise and All-powerful God.”[348] Moreover, as Bishop Ignatius writes, “in blessed Russia, according to the spirit of the pious people, the Tsar and the fatherland constitute one whole, as in a family the parents and their children constitute one whole.”[349] This being so, it was only natural that the law of succession should be hereditary, from father to son.

 

     Solonevich continues: “The human individual, born by chance as heir to the throne, is placed in circumstances which guarantee him the best possible professional preparation from a technical point of view. His Majesty Emperor Nicholas Alexandrovich was probably one of the most educated people of his time. The best professors of Russia taught him both law and strategy and history and literature. He spoke with complete freedom in three foreign languages. His knowledge was not one-sided.. and was, if one can so express it, living knowledge

 

     “The Russian tsar was in charge of everything and was obliged to know everything  - it goes without saying, as far as humanly possible. He was a ‘specialist’ in that sphere which excludes all specialisation. This was a specialism standing above all the specialisms of the world and embracing them all. That is, the general volume of erudition of the Russian monarch had in mind that which every philosophy has in mind: the concentration in one point of the whole sum of human knowledge. However, with this colossal qualification, that ‘the sum of knowledge’ of the Russian tsars grew in a seamless manner from the living practice of the past and was checked against the living practice of the present. True, that is how almost all philosophy is checked – for example, with Robespierre, Lenin and Hitler – but, fortunately for humanity, such checking takes place comparatively rarely….

 

     “The heir to the Throne, later the possessor of the Throne, is placed in such conditions under which temptations are reduced.. to a minimum. He is given everything he needs beforehand. At his birth he receives an order, which he, of course, did not manage to earn, and the temptation of vainglory is liquidated in embryo. He is absolutely provided for materially – the temptation of avarice is liquidated in embryo. He is the only one having the Right – and so competition falls away, together with everything linked with it. Everything is organised in such a way that the personal destiny of the individual should be welded together into one whole with the destiny of the nation. Everything that a person would want to have for himself is already given him. And the person automatically merges with the general good.

 

     “One could say that all this is possessed also by a dictator of the type of Napoleon, Stalin or Hitler. But this would be less than half true: everything that the dictator has he conquered, and all this he must constantly defend – both against competitors and against the nation. The dictator is forced to prove every day that it is precisely he who is the most brilliant, great, greatest and inimitable, for if not he, but someone else, is not the most brilliant, then it is obvious that that other person has the right to power…

 

     “We can, of course, quarrel over the very principle of ‘chance’. A banally rationalist, pitifully scientific point of view is usually formulated thus: the chance of birth may produce a defective man. But we, we will elect the best… Of course, ‘the chance of birth’ can produce a defective man. We have examples of this: Tsar Theodore Ivanovich. Nothing terrible happened. For the monarchy ‘is not the arbitratriness of a single man’, but ‘a system of institutions’, - a system can operate temporarily even without a ‘man’. But simple statistics show that the chance of such ‘chance’ events are very small. And the chance of ‘a genius on the throne’ appearing is still smaller.

 

     “I proceed from the axiom that a genius in politics is worse than the plague. For a genius is a person who thinks up something that is new in principle. In thinking up something that is new in principle, he invades the organic life of the country and cripples it, as it was crippled by Napoleon, Stalin and Hitler…

 

     “The power of the tsar is the power of the average, averagely clever man over two hundred million average, averagely clever people… V. Klyuchevsky said with some perplexity that the first Muscovite princes, the first gatherers of the Russian land, were completely average people: - and yet, look, they gathered the Russian land. This is quite simple: average people have acted in the interests of average people and the line of the nation has coincided with the line of power. So the average people of the Novgorodian army went over to the side of the average people of Moscow, while the average people of the USSR are running away in all directions from the genius of Stalin.”[350]  

 

     Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow expressed the superiority of the hereditary over the elective principle as follows: “What conflict does election for public posts produce in other peoples! With what conflict, and sometimes also with what alarm do they attain the legalisation of the right of public election! Then there begins the struggle, sometimes dying down and sometimes rising up again, sometimes for the extension and sometimes for the restriction of this right. The incorrect extension of the right of social election is followed by its incorrect use. It would be difficult to believe it if we did not read in foreign newspapers that elective votes are sold; that sympathy or lack of sympathy for those seeking election is expressed not only by votes for and votes against, but also by sticks and stones, as if a man can be born from a beast, and rational business out of the fury of the passions; that ignorant people make the choice between those in whom wisdom of state is envisaged, lawless people participate in the election of future lawgivers, peasants and craftsmen discuss and vote, not about who could best keep order in the village or the society of craftsmen, but about who is capable of administering the State.

 

     “Thanks be to God! It is not so in our fatherland. Autocratic power, established on the age-old law of heredity, which once, at a time of impoverished heredity, was renewed and strengthened on its former basis by a pure and rational election, stands in inviolable firmness and acts with calm majesty. Its subjects do not think of striving for the right of election to public posts in the assurance that the authorities care for the common good and know through whom and how to construct it.”[351]

 

     “God, in accordance with the image of His heavenly single rule, has established a tsar on earth; in accordance with the image of His almighty power, He has established an autocratic tsar; in accordance with the image of His everlasting Kingdom, which continues from age to age, He has established a hereditary tsar.”[352]

 

     We may now define more precisely why the hereditary principle was considered by the Russian people to be not simply superior to the elective principle, but as far superior to it as heaven is to the earth. For while an elected president is installed by the will of man, and can be said to be installed by the will of God only indirectly, insofar as God has allowed it, without positively willing it; the determination of who will be born as the heir to the throne is completely beyond the power of man, and so entirely within the power of God. The hereditary principle therefore ensures that the tsar will indeed be elected – but by God, not by man.

 

 

Tsar, Patriarch and People

 

     The first Romanov tsar, Michael Fyodorovich, had his own natural father, Philaret Nikitich, as his Patriarch. This unusual relationship, in which both took the title “Great Sovereign”, was profoundly significant in the context of the times. It was “unique, according to Lebedev, “not only for Russian history, but also for the universal history of the Church, when a natural father and son become the two heads of a single Orthodox power!”.[353]

 

     The sixteenth century had seen the power of the tsar, unchecked now by the non-Russian power of the Ecumenical Patriarch, leaning dangerously towards caesaropapism in practice, if not in theory. However, the Time of Troubles had demonstrated how critically the Orthodox Autocracy depended on the legitimising and sanctifying power of the Church. In disobedience to her, the people had broken their oath of allegiance to the legitimate tsar and plunged the country into anarchy; but in penitent obedience to her, they had succeeded in finally driving out the invaders. The election of the tsar’s father to the patriarchal see both implicitly acknowledged this debt of the Autocracy and People to the Church, and indicated that while the Autocracy was now re-established in all its former power and inviolability, the tsar being answerable to God alone for his actions in the political sphere, nevertheless he received his sanction and sanctification from the Church in the person of the Patriarch, who was as superior to him in his sphere, the sphere of the Spirit, as a father is to his son, and who, as the Zemskij Sobor of 1619 put it, “for this reason [i.e. because he was father of the tsar] is to be a helper and builder for the kingdom, a defender for widows and intercessor for the wronged.”[354] Thus on the firm basis of this quasi-filial relationship between Church and State, there began, slowly but surely, the recovery of Russia to her former greatness – and more.

 

     The Church’s recovery of her independence and prestige was reflected in the more frequent convening of Church Councils. If we exclude the false council of 1666-67 (of which more anon), these were genuinely free of interference from the State, and the tsar was sometimes forced to submit to them against his will. Thus a Church Council in 1621 decreed that the proposed Catholic bridegroom for the Tsar’s daughter would have to be baptised first in the Orthodox Church.

 

     However, seventeenth-century Russia not only displayed a rare symphony of Church and State. It also included in this symphony the People in the sense that all classes of the population took part in the Zemskii Sobory, “Councils of the Land”, which were such a striking characteristic of the period. Again, this owed much to the experience of the Time of Troubles; for, as we have seen, the People played a large part at that time in the re-establishment of lawful autocratic rule. Thus in the reign of Tsar Michael Fyodorovich, who died in 1645, all the most important matters were decided by Councils, which, like the first Council of 1613, were Councils “of the whole land” – that is, they contained representatives of all classes of the people from all parts of the country. Such Councils continued to be convened until 1689.

 

     The symphony between Tsar and People was particularly evident in judicial matters, where the people jealously guarded their ancient right to appeal directly to the Tsar for justice. Of course, as the State became larger it became impossible for the Tsar personally to judge all cases, and he appointed posadniki, namestniki and volosteli to administer justice in his name. At the same time, the Tsars always appreciated the significance of a direct link with the people over the heads of the bureaucracy; and in 1550 Ivan the Terrible created a kind of personal office to deal with petitions called the Chelobitnij Prikaz, which lasted until Peter the Great. It was also Ivan who convened the first Zemskii Sobory.

 

     The bond between Tsar and People was maintained throughout the administration. The central administrative institutions were: (a) the Prikazi, or Ministries, over each of which the Tsar appointed a boyar with a staff of secretaries (dyaki), (b) the Boyar Duma, an essentially aristocratic institution, which, however, was broadened into the more widely representative (c) Councils of the Land for particularly important matters. This constituted a much wider consultative base than prevailed in contemporary Western European states.

 

     To the local administration, writes Tikhomirov,  “voyevodas were sent, but besides them there existed numerous publicly elected authorities. The voyevodas’ competence was complex and broad. The voyevoda, as representative of the tsar, had to look at absolutely everything: ‘so that all the tsar’s affairs were intact, so that there should be guardians everywhere; to take great care that in the town and the uyezd there should be no fights, thievery, murder, fighting, burglary, bootlegging, debauchery; whoever was declared to have committed such crimes was to be taken and, after investigation, punished. The voyevoda was the judge also in all civil matters. The voyevoda was in charge generally of all branches of the tsar’s administration, but his power was not absolute, and he practised it together with representatives of society’s self-administration… According to the tsar’s code of laws, none of the administrators appointed for the cities and volosts could judge any matter without society’s representatives…

 

     “Finally, the whole people had the broadest right of appeal to his Majesty in all matters in general. ‘The government,’ notes Soloviev, ‘did not remain deaf to petitions. If some mir [village commune] asked for an elected official instead of the crown’s, the government willingly agreed. They petition that the city bailiff.. should be retired and a new one elected by the mir: his Majesty ordered the election, etc. All in all, the system of the administrative authorities of the Muscovite state was distinguished by a multitude of technical imperfections, by the chance nature of the establishment of institutions, by their lack of specialisation, etc. But this system of administration possessed one valuable quality: the broad admittance of aristocratic and democratic elements, their use as communal forces under the supremacy of the tsar’s power, with the general right of petition to the tsar. This gave the supreme power a wide base of information and brought it closer to the life of all the estates, and there settled in all the Russias a deep conviction in the reality of a supreme power directing and managing everything.”[355]

 

     For "in what was this autocratic power of the Tsar strong?” asks Hieromartyr Andronicus, Archbishop of Perm. “In that fact that it was based on the conscience and on the Law of God, and was supported by its closeness to the land, by the council of the people. The princely entourage, the boyars’ Duma, the Zemskij Sobor - that is what preserved the power of the Tsars in its fullness, not allowing anyone to seize or divert it. The people of proven experience and honesty came from the regions filled with an identical care for the construction of the Russian land. They raised to the Tsar the voice and counsel of the people concerning how and what to build in the country. And it remained for the Tsar to learn from all the voices, to bring everything together for the benefit of all and to command the rigorous fulfilment for the common good of the people of that for which he would answer before the Omniscient God and his own conscience.”[356]

 

 

The Schism of the Old Believers

 

     By the middle of the century, at a time when the principle of monarchical rule was being shaken to its foundations in the English revolution, the Russian Autocracy had acquired such prestige in the Orthodox world that even the Greeks were looking to it to deliver them from the Turkish yoke and take over the throne of the Constantinopolitan Emperor.

 

     Thus in 1645, during the coronation of Tsar Alexis, Patriarch Joseph for the first time read the “Prayer of Philaret” on the enthronement of the Russian Tsar over the whole oikoumene.[357] And in 1649 Patriarch Paisius of Jerusalem wrote to the tsar: “May the All-Holy Trinity multiply you more than all the tsars, and count you worthy to grasp the most lofty throne of the great King Constantine, your forefather, and liberate the peoples of the pious and Orthodox Christians from impious hands. May you be a new Moses, may you liberate us from captivity just as he liberated the sons of Israel from the hands of Pharaoh.”[358]

 

     As Fr. Gregory Lurye writes: “At that time hopes in Greece for a miraculous re-establishment of Constantinople before the end of the world [based on the prophecies of Leo the Wise and others], were somewhat strengthened, if not squeezed out, by hopes on Russia. Anastasius Gordius (1654-1729), the author of what later became an authoritative historical-eschatological interpretation of the Apocalypse (1717-23) called the Russian Empire the guardian of the faith to the very coming of the Messiah. The hopes of the Greeks for liberation from the Turks that were linked with Russia, which had become traditional already from the time of St. Maximus the Greek (1470-1555), also found their place in the interpretations of the Apocalypse. Until the middle of the 19th century itself – until the Greeks, on a wave of pan-European nationalism thought up their ‘Great Idea’ – Russia would take the place of Byzantium in their eschatological hopes, as being the last Christian Empire. They considered the Russian Empire to be their own, and the Russian Tsar Nicholas (not their Lutheran King Otto) as their own, to the great astonishment and annoyance of European travellers.”[359]

 

     Tragically, however, it was at precisely this time, when Russia seemed ready to take the place of the Christian Roman Empire in the eyes not only of Russians, but also of non-Russian Orthodox, that the Russian autocracy and Church suffered a simultaneous attack from two sides from which it never fully recovered until its destruction in 1917. From the right came the attack of the Old Believers, who expressed the schismatic and nationalist idea that the only true Orthodoxy was Russian Orthodoxy, and from the left – that of the westernising Russian aristocracy and the Greek pseudo-hierarchs of the council of 1666-67, who succeeded in removing the champion of the traditional Orthodox symphony of powers, Patriarch Nicon of Moscow.

 

     The beginnings of the tragedy of the Old Believers lay in the arrival in Moscow of some educated monks from the south of Russia, which at that time was under the jurisdiction of the Patriarchate of Constantinople. They pointed to the existence of several differences between the Muscovite service books and those employed in the Greek Church. These differences concerned such matters as how the word "Jesus" was to be spelt, whether two or three "alleluias" should be chanted in the Divine services, whether the sign of the Cross should be made with two or three fingers, etc.

 

     A group of leading Muscovite clergy led by Protopriests John Neronov and Avvakum rejected these criticisms. They said that the reforms contradicted the decrees of the famous Stoglav council of 1551, and they suspected that the southerners were tainted with Latinism through their long subjection to Polish rule. Therefore they were unwilling to bow unquestioningly to their superior knowledge.

 

     Moreover, beneath the issue of ritual differences between the Greek and Russian Churches lay a deeper principle, that of the source of authority in the Orthodox Church as a whole. The Greeks argued that, since Orthodoxy had come to Russia and the other Orthodox nations from the Greeks, the criterion of correctness should be the practices of the Greek Church. The Muscovite “zealots for piety”, however, argued that the Greeks had betrayed the faith at the council of Florence, and that the pupils might have remained more faithful over the years to the teaching they had received than their original teachers.

 

     This was the situation in 1652 when the close friend of the tsar, Metropolitan Nicon of Novgorod, was elected patriarch. Knowing of the various inner divisions within Russian society caused by incipient westernism and secularism, on the one hand, and Old Believerism, on the other, the new patriarch demanded, and obtained a solemn oath from the tsar and all the people that they should obey him in all Church matters. The tsar was very willing to give such an oath because he regarded Nicon as his “special friend” and father, giving him the same title of “Great Sovereign” that Tsar Michael had given to his father, Patriarch Philaret.

