CHRISTIAN POWER IN THE AGE OF REVOLUTION

From the First French Revolution to the Paris Commune, 1789-1871

 

 

Vladimir Moss

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

© Vladimir Moss, 2004
CONTENTS

 

Introduction..…………………………………………….……………...…..4

 

 

Part I. Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1789-1830)

 

1. The West: The Man-God Arises..…..…….……..…………...…………7

The French Revolution: (1) The Constitutional Monarchy – Burke versus Paine – The American Constitution and Slavery - Illuminism – The French Revolution: (2) The Jacobin Terror – The Revolution and Religion – The French Revolution: (3) Napoleon Bonaparte – Napoleon and Catholicism - La Grande Nation - The Jews and the Revolution - Napoleon and the Jews – Napoleon and the Latin American Revolutions – Romanticism and Nationalism - German Nationalism – The German War of Liberation - The Ideology of Counter-Revolution

 

2. The East: The Man-God Defeated..……….....……………..……….126

Tsar Paul I – The Annexation of Georgia and the Edinoverie – The Murder of Tsar Paul - The Golden Age of Masonry – Alexander, Napoleon and Speransky - 1812 – The Aftermath of Victory – The Holy Alliance - The Polish Question - The Jewish Question - The Reaction against Masonry - The Serbian Revolution – The Greek Revolution – The Kollyvades Movement - The Decembrist Rebellion – St. Seraphim of Sarov

 

 

Part II. Liberalism and Autocracy (1830-1871)

 

3. The West: The Dual Revolution….………….………………………216

Art and Revolution: (1) Byronism – Art and Revolution: (2) The July Days – The Polish Question – Liberalism and Free Trade – The Irish Famine – The British Empire - De Tocqueville on America – Mill on Liberty – Victorian Religion - The Collectivist Reaction: (1) English Self-Help – The Collectivist Reaction: (2) French Socialism – The Collectivist Reaction: (3) German Historicism – Hegel’s Political Philosophy - Marx’s Historical Materialism - 1848 and the Spectre of Communism - The World as Will: Schopenhauer – Nature and Society as Will: Darwin - The American Civil War - Emperor Napoleon III - Il Risorgimento and the Pope – The Paris Commune

 

4. The East: The Gendarme of Europe………………..………………..339

Introduction: Instinct and Consciousness – Tsar Nicholas I – Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov: The Struggle against Westernism - Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow: Church and State – Russia and Europe: (1) Chaadaev vs. Pushkin – Russia and Europe: (2) Belinsky vs. Gogol – Russia and Europe: (3) Herzen vs. Khomiakov – Russia and Europe: (4) Kireevsky - Russia and Europe: (5) Dostoyevsky - The Slavophiles on Autocracy: (1) Kireevsky – The Slavophiles on Autocracy – The Crimean War – St. Petersburg: the Third Rome? - Relations with Heretics and Schismatics – The Caucasian Wars – Orthodox America - Nihilism: “Fathers and Sons” – The Great Reforms: (1) The Emancipation of the Serfs – The Great Reforms: (2) The Zemstvo Assemblies – The Great Reforms: (3) Crime and Punishment – The Autocracy, the Church and the Revolution

 


INTRODUCTION

 

     This book represents a continuation of my earlier books, The Mystery of Christian Power (to 1453) and Christian Power in the Age of Reason (1453-1789). It follows the same theme of the struggle between Christian political power and its enemies into the age of revolution – that is, the age beginning with the storming of the Bastille in 1789 and ending with the storming of the Paris Commune in 1871. Of course, the revolution neither began nor ended in this period. But it may be called the revolutionary age par excellence insofar as it presented all the main ideas of the revolution in their classical French expression, and provided the classic themes and symbolism of the later, and still greater Russian revolution. Moreover, it is the age in which the counter-revolution - in the person, in particular, of Orthodox and Autocratic Russia - appeared to have the measure of its enemies, although a major theme of the book will be the way in which revolutionary ideas were sapping the foundations of Russian Autocracy, too.

 

     The book is divided into two parts, with each part further subdivided into chapters on East and West on the model of my earlier books. In the first part, we see the first French revolution, its continuation and internationalisation under Napoleon I, and its defeat and seeming reversal under the absolutist rule of King Charles X. The second part continues the story of the French revolutions (of 1830, 1848 and 1871), and their offshoots in other European countries, while outlining the development of political and economic liberalism in England and America. In the East, meanwhile, we see Russia, “the Gendarme of Europe”, both administering the decisive blow to Napoleon I, and, in its suppression of the Polish and Hungarian uprisings, ensuring that the revolution will not spread to Eastern Europe. However, Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War at the hands of England, France and Turkey marks the end of the Congressional System and the first international attempt to contain the revolution, boding badly for truly Christian statehood – indeed, for legitimate statehood in general - in the coming age.