 

     The “zealots of piety” were also happy to submit to Nicon because he had been a member of their circle and shared, as they thought, their views. However, they were mistaken. “Not immediately,” writes Lebedev, “but after many years of thought (since 1646), and conversations with the tsar, Fr. Stefan [Bonifatiev], the Greek and Kievan scholars and Patriarch Paisius of Jerusalem, he had come to the conviction that the criterion of the rightness of the correction of Russian books and rites consisted in their correspondence with that which from ages past had been accepted by the Eastern Greek Church and handed down by it to Rus’ and, consequently, must be preserved also in the ancient Russian customs and books, and that therefore for the correction of the Russian books and rites it was necessary to take the advice of contemporary Eastern authorities, although their opinion had to be approached with great caution and in a critical spirit. It was with these convictions that Nicon completed the work begun before him of the correction of the Church rites and books, finishing it completely in 1656. At the same time he did not know that the correctors of the books had placed at the foundation of their work, not the ancient, but the contemporary Greek books, which had been published in the West, mainly in Venice (although in the most important cases they had nevertheless used both ancient Greek and Slavonic texts). The volume of work in the correction and publishing of books was so great that the patriarch was simply unable to check its technical side and was convinced that they were correcting them according to the ancient texts.

 

     “However, the correction of the rites was carried out completely under his observation and was accomplished in no other way than in consultation with the conciliar opinion in the Eastern Churches and with special councils of the Russian hierarchs and clergy. Instead of using two fingers in the sign of the cross, the doctrine of which had been introduced into a series of very important books under Patriarch Joseph under the influence of the party of Neronov and Avvakum, the three-fingered sign was confirmed, since it corresponded more to ancient Russian customs[360] and the age-old practice of the Orthodox East.[361] A series of other Church customs were changed, and all Divine service books published earlier with the help of the ‘zealots’ were re-published.

 

     “As was to be expected, J. Neronov, Avvakum, Longinus, Lazarus, Daniel and some of those who thought like them rose up against the corrections made by his Holiness. Thus was laid the doctrinal basis of the Church schism, but the schism itself, as a broad movement among the people, began much later, without Nicon and independently of him. Patriarch Nicon took all the necessary measures that this should not happen. In particular, on condition of their obedience to the Church, he permitted those who wished it (J. Neronov) to serve according to the old books and rites, in this way allowing a variety of opinions and practices in Church matters that did not touch the essence of the faith. This gave the Church historian Metropolitan Macarius (Bulgakov) a basis on which to assert, with justice, that ‘if Nicon had not left his see and his administration had continued, there would have been no schism in the Russian Church.’

 

     “However, it was not only a matter of differences of opinion with regard to the correction of books and rites. The point was the deep differences in perception of the ideas forming the basis of the conception of ‘the third Rome’, and in the contradictions of the Russian Church self-consciousness of the time.”[362]

 

     These differences and contradictions were particularly important at this time because the Russian State, after consolidating itself in the first half of the seventeenth century, was now ready to go on the offensive against Catholic Poland, and rescue the Orthodox Christians who were being persecuted by the Polish and uniate authorities. In 1654 Eastern Ukraine was wrested from Poland and came within the bounds of Russia again. But the Orthodox Church in the Ukraine had been under the jurisdiction of Constantinople and employed Greek practices, which, as we have seen, differed somewhat from those in the Great Russian Church. If Moscow was to be the Third Rome in the sense of the protector of all Orthodox Christians, it was necessary that the faith and practice of the Moscow Patriarchate should be in harmony with the faith and practice of the Orthodox Church as a whole. That is why Nicon, supported by the Grecophile Tsar Alexis, encouraged the reform of the service-books to bring them into line with the practices of the Greek Church.

 

     The Old Believers (as we shall now call the opponents of Nicon’s programme) represented a serious threat to the achievement of this ideal. For they believed that the Russian Church did not need the help of the Eastern Orthodox Churches, and did not need to seek agreement and harmony with them; she was self-sufficient. Moreover, - and here they were supported, as we shall see, by certain influential Greek hierarchs, – they resented the lead that the patriarch was taking in this affair. In their opinion, the initiative in such matters should come from the tsar insofar as it was the tsar, rather than the hierarchs, who defended the Church from heresies.

 

     Here they were thinking of the Russian Church’s struggle against the false council of Florence and the Judaising heresy, when the tsar did indeed take a leading role in the defence of Orthodoxy while some of the hierarchs fell away from the truth. However, they ignored the no less frequent cases – most recently, in the Time of Troubles – when it had been the Orthodox hierarchs who had defended the Church against apostate tsars.

 

     Against this narrow, nationalistic and state-centred conception of “Moscow – the Third Rome”, Patriarch Nicon erected a more universalistic, Church-centred conception which stressed the unity of the Russian Church with the Churches of the East.

 

     “In the idea of ‘the Third Rome’,” writes Lebedev, “his Holiness saw first of all its ecclesiastical, spiritual content, which was also expressed in the still more ancient idea of ‘the Russian land – the New Jerusalem’. This idea was to a large degree synonymous with ‘the Third Rome’. To a large extent, but not completely! It placed the accent on the Christian striving of Holy Rus’ for the world on high.

 

     “In calling Rus’ to this great idea, Patriarch Nicon successively created a series of architectural complexes in which was laid the idea of the pan-human, universal significance of Holy Rus’. These were the Valdai Iveron church, and the Kii Cross monastery, but especially – the Resurrection New-Jerusalem monastery, which was deliberately populated with an Orthodox, but multi-racial brotherhood (Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, Lithuanians, Germans, Jews, Poles and Greeks).

 

     “This monastery, together with the complex of ‘Greater Moscovite Palestine’, was in the process of creation from 1656 to 1666, and was then completed after the death of the patriarch towards the end of the 17th century. As has been clarified only comparatively recently, this whole complex, including in itself Jordan, Nazareth, Bethlehem, Capernaum, Ramah, Bethany, Tabor, Hermon, the Mount of Olives, the Garden of Gethsemane, etc., was basically a monastery, and in it the Resurrection cathedral, built in the likeness of the church of the Sepulchre of the Lord in Jerusalem with Golgotha and the Sepulchre of the Saviour, was a double image – an icon of the historical ‘promised land’ of Palestine and at the same time an icon of the promised land of the Heavenly Kingdom, ‘the New Jerusalem’.

 

     “In this way it turned out that the true union of the representatives of all the peoples (pan-human unity) in Christ on earth and in heaven can be realised only on the basis of Orthodoxy, and, moreover, by the will of God, in its Russian expression. This was a clear, almost demonstrative opposition of the union of mankind in the Church of Christ to its unity in the anti-church of ‘the great architect of nature’ with its aim of constructing the tower of Babylon. But it also turned out that ‘Greater Muscovite Palestine’ with its centre in the New Jerusalem became the spiritual focus of the whole of World Orthodoxy. At the same time that the tsar was only just beginning to dream of become the master of the East, Patriarch Nicon as the archimandrite of New Jerusalem had already become the central figure of the Universal Church.

 

     “This also laid a beginning to the disharmony between the tsar and the patriarch, between the ecclesiastical and state authorities in Russia. Alexis Mikhailovich, at first inwardly, but then also outwardly, was against Nicon’s plans for the New Jerusalem. He insisted that only his capital, Moscow, was the image of the heavenly city, and that the Russian tsar (and not the patriarch) was the head of the whole Orthodox world. From 1657 there began the quarrels between the tsar and the patriarch, in which the tsar revealed a clear striving to take into his hands the administration of Church affairs, for he made himself the chief person responsible for them.”[363]

 

     Many have idealised the Old Believers, as if they represented the true old piety of Holy Russia which the "Niconians" destroyed. But this was not the opinion of the great Russian fathers, such as Saints Demetrius of Rostov and Seraphim of Sarov.[364] Others have considered the violence meted out to the Old Believers a stain on the conscience of the Russian Church.

 

     Undoubtedly the personal sins of some on the side of the authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, played their part. Unlike during the earlier liturgical reforms of Peter Moghila, the reforms of the mid-seventeenth century were not sufficiently explained, and resistance to them was put down too forcibly at first. For these personal sins the Russian Church Abroad publicly asked forgiveness on behalf of the whole of the Russian Church in 1974.

 

     However, these sins, and the unwillingness of the authorities to correct them, have been exaggerated. As Paul Meyendorff writes, “to its credit, the Russian Church appears to have realized its tactical error and tried to repair the damage. As early as 1656, Nikon made peace with Neronov, one of the leading opponents of the reform, and permitted him to remain in Moscow and even to use the old books at the Cathedral of the Dormition. After Nikon left the patriarchal throne in 1658, Tsar Alexis made repeated attempts to pacify the future Old-Believers, insisting only that they cease condemning the new books, but willing to allow the continued use of the old. This was the only demand made of the Old-Believers at the 1666 Moscow Council. Only after all these attempts to restore peace had failed did the 1667 Council, with Greek bishops present, condemn the old books and revoke the 1551 “Stoglav (Hundred Chapters)” Council.”[365]

 

     Again Sergei Firsov writes: “At the end of his patriarchy Nikon said about the old and new (corrected) church-service books: ‘Both the ones and the others are good; it doesn’t matter, serve according to whichever books you want’. In citing these words, V.O. Klyuchevsky noted: ‘This means that the matter was not one of rites, but of resistance to ecclesiastical authority’.  The Old Believers’ refusal to submit was taken by the church hierarchy and the state authorities as a rebellion, and at the Council of 1666-1667 the disobedient were excommunicated from the Church and cursed ‘for their resistance to the canonical authority of the pastors of the Church’”.[366]

 

     Moreover, it must be remembered that the Old Believers were themselves very violent, that they constituted a real threat to the survival of the Russian State, and that many of their deaths were self-inflicted, consisting of the mass suicide of tens of thousands of their followers. By 1690, 20,000 Old Believers are reported to have burned themselves to death. Thus Bishop Gregory Grabbe writes: “The very act of burning themselves, according to the research of Professor Barsov, was sometimes not committed out of fear of persecution, but from a fanatical thought of purifying themselves through fire. The Church Herself hardly participated in the persecution… The persecutions were from the State and for political reasons, insofar as (some of) the Old Believers considered the power of the State to be antichristian and did not want to submit to it.”[367]

 

     From a purely ecclesiastical point of view, the Old Believers represented a nationalist schism, which, if allowed to triumph, might well have torn the Russian Church away from the Ecumenical Church altogether. This is exemplified particularly by Archpriest Avvakum, perhaps the most articulate and educated of the schismatics, who wrote from his prison cell to Tsar Alexis: "Say in good Russian 'Lord have mercy on me'. Leave all those Kyrie Eleisons to the Greeks: that's their language, spit on them! You are Russian, Alexei, not Greek. Speak your mother tongue and be not ashamed of it, either in church or at home!"[368] Again, Avvakum announced “that newborn babies knew more about God than all the scholars of the Greek church”.[369]

 

     Again, in the trial of 1667, whose leader was the deposed Greek bishop and crypto-papist Paisios Ligarides and fourteen of whose bishops were foreigners,  Avvakum said to the Greek bishops: “You, ecumenical teachers! Rome has long since fallen, and lies on the ground, and the Poles have gone under with her, for to the present day they have been enemies of the Christians. But with you, too, Orthodoxy became a varied mixture under the violence of the Turkish Muhammed. Nor is that surprising: you have become powerless. From now on you must come to us to learn: through God’s grace we have the autocracy. Before the apostate Nikon the whole of Orthodoxy was pure and spotless in our Russia under the pious rulers and tsars, and the Church knew no rebellion. But the wolf Nikon along with the devil introduced the tradition that one had to cross oneself with three fingers…”[370]

 

     Like their opponents, the Old Believers believed in the ideology of the Third Rome, but understood it in a different way: whereas for the Grecophiles of the “Greco-Russian Church” Moscow the Third Rome was the continuation of Christian Rome, which in no wise implied any break with Greek Orthodoxy, for the Old Believers the influence of the Greeks, who had betrayed Orthodoxy at the council of Florence in 1438-39, could only be harmful. They could not believe that the Greeks could still be Orthodox when they were “powerless”, that is, without an emperor; and when Russia, too, in their view, became “powerless” through the tsar’s “apostasy” to the views of Nicon, they prepared for the end of the world. For, as Fr. Gregory Lurye writes, “the Niconite reforms were perceived by Old Believerism as apostasy from Orthodoxy, and consequently… as the end of the last (Roman) Empire, which was to come immediately before the end of the world.”[371]

 

     More important to the Old Believers even than the supposed apostasy of the official Church was the tsar’s apostasy; for, as we have seen, for them the Third Rome depended on the Orthodoxy of the tsar first and foremost. Some of them thought that the Antichrist had in fact come when their schism with the patriarchate and the tsar was sealed by the council of 1667. The persecutions of Tsaritsa Sophia strengthened this belief; and the western innovations of Peter the Great confirmed it still further, to the extent that Peter was himself the Antichrist in their eyes…

 

     The Old Believers’ fanatical attachment to the letter of the law (which they in any case distorted[372]), placing ritual differences on a par with dogmatic differences (which Patriarch Paisius of Constantinople had warned against), led to the loss of the Spirit that gives life; and, like the Jews, they became the enemies of lawful political authority and the revolutionary forerunners of the Bolsheviks, whose 1905 revolution they financed generously. Their own communities, like those on the River Vyg in the north, were almost democratic communes, having no priests and recognising no political authority – not unlike the contemporary Puritan communities of North America. And gradually, as in the writings of Semeon Denisov, one of the leaders of the Vyg community, they evolved a new conception of Holy Russia, according to which the real Russia resided, not in the Tsar and the Church, for they had both apostasised, but in the common people. As Sergei Zenkovsky writes, Denisov “transformed the old doctrine of an autocratic Christian state into a concept of a democratic Christian nation.”[373]

 

     The combination of democratism and apocalypticism was a powerful mixture in Russia, as it had been in many proto-Protestant movements in the West. The apocalyptic element took its starting-point from the prophecy of Archimandrite Zachariah (Kopystensky) of the Kiev Caves Lavra, who in 1620 had foretold that the coming of the Antichrist would take place in 1666. And in a certain sense the Antichrist did indeed come in 1666. Not only was Patriarch Nicon unlawfully deposed in that year, which fatally weakened the symphony of powers in Russia and therefore led, in the long run, to the appearance of the collective Antichrist in 1917. But in the same year, as we have seen, a Sephardic Jew called Shabbatai Zevi proclaimed himself to be the Messiah in Smyrna.

 

     An apocalyptic sign was a certain slackening of public piety from the very high levels that foreign visitors had marvelled at. Westernism began to undermine the foundations of Russian Church life just as the Muscovite State reached the height of its power. Thus Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes that “the condemnation of Patriarch Nicon was a kind of end of the world in the sense that there ended the world of Russian life, in which the most important and central in everything was that which can conditionally be signified by the general concept of ‘Holy Russia’” [374].

 

     From that time an apocalyptic rejection of the State became the keynote of Old Believerism. As Fr. George Florovsky writes, “the keynote and secret of Russia’s Schism was not ‘ritual’ but the Antichrist, and thus it may be termed a socio-apocalyptical utopia. The entire meaning and pathos of the first schismatic opposition lies in its underlying apocalyptical intuition (‘the time draws near’), rather than in any ‘blind’ attachment to specific rites or petty details of custom. The entire first generation of raskolouchitelei [‘schismatic teachers’] lived in this atmosphere of visions, signs, and premonitions, of miracles, prophecies, and illusions. These men were filled with ecstasy or possessed, rather than pedants… One has only to read the words of Avvakum, breathless with excitement: ‘What Christ is this? He is not near; only hosts of demons.’ Not only Avvakum felt that the ‘Nikon’ Church had become a den of thieves. Such a mood became universal in the Schism: ‘the censer is useless; the offering abominable’.