 

     As in my earlier books, I have tried to look beyond the political and economic events to the spiritual events that are the real causes of history. For, as Fr. Seraphim Rose said: “The real cause is the soul and God: whatever God is doing and whatever the soul is doing. These two things actualise the whole of history; and all the external events – what treaty was signed, or the economic reasons for the discontent of the masses, and so forth – are totally secondary. In fact, if you look at modern history, at the whole revolutionary movement, it is obvious that it is not the economics that is the governing factor, but various ideas which get into people’s souls about actually building paradise on earth. Once that idea gets there, then fantastic things are done, because this is a spiritual thing. Even though it is from the devil, it is on a spiritual level, that is where actual history is made…”[1]

 

     In pursuit of this, the spiritual meaning of history I owe an especial debt to Fr. Seraphim Rose, Adam Zamoyski, Lev Alexandrovich Tikhomirov, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and the Russian Slavophile philosophers.

 

     Through the prayers of our Holy Fathers, Lord Jesus Christ, our God, have mercy on us!

 

December 18/31, 2004.

Holy Martyr Sebastian of Rome.


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PART I. REVOLUTION AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION (1789-1830)


1. THE WEST: THE MAN-GOD ARISES

 

Lo, thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;

Light dies before thy uncreating word:

Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;

And Universal Darkness buries All.

Alexander Pope, Dunciad.

 

The human I, wishing to depend only on itself, not recognising and not accepting any other law besides its own will – in a word, the human I, taking the place of God, - does not, of course, constitute something new among men. But such has it become when raised to the status of a political and social right, and when it strives, by virtue of this right, to rule society. This is the new phenomenon which acquired the name of the French revolution in 1789.

F.I. Tiutchev, Russia and the Revolution (1848).

 

The nation, this collective organism, is just as inclined to deify itself as the individual man. The madness of pride grows in this case in the same progression, as every passion becomes inflamed in society, being refracted in thousands and millions of souls.

Metropolitan Anastasius (Gribanovsky) of New York.[2]

 

     After the Humanist-Protestant revolution of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the English revolution of the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment Programme of the eighteenth century, the French revolution of 1789 marks the fourth major turning-point in Western life and thought. In some countries – England, for example, and still more America - some of the less radical ideas of the French revolution were already being put into effect, at least partially, well before 1789; while in others – Russia and China, for example – they did not achieve dominance until the twentieth century. Eventually, however, the French revolutionary ideals of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity” and “the Rights of Man”, combined with an essentially secularist and utilitarian attitude to religion, became the dominant ideology, not only of Europe and North America, but of the whole world. For, as Eric Hobsbawn writes, “alone of all the contemporary revolutions, the French was ecumenical. Its armies set out to revolutionize the world; its ideas actually did so.”[3]

 

     The period 1789-1815 can be compared, for its profound impact on the destinies of the world, only with the period 1914-45. Both periods are dominated by a national revolution with enormous international ramifications – the French in the earlier period, the Russian in the later – and by international war on a previously unprecedented scale. In both periods the main victors were an Anglo-Saxon nation (Britain in the earlier period, America in the later), on the one hand, and Russia (Tsarist Russia in the earlier period, Soviet Russia in the later), on the other. At the end of each period Russia became the dominant political power on the continent of Europe, while the Anglo-Saxon nation became the dominant power outside Europe, going on to dominate the world economically through its exploitation of important scientific and technological discoveries.

 

The French Revolution: (1) The Constitutional Monarchy

 

     The French revolution, like its English forerunner, went through several phases, each of which on its own was profoundly influential outside the borders of France. The first was the constitutional monarchy (1789-92). The second was the Jacobin terror (1792-94). The third (after the interregnum of the Directory) was the Napoleonic dictatorship and empire (1799-1815). Just as the English revolution had its proto-communist elements, which, however, failed in the end, so did the French (Babeuf’s failed coup of 1796). Just as the upshot of the English revolution was to transfer power from the king to the landowning aristocracy, so the upshot of the French revolution was to transfer power from the king and the aristocrats to the bourgeoisie – a trend which came to dominate the whole of Western Europe in the course of the nineteenth century.

 

     From a sociological point of view, France in 1789 had not changed in essence since the eleventh century; it was an agrarian, hierarchical society consisting of “the three Estates”: those who prayed (the clergy), those who fought (the nobility) and those who worked (the rest, mainly peasants, but including lawyers and intellectuals). The ideas of the Enlightenment and Masonry had infected a narrow stratum of the more educated classes. But the mass of the population lived and thought as they had lived and thought for centuries.

 

     It is customary to explain the French revolution as the product of corrupt political, social and economic conditions, and in particular of the vast gap in wealth and power between the ancien régime and the people. Discontent with social and economic injustices undoubtedly played a large part in fuelling this horrific atheist and anti-theist outburst. But it was not the king who was primarily to blame for these injustices. In the years 1745-89 he and his ministers made numerous attempts at economic reform and a more equitable redistribution of the tax burden. But they were always foiled by opposition at court and in the Parlements from the aristocrats, who paid no tax. Thus when five of his minister Turgot’s Six Edicts were rejected by the Paris Parlement in 1776, Louis XVI observed: “I see well that there is no-one here but M. Turgot and myself who love the people.”[4] This prompted de Tocqueville’s words: “The social order destroyed by a revolution is almost always better than that which preceded it; and experience shows that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is generally that in which it sets about reform. Only great genius can save a ruler who takes on the task of improving the lot of his subjects after long oppression…”[5]

 

     The aristocrats claimed that their opposition was an expression of Montesquieu’s doctrine of the necessity of checks on executive power. In fact, however, they were trying to replace a royal “despotism” with their own aristocratic one. For, as Hobsbawm writes, “the Revolution began as an aristocratic attempt to recapture the state.”[6] And here, as so often in history, the “despotism” of one man standing above the political fray turned out to be less harmful to the majority of the population than the despotism of an oligarchical clique pursuing only one class or factional interest. Indeed, the problem with the French monarchy was not its excessive strength, but its weakness, its inability to impose its will on the privileged class.

 

     However, there was much more to the Revolution than a conflict between king and nobility, letting in the Third Estate that destroyed them both. The essential conflict was between two ideas of the origin of authority: between the idea that it comes from above – ultimately, from God, and the idea that it comes from below – ultimately from what the Masons called “Nature”. King Louis XVI stated the Christian principle: “I have taken the firm and sincere decision to remain loftily, publicly and generously faithful to Him Who holds in His hand kings and kingdoms. I can only be great through Him, because in Him alone is greatness, glory, majesty and power; and because I am destined one day to be his living image on earth.”[7] This firm, but humble statement of the doctrine, not so much of the Divine right of kings, as of their Divine dependence on the King of kings, was opposed by the satanic pride of the revolutionary faith. “The Revolution is neither an act nor a fact,” said De Mounier. “It is a political doctrine which claims to found society on the will of man instead of founding it on the will of God, which puts the sovereignty of human reason in the place of the Divine law.[8]

 

     This anti-theistic character of the French Revolution was confirmed by the great Anglo-Irish parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, wrote: “We cannot, if we would, delude ourselves about the true state of this dreadful contest. It is a religious war. It includes in its object undoubtedly every other interest of society as well as this; but this is the principal and leading feature. It is through this destruction of religion that our enemies propose the accomplishment of all their other views. The French Revolution, impious at once and fanatical, had no other plan for domestick power and foreign empire. Look at all the proceedings of the National Assembly from the first day of declaring itself such in the year 1789, to this very hour, and you will find full half of their business to be directly on this subject. In fact it is the spirit of the whole. The religious system, called the Constitutional Church, was on the face of the whole proceeding set up only as a mere temporary amusement to the people, and so constantly stated in all their conversations, till the time should come, when they might with safety cast off the very appearance of all religion whatsoever, and persecute Christianity throughout Europe with fire and sword… This religious war is not a controversy between sect and sect as formerly, but a war against all sects and all religions…”[9]

 

     So the real question that the Revolution sought to answer was not political or economic, but theological or ideological, not: who pays the taxes?, but: who rules the universe?

 

     It is striking how similar was the sequence of events in the French Revolution to that in its English predecessor. Just as the English revolution started with the king’s compelling need to seek money for his war against the Scots, so the French revolution started with a severe financial crisis caused by the king’s intervention in the American War of Independence. And just as the English parliament’s refusal to accede to the king’s request led successively to civil war, the overthrowing of the State Church, the execution of the king, a radicalisation of the country to a state of near-communist revolution, foreign wars (in Scotland and Ireland), and finally a military dictatorship under Cromwell that restored order while preserving many of the fruits of the revolution, so the refusal, first of the Nobles’ Assembly and then of the Estates General to accede to the French king’s request led to a constitutional monarchy, the overthrowing of the State Church, the execution of the king, increased radicalisation and the Great Terror, wars with both internal and external enemies, and finally a military dictatorship under Napoleon that restored order while consolidating many of the results of the revolution.