 

     “The Schism, an outburst of a socio-political hostility and opposition, was a social movement, but one derived from religious self-consciousness. It is precisely this apocalyptical perception of what has taken place which explains the decisive or rapid estrangement among the Schismatics. ‘Fanaticism in panic’ is Kliuchevskii’s definition, but it was also panic in the face of ‘the last apostasy’…

 

     “The Schism dreamed of an actual, earthly City: a theocratic utopia and chiliasm. It was hoped that the dream had already been fulfilled and that the ‘Kingdom of God’ had been realised as the Muscovite State. There may be four patriarchs in the East, but the one and only Orthodox tsar is in Moscow. But now even this expectation had been deceived and shattered. Nikon’s ‘apostasy’ did not disturb the Old Believers nearly as much as did the tsar’s apostasy, which in their opinion imparted a final apocalyptical hopelessness to the entire conflict.

 

     “’At this time there is no tsar. One Orthodox tsar had remained on earth, and whilst he was unaware, the western heretics, like dark clouds, extinguished this Christian sun. Does this not, beloved, clearly prove that the Antichrist’s deceit is showing its mask?’

 

     “History was at an end. More precisely, sacred history had come to an end; it had ceased to be sacred and had become without Grace. Henceforth the world would seem empty, abandoned, forsaken by God, and it would remain so. One would be forced to withdraw from history into the wilderness. Evil had triumphed in history. Truth had retreated into the bright heavens, while the Holy Kingdom had become the tsardom of the Antichrist…”[375]

 

     What the Old Believers did not realise that their rejection of the Muscovite State because of its supposed surrender to the western heretics betrayed a very western – and heretical – view of world history. The Old Believers believed that Tsar Alexis had apostasised by accepting Patriarch Nicon’s reforms. In the same way the western Protestants believed that true Christianity ended when State and Church (originally the Emperor Constantine and the Pope of Rome) jointly reverted to idolatrous practices. The Old Believers fled into the woods to escape the Antichrist and wait for the Second Coming of Christ in their democratic communes, accepting the authority of neither king nor priest. Similarly, the Czech Taborites and German Anabaptists and English Puritans fled from existing states to build their millenial communities in which the only king and priest was God.

 

     In both East and West the failure of the Second Coming to come as predicted by these revolutionaries led them to compromise with their original beliefs. But the spirit of the revolution continued to burn under the embers of their shattered belief-systems. And it burns to this day…

 

 

Patriarch Nicon of Moscow

 

     Still more serious in its long-term consequences than the Old Believer schism was the unlawful deposition of Patriarch Nicon in the Moscow council of 1666-67. In the opinion of many, this assault on the patriarchate paved the way for its abolition by Peter the Great, which in turn led to Peter’s establishment of an absolutist state in Russia on the model of Hobbes’ Leviathan. In the longer term this led, by an opposite swing of the pendulum, to the democratic revolution of February, 1917.

 

     On becoming patriarch in 1652, as we have seen, Nicon secured from the Tsar, his boyars and the bishops a solemn oath to the effect that they would keep the sacred laws of the Church and State “and promise… to obey us as your chief pastor and supreme father in all things which I shall announce to you out of the divine commandments and laws.”[376] There then followed a short, but most remarkable period, in which, in Lebedev’s words, “the undivided, although unconfused, union of state and ecclesiastical powers constituted the natural basis of the public life of Russia. The spiritual leadership in this belonged, of course, to the Church, but this leadership was precisely spiritual and was never turned into political leadership. In his turn the tsar… never used his political autocracy for arbitrariness in relation to the Church, since the final meaning of life for the whole of Russian society consisted in acquiring temporal and eternal union with God in and through the Church…”[377] Thus the relationship between the two was characterised in the preface to a service book published in Moscow in 1653, as “the diarchy, complementary, God-chosen”.[378]

 

     Although the patriarch had complete control of Church administration and services, and the appointment and judgement of clerics in ecclesiastical matters, “Church possessions and financial resources were considered a pan-national inheritance. In cases of special need (for example, war) the tsar could take as much of the resources of the Church as he needed without paying them back. The diocesan and monastic authorities could spend only strictly determined sums on their everyday needs. All unforeseen and major expenses were made only with the permission of the tsar. In all monastic and diocesan administrations state officials were constantly present; ecclesiastical properties and resources were under their watchful control. And they judged ecclesiastical peasants and other people in civil and criminal matters. A special Monastirsky Prikaz established in Moscow in accordance with the Ulozhenie of 1649 was in charge of the whole clergy, except the patriarch, in civil and criminal matters. Although in 1649 Nicon together with all the others had put his signature to the Ulozhenie, inwardly he was not in agreement with it, and on becoming patriarch declared this opinion openly. He was most of all disturbed by the fact that secular people – the boyars of the Monastirsky Prikaz – had the right to judge clergy in civil suits. He considered this situation radically unecclesiastical and unchristian. When Nicon had still been Metropolitan of Novgorod, the tsar, knowing his views, had given him a ‘document of exemption’ for the whole metropolia, in accordance with which all the affairs of people subject to the Church, except for affairs of ‘murder, robbery and theft’, were transferred from the administration of the Monastirsky Prikaz to the metropolitan’s court. On becoming patriarch, Nicon obtained a similar exemption from the Monastirsky Prikaz for his patriarchal diocese (at that time the patriarch, like all the ruling bishops, had his own special diocese consisting of Moscow and spacious lands adjacent to it). As if to counteract the Ulozhenie of 1649, Nicon published ‘The Rudder’, which contains the holy canons of the Church and various enactments concerning the Church of the ancient pious Greek emperors. As we shall see, until the end of his patriarchy Nicon did not cease to fight against the Monastirsky Prikaz. It should be pointed out that this was not a struggle for the complete ‘freedom’ of the Church from the State (which was impossible in Russia at that time), but only for the re-establishment of the canonical authority of the patriarch and the whole clergy in strictly spiritual matters, and also for such a broadening of the right of the ecclesiastical authorities over people subject to them in civil matters as was permitted by conditions in Russia.”[379]

 

     From May, 1654 to January, 1657, while the tsar was away from the capital fighting the Poles, the patriarch acted as regent, a duty he carried out with great distinction. Some later saw in this evidence of the political ambitions of the patriarch. However, the patriarch undertook this duty only at the request of the tsar, and was very glad to return the reins of political administration when the tsar returned. Nevertheless, from 1656, the boyars succeeded in undermining the tsar’s confidence in the patriarch, falsely insinuating that the tsar’s authority was being undermined by Nicon’s ambition. And they began to apply the Ulozhenie in Church affairs, even increasing the rights given by the Ulozhenie to the Monastirsky Prikaz. The Ulozhenie also decreed that the birthdays of the Tsar and Tsarina and their children should be celebrated alongside the Church feasts, which drew from the Patriarch the criticism that men were being likened to God, “and even preferred to God”.[380] Another bone of contention was the tsar’s desire to appoint Silvester Kossov as Metropolitan of Kiev, which Nicon considered uncanonical in that the Kievan Metropolitan was in the jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Constantinople at that time.[381]

 

     Since the tsar was clearly determined to have his way even in these strictly ecclesiastical matters, and since he was manifesting his anger in other ways (not inviting him to state banquets, not going to church), on July 10, 1658 Nicon protested by withdrawing to his monastery of New Jerusalem, near Moscow. He compared this move to the flight of the Woman clothed with the sun into the wilderness in Revelation 12, and quoted the 17th Canon of the Council of Sardica[382] and the words of the Gospel: “If they persecute you in one city, depart to another, shaking off the dust from your feet”.[383]. “The whole state knows,” he said, “that in view of his anger against me the tsar does not go to the Holy Catholic Church, and I am leaving Moscow. I hope that the tsar will have more freedom without me.”[384]

 

     Some have regarded Nicon’s action as an elaborate bluff that failed. Whatever the truth about his personal motivation, which is known to God alone, there can be no doubt that the patriarch, unlike his opponents, correctly gauged the seriousness of the issue involved. For the quarrel between the tsar and the patriarch signified, in effect, the beginning of the schism of Church and State in Russia. In withdrawing from Moscow to New Jerusalem, the patriarch demonstrated that “in truth ‘the New Jerusalem’, ‘the Kingdom of God’, the beginning of the Heavenly Kingdom in Russia was the Church, its Orthodox spiritual piety, and not the material earthly capital, although it represented… ‘the Third Rome’.”[385] And to further underline the significance of these events, the Old Believer schism began to develop precisely in this period…

 

     However, Nicon had appointed a vicar-metropolitan in Moscow, and had said: “I am not leaving completely; if the tsar’s majesty bends, becomes more merciful and puts away his wrath, I will return”. In other words, while resigning the active administration of the patriarchy in view of the disobedience of his spiritual children, he had not resigned his rank – a situation to which there were many precedents in Church history. And to show that he had not finally resigned from Church affairs, he protested against moves made by his deputy on the patriarchal throne, and continued to criticise the Tsar for interfering in the Church's affairs, especially in the reactivation of the Monastirsky Prikaz.

 

     Not content with having forced his withdrawal from Moscow, his enemies – in particular, the boyars - resolved to have him defrocked, portraying him as a dangerous rebel against both Church and State - although, as Zyzykin points out, Patriarch Nicon interfered less in the affairs of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich than St. Philip of Moscow had done in the affairs of Ivan the Terrible.[386] And so, in 1660, they convened a council which appointed a patriarchal locum tenens, Metropolitan Pitirim, to administer the Church independently without seeking the advice of the patriarch and without commemorating his name. Nicon rejected this council, and cursed Pitirim. Then the Tsar, in his efforts to gain greater support for his policies, made a fatal mistake. He invited three Greek hierarchs who were in Moscow on alms-raising missions - two patriarchs of Alexandria and Antioch who had been suspended by the Patriarch of Constantinople, and the defrocked former metropolitan of Gaza Paisius Ligarides, - to participate in the councils of the Russian Church. Ligarides was in the pay of the Vatican[387], but paradoxically preached a form of caesaropapism in order to ingratiate himself with the tsar and undermine the patriarch.

 

     But the State that encroaches on the Church is itself subject to destruction. Thus in 1661 Patriarch Nicon had a vision in which he saw the Moscow Dormition cathedral full of fire. “The hierarchs who had previously died were standing there. Peter the metropolitan rose from his tomb, went up to the altar and laid his hand on the Gospel. All the hierarchs did the same, and so did I. And Peter began to speak: ‘Brother Nicon! Speak to the Tsar: why has he offended the Holy Church, and fearlessly taken possession of the immovable things collected by us. This will not be to his benefit. Tell him to return what he has taken, for the great wrath of God has fallen upon him because of this: twice there have been pestilences, and so many people have died, and now he has nobody with whom to stand against his enemies.’ I replied: ‘He will not listen to me; it would be good if one of you appeared to him.’ Peter continued: ‘The judgements of God have not decreed this. You tell him; if he does not listen to you, then if one of us appeared to him, he would not listen to him. And look! Here is a sign for him.’ Following the movement of his hand I turned towards the west towards the royal palace and I saw: there was no church wall, the palace was completely visible, and the fire which was in the church came together and went towards the royal court and burned it up. ‘If he will not come to his senses, punishments greater than the first will be added,’ said Peter. Then another grey-haired man said: ‘Now the Tsar wants to take the court you bought for the churchmen and turn it into a bazaar for mammon’s sake. But he will not rejoice over his acquisition.’”[388]

 

     On December 12, 1666 Patriarch Nicon was reduced to the rank of a simple monk on the basis of patently unfounded charges, of which the most important was that “he annoyed his great majesty [the tsar], interfering in matters which did not belong to the patriarchal rank and authority”.[389] The truth was in fact the exact opposite: that the tsar and his boyars had interfered in matters which did not belong to their rank and authority, breaking the oath they had made to the patriarch upon his assuming the patriarchy.[390] The council also sinned in that the Tomos sent by the Eastern Patriarchs to Moscow in 1663 to justify the supposed lawfulness of Nicon’s deposition and attached to the acts of the council under the name of Patriarchal Replies expressed a definitely caesaropapist doctrine, according to which, for example, the Patriarch was exhorted to obey the tsar and the tsar was permitted to remove the patriarch in case of conflict with him.

 

     As Patriarch Dionysius of Constantinople put it in a letter to the tsar: “I inform your Majesty that in accordance with these chapters you have the power to have a patriarch and all your councillors established by you, for in one autocratic state there must not be two principles, but one must be the senior.” To which Fr. Lev Lebedev justly rejoins: “It is only to be wondered at how the Greeks by the highest authority established and confirmed in the Russian kingdom that [caesaropapism] as a result of which they themselves had lost their monarchy! It was not Paisius Ligarides who undermined Alexis Mikhailovich: it was the ecumenical patriarchs who deliberately decided the matter in favour of the tsar.”[391]

 

     However, opposition was voiced by Metropolitans Paul of Krutitsa and Hilarion of Ryazan, who feared “that the Patriarchal Replies would put the hierarchs into the complete control of the royal power, and thereby of a Tsar who would not be as pious as Alexis Mikhailovich and could turn out to be dangerous for the Church”. So after several further sessions, as Zyzykin writes, “the Patriarchs were forced to write an explanatory note, in which they gave another interpretation to the second chapter of the patriarchal replies… The Council came to a unanimous conclusion: ‘Let it be recognized that the Tsar has the pre-eminence in civil affairs, and the Patriarch in ecclesiastical affairs, so that in this way the harmony of the ecclesiastical institution may be preserved whole and unshaken.’ This was the principled triumph of the Niconian idea, as was the resolution of the Council to close the Monastirsky Prikaz and the return to the Church of judgement over clergy in civil matters (the later remained in force until 1700).[392]

 

     And yet it had been a close-run thing. During the 1666 Council Paisius Ligarides had given voice to an essentially pagan view of tsarist power that had not been heard since Leo the iconoclast in the eighth century: “[The tsar] will be called the new Constantine. He will be both tsar and hierarch, just as the great Constantine, who was so devoted to the faith of Christ, is praised among us at Great Vespers as priest and tsar. Yes, and both among the Romans and the Egyptians the tsar united in himself the power of the priesthood and of the kingship.”[393]

 

     If this doctrine had triumphed at the Council, then Russia would indeed have entered the era of the Antichrist, as the Old Believers believed. And if the good sense of the Russian hierarchs finally averted a catastrophe, the condemnation of Patriarch Nicon, the chief supporter of the Orthodox doctrine, cast a long shadow of evil over the proceedings, and meant that within a generation the attempt to impose absolutism on Russia would begin again…[394]

 

     According to M.V. Zyzykin, “in Church-State questions Nicon fought with the same corruption that had crept into Muscovite political ideas after the middle of the 15th century and emerged as political Old Believerism, which defended the tendency that had established itself in life towards caesaropapism. The fact that the guardian of Orthodoxy, at the time of the falling away of the Constantinopolitan Emperor and Patriarch and Russian Metropolitan into the unia, had turned out to be the Muscovite Great Prince had too great an influence on the exaltation of his significance in the Church. And if we remember that at that time, shortly after the unia, the Muscovite Great Prince took the place of the Byzantine Emperor, and that with the establishment of the de facto independence of the Russian Church from the Constantinopolitan Patriarch the Muscovite first-hierarchs lost a support for their ecclesiastical independence from the Great Princes, then it will become clear to us that the Muscovite Great Prince became de facto one of the chief factors in ecclesiastical affairs, having the opportunity to impose his authority on the hierarchy.”[395]