 

     But the French Revolution went much further than the English in the number of its victims, in the profundity of its effects, not only on France but also on almost every country in Europe, and in its unprecedented radicalism, even anti-theism. It really began on June 17, 1789, when the Third Estate gathered a so-called National Assembly, of which they declared: “To it, and it alone, belongs the right to interpret and express the general will of the nation. Between the throne and this Assembly there can exist no veto, no power of negation.”[10] This, writes Davies, “was the decisive break. Three days later, locked out of their usual hall, the deputies met on the adjacent tennis court, le jeu de paume, and swore an oath never to disband until France was given a Constitution. ‘Tell your master,’ thundered Count Mirabeau to the troops sent to disperse them, ‘that we are here by the will of the people, and will not disperse before the threat of bayonets.’

 

     “Pandemonium ensued. At court, the King’s conciliatory ministers fell out with their more aggressive colleagues. On 11 July [the chief minister] Jacques Necker, who had received a rousing welcome at the opening of the Estates General, was dismissed. Paris exploded. A revolutionary headquarters coalesced round the Duc d’Orléans at the Palais Royal. The gardens of the Palais Royal became a notorious playground of free speech and free love. Sex shows sprang up alongside every sort of political harangue. ‘The exile of Necker,’ screamed the fiery orator Camille Desmoulins fearing reprisals, ‘is the signal for another St. Bartholomew of patriots.’ The royal garrison was won over. On the 13th a Committee of Public Safety[11] was created, and 48,000 men were enrolled in a National Guard under General Lafayette. Bands of insurgents tore down the hated barrières or internal customs posts in the city, and ransacked the monastery of Saint-Lazare in the search for arms. On the 14th, after 30,000 muskets were removed from the Hôtel des Invalides, the royal fortress of the Bastille was besieged. There was a brief exchange of gunfire, after which the governor capitulated. The King had lost his capital.”[12]

 

     Power appeared to have passed from the king to the National Assembly and the Third Estate; but already at this early stage of the revolution (as in February, 1917 in Russia), real power was neither with the king nor with any of the Estates, but with the mob – or rather, with those who incited and controlled the mob. Thus on July 20 Arthur Young wrote: “I hear nothing of their [the Assembly’s] moving from Versailles; if they stay there under the control of an armed mob, they must make a government that will please the mob; but they will, I suppose, be wise enough to move to some central town, Tours, Blois or Orléans, where their deliberations may be free. But the Parisian spirit of commotion spreads quickly…”

 

     So quickly, in fact, that a year later Antoine, Comte de Rivarol could write: “Three million armed peasants, from one end of the kingdom to the other, stop travellers, check their papers, and bring the victims back to Paris; the town hall cannot protect them from the fury of the patriotic hangman; the National Assembly in raising Paris might well have been able to topple the throne, but it cannot save a single citizen. The time will come… when the National Assembly will say to the citizen army: ‘You have saved me from authority, but who will save me from you?’ When authority has been overthrown, its power passes inevitably to the lowest classes of society… Such is today the state of France and its capital.”[13]

 

     The success of the Revolution was assured by the weakness of the King; for when “he who restrains” stops restraining, “then everything is permitted”. Doyle writes: “News of the king’s surrender to popular resistance broke all restraints. His acquiescence in the defeat of the privileged orders was taken as a signal for all his subjects to take their own measures against public enemies. The prolonged political crisis has spawned countless wild rumours of plots to thwart the patriotic cause by starving the people. Monastic and noble granaries, reputedly bulging with the proceeds of the previous season’s rents, dues, and tithes, seemed obvious evidence of their owners’ wicked intentions. Equally suspicious were urban merchants scouring country markets far beyond their usual circuits to provide bread for hungry townsmen. Besides, the roads were thronged with unprecedented numbers of men seeking work as a result of the slump. Farmers had good reason to dread the depredations of bands of travelling vagrants, and now took little persuading that the kingdom was alive with brigands in aristocratic pay. It was just a year since the notorious storms of July 1788, and as a promising harvest began to ripen country people were particularly nervous. All this produced the ‘Great Fear’, a massive panic that swept whole provinces in the last weeks of July and left only the most peripheral regions untouched. Peasants assembled, armed themselves, and prepared to fight off the ruthless hirelings of aristocracy. Seen from a distance, such armed bands were often taken for brigands themselves, and so the panic spread.

 

     “In many areas villagers did not wait for the marauders to arrive. Then it would be too late. They were determined to make sure of aristocratic defeat by striking pre-emptively. After all, they would only anticipating what the Assembly was bound to decree. As one country priest explained, ‘When the inhabitants heard that everything was going to be different they began to refuse to pay both tithes and dues, considering themselves so permitted, they said, by the new law to come.’”[14]

 

     On August 4, under pressure of the peasant revolt, the National or Constituent Assembly declared that it “abolishes the feudal system in its entirety”. It also proclaimed “King Louis XVI Restorer of French Liberty”…

 

     In his pamphlet What is the Third Estate? published in that year, Abbé Sieyès asked: What is the Third Estate? Everything. What has it been in the political order up to the present? Nothing. What does it demand? To become something…” Now the Third Estate was something.  Rarely, if ever, in political history has a single act had such a huge and immediate effect (the abdication of the Tsar in February, 1917 is perhaps the only parallel).

 

     On August 26, the Assembly passed the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, which listed the following “natural, inalienable and sacred rights”:

 

     “’I. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can only be founded on public utility.

     II. The purpose of every political association is the preservation of the natural and unprescriptible rights of men. These rights are liberty, property, and safety from, and resistance to, oppression.

     III. The principle of all sovereignty lies in the nation. No body of men, and no individual, can exercise authority which does not emanate directly therefrom.

     IV. Liberty consists in the ability to do anything which does not harm others.

     V. The Law can only forbid actions which are injurious to society…

     VI. The Law is the expression of the General Will… It should be the same for all, whether to protect or to punish.

     VII. No man can be accused, arrested, or detained except in those instances which are determined by law.

     VIII. The Law should only establish punishments which are strictly necessary. No person should be punished by retrospective legislation.

     IX. No man [is] presumed innocent till found guilty…

     X. No person should be troubled for his opinions, even religious ones, so long as their manifestation does not threaten public order.

     XI. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of men’s most precious rights. Every citizen, therefore, can write, speak, and publish freely, saving only the need to account for abuses defined by law.

     XII. A public force is required to guarantee the [above] rights. It is instituted for the benefit of all, not for the use of those to whom it is entrusted.

     XIII. Public taxation is indispensable for the upkeep of the forces and the administration. It should be divided among all citizens without distinction, according to their abilities.

     XIV. Citizens… have the right to approve the purposes, levels, and extent of taxation.

     XV. Society has the right to hold every public servant to account.

     XVI. Any society in which rights are not guaranteed nor powers separated does not have a constitution.

     XVII. Property being a sacred and inviolable right, no person can be deprived of it, except by public necessity, legal process, and just compensation.’

 

     “Social convention held that the ‘Rights of Man’ automatically subsumed the rights of women. But several bold souls, including Condorcet, disagreed, arguing that women had simply been neglected.[15] In due course the original Declaration was joined by new ideas, notably about human rights in the social and economic sphere. Article XXI of the revised Declaration of June 1793 stated: ’Public assistance is a sacred obligation [dette]. Society owes subsistence to unfortunate citizens, whether in finding work for them, or in assuring the means of survival of those incapable of working.’ Slavery was outlawed in 1794. Religious toleration was guaranteed.”[16]

 

     In October a great crowd of hungry women brought the king from Versailles to Paris. Thereafter the forging of a new Constitution that would include limited powers for the king went ahead relatively peacefully. However, the king.could not make up his mind whether to accept or reject the Revolution[17]; and this vacillation, combined with his arrest at Varennes on June 21, 1791 while attempting to flee the country, gradually undermined what remained of his authority.[18] For, as Hobsbawn points out, “traditional kings who abandon their peoples lose the right to royalty".[19] In a similar situation in 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was given the opportunity to flee by the Provisional Government, but chose not to…

 

     Moreover, while the Assembly passed a large number of laws, it completely failed to solve the problems which had propelled it to power – the financial insolvency of the country. It simply printed money which rapidly deteriorated in value, fuelling inflation, and in 1791 collected only 249 livres in taxes against 822.7 livres expended.[20]

 

     In spite of these problems, the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, witnessed an extraordinary celebration of the revolution in which even the king took part.