 

     Patriarch Nicon corrected the caesaropapist bias of the Russian Church, which was expressed in his time especially by the friend of the tsar, Paisius Ligarides. He set down his thoughts in detail in his famous work Razzorenie (“Destruction”) – which, however, has yet to be published in its original Russian, having been published only in 1871 in an English translation by William Palmer. In it he defined the rights and duties of the tsar as follows: “The tsar undoubtedly has power to give rights and honours, but within the limits set by God; he cannot give spiritual power to Bishops and archimandrites and other spiritual persons: spiritual things belong to the decision of God, and earthly things to the king” (I, 555).[396] “The main duty of the tsar is to care for the Church, for the dominion of the tsar can never be firmly established and prosperous when his mother, the Church of God, is not strongly established, for the Church of God, most glorious tsar, is thy mother, and if thou art obliged to honour thy natural mother, who gave thee birth, then all the more art thou obliged to love thy spiritual mother, who gave birth to thee in Holy Baptism and anointed thee to the kingdom with the oil and chrism of gladness.”[397]

 

     Indeed, “none of the kings won victory without the prayers of the priests” (I, 187).[398] For “Bishops are the successors of the Apostles and the servants of God, so that the honour accorded to them is given to God Himself.”[399] “It was when the evangelical faith began to shine that the Episcopate was venerated; but when the spite of pride spread, the honour of the Episcopate was betrayed.” “A true hierarch of Christ is everything. For when kingdom falls on kingdom, that kingdom, and house, that is divided in itself will not stand.”[400] “The tsar is entrusted with the bodies, but the priests with the souls of men. The tsar remits money debts, but the priests – sins. The one compels, the other comforts. The one wars with enemies, the other with the princes and rulers of the darkness of this world. Therefore the priesthood is much higher than the kingdom.”[401]

 

     The superiority of the priesthood is proved by the fact that the tsar is anointed by the patriarch and not vice-versa: “The highest authority of the priesthood was not received from the tsars, but on the contrary the tsars are anointed to the kingdom through the priesthood… We know no other lawgiver than Christ, Who gave [me] the power to bind and to loose. What power did the tsar give me? This one? No, but he himself seized it for himself…. Know that even he who is distinguished by the diadem is subject to the power of the priest, and he who is bound by him will be bound also in the heavens.[402]

 

     Nicon explains why, on the one hand, the priesthood is higher than the kingdom, and on the other, the kingdom cannot be abolished by the priesthood: “The kingdom is given by God to the world, but in wrath, and it is given through anointing from the priests with a material oil, but the priesthood is a direct anointing from the Holy Spirit, as also our Lord Jesus Christ was raised to the high-priesthood directly by the Holy Spirit, as were the Apostles. Therefore, at the consecration to the episcopate, the consecrator holds an open Gospel over the head of him who is being consecrated” (I, 234, 235)… There is no human judgement over the tsar, but there is a warning from the pastors of the Church and the judgement of God.[403]

 

     However, the fact that the tsar cannot be judged by man shows that the kingdom is given him directly by God, and not by man. “For even if he was not crowned, he would still remain king.” But he can only be called an Orthodox, anointed king if he is crowned by the Bishop. Thus “he receives and retains his royal power by the sword de facto. But the name of king (that is, the name of a consecrated and Christian or Orthodox king) he receives from the episcopal consecration, for which the Bishop is the accomplisher and source.” (I, 254).[404]

 

     The “two swords” of royal and ecclesiastical power, of which Pope Gregory VII and his successors made such perverted use, are explained by Nicon as follows: “The old Greek laws declare what are the swords of power: the spiritual and the secular, which the Lord Jesus Christ established for the defence of His people in the Church, in which the Bishop is the spiritual sword, and the tsar the secular… If anyone does not obey the Bishop, the tsar forces him to obedience, just as those who refused to obey the tsar are forced to obedience to the Bishop, when a need for this arises. But these swords are of two different kinds of power and jurisdiction… In spiritual affairs belonging to the Glory of God, the Bishop is higher than the tsar, for there only he can realise spiritual jurisdiction, but in the affairs of this world the tsar is higher. Thus the two sides do not contradict each other. However, the Bishop has a certain relationship to secular affairs.. If the tsar does not do what he should do in obeying the laws of God, then it is in the power of the Bishop to punish or excommunicate him, not as king, but as an apostate from the law of God.[405]

 

     We see here how far Nicon is from the papocaesarism of a Pope Gregory VII, who claimed to be able to depose kings precisely “as kings”. And yet he received a reputation for papocaesarism (which prevented his recognition at least until the Russian Council of 1917-18) because of his fearless exposure of the caesaropapism of the Russian tsar: “Everyone should know his measure. Saul offered the sacrifice, but lost his kingdom; Uzziah, who burned incense in the temple, became a leper. Although thou art tsar, remain within thy limits. Wilt thou say that the heart of the king is in the hand of God? Yes, but the heart of the king is in the hand of God [only] when the king remains within the boundaries set for him by God.”[406]

 

     In another passage Nicon combines the metaphor of the two swords with that of the sun and moon. The analogy with the sun and the moon had been used by Pope Innocent III; but Patriarch Nicon’s development of it is Orthodox and does not exalt the power of the priesthood any more than did the Fathers of the fourth century: “The all-powerful God, in creating the heaven and the earth, order the two great luminaries – the sun and the moon – to shine upon the earth in their course; by one of them – the sun - He prefigured the episcopal power, while by the other – the moon – He prefigured the tsarist power. For the sun is the greater luminary, it shines by day, like the Bishop who enlightens the soul. But the lesser luminary shines by night, by which we must understand the body. As the moon borrows its light from the sun, and in proportion to its distance from it receives a fuller radiance, so the tsar derives his consecration, anointing and coronation (but not power) from the Bishop, and, having received it, has his own light, that it, his consecrated power and authority. The similarity between these two persons in every Christian society is exactly the same as that between the sun and the moon in the material world. For the episcopal power shines by day, that is, over souls; while the tsarist power shines in the things of this world. And this power, which is the tsarist sword, must be ready to act against the enemies of the Orthodox faith. The episcopate and all the clergy need this defence from all unrighteousness and violence. This is what the secular power is obliged to do. For secular people are in need of freedom for their souls, while spiritual people are in need of secular people for the defence of their bodies. And so in this neither of them is higher than the other, but each has power from God.”[407]

 

     But Nicon insists that when the tsar encroaches on the Church he loses his power. For “there is in fact no man more powerless than he who attacks the Divine laws, and there is nothing more powerful than a man who fights for them. For he who commits sin is the slave of sin, even if he bears a thousand crowns on his head, but he who does righteous deeds is greater than the tsar himself, even if he is the last of all.”[408] So a tsar who himself chooses patriarchs and metropolitans, breaking his oath to the patriarch “is unworthy even to enter the church, but he must spend his whole life in repentance, and only at the hour of death can he be admitted to communion… Chrysostom forbade every one who breaks his oath … from crossing the threshold of the church, even in he were the tsar himself.” (I, 581).[409]

 

     Nicon comes very close to identifying the caesaropapist tsar with the Antichrist. For, as Zyzykin points out, “Nicon looked on the apostasy of the State law from Church norms (i.e. their destruction) as the worship by the State of the Antichrist, ‘This antichrist is not satan, but a man, who will receive from satan the whole power of his energy. A man will be revealed who will be raised above God, and he will be the opponent of God and will destroy all gods and will order that people worship him instead of God, and he will sit, not in the temple of Jerusalem, but in the Churches, giving himself out as God. As the Median empire was destroyed by Babylon, and the Babylonian by the Persian, and the Persian by the Macedonian, and the Macedonian by the Roman, thus must the Roman empire be destroyed by the antichrist, and he – by Christ. This is revealed to us by the Prophet Daniel. The divine Apostle warned us about things to come, and they have come for us through you and your evil deeds (he is speaking to the author of the Ulozhenie, Prince Odoyevsky) Has not the apostasy from the Holy Gospel and the traditions of the Holy Apostles and holy fathers appeared? (Nicon has in mind the invasion by the secular authorities into the administration of the Church through the Ulozheniye). Has not the man of sin been discovered - the son of destruction, who will exalt himself about everything that is called God, or that is worshipped? And what can be more destructive than abandoning God and His commandments, as they have preferred the traditions of men, that is, their codex full of spite and cunning? But who is this? Satan? No. This is a man, who has received the work of Satan, who has united to himself many others like you, composer of lies, and your comrades. Sitting in the temple of God does not mean in the temple of Jerusalem, but everywhere in the Churches. And sitting not literally in all the Churches, but as exerting power over all the Churches. The Church is not stone walls, but the ecclesiastical laws and the pastors, against whom thou, apostate, hast arisen, in accordance with the work of satan, and in the Ulozhenie thou hast presented secular people with jurisdiction over the Patriarch, the Metropolitans, the Archbishops, the Bishops, and over all the clergy, without thinking about the work of God. As the Lord said on one occasion: ‘Depart from Me, satan, for thou thinkest not about what is pleasing to God, but about what is pleasing to men.’ ‘Ye are of your father the devil and you carry out his lusts.’ Concerning such Churches Christ said: ‘My house will be called a house of prayer, but you will make it a den of thieves’; as Jeremiah says (7.4): ‘Do not rely on deceiving words of those who say to you: here is the temple of the Lord.’ How can it be the temple of God if it is under the power of the tsar and his subjects, and they order whatever they want in it? Such a Church is no longer the temple of God, but the house of those who have power over it, for, if it were the temple of God, nobody, out of fear of God, would be capable of usurping power over it or taking anything away from it. But as far as the persecution of the Church is concerned, God has revealed about this to His beloved disciple and best theologian John (I, 403-408),… [who] witnesses, saying that the Antichrist is already in the world. But nobody has seen or heard him perceptibly, that is, the secular authorities will begin to rule over the Churches of God in transgression of the commandments of God.’ For the word ‘throne’ signifies having ecclesiastical authority, and not simply sitting… And he will command people to bow down to him not externally or perceptibly, but in the same way as now the Bishops, abandoning their priestly dignity and honour, bow down to the tsars as to their masters. And they ask them for everything and seek honours from them” (I, 193).”[410] For “there is apostasy also in the fact that the Bishops, abandoning their dignity, bow down before the tsar as their master in spiritual matters, and seek honours from him.”[411]

 

     The power of the Roman emperors, of which the Russian tsardom is the lawful successor, is “that which restraineth” the coming of the Antichrist. And yet “the mystery of iniquity is already being accomplished” in the shape of those kings, such as Nero, who ascribed to themselves divine worship.[412] The warning was clear: that which restrains the antichrist can be swiftly transformed into the antichrist himself. Even the present tsar could suffer such a transformation; for “what is more iniquitous than for a tsar to judge bishops, taking to himself a power which has not been given him by God?… This is apostasy from God.”[413]

 

     In this apocalyptic outlook on events, if in nothing else, Patriarch Nicon and the Old Believers were united…

 

 

The Swansong of the Moscow Patriarchate

 

     It was not only the Russian State that had sinned in Nicon’s deposition: both the Russian hierarchs and the Eastern Patriarchs had displayed pusillanimity in submitting to the pressure of tsar and boyars. But judgement was deferred for a generation or two, while the Russian autocracy restored the Ukraine, “Little Russia”, to the Great Russian kingdom, thereby taking a big step in the task of “the gathering of the Russian lands”. Indeed, in the period between the council of 1667 and the death of Patriarch Adrian in 1700, the Moscow Patriarchate seemed to be at the height of its power. With the weakening of Poland and the increase in strength of the generally pro-Muscovite Cossacks under Hetman Bogdan Khmelnitsky, large areas of Belorussia and the Ukraine, including Kiev, were freed from Latin control, which could only be joyful news for the native Orthodox population who had suffered so much from the Polish-Jesuit yoke. Moreover, the liberated areas, albeit with some initial opposition from unia-inclined hierarchs and the Patriarch of Constantinople (which had had nominal jurisdiction over these areas for many years), were returned to the jurisdiction of the Russian Church in 1686. This meant that most of the Russian lands were now, for the first time for centuries, united under a single, independent Russian State and Church. The Russian national Church had been restored to almost its original dimensions.

 

     As if in acknowledgement of its achievement, at the coronation of Tsar Theodore Alexeyevich certain additions were made to the rite that showed that the Russian Church now looked on the tsardom as a quasi-priestly rank. “These additions were: 1) the proclamation of the symbol of faith by the tsar before his crowning, as was always the case with ordinations, 2) the vesting of the tsar in royal garments signifying his putting on his rank, and 3) communion in the altar of the Body and Blood separately in accordance with the priestly order, which was permitted only for persons of the three hierarchical sacred ranks. These additions greatly exalted the royal rank, and Professor Pokrovsky explained their introduction by the fact that at the correction of the liturgical books in Moscow in the second half of the 17th century, the attention of people was drawn to the difference in the rites of the Byzantine and Muscovite coronation and the additions were introduced under the influence of the Council of 1667, which wanted to exalt the royal rank.”[414]

 

     Although exalted in this way, the pious tsar did not use his position to humiliate the Church. On the contrary, he acted to correct, as far as it was in his power, the great wrong that had been done to the Church in his father’s reign. Thus when Nicon died it was the tsar who had to overcome the resistance of Patriarch Joachim before the reposed patriarch’s body could be buried as a hierarch in the place that he had desired. And it was the tsar who ordered “that the body should be conveyed to New Jerusalem. The patriarch did not want to give the reposed hierarchical honours. [So] his Majesty persuaded Metropolitan Cornelius of Novgorod to carry out the burial. He himself carried the coffin with the remains.”[415] Moreover, it was the tsar rather than the patriarch who obtained a gramota from the Eastern Patriarchs in 1682 restoring Nicon to patriarchal status and “declaring that he could be forgiven in view of his redemption of his guilt by his humble patience in prison”[416]. This was hardly an adequate summary of the situation, but it did go some of the way to helping the Greeks at least in part to redeem their guilt in the deposition of the most Grecophile of Russian patriarchs.