 

     Zamoyski writes: “It was to be a kind of Rousseauist troth-pledging, at which the nation would come together and symbolically constitute itself as a body, simultaneously paying homage to itself as such – the first of many acts of political onanism. Bailly [the mayor of Paris] suggested that the solemnity should take the form of a ‘National Federation’, with delegations from every corner of France meeting in Paris while those from surrounding villages congregated in every provincial town. Lafayette steered the whole exercise into the military sphere, substituting companies of National Guards from every part of the country for civilian delegates.

 

     “The capital was to be decked out in a fitting manner to greet those making their long pilgrimage. Half the population of Paris spent three days in the pouring rain putting up triumphant arches and decorations. The Champ-de-Mars was transformed into a vast elliptical arena surrounded by grass banks on which seats were erected for spectators. At the end nearest the École Militaire there was a stand draped in the tricolor for the members of the Assembly and important guests. At the opposite end, nearest the River Seine, was the entrance, through a triple triumphal arch in the Roman style. Between the two stood a podium with a throne for the king and seats for the royal family, and, towering above everything else, a great square plinth with steps on all four sides, on which stood an altar.

 

     “The morning of 14 July was wetter than ever, and the feet of the 300,000 Parisians soon turned the Champ-de-Mars into a quagmire. This did not make the event any easier to manage, but good humour triumphed. As they waited in the rain, people made jokes about being baptized in the national rain, and groups from different parts of the country showed off regional dances to each other.

 

     “The king and queen arrived at noon, but it took a long time for them to be settled into their stand. Then came a march-past by 50,000 National Guards. It was not until four in the afternoon that the Bishop of Autun, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, attended by four hundred priests wearing the tricolor, began to celebrate mass. The altar at which he officiated was not a traditional liturgical mensa, but a circular neoclassical affair redolent of burnt offerings in ancient Rome. It was not the altar of God, on which sacrifice was offered up to the Almighty, it was the autel de la patrie, on which citizens pledged their devotion to the motherland.

 

     “Lafayette was much in evidence all day on his white charger, and when the mass was over, he took centre stage. As if by a miracle, the weather cleared and the sun came out, bathing the whole scene in a soft luminous aura. While trumpets blared, Lafayetter ascended the steps of the altar. As he began to swear loyalty to the king, the nation and the law, he drew his sword with a flourish and laid it on the altar. Fifty thousand National Guardsmen then repeated the same oath, followed by the king. Next came the singing of the Te Deum specially composed by François Gossec, during which people of all stations embraced tearfully in a hundred thousand acts of national fraternity. Lafayetter was carried by the crowd to his white horse, on which he majestically left the field, with people kissing his hands and his clothers…

 

     “The Fête de la Fédération represented a reconciliation of all the people living in France, and their betrothal as one nation. It mimicked Rousseau’s vision of the Corsicans coming together to found their nation through a common pledge. The festival was also a recognition that the Marquis de Lafayette and the humblest peasant in France were brothers, both as members of a biological family and through the ideological kinship represented by the oath. At the same time, the celebration exposed a new reality. It showed how far the concept of nationhood had altered from the Enlightenment vision of a congeries living in consensus to something far more metaphysical and inherently divine…”[21]

 

Burke versus Paine

 

     The ideas of the French revolution posed a great threat to the British, who prided themselves on being the home of liberty, but who saw that French revolutionary “liberty” would speedily destroy their own. Already the Americans had shown that libertarianism and empire made an uncomfortable fit; and the fit would look still worse in India and Ireland as the French ideas filtered through. Moreover, the first effects of the industrial revolution on the industrial poor, and of the “dark, satanic mills” on England’s “green and pleasant land”, threatened to arouse revolutionary passions among the poor.

 

     “’Two causes, and only two, will rouse a peasantry to rebellion,’ opined Robert Southey, a radical turned Tory: ‘intolerable oppression, or religious zeal’. But that moderately comforting scenario no longer applied: ‘A manufacturing poor is more easily instigated to revolt: they have no local attachments… they know enough of what is passing in the political world to think themselves politicians’. England’s rulers must pay heed: ‘If the manufacturing system continues to be extended, I believe that revolution inevitably must come, and in its most fearful shape’.”[22]

 

     Already in the years 1778-83 a debate had begun on whether the ideas of the founding philosopher of English liberalism, John Locke, had been right after all. In 1783 the Baptist Noel Turner wondered whether the “present national propensity” was the deployment of Locke on behalf of the “many-headed majesty” of “king-people”. And in the same year Josiah Tucker publish his “On the Evil Consequences Arising from the Propagation of Locke’s Democratic Principles”. Tucker’s disciple Soame Jenyns declared that he had refuted the Lockean philosophy of the Whigs, writing:

 

I controvert these five positions

Which Whigs pretend are the conditions

Of civil rule and liberty;

That men are equal born – and free –

That kings derive their lawful sway

All from the people’s yea and nay –

That compact is the only ground,

On which a prince his rights can found –

Lastly, I scout that idle notion,

That government is put in motion,

And stopt again, like clock or chime,

Just as we want them to keep time.[23]

     This debate became more urgent as the atrocities of the French revolution became known. Could the ideas of the urbane and civilised Locke really have led to such barbarism? William Jones thought so. Writing in 1798, he said that “with Mr. Locke in his hand”, that “mischievous infidel Voltaire” had set about destroying Christianity. And Locke was “the oracle of those who began and conducted the American Revolution, which led to the French Revolution; which will lead (unless God in his mercy interfere) to the total overthrow of religion and government in this kingdom, perhaps in the whole Christian world.”[24]

 

     However, the most famous ideological attack on the French revolution came from Edmund Burke, who had adopted a liberal position on America and Ireland[25], and who now tried to defend English liberalism while attacking French radicalism. His Reflexions on the Revolution in France (1790) foresaw saw that the French revolution would bring in its train, not freedom, but tyranny - and precisely because of its populist character. For “the tyranny of a multitude,” he wrote, “is a multiplied tyranny”.[26] Burke agreed with the Catholic monarchist Joseph de Maistre in calling the revolution “satanic”. And, as we have seen, he called the war that broke out between revolutionary France and Britain in 1793 “a religious war”. For truly, the war between the revolution and its opponents was a religious war, a war between two opposed ideas of who rules human society: God or the people.

 

     Burke laid great emphasis on the importance of tradition and the organic forms of social life, which was important at a time when the rage was all for the destruction of everything that was old and venerable. In this respect (although not in others) he went against one of the main presuppositions of the English social contract theorists, following rather in the line of thought of the German Counter-Enlightenment thinkers Hamann and Herder.

 

     As Berlin writes: “Burke’s famous onslaughts on the principles of the French revolutionaries was founded upon the selfsame appeal to the myriad strands that bind human beings into a historically hallowed whole, contrasted with the utilitarian model of society as a trading-company held together by contractual obligations, the world of ‘sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators’ who are blind and deaf to the unanalysable relationships that make a family, a tribe, a nation, a movement, any association of human beings held together by something more than a quest for mutual advantage, or by force, or by anything that is not mutual love, loyalty, common history, emotion and outlook.”[27]

 

     Society exists over several generations, so why, asked Burke, should only one generation’s interests be respected in drawing up the social contract? For, as Roger Scruton writes, interpreting his thought, “the social contract prejudices the interests of those who are not alive to take part in it: the dead and the unborn. Yet they too have a claim, maybe an indefinite claim, on the resources and institutions over which the living so selfishly contend. To imagine society as a contract among its living members, is to offer no rights to those who go before and after. But when we neglect those absent souls, we neglect everything that endows law with its authority, and which guarantees our own survival. We should therefore see the social order as a partnership, in which the dead and the unborn are included with the living.”[28]

 

     “Every people,” writes L.A. Tikhomirov, “is, first of all, a certain historical whole, a long row of consecutive generations, living over hundreds or thousands of years in a common life handed down by inheritance. In this form a people, a nation, is a certain socially organic phenomenon with more or less clearly expressed laws of inner development… But political intriguers and the democratic tendency does not look at a people in this form, as a historical, socially organic phenomenon, but simply in the form of a sum of the individual inhabitants of the country. This is the second point of view, which looks on a nation as a simple association of people united into a state because they wanted that, living according to laws which they like, and arbitrarily changing the laws of their life together when it occurs to them.”[29]

 

     Burke rejected the idea that the French Revolution was simply the English Revolution writ large. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 was not a revolution in the new, French sense, because it left English traditions, including English traditions of liberty, intact: it “was made to preserve our ancient indisputable laws and liberties, and that ancient constitution of government which is our only security for law and liberty… We wished at the period of the Revolution, and do now wish, to derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers… All the reformations we have hitherto made, have proceeded upon the principle of reference to antiquity.”[30] In fact, far from making the people the sovereign power, the English parliament in 1688 had sworn “in the name of the people” to “most humbly and faithfully submit themselves, their heirs and posterities” to the Monarchs William and Mary “for ever”. The French Revolution, by contrast, rejected all tradition. “You had,” he told the French, “the elements of a constitution very nearly as good as could be wished…; but you chose to act as if you have never been moulded into civil society, and had everything to begin anew. You began ill, because you began by despising everything that belonged to you.” “Your constitution, it is true,… suffered waste and dilapidation; but you possessed in some parts the walls and, in all, the foundations of a noble and venerable castle. You might have repaired those walls; you might have built on those old foundations. Your constitution was suspended before it was perfected.” “Rage and phrenzy will pull down more in half an hour, that prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in an hundred years.”[31] There was in fact nothing new about the French Revolution. It was just another disaster “brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal”. The “rights of man” were just a “pretext” invented by the “wickedness” of human nature.[32]