 

     However, Patriarch Nicon was never completely rehabilitated. Indeed, in 1676 Patriarch Joachim had convened a council which hurled yet more accusations against him.[417] It was not until after the fall of the Russian empire, at the Moscow Council of 1917-18, that the first steps towards his complete rehabilitation were undertaken, under the leadership of Metropolitan Anthony (Khrapovitsky) of Kiev. Moreover, in spite of the formal abolition of the Monastirsky Prikaz in 1675, as Nikolin writes, “the interference of the State in the life of the Church was becoming constantly stronger. The property privileges of ecclesiastical institutions and the clergy were gradually restricted or completely removed. Gradually also State obligations were extended to the Church’s properties.”[418]

 

     The last Patriarch of Muscovite Russia, Adrian, was enthroned in 1690, and expressed a traditional, very Niconian concept of the relationship between the Church and the State: “The kingdom has dominion only on earth, … whereas the priesthood has power on earth as in heaven… I am established as archpastor and father and head of all, for the patriarch is the image of Christ. He who hears me hears Christ. For all Orthodox are the spiritual sons [of the patriarch] – tsars, princes, lords, honourable warriors, and ordinary people… right-believers of every age and station. They are my sheep, they know me and they heed my archpastoral voice…”[419]

 

     However, this boldness evaporated when the domineering personality of Peter the Great came to full power in the kingdom. Thus “when Tsaritsa Natalia, who had supported Patriarch Adrian, a supporter of the old order of life, died [in 1694], there began a reform of customs which showed itself already in the outward appearance of the Tsar [Peter]. The Tsar’s way of life did not accord with the sacred dignity of the Tsar and descended from this height to drinking bouts in the German suburb and the life of a simple workman. The Church with its striving for salvation.. retreated into the background, and, as a consequence of this, a whole series of changes in customs appeared. Earlier the First-hierarchs and other hierarchs had been drawn into the Tsar’s council even in civil matters; they had been drawn to participate in the zemskie sobory and the Boyar’s Duma; now Peter distanced the Church’s representatives from participation in state matters; he spoke about this even during the lifetime of his mother to the Patriarch and did not summon him to the council. The ceremony on Palm Sunday in which the Tsar had previously taken part only as the first son of the Church, and not as her chief master, was scrapped. This ceremony on the one hand exalted the rank of the Patriarch before the people, and on the other hand also aimed at strengthening the authority of his Majesty’s state power through his participation in front of the whole people in a religious ceremony in the capacity of the first son of the Church. Until the death of his mother Peter also took part in this ceremony, holding the reins of the ass on which Patriarch Adrian [representing Christ Himself] sat, but between 1694 and 1696 this rite was put aside as if it were humiliating for the tsar’s power. The people were not indifferent to this and in the persons of the riflemen who rebelled in 1698 they expressed their protest. After all, the motive for this rebellion was the putting aside of the procession on Palm Sunday, and also the cessation of the cross processions at Theophany and during Bright Week, and the riflemen wanted to destroy the German suburb and beat up the Germans because ‘piety had stagnated among them’. In essence this protest was a protest against the proclamation of the primacy of the State and earthly culture in place of the Church and religion. So as to introduce this view into the mass of the people, it had been necessary to downgrade the significance of the First Hierarch of the Church, the Patriarch. After all, he incarnated in himself the earthly image of Christ, and in his position in the State the idea of the churchification of the State, that lay at the foundation of the symphony of powers, was vividly expressed. Of course, Peter had to remove all the rights of the Patriarch that expressed this. We have seen that the Patriarch ceased to be the official advisor of the Tsar and was excluded from the Boyars’ Duma. But this was not enough: the Patriarch still had one right, which served as a channel for the idea of righteousness in the structure of the State. This was the right to make petitions before the Tsar, and its fall symbolised the fall in the authority of the Patriarch. Soloviev has described this scene of the last petitioning in connection with the riflemen’s rebellion. ‘The terrible preparations for the executions went ahead, the gallows were placed on Belij and Zemlyanoj gorod, at the gates of the Novodevichi monastery and at the four assembly houses of the insurgent regiments. The Patriarch remembered that his predecessors had stood between the Tsar and the victims of his wrath, and had petitioned for the disgraced ones, lessening the bloodshed. Adrian raised the icon of the Mother of God and set off for Peter at Preobrazhenskoye. But the Tsar, on seeing the Patriarch, shouted at him: ‘What is this icon for? Is coming here really your business? Get away from here and put the icon in its place. Perhaps I venerate God and His All-holy Mother more than you. I am carrying out my duties and doing a God-pleasing work when I defend the people and execute evil-doers who plot against it.’ Historians rebuke Patriarch Adrian for not saying what the First Priest was bound to say, but humbly yielded to the Tsar, leaving the place of execution in shame without venturing on an act of heroic self-sacrifice. He did not oppose moral force to physical force and did not defend the right of the Church to be the guardian of the supreme righteousness. The petitioning itself turned out to be, not the heroism of the Patriarch on his way to martyrdom, but an empty rite. The Patriarch’s humiliation was put in the shade by Peter in that he heeded the intercession of a foreigner, the adventurer Lefort. ‘Lefort, as Golikov informs us, firmly represented to Peter that his Majesty should punish for evil-doing, but not lead the evil-doers into despair: the former is the consequence of justice, while the latter is an act of cruelty.’ At that very moment his Majesty ordered the stopping of the execution...”[420]

 

     In February, 1696 Patriarch Adrian was paralyzed, and in October, 1700, he died. Peter did not permit the election of a new patriarch, but only a locum tenens. Later in his reign he abolished the patriarchate itself and introduced what was in effect a Protestant form of Church-State relations…  Thus the seventeenth century ended with the effective fall of the symphony of powers in Russia in the form of the shackling of one of its two pillars – the patriarchate.

 

     That this would eventually lead to the fall of the other pillar, the tsardom, had been demonstrated by events in contemporary England. For there were uncanny parallels in the histories of the two countries at this time. Thus 1649 saw both the enactment of the Ulozhenie, the first official and legal expression of caesaropapism in Russia, and the execution of the king in England - the first legalised regicide in European history. And if by the 1690s both the patriarchate in Russia and the monarchy in England appeared to have been restored to their former status, this was only an illusion. Soon the doctrine of the social contract, which removed from the monarchy its Divine right and gave supreme power to the people, would triumph in both countries: in England in its liberal, Lockean form, and in Russia in its absolutist, Hobbesean form…

 

 

From Holy Rus’ to Great Russia

 

     “The most important task of the Orthodox Tsar,” wrote Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich to the Patriarch of Jerusalem, “is care for the faith, the Church, and all the affairs of the Church.” “There is no question”, writes Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “that the Orthodox Sovereign does indeed care for the Orthodox Church, defends her, protects her, takes part in all her most important affairs. But not he in the first place; and not he mainly. The Church has her own head on earth – the Patriarch. Relations between the head of the state and the head of the Church in Russia, beginning from the holy equal-to-the-apostles Great Prince Vladimir and continuing with Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich and Patriarch Nicon, were always formed in a spirit of symphony.

 

     “Not without exceptions, but, as a rule, this symphony was not broken and constituted the basis of the inner spiritual strength of the whole of Rus’, the whole of the Russian state and society. The complexity of the symphony consisted in the fact that the Tsar and Patriarch were identically responsible for everything that took place in the people, in society, in the state. But at the same time the Tsar especially answered for worldly matters, matters of state, while the Patriarch especially answered for Church and spiritual affairs. In council they both decided literally everything. But in worldly affairs the last word lay with the Tsar; and in Church and spiritual affairs – with the Patriarch. The Patriarch unfailingly took part in the sessions of the State Duma, that is, of the government. The Tsar unfailingly took part in the Church Councils. In the State Duma the last word was with the Sovereign, and in the Church Councils – with the Patriarch. This common responsibility for everything and special responsibility for the state and the Church with the Tsar and the Patriarch was the principle of symphony or agreement.”[421]

 

     Although it is customary to date the breakdown of Church-State symphony or agreement in Russia to the time of Peter the Great, western influence in Russia had increased, and the foundations of Holy Russia had been undermined, already in the time of his father, Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich. For, as Archbishop Nathaniel of Vienna writes, “by the time of Peter Holy Rus’ was not an integral, full-blooded vital phenomenon, since it had been broken… The Moscow Rus’ of Tsars Alexis Mikhailovich and Theodore Alekseyevich and Tsarevna Sophia, with whom Peter had to deal, was already only externally Holy Rus’.

 

     “There is evidence that Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich had an illegitimate son (who later became the boyar Ivan Musin-Pushkin). Concerning Tsaritsa Natalia Kirillovna Tikhon Streshnev said that he was not her only lover, and Tsarevna Sophia had a “dear friend” in Prince Basil Golitsyn. Such sinful disruptions had been seen earlier, being characteristic of the generally sensual Russian nature. But earlier these sins had always been clearly recognised as sins. People did not justify them, but repented of them, as Great Prince Ivan III repented to St. Joseph of Volotsk for his sin of sorcery and fortune-telling, as the fearsome Ivan the Terrible repented of his sins. But if the tsars did not repent of their sins, as, for example, Basil III did not repent of his divorce from St. Solomonia, these sins were rebuked by the representatives of the Church and burned out and rooted out by long and painful processes. In the second half of the 17th century in Moscow we see neither repentance for sins committed, not a pained attitude to them on the part of the sinners themselves and the society surrounding them. There was only a striving to hide sins, to make them unnoticed, unknown, for “what is done in secret is judged in secret”. A very characteristic trait distinguishing the Muscovite society of the second half of the 17th century from the preceding epochs, a trait fraught with many consequences, was the unrestrained gravitation of the upper echelons of Muscovite society towards the West, to the sinful West, to the sinful free life there, which, as always with sin viewed from afar, seemed especially alluring and attractive against the background of the wearisome holy Russian way of life.

 

     “Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, and all the higher Moscow boyars after him, introduced theatres. Originally the theatrical troupes most frequently played ‘spiritual’ pieces. But that this was only an offering to hypocrisy is best demonstrated by the fact that the actors playing ‘sacred scenes” gratifying unspoiled sensuality about Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, David and Bathsheba and Herod and Salome, were profoundly despised by the tsar and other spectators, who considered them to be sinful, ‘scandal-mongering’ people. Neither holy days nor festal days, and still more not the eves of feasts, were chosen for the presentation of these scenes. (It is known that Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich changed the date of a presentation fixed for December 18, for ‘tomorrow is the eve of the Forefeast of the Nativity of Christ’.) The real exponents of the really sacred scenes: The Action in the Cave and the Procession on the Donkey were considered by nobody to be sinful people, and their scenes were put on precisely on holy days. The tsar was followed by the boyars, and the boyars by the noblemen; everything that was active and leading in the people was drawn at this time to a timid, but lustful peeping at the West, at its free life, in which everything was allowed that was strictly forbidden in Holy Rus’, but which was so longed for by sin-loving human nature, against which by this time the leading echelons of Muscovite life no longer struggled, but indecisively pandered to. In this sinful gravitation towards the West there were gradations and peculiarities: some were drawn to Polish life, others to Latin, a third group to German life. Some to a greater degree and some to a lesser degree, but they all turned away from the Orthodox Old Russian way of life. Peter only decisively opened up this tendency, broke down the undermined partition between Rus’ and the West, beyond which the Muscovites timidly desired to look, and unrestrainedly threw himself into the desired sinful life, leading behind him his people and his state.

 

     “Holy Rus’ was easily broken by Peter because much earlier it had already been betrayed by the leading echelons of Muscovite society.

 

     “We can see the degree of the betrayal of the Holy Rus’ to a still greater degree than in the pandering to the desires of the flesh and the gravitation towards the free and sinful life, in the state acts of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, and principally in the creation of the so-called ‘Monastirsky Prikaz’, through which, in spite of the protests of Patriarch Nicon, the tsar crudely took into his own hands the property of the Church ‘for its better utilisation’, and in the persecutions to which ‘the father and intercessor for the tsar’, his Holiness Patriarch Nicon, was subjected. Nicon understood more clearly than anyone where the above-listed inner processes in the Muscovite state were inclining, and unsuccessfully tried to fight with it. For a genuinely Old Russian consciousness, it was horrific to think that the state could ‘better utilise’ the property of the Church than the Church. The state had been able earlier - and the more ancient the epoch, and the more complete its Old Russianness, the easier and the more often – to resort to Church property and spend it on its own urgent military and economic needs. After all, the Church took a natural interest in this. A son or daughter can freely take a mother’s money in a moment of necessity, and in the given case it is of secondary importance whether he returns it or not: it is a question of what is more convenient to the loving mother and her loving son. They do not offend each other. But in the removal of the monastery lands by Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich (although this measure was elicited by the needs of the war in the Ukraine, which the Church very much sympathised with), another spirit was clearly evident: the spirit of secularisation. This was no longer a more or less superficial sliding towards the longed-for sinful forms of western entertainment, it was not a temporary surrender to sin: it was already a far-reaching transfer into the inner sphere of the relations between Church and State – and what a state: Holy Rus’ (!), - of the secular ownership relations with a view to ‘better utilisation’ instead of the loving relations between mother and children characteristic of Orthodox morality. Better utilisation for what ends? For Church ends? But it would be strange to suppose that the state can use Church means for Church ends better than the Church. For state ends? But then the degree of the secularisation of consciousness is clear, since state ends are placed so much higher than Church ends, so that for their attainment Church property is removed. State ends are recognised as ‘better’ in relation to Church ends.

 

     “Finally, the drying up of holiness in Rus’ in the second half of the 17th century is put in clearer relief by the fact that, after the period of the 14th-16th centuries, which gave a great host of saints of the Russian people, the 17th century turned out to be astonishingly poor in saints. There were far more of them later. In the century of the blasphemous Peter there were far more saints in Russia than in the century of the pious tsars Alexis Mikhailovich and Theodore Alexeyevich. In the second half of the 17th century there were almost no saints in Rus’. And the presence or absence of saints is the most reliable sign of the flourishing or, on the contrary, the fall of the spiritual level of society, the people or the state.

 

     “And so it was not Peter who destroyed Holy Rus’. Before him it had been betrayed by the people and state that had been nurtured by it. But Peter created Great Russia…”[422]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



[1] Armstrong, The Battle for God: a History of Fundamentalism, New York: Ballantine Books, 2001, pp. 3-4.

[2] David Vital, A People Apart: The Jews in Europe, 1789-1939, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 32.

[3] Platonov, op. cit., p. 137.

[4] Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, The Christian Book Club of America, 1924, pp. 12-13. Further evidence for paganism in modern Judaism is the adoption of the Babylonian Fast of Tammuz as one of the two main fasts of the synagogue year, though condemned by the Prophet Ezekiel (Elizabeth Dilling, The Jewish Religion: Its Influence Today, The Noontide Press, 1963).

[5] Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 196.

[6] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 198-199.

[7] Cohn-Sherbok, Atlas of Jewish History, London & New York: Routledge, 1996, p. 112.

[8] Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 13-14.

[9] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 260-261. Luria also believed in reincarnation, writing: “If the soul was not purified entirely the first time, and it left this world, that soul must come back in a reincarnation, even a few times, until it is entirely purified.” Recently Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, the ultra-orthodox leader known as the “Moses of the Sephardic world” has applied this theory to the Holocaust, declaring that the Jewish victims of Nazism were “the reincarnation of earlier souls who sinned [and who] returned… to atone for their sins” (Lisa Beyer, Eric Silver, “Heresy and Holocaust”, Time, August 21, 2000, p. 74).

[10] Armstrong, op. cit., p. 11.

[11] Cohn-Sherbok, op. cit., pp. 117-119. However, as Johnson writes, “the Shabbatean movement, sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, not only survived the débâcle of the apostasy but continued in existence for over a century… The movement survived splits, nonconformist deviations of its own and eventually produced a breakaway religion founded by a reincarnation of Zevi called Jacob Frank (1726-91)… While embracing Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Frank continued to follow Nathan’s expanded religious theories. He created a new Trinity, of the ‘Good God’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘She’, the last an amalgam of the Shekinah and the Virgin Mary, and eventually propounded the notion that the messianic idea could be pursued equally well in all the main religions or, for that matter, in the secular enlightenment or freemasonry. Thus the kabbalah, which began in unspecific, formless gnosticism in late antiquity, returned to unspecific, formless gnosticism in the late eighteenth century.” (op. cit., pp. 273, 274)

[12] Armstrong, op. cit., p. 7.

[13] Armstrong, op. cit., p. 15.

[14] Armstrong, op. cit., pp. 22, 23-24.

[15] Braudel, A History of Civilizations, London: Penguin Books, 1993, pp. 315-316.

[16] Braudel, op. cit., p. 322.

[17] J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. 172, 173.

[18] Leontiev, “Vizantizm i Slavyanstvo”, in Vostok, Rossia i Slavyanstvo, Moscow, 1996, p. 142 (in Russian).

[19] Pico’s man-centred world-view is evident in the following: “O sublime generosity of God the Father! O highest and most wonderful felicity of Man! To him it was granted to be what he wills. The Father endowed him with all kinds of seeds and with the germs of every way of life. Whatever seeds each man cultivates will grow and bear fruit in him” (On the Dignity of Man). (V.M.)

[20] Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 471, 479.

[21] Braudel, op. cit., pp. 348-349.

[22] Braudel, op. cit., p. 326.

[23] As an example of this paradox, we may consider the example of Marx, who was, of course, the spiritual father of the despotic, materialist and anti-Christian regimes of the twentieth century. And yet, according to Sir Karl Popper, “although he recognised that the material world and its necessities are fundamental, he did not feel any love for the ‘kingdom of necessity’, as he called a society which is in bondage to its material needs. He cherished the spiritual world, the ‘kingdom of freedom’, and the spiritual side of ‘human nature’, as much as any Christian dualist” (The Open Society and its Enemies, p. 103). It must be borne in mind, of course, that Marx’s understanding of “the spiritual world” was not Christian.

[24] Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, 1500 to the Present, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 11.

[25] Averky (Taushev), "On the Situation of the Orthodox Christian in the Contemporary World", Istinnoe Pravoslavie i Sovremennij Mir, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, pp. 19-21 (in Russian).

[26] Quoted in V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do Nashikh Dnej, Harbin, 1934, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 75 (in Russian).

[27] Martin Luthers Werke Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Weimar, 1885, 405, 35. Quoted by Deacon John Whiteford in ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU (Orthodox Christianity), September 6, 1999.

[28] Archbishop Hilarion, Christianity or the Church?, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1971, p. 28.

[29] We are here anticipating future developments in Protestantism, which Luther and Calvin did not espouse in the simplistic form here described. Nevertheless, their root was already there, in the sixteenth-century Reformers.

[30] Descartes wrote in The Principles of Philosophy: “Above all else we must impress on our memory the overriding rule that whatever God has revealed to us must be accepted as more certain than anything else. And although the light of reason may, with the utmost clarity and evidence, appear to suggest something different, we must still put our entire faith in Divine authority rather than in our own judgement.”

[31] Tikhomirov, Religiozniye-Filosofskiye Osnovy Istorii, Moscow, 1997, pp. 472-474 (in Russian).

[32] Zhukovsky, “O stikhotvorenii ‘Svyataya Rus’”, in V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra i do nashikh dnej, Harbin, 1934, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 74 (in Russian).

[33] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 119-120.

[34] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 125, 127.

[35] Luther, “On the Appointment of Ministers”, 1523; translated in Englander, D. et al. (eds.) Culture and Belief in Europe 1450-1600, Oxford: Blackwells, 1990, p. 186.

[36] Gilbert Dagron, Empereur et Prêtre, Gallimard, 1996, pp 292-293 (in French).

[37] Peter Matheson, “Thomas Müntzer’s idea of an audience”, History, vol. 76, no. 247, June, 1991, pp. 192, 193.

[38] There was some justification for this charge. For Luther’s need of the Prince’s support compelled him to condone “the bigamous marriage of Philip of Hesse by advising the new faith’s leading patron ‘to tell a good strong lie’” (Davis, op. cit., p. 492).

[39] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-filosofskiye osnovy, op. cit., p. 271.

[40] Peter Ackroyd, The Life of Thomas More, London: Vintage, 1999, p. 261. 

[41] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 223.

[42] See John Guy, “More to Thomas than a man for all seasons”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 2, no. 2, February, 2001, p. 53.

[43] Ackroyd, op. cit., pp. 224-225, 221.

[44] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 279.

[45] It was Warham who in 1508 uncovered the fragrant relics of perhaps the greatest of the Orthodox archbishops of Canterbury, St. Dunstan. Dunstan had been distinguished by his fearless defence of the Church against secular encroachment, and had even imposed a penance upon King Edgar of not wearing his crown from his sixteenth to his thirtieth year (see V. Moss, The Saints of Anglo-Saxon England, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1993, p. 28). The uncovering of his relics was a hint to Warham that the time for confession against secular encroachment had come again; but sadly he paid no heed.

[46] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 354.

[47] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 388.

[48] Ackroyd, op. cit., p. 394.

[49] Davies, op. cit., p. 453. United, also, with the people; for “throughout the history of the Inquisition, commentators agreed on the impressive support given to it by the people” (Henry Kamen, The Spanish Inquisition, London: The Folio Society, 1998, p. 69).

[50] Davies, op. cit., p. 453.

[51] Henry Kamen, Spain’s Road to Empire: the Making of a World Power, 1492-1763, Allen Lane: The Penguin Press, 2002.

[52] Belloc, Richelieu, London: Ernest Benn, 1930, pp. 67-68.

[53] We may note that the Pope is supposedly king even of heaven! In view of these and similar statements, it is hard to deny that the Counter-Reformation papacy, no less than its medieval predecessor, usurped the power of God and became, in the strict definition of the word, idolatrous. (V.M.)

[54] Las Casas, Aqui se contienen treinta proposiciones muy juridicas, Propositions XVI, XVII, in Englander, op. cit., p. 327.

[55] Gilbert Dagron, Vostochnij tsezaropapizm (istoria i kritika odnoj kontseptsii), http://portal-credo.ru/site/?act=lib&id=177 (in Russian).

[56] Las Casas, op. cit., Proposition XI, in Englander, op. cit., p. 325.

[57]  John Warrington, introduction to More’s Utopia, London: Dent, Everyman’s Library, 1974, p. xi.

[58] De Mariana, The King and the Education of the King, in Englander, op. cit., p. 265.

[59] Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, p. 233, footnote.

[60] McClelland, op. cit., p. 175.

[61] McClelland, op. cit., p. 174.

[62] Luther, “Secular Authority: To What Extent it Should be Obeyed”, in Englander, op. cit., p. 190.

[63] Calvin, Institutes IV.xi.3; quoted in Jay, op. cit., p. 175).

[64] Jay, The Church, London: SPCK, 1977, p. 176.

[65] Chadwick, The Reformation, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 83, 86-87.

[66] Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 190-191.

[67] Frazier, A Second Look at the Second Coming, Ben Lomond: Conciliar Press, 1999, pp. 61-62.

[68] Quoted in Jay, op. cit., p. 178.

[69] Quoted in Jay, op. cit., p. 179.

[70] Quoted in Jeremy Paxman, The English, London: Penguin Books, 1998, 1999. p. 98.

[71] Later, Anglicanism was to acquire a deeply individualist character, too. This was akin to the doctrine of another German Reformer, Kaspar Schwenkfeld, who asserted, in Barzun’s words, that “if each soul has a unique destiny, then each man and woman may frame his or her creed within the common Christian religion. They deserve to have faith custom-tailored to their needs” (op. cit., p. 33).

[72] G.W. Bernard, “The Church of England c.1529-c.1642”, History, vol. 75, no. 244, June, 1990, p. 185.

[73] Bernard, op. cit., p. 187.

[74] Bernard, op. cit., p. 188.

[75] Bernard, op. cit., pp. 205-206.

[76] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-filosofskiye osnovy, op. cit., p. 269.

[77] Hill, “Social and Economic Consequences of the Henrician Revolution”, in Puritanism and Revolution, op. cit., p. 47.

[78] Hill, op. cit., pp. 56-57.

[79] Paxman, op. cit., p. 89.

[80] Owen Chadwick, op. cit., p. 128; quoted in Paxman, op. cit., p. 91.

[81] Henry Bettenson & Chris Maunder, Documents of the Christian Church, Oxford University Press, third edition, 1999, pp. 267-268.

[82] Hilaire Belloc writes: “The mass of England was Catholic in tradition and feeling during all the last half of the sixteenth century. Even into the beginning of the seventeenth the tradition survived. A good half of the people still had Catholic sympathies in the earlier years of James I. A quarter of them had, in varying degrees, Catholic sympathies (and half that quarter was willing to sacrifice heavily for the sake of openly confessing Catholicism) as late as the fall of the Stuarts in 1685-88.” (How the Reformation Happened, London: Jonathan Cape, 1933, p. 176)

[83] Quoted in Archbishop Seraphim, “Sud’by Rossii”, Pravoslavnij Vestnik, N 87, January-February, 1996, pp. 6-7 (in Russian).

[84] Nazarov, Taina Rossii, Moscow: “Russkaia Idea”, 1999, p. 538 (in Russian).

[85] Òrapezuntios, quoted in Simon Sebag Montefiore, Prince of Princes: The Life of Potemkin, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, C. 215.

[86] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaya Gosudarstvennost’, St. Petersburg, 1992, p. 164 (in Russian).

[87] Fr. John Meyendorff, “From Byzantium to Russia: Religious and Cultural Legacy”, in Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1996, p. 115.

[88] The Russians were not even exposed to the classical pagan authors; for, as Meyendorff (ibid., pp. 119-120) writes, because of “the availability of Scriptures and other literature in translation”, “there was no compelling need to study a ‘classical’ language, classical civilisation was not assimilated in Russia together with Christianity, as was the case in the West. Indeed a Latin medieval scholar who knew Latin would not read only Christian scriptures, but also Cicero, Augustine, and eventually Aristotle. Instead, a Russian knizhnik would only have at his disposal works translated from the Greek and channeled through the Church, i.e., liturgical, hagiographic, canonical, and some historical materials.”

[89] Boyeikov, Tserkov', Rus' i Rim, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983 (in Russian).

[90] With the exception of Georgia, which later entered the Russian empire. The metropolitan of Georgia had been among the very few, with St. Mark of Ephesus, who refused to sign the unia in Florence. Romania under Stephen the Great was also independent for a time, but soon came under the suzerainty of the Ottomans.

[91] “The primary sense of imperium is ‘rule’ and ‘dominion’, with no connotation of overseas territories, or oppressed indigenous peoples. Though ambitious monarchs, of course, aspired to as extensive an imperium as possible, the main point about being an emperor was that you did not have to take orders from anybody.” (Alan MacColl, “King Arthur and the Making of an English Britain”, History Today, volume 49 (3), March, 1999, p. 11).

[92] Simeon of Suzdal, in Fomin, S. & Fomina, T., Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem, Moscow, 1994, p. 242 (in Russian).

[93] Meyendorff, “Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, op. cit., p. 108.

[94] Meyendorff, “Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, op. cit., pp. 109-110.

[95] Meyendorff, “Was there an Encounter between East and West at Florence?”, op. cit., p. 109.

[96] Meyendorff, “Was There Ever a ‘Third Rome’? Remarks on the Byzantine Legacy in Russia”, in Rome, Constantinople, Moscow, op. cit., p. 135.

[97] Quoted in Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 114.

[98] Ya.S. Lurye, «Perepiska Groznogo s Kurbskim v obschestvennoj Mysli Drevnej Rusi», in Ya.S. Lurye and Yu.D. Rykov, Perepiska Ivana Groznogo s Andreem Kurbskim, Ìîscow: «Nauka», 1993, p. 230 (in Russian).

[99] Philotheus, Letter against the Astronomers and the Latins. In van den Bercken, op. cit.

[100] See N. Ulyanov, "Kompleks Filofeya", Voprosy Filosofii, 1994, no. 4, pp. 152-162 (in Russian).

[101] Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, pp. 231,

[102] Koestler, A. The Thirteenth Tribe. London: Pan Books, 1980, pp. 125-26. Koestler claims that about 82% of the present-day Jews are in fact of Turkic Khazar, that is, non-semitic, descent. This conclusion is supported by B. Freedman (The Truth about the Khazars, Los Angeles, 1954)

[103] O.A. Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii, Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, pp. 74-76, 87 (in Russian).

[104] Nechvolodov, A. L'Empereur Nicolas II et les Juifs. Paris, 1924, p. 183 (in French).

[105] Another cause was the introduction into Russian service-books of several materials that were read in the cycle of synagogue feasts and readings. Also in the 15th century the five books of Moses and the Book of Daniel were translated from Jewish (non-Greek) texts. See Platonov, op. cit., p. 91.

[106] According to St. Joseph of Volotsk, “they said: we are mocking these icons just as the Jews mocked Christ” (Platonov, op. cit., opposite page 320).

[107] Russkaia Pravoslavnaia Tserkov', Publication of the Moscow Patriarchate, 1988, pp. 25-26 (in Russian).

[108] In the speech of Patriarch Alexis II (Ridiger) to the Rabbis of New York in November, 1991. See Shmakov, Rech’ Patriarkha Alekseya II k rabbinam g. Nyu Yorka (S.Sh.A.) i Eres’ Zhidovstvuyushchikh, U.S.A., 1993 (MS, in Russian).

[109] St. Joseph, The Enlightener, Word 16.

[110] At the very moment that Joseph passed into eternal life, Serapion stood up and said to those around him: “Our brother Joseph has died. May God forgive him: such things happen even with righteous people” (Ìîskovskij Paterik, Moscow: “Stolitsa”, 1991, p. 46 (in Russian)).

[111] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, pp. 153-154.

[112] Kologrivov, Îcherki po Istorii Russkoj Svyatosti, Brussels, 1961, p. 204 (in Russian).

[113] St. Joseph, The Enlightener, Word 16.

[114] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 151.

[115] However, here is another opinion: “There were state laws in both Byzantium and Russia that envisaged the death penalty for heretics (not for all, but for separate groups), and which the Church called on the emperor to observe. Everyone – this has always been the teaching of the Orthodox Church – must pass his life in accordance with his station: the monk and the hermit must love everybody, the hierarch is obliged to speak out against heresy, and the emperor is obliged, in accordance with the laws, to execute heretics. If they will not do this, the monk will destroy his silence, the hierarch his flock and the emperor the state given to him by God. And all will give an answer for this at the Terrible Judgement.

     “The laws concerning heretics in Russia and Byzantium were as follows. In Byzantium the state laws envisage the death penalty for apostates and Manichaeans, that is how they related to a series of public and more dangerous crimes (it was not the beliefs themselves that were punished, but the spreading of them), but other heresies were sometimes subsumed under these two large categories. Russia fully accepted the Byzantine laws (changing several of them in form), and already from the Ustav of St. Vladimir until the Ulozhenie of Tsar Alexis Mikhailovich, native laws envisaged such penalties as death for ‘blasphemy’ (burning, ch. 1, article 2 of the Ulozhenie), ‘for seducing from the Orthodox Faith into Islam [Judaism]’ (burning, ch. 22, article 24), ‘wizardry’ (burning), sacrilege (death penalty), etc.” (“Iosif Volotsky”, http://webforum.land.ru/mes.php?id=4176471&fs=0&ord=0&board=287&1st=&arhv= (09/08/02).

[116] Kologrivov, op. cit., p. 177.

[117] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 146.

[118] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 158.

[119] Quoted in G.P. Fedotov, The Russian Religious Mind, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, volume II, 1966, pp. 168, 255.

[120] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 152.

[121] “Our Father among the Saints Maxim the Greek”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XIII, no. 1, January-February, 1991, p. 11.

[122] Francis Carr, Ivan the Terrible, London: David & Charles, 1981, pp. 61-62.

[123] Lurye,Sergianstvo: parasinagoga, pereshedshaia v raskol”, http://web.referent.ru/nvc/forum/0/co/BC415C9E/179

[124] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 230, 270.

[125] M. Macarius, Istoria Russkoj Tserkv, ,Moscow, 1996, vol. 4, part 2, pp. 91, 93 (in Russian).

[126] Ya.S. Lurye, op. cit., pp. 230-231.

[127] Hosking, Russia: People and Empire, 1552-1917, London: Harper Collins, 1997, pp. 48-49.

[128] Ya.S. Lurye, op. cit., p. 232.

[129] Pokrovsky, quoted in Solonevich, Narodnaia Monarkhia, Minsk, 1998, p. 331 (in Russian).

[130] Thus Solonevich points out that according to Ivan’s Sudebnik of 1550, “the administration did not have the right to arrest a man without presenting him to the representatives of the local self-government…, otherwise the latter on the demand of the relatives could free the arrested man and exact from the representative of the administration a corresponding fine ‘for dishonour’. But guarantees of security for person and possessions were not restricted to the habeas corpus act. Klyuchevsky writes about ‘the old right of the ruled to complain to the highest authority against the lawless acts of the subject rulers’” (op. cit., p. 340).

[131] Ivan IV, Sochineniya, St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2000, p. 49 (in Russian).

[132] Ivan IV, Sochinenia, op. cit., p. 40.

[133] Ivan IV, Sochineniya, op. cit., p. 37.

[134] Peter Budzilovich, “O vozmozhnosti vosstanovlenia monarkhii v Rossii”, Russkoe Vozrozhdenie, 1986, ¹ 34, http://www.russia.talk.com/monarchy.htm.

[135] In this way the victims of Ivan’s rule prefigure the Christian victims of Lenin and Stalin, while the oprichnina looks forward to Stalin’s Russia, the NKVD-KGB, dekulakisation and the great terror of the 1930s. There has been no shortage of historians who have seen in Stalin’s terror simply the application of Ivan the Terrible’s methods on a grander scale. This theory is supported by the fact that Stalin called Ivan “my teacher”, and commissioned Eisenstein’s film, Ivan the Terrible, instructing him to emphasise the moral that cruelty is sometimes necessary to protect the State from its internal enemies.

 

[136] Carr, op. cit., pp. 199-200.

[137] St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, v, 24, 3; translated in Maurice Wiles & Mark Santer, Documents in Early Christian Thought, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. 226.

[138] St. Isidore, Letter 6, quoted in Selected Letters of Archbishop Theophan of Poltava, Liberty, TN: St. John of Kronstadt Press, 1989, p. 36.

[139] Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “ O Petre Velikom”, Epokha, N 10, 2000, no. 1, p. 38 (in Russian).

[140] Kurbsky, letter to Monk Vassian of the Pskov Caves monastery; translated in van den Bercken, op. cit., pp. 157-158.

[141] “Svyatoj Filipp Mitropolit”, Nadezhda, 14, in Troitsky Paterik, Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra, 1896; reprinted in Nadezhda, 14, Frankfurt: Possev-Verlag, 1988, p. 66 (in Russian).

[142] Van den Bercken, op. cit., p. 153.

[143] Zhitia Svyatykh, Òàtaev, 2000, vol. 2, pp. 695, 696 (in Russian).

[144] Sochineniya, op. cit., p. 37.

[145] Cherniavsky, “Khan or basileus: an aspect of Russian medieval political theory”, Journal of the History of Ideas, 10, No. 4, October-December, 1950, p. 476; quoted in Hosking, op. cit., p. 7.

[146] Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2000, p. 265.

[147] Thus Hilaire Belloc writes of “that cancer point of Holland, whereby the huge organism [of Spain] was slowly poisoned and at last broke down” (Richelieu, London: Ernest Benn, 1930, p. 69).

[148] Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 534, 536, 538.

[149] Mark Almond, Revolution, London: De Agostini Editions, 1996, p. 44.

[150] Davies, op. cit., pp. 538-539.

[151] Davies, op. cit., pp. 538, 539.

[152] J.S. McClelland, A History of Western Political Thought, Routledge: London and New York, 1996, p. 287.

[153] Belloc, How the Reformation Happened, pp. 126, 127.

[154] Landes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 174-176, 177-178.

[155] Buruma, “China and Liberty”, Prospect, May, 2000, p. 37.

[156] Doran, “Elizabeth I’s Religion: The Evidence of Her Letters”, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, vol. 51, no. 4.

[157] Lyall, “India. (1) The Mogul Empire”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, pp. 514-515.

[158] Lewis, "Myth became Fact", God in the Dock: Essays on Theology, Fount Paperbacks, 1979, p. 64.

[159] A better word here would be “providential”. It is God, not chance, that places monarchs on their thrones (Wisdom 6.3).

[160] Scruton, England: An Elegy, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, p. 188.

[161] Chadwick, op. cit., p. 222.

[162] Quoted in Barzun, op. cit., p. 33. The Arminians were Calvinists who ascribed a greater role to free will than was acceptable to the Calvinist orthodoxy.

[163] Quoted in Harold Nicolson, Monarchy, London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1962, p. 201.

[164] Nicolson, op. cit., p. 200.

[165] Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York: Fontana, 1968, pp. 37, 40.

[166] J.M. Roberts, The Triumph of the West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 149.

[167] Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 43-44.

[168] Tocqueville, op. cit., p. 45.

[169] Quoted in Jay, The Church, London: SPCK, 1977, p. 214.

[170] Lopukhin, A.P. Zakonodatel'stvo Moiseya. Saint Petersburg, 1888, p. 233; quoted in Alexeyev, N.N. "Khristianstvo i Idea Monarkhia", Put', no. 6, January, 1927, p. 557 (in Russian).

[171] Berdyaev, N. "Tsarstvo Bozhiye i Tsarstvo Kesarya", Put', September, N 1, September, 1925, p. 44 (in Russian).

[172] Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 47-49, 51.

[173] Quoted in Barzun, op. cit., p. 278.

[174] Coleridge, Table Talk, 9 November, 1833.

[175] Guizot, op. cit., p. 217.

[176] Quoted by Barzun, op. cit., p. 270.

[177] Thus in France in 1614 the bourgeois order in the Estates General made the Divine Right of Kings Article I of their petition. Barzun, op. cit., p. 248.

[178] As A.L. Smith puts it: “The theory [of the Divine Right of Kings] was due to many converging influences. First: at the Reformation, the civil power became rival claimant with the Pope to represent God upon earth; and it had to counter the papal axioms of sovereignty of the people, right o resistance, accountability of Kings, by propositions the direct contrary. Secondly: in England, Wars of the Roses, risings of the Commons, French and Spanish threats, papal interferences, had led to a Tudor monarchy which Bodin could quote as a type of absolutism” (“English Political Philosophy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VI: The Eighteenth Century, 1909, pp. 802-803).

[179] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 250-251.

[180] Quoted by Ashton, The English Civil War, p. 7.

[181] Barzun, op. cit., p. 249.

[182] Ashton, op. cit., pp. 7, 8.

[183] J.R. Western, Monarchy and Revolution, London: Blandford Press, 1972, p. 8.

[184] McClelland, op. cit., p. 232. Rousseau also pointed out, in The Social Contract, that since every man is equally a descendant of Adam, it was not clear which descendants of Adam were to exercise lordship over others.

[185] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 9-10.

[186] Nicolson, op. cit., p. 194.

[187] Cf. Gerald R. Cragg, The Church and the Age of Reason, 1648-1789, Penguin books, 1970, p. 79.

[188] As is always the case with religious radicals. Pope Gregory VII was a religious radical for his time, and his revolution led to a secularisation of the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformers were religious radicals, leading to a further secularisation. (V.M.)

[189] Taylor Downing and Maggie Millman, Civil War, London: Parkgate books, 1991, pp. 109, 112-116.

[190] Downing and Millman, op. cit., pp. 119-121, 125.

[191] Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, London: Faber & Faber, 1997, p. 172.

[192] Quoted in John Dover Wilson, The Essential Shakespeare, Cambridge University Press, 1967, p. 92.

[193] Downing and Millman, op. cit., pp. 134-135.

[194] Kelsey, “The Trial of Charles I: A New Perspective”, History Today, vol. 49 (1), January, 1999, p. 37.

[195] Quoted in Almond, op. cit., p. 51.

[196] As Guizot wrote, Cromwell  “was successively a Danton and a Buonaparte” (op. cit., p. 221).

[197] This has been a characteristic of the English throughout their history. Thus Jeremy Paxman writes: “England has had her share of class revolts, from Wat Tyler’s peasants’ revolt in the fourteenth century to the Chartists in the nineteenth. But they were very civilized affairs by comparison with the bloodletting which accompanied similar events on the European continent” (The English, op. cit., p. 136)

[198] Metropolitan Anastasius, “The Dark Visage of Revolution”, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVII, no. 5, September-October, 1996, p. 10.

[199] Sir Edmund Leach, “Melchisedech and the Emperor: Icons of Subversion and Orthodoxy”, Proceedings of the Royal Anthropological Society, 1972, p. 6.

[200] Quoted in Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, op. cit., p. 167.

[201] Quoted in Hill, Milton and the English Revolution, op. cit., pp. 100, 101, 169.

[202] Quoted in Hill, op. cit., p. 169.

[203] Brown, Love’s Body, New York, 1966, p. 114; quoted in Hill, op. cit., p. 171.

[204] Quoted in Hill, op. cit., pp. 173-174.

[205] Hill, op. cit., p. 181.

[206] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen & Unwin, 1946, p. 520.

[207] Russell, op. cit., p. 529.

[208] Russell, op. cit., p. 529.

[209] Hobbes, Leviathan; quoted in Davies, op. cit., p. 521.

[210] Scruton, Modern Philosophy, London: Arrow Books, 1997, p. 415.

[211] McClelland, op. cit., p. 199.

[212] McClelland, op. cit., p. 207.

[213] Russell, op. cit., p. 575.

[214] McClelland, op. cit., p. 203.

[215] Russell, op. cit., p. 579.

[216] McClelland, op. cit., p. 201.

[217] Shaftesbury, quoted in Roy Porter, Enlightenment, London: Penguin Books, p. 160.

[218] Smith, op. cit., pp. 786-787.

[219] Smith, op. cit., p. 789.

[220] Smith, op. cit., p. 791.

[221] Russell, op. cit., p. 643.

[222] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government.

[223] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 2, section 6.

[224] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 13, section 149.

[225] Quoted in Russell, op. cit., p. 651.

[226] McClelland, op. cit., p. 234.

[227] McClelland, op. cit., p. 236.

[228] McClelland, op. cit., p. 237.

[229] Locke, Two Treatises on Government; quoted by David Held, Models of Democracy, Oxford: Polity Press, 1987, p. 51.

[230] Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws; quoted by Held, op. cit., p. 57.

[231] Smith, op. cit., p. 809.

[232] Weston, op. cit., p. 24.

[233] Locke, An Essay concerning the true, original, extent, and end of Civil Government (1690).

[234] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, chapter 13, section 149.

[235] Russell, op. cit., pp. 662-663.

[236] Locke, Second Treatise of Civil Government, treatise 2, chapter 14, section 168.

[237] Weston, op. cit., p. 25.

[238] Smith, op. cit., p. 813.

[239] Scruton, op. cit., p. 416.

[240] Andrezev Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 39.

[241] Scruton, op. cit., p. 417.

[242] Tikhomirov, “Demokratiya liberal’naia i sotsial’naia”, in Kritika Demokratia, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 122 (in Russian).

[243] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, Moscow, 1877, vol. 3, pp. 448, 449; reprinted in Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, 49, N 9 (573), September, 1997, pp. 3-4 (in Russian).

[244] Ben Rogers, “Portrait: John Rawls”, Prospect, June, 1999, p. 51.

[245] Rogers, op. cit., p. 51.

[246] McClelland, op. cit., pp. 281-282, 283, 284.

[247] Belloc, Richelieu, op. cit., pp. 83-84.

[248] Belloc, Richelieu, op. cit., p. 304.

[249] Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 62.

[250] Roger Price, A Concise History of France, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 59.

[251] Davies, op. cit., pp. 620, 621.

[252] Quoted in Robert Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix Press, 2001, p. 193.

[253] Quoted in William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, p. 38.

[254] François Guizot, The History of Civilization in Europe, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1847, 1997, pp. 140-141.

[255] On Mariana, see above, chapter I, “Catholic Rationalism”.

[256] Willert, “Philosophy and the Revolution”, in The Cambridge Modern History, vol. VIII: The French Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1934, pp. 3-5.

[257] Norman Davies, op. cit., p. 568.

[258] Quoted in Robin Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, London: Penguin Books, 1988, p. 637.

[259] Quoted by Fr. Antonious Henein, <orthodox-tradition@egroups.com> , 8 August, 2000.

[260] Patapios, “On Caution regarding Anathematization”, Orthodox Tradition, vol. XVII, no. 1, January, 2000, p. 22.

[261] More, Utopia, book II, pp. 119-120.

[262] Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., p. 241.

[263] Edwards, in Porter, op. cit., p. 105.

[264] Winstanley, quoted in Downing and Millman, op. cit., p. 136.

[265] Milton, Areopagitica, in C.A Patrides (ed.), John Milton: Selected Prose, London: Penguin, p. 216.

[266] Barzun, op. cit., p. 276.

[267] Porter, op. cit., p. 50.

[268] Hobbes, Leviathan; in Christopher Hill, “Thomas Hobbes and the Revolution in Political Thought”, Puritanism and Revolution, London: Penguin books, 1958, p. 277.

[269] Hobbes, Leviathan; in Hill, Puritanism and Revolution, op. cit., p. 283.

[270] According to the principles of this father of liberalism, therefore, communist parties should be banned, as well as the expression of communist opinions, first, because communists are atheists, and therefore cannot be trusted to keep their oaths, and secondly because they work towards the destruction of all non-communist governments. (V.M.)

[271] Porter, op. cit., pp. 106-197.

[272] Bettenson & Maunder, op. cit., p. 342.

[273] This put an end to pre-publication censorship. From now on, as Porter remarks, “though laws against blasphemy, obscenity and seditious libel remained on the statute book, and offensive publications could still be presented before the courts, the situation was light years away from that obtaining in France, Spain or almost anywhere else in ancien régime Europe.” (Enlightenment, London: Penguins books, 2000, p. 31).

[274] Porter, op. cit., p. 108.

[275] Porter, op. cit., pp. 21-22.

[276] Israel Shahak writes that many Israeli-Palestinian negotiations have failed because “displaying the flag of a ‘non-Jewish state’ within the Land of Israel contradicts the sacred principle which states that all this land ‘belongs’ to the Jews” (“Jewish History, Jewish Religion, Political Consequences”,  http://www.ptimes.com/current/articles.html).

[277] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 144-145, 147.

[278] Johnson, op. cit., p. 174.

[279] Hence the English word “slave”, and the French “esclave”.

[280] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 148-149.

[281] Cohn-Sherbok, op. cit., p. 115.

[282] York, Letters, History Today, vol. 50 (12), December, 2000, p. 61.

[283] David Vital writes: “When Cromwell resolved to rescind King Edward I’s edict of expulsion of 1290 in the interests of allowing London’s very small colony of crypto-Jews to surface and permit other Jews, mostly from Holland, to join them, he did so primarily because he had his eye on the advantages Spanish and Portuguese Jews, with their worldwide connections might bring to English commerce, the information on foreign affairs with which they could supply him, and the political services they could perform for him on the continent. What is of greatest interest, because, unwittingly, it set a pattern of sorts, was that Cromwell had begun by considering a more open and comprehensive policy that the one that his administration was eventually to implement. When it became apparent, however, that by formally revoking the thirteenth-century edict of expulsion a noisy and troublesome opposition would be aroused, the plan was abandoned. The resettlement of Jews in England was allowed to take place, but on a de facto basis and Edward I’s edict left to pass into history…

     “By the early years of the eighteenth century, political interest in the Jews of the kind that had initially drawn the Cromwellian government to favour them had largely faded. But English conventional wisdom was firm in holding them to be of worldwide commercial significance…

     “By the end of the eighteenth century the Jews of England had little to complain of…” (op. cit., pp. 38, 39).

     “Indeed, in 1732 a judgement gave Jews, in effect, legal protection against generic libels which might endanger life. Hence… England became the first place in which it was possible for a modern Jewish community to emerge” (Johnson, op. cit., p. 278).

[284] Thus “by 1694 the Austrian state debt to Oppenheimer alone amounted to no less than 3 million florins. At his death, by his Emmanuel’s estimate, it had reached double that figure.” (Vital, op. cit., p. 14).

[285] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 154-155. Thus in the 18th century the Jewish banker Jean Lo (Levi) founded a huge “Mississipi company” in Paris, which gave him monopoly rights to trade with China, India, the islands of the southern seas, Canada and all the colonies of France in America, and which “guaranteed” dividends of 120% a year to investors. However, the paper he issued was founded on nothing, the company collapsed, “millions of Frenchmen were ruined and for many years the finances of the country were hopelessly disordered. At the same time many representatives of the Jewish community of Paris amassed huge fortunes on this misery” (Platonov, op. cit., p. 153).

[286] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 256-258.

[287] Johnson, op. cit., p. 281.

[288] Arendt, “On Totalitarianism”, in Mikhail Nazarov, “Triumf mirovoj kulisy”, Tajna Rossii, Moscow: “Russkaya ideya”, 1999, p. 394 (in Russian).

[289] Quoted in Philip Mansel, Constantinople, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 124.

[290] Mansel, op. cit., p. 126.

[291] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 245-246, 247, 283, 285, 286.

[292] The transition from the early to the later empiricism is marked by David Hume’s Dialogues concerning Natural Religion (1747), in which he writes: “While we argue from the course of nature and infer a particular intelligent cause which first bestowed and still preserves order in the universe, we embrace a principle which is still uncertain and useless. It is uncertain because the subject lies entirely beyond the reach of human experience. It is useless because… we can never on that basis establish any principles of conduct and behaviour” .

[293] Donne, The First Anniversarie (1611), quoted in Porter, op. cit., p. 130.

[294] Trostnikov, “The Role and Place of the Baptism of Rus in the European Spiritual Process of the Second Millenium of Christian History”, Orthodox Life, volume 39, no. 3, May-June, 1989, p. 29.

[295] Landes, op. cit., p. 179.

[296] The proof that the earth is not circular but flat according to the Scriptures is to be found in Isaiah 40.22, which reads: “It is He Who sits above the circle of the earth”. So the Pope need not have worried. On this controversy, see Peter De Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, pp. 221-231.

[297] Michael White, Isaac Newton: The Last Sorcerer, London: Fourth Estate, 1998, p. 106.

[298] Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Book I, 1, 3.

[299] Roberts, The Triumph of the West, London: Phoenix Press, 1985, p. 160.

[300] Roy Porter, The Enlightenment, London: Macmillan, 1990, p. 17.

[301] White, op. cit., p. 140.

[302] White, op. cit., p. 121.

[303] White, op. cit., p. 122.

[304] White, op. cit., p. 128.

[305] White, op. cit., p. 129.

[306] White, op. cit., p. 155.

[307] White, op. cit., pp. 157, 158.

[308] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1959, p. 512.

[309] Polanyi, “The Two Cultures", Encounter, 1959, 13, p. 61.

[310] See A.V. Kartashev, Ocherki po Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi, Paris: YMCA Press, 1959, pp. 10-46, Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi, 1988, pp. 152-156, and the life of St. Job, first patriarch of Moscow, in Moskovskij Paterik, Moscow: Stolitsa, 1991, pp. 110-113 (in Russian).

[311] This anathema was confirmed by two further Pan-Orthodox Councils in 1587 and 1593, and by several conciliar statements in later centuries.

[312] P. Ioseliani, A Short History of the Georgian Church, Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1983, pp. 146-148.

[313] Thus in 1615 6000 monks inhabiting twelve monasteries in the wilderness of David-Garejeli were martyred by Shah Abbas I. Again, several of the Georgian monarchs suffered martyrdom in the struggle at the hands of the Persian Muslims. See, for example, the life of Great-Martyr Queen Ketevan, Living Orthodoxy, vol. XVI, no. 5, September-October, 1994, pp. 3-12

[314] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 156. This thought was echoed by the patriarch of Alexandria, who wrote to the “most Orthodox” tsar in 1592: “The four patriarchates of the Orthodox speak of your rule as that of another, new Constantine the Great… and say that if there were no help from your rule, then Orthodoxy would be in extreme danger.” (Quoted in van den Bercken, op. cit., p. 160).

[315] Appendix to Protopresbyter Michael Pomazansky, Orthodox Dogmatic Theology, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1984, p. 379.

[316] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 250-252, 258-260.

[317] Smirnov, Istoria Khristianskoj Pravoslavnoj Tserkvi, Ìîscow, 2000, pp. 203-204 (in Russian).

[318] Sir Steven Runciman, The Great Church in Captivity, Cambridge, 1968.

[319] See New Martyrs of the Turkish Yoke, Seattle: St. Nectarios Press, 1985.

[320] Runciman, op. cit. On the unia, see Boyeikov, op. cit.. ch. 4; A.V. Kartashev, op. cit., vol. II, pp. 267-310.

[321] See Timothy Ware, Eustratios Argenti: A Study of the Greek Church under Turkish Rule, Oxford, 1964.

[322] See Boyeikov, op. cit.; Kartashev, op. cit.; Russkaya Pravoslavnaya Tserkov', op cit., pp. 45-48.

[323] See Constantine Cavarnos, St. Cosmas Aitolos, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1985.

[324] Smirnov, op. cit., 205-207, 208.

[325] Graham, Boris Godunof, London: Ernest Benn, 1933, p. 116.

[326] Quoted in Carr, op. cit., p. 130.

[327] Quoted in Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), Russkaia Ideologia, St. Petersburg: Suvorina, 1992, p. 64 (in Russian).

[328] Archbishop Seraphim (Sobolev), op. cit., p. 65.

[329] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie Zakona o Prestolonasledii v Rossii; in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?”, Svecha Pokayania. N 4, February, 2000, p. 12 (in Russian).

[330] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 81, 82.

[331] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 255.

[332] St. John Maximovich, op. cit.; in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?”, Svecha Pokayaniya. N 4, February, 2000, p. 13 (in Russian).

[333] Lebedev, Moskva Patriarshaia, Moscow: “Veche”, 1995, p. 14 (in Russian).

[334] The Life of St. Irinarchus, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., pp. 16-17.

[335] Hosking, op. cit., pp. 60-61.

[336] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 15.

[337] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 63, 64.

[338] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 18-19.

[339] In this respect the thinking of St. Basil the Great on the State – anti-democratic but also not in favour of the hereditary principle – was typically Byzantine: "Even the king of the birds is not elected by the majority because the temerity of the people often nominates for leader the worst one; nor does it receive its power by lot, because the unwise chance of the lot frequently hands over power to the last; nor in accordance with hereditary succession, because those living in luxury and flattery are also less competent and untaught in any virtue; but according to nature one holds the first place over all, both in its size and appearance and meek disposition." (Hexaemeron 8).

[340] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 82-83. As St. John Maximovich writes: “It was almost impossible to elect some person as tsar for his qualities; everyone evaluated the candidates from his own point of view” (op. cit., in “Nasledstvennost’ ili Vybory?”, Svecha Pokayania, N 4, February, 2000, p. 13).

[341] St. John, op. cit., pp. 43-45.

[342] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochineniya, 1848, vol. 2, p. 134; Pravoslavnya Zhizn’, op. cit., p. 6.

[343] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 84, 85.

[344] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochineniya, 1861, vol. 3, p. 226; Pravoslavnya Zhizn’, 49, N 9 (573), September, 1997, p. 8.

[345] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 85-86.

[346] Solonevich, op. cit., p. 86.

[347] Solonevich, op. cit., p. 87.

[348] Brianchaninov, “On the Judgements of God”.

[349] Brianchaninov, Pis’ma, Moscow, 2000, p. 781 (in Russian).

[350] Solonevich, op. cit., pp. 87-88, 89-90, 91-92.

[351] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, 1861, vol. 3, pp. 322-323; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, op. cit., p. 9.

[352] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia, 1877, vol. 3, p. 442; Pravoslavnaia Zhizn’, op. cit., p.  5.

[353] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 20.

[354] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 20.

[355] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’, op. cit., pp. 270-271, 272.

[356] Archbishop Andronicus, O Tserkvi Rossii, Fryazino, 1997, pp. 132-133 (in Russian).

[357] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 259.

[358] Quoted in Sergius Fomin, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem, Sergiev Posad: Holy Trinity – St. Sergius monastery, first edition, 1993, p. 20 (in Russian).

[359] Lurye, “O Vozmozhnosti Kontsa Sveta v Odnoj Otdel’no Vzyatoj Strane”, pp. 1-2 (MS) (in Russian).

[360] But not to Russian practice since the Stoglav council of 1551, which had legislated in favour of the two-fingered sign.

[361] And of the Orthodox West.  Thus Hieromonk Aidan of St. Hilarion’s Monastery, Texas (quoted in “Sign of the Cross is first millenium Europe”, ORTHODOX@LISTSERV.INDIANA.EDU (Orthodox Christianity), 11/10/1999) writes:  “We know that in England the change from right shoulder first and probably also to indiscriminate use of the fingers was underway sometime in the 14th century, though there were holdouts… Pope Innocent III (d. 1216) has a commentary on the sign of the cross making clear that the three fingers were used and that it was, in his day, right to left still.  There is an interesting sermon of Abbot Aelfric of Abingdon which he gave around the year 1000 in which he states, "Though a man wave wonderfully with his hand, yet it is not the sign of the Cross: With three fingers thou shalt sign thyself."  (Sermon for Sept. 14).”

[362] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 36-37.

[363] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 40-41.

[364] A passage from the life of St. Seraphim of Sarov is instructive in this respect: “Another time an Old Ritualist asked him: ‘Tell me, old man of God, which faith is the best – the present faith of the Church or the old one?’

     “’Stop your nonsense,’ replied Father Seraphim sharply, contrary to his wont. ‘Our life is a sea, the Holy Orthodox Church is our ship, and the Helmsman is the Saviour Himself. If with such a Helmsman, on account of their sinful weakness people cross the sea of life with difficulty and are not all saved from drowning, where do you expect to get with your little dinghy? And how can you hope to be saved without the Helmsman?’

     “Once they brought him a woman whose limbs were so distorted that her knees bent up to her breast. She had previously been Orthodox, but having married an Old Ritualist, she stopped going to Church. St. Seraphim cured her in front of all the people by anointing her breast and hands with oil from his Icon-lamp, and then ordered her and her relations to pray in the Orthodox way.

     “’Did some of your now-deceased relatives pray with the two-finger Sign of the Cross?’

     “’To my grief, everyone prayed like that in our family.’

     “Father Seraphim reflected a little, and then remarked: ‘Even though they were virtuous people, they will be bound; the Holy Orthodox Church does not accept this Sign of the Cross…’” (Archimandrite Lazarus Moore, St. Seraphim of Sarov, Blanco, Texas: New Sarov Press, 1994, p. 235).

[365] Meyendorff, Russia, Ritual & Reform, Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1991, p. 33.

[366] Firsov, Russkaia Tserkov’ nakanune peremen (konets 1890-kh – 1918 gg.), Moscow, 2002, p. 252 ®.

[367] Bishop Gregory, Pis’ma, Moscow, 1998, p. 24 (in Russian).

[368] See Michael Cherniavsky, "The Old Believers and the New Religion", Slavic Review, vol. 25, 1966, pp. 27-33.

[369] Robert Massie, Peter the Great, London: Phoenix, 2001, p. 63.

[370] Avvakum, translated in van den Bercken, op. cit., p. 165.

[371] Lurye, “O Vozmozhnosti”, op. cit., p. 14.

[372] Cf. the comments of Epiphany Slavinetsky, one of the main correctors of the books: “Blind ignoramuses, hardly able to read one syllable at a time, having no understandng of grammar, not to mention rhetoric, philosophy, or theology, people who have not even tasted of study, dare to interpret divine writings, or, rather, to distort them, and slander and judge men well-versed in Slavonic and Greek languages. The ignoramuses cannot see that we did not correct the dogmas of faith, but only some expressions which had been altered through the carelessness and errors of uneducated scribes, or through the ignorance of correctors at the Printing Office”. And he compared the Old Believers to Korah and Abiram, who had rebelled against Moses (Meyendorff, op. cit., p. 113).

[373] Zenkovsky, in Hosking, op. cit., p. 72.

[374] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit., volume I, pp. 280, 283.

[375] Florovsky, Ways of Russian Theology, Belmont, Mass.: Nordland, part I, 1979, pp. 98, 99.

[376] Quoted by Fr. Sergei Hackel, “Questions of Church and State in ‘Holy Russia’: some attitudes of the Romanov period”, Eastern Churches Review, vol. II, no. 1, Spring, 1970, p. 8

[377] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 87.

[378] Quoted in Hackel, op. cit., p. 8.

[379] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 88-89.

[380] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit., volume I, p. 281.

[381] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 101.

[382] “If any Bishop who has suffered violence has been cast out unjustly, either on account of his science or on account of his confession of the Catholic Church, or on account of his insisting upon the truth, and fleeing from peril, when is innocent and jeoparded, should come to another city, let him not be prevented from living there, until he can return or find relief from the insolent treatment he had received. For it is cruel and most burdensome for one who has had to suffer an unjust expulsion not to be accorded a welcome by us. For such a person ought to be shown great kindness and courtesy.”

[383] Fomin & Fomin, op. cit., volume I, p. 23; Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 105.

[384] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 104.

[385] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 141. Italics mine (V.M.).

[386] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 106-107.

[387] Hackel, op. cit., p. 9.

[388] Fomin, op. cit., volume I, pp. 24-25.

[389] Vladimir Rusak, Istoria Rossijskoj Tserkvi, USA, 1993, p. 191(in Russian).

[390] Ironically, they also transgressed those articles of the Ulozheniye, chapter X, which envisaged various punishments for offending the clergy (Priest Alexis Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo, Izdaniye Sretenskogo monastyrya, 1997, p. 71 (in Russian)).

[391] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 132.

[392] Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, pp. 274, 275.

[393] Quoted by Vyacheslav (now Ali) Polosin, in “Pochemy ya, pravoslavnij svyashchennik, prinyal islam”, http://www/lebed.com/art1181.htm.

[394] The tsar asked forgiveness of the patriarch just before his death. The patriarch replied to the messenger: “Imitating my teacher Christ, who commanded us to remit the sins of our neighbours, I say: may God forgive the deceased, but a written forgiveness I will not give, because during his life he did not free us from imprisonment” (quoted in Rusak, op. cit., p. 193).

[395] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 9.

[396] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 15.

[397] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 16.

[398] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 41.

[399] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 91.

[400] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 86.

[401] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 17.

[402] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 30, 32.

[403] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 41. As Zyzykin says in another place, Nicon “not only does not call for human sanctions against the abuses of tsarist power, but definitely says that there is no human power [that can act] against them, but there is the wrath of God, as in the words of Samuel to Saul: ‘It is not I that turn away from thee, in that thou has rejected the Word of the Lord, but the Lord has rejected thee, that thou shouldest not be king over Israel’ (I Kings 15.26)” (op. cit., part II, p. 17).

[404] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 55.

[405] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 55, 56, 57.

[406] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 19-20.

[407] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 59.

[408] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 62.

[409] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 63-64.

[410] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, pp. 24-25, 28.

[411] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 27.

[412] Zyzykin, op. cit., part II, p. 48.

[413] Quoted in Hackel, op. cit., p. 9.

[414] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 165.

[415] Rusak, op. cit., p. 194.

[416] Zyzykin, op. cit., part I, p. 26.

[417] Rusak, op. cit., pp. 193-194.

[418] Nikolin, op. cit., p. 73.

[419] Quoted by Hackel, op. cit., p. 10.

[420] Zyzykin, op. cit., part III, pp. 218-220.

[421] Lebedev, “Razmyshleniya vozlye styen novogo Ierusalima”, Vozvrashchenie, NN 12-13, 1999, p. 60 (in Russian).

[422] Archbishop Nathaniel (Lvov), “O Petre Velikom”, Epokha, N 10, 2000, no. 1, pp. 39-41 (in Russian).