 

     “It was Burke’s Reflections,” writes G.P. Gooch, “which overthrew the supremacy of Locke [for the time being], and formed the starting-point of a number of schools of thought, agreeing in the rejection of the individualistic rationalism which had dominated the eighteenth century. The work is not only the greatest exposition of the philosophic basis of conservatism ever written, but a declaration of the principles of evolution, continuity, and solidarity, which must hold their place in all sound political thinking. Against the omnipotence of the individual, he sets the collective reason; against the claims of the present, he sets the accumulated experience of the past; for natural rights he offers social rights; for liberty he substitutes law. Society is a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are yet to be born.”[33]

 

     Burke, writes Doyle, attributed the fall of the old order “to a conspiracy. On the one hand were the ‘moneyed interest’, resentful at their lack of esteem and greedy for new profits; on the other, and even more important, were the so-called philosophers of the Enlightenment, a ‘literary cabal’ committed to the destruction of Christianity by any and every available means. The idea of a philosophic conspiracy was not new. It went back to the only one ever conclusively proved to have existed, the plot of the self-styled Illuminati to undermine the Church-dominated government of Bavaria. The Bavarian government published a sensational collection of documents to illustrate its gravity, and Burke had read it. Although he was not the first to attribute events in France to conspiracy of the sort thwarted in Bavaria, the way he included the idea in the most comprehensive denunciation of the Revolution yet to appear lent it unprecedented authority. Nor was the destruction of Christianity and the triumph of atheism the only catastrophe he predicted. Disgusted by the way the ‘Republic of Paris’ and its ‘swinish multitude’ held the government captive, the provinces would eventually cut loose and France would fall apart. The assignats would drive out sound coinage and hasten, rather than avert, bankruptcy. The only possible end to France’s self-induced anarchy would come when ‘some popular general, who understand the art of conciliating the soldiery, and who possesses the true spirit of command, shall draw the eyes of all men upon himself. Armies will obey him on his personal account… the moment in which that event will happen, the person who really commands the army is your master.’”[34]

 

     Burke’s Reflections were answered by Tom Paine’s Rights of Man, which sold still more copies – an astonishing 250,000 in two years. This debate between two Englishmen, which was eagerly followed all over Europe, turned out to be the first of the major debates between “right” and “left” that have dominated European intellectual life since 1789, taking the place of the old Catholic-Protestant polemics. Burke proved to be more accurate than Paine in its forecasts about the future of the revolution (he predicted both the killing of the king and the military dictatorship); but it was to be Paine’s ideas that proved to be the more popular and influential. [35]

 

     Paine admitted that Louis XVI had “natural moderation”; but the revolution, he argued, was not against people, but against principles – in particular, the principle of despotism. In any case, he wrote, “[Burke] is not affected by the showy resemblance of it striking his imagination. He pities the plumage, but forgets the dying bird… His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy victim, expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon.”[36] However, Paine himself was soon to become “a real prisoner of misery” in a Jacobin dungeon, just one of the hundreds of thousands of people – including the “naturally moderate” King and vast numbers of the poorer classes – far more than the ancien régime had caused in centuries.

 

     As for the principle of despotism, Paine saw it everywhere: “When despotism has established itself for ages in a country, as in France, it is not in the person of the King only that it resides. It has the appearance of being so in show, and in nominal authority; but it is not so in practice, and in fact. It has its standard everywhere. Every office and department has its despotism, founded upon custom and usage. Every place has its Bastille, and every Bastille its despot. The original hereditary despotism resident in the person of the King, divides and subdivides itself into a thousand shapes and forms, till at last the whole of it is acted by deputation. This was the case in France; and against this species of despotism, proceeding on through an endless labyrinth of office till the source of it is scarcely perceptible, there is no mode of redress. It strengthens itself by assuming the appearance of duty, and tyrannizes under the pretence of obeying.

 

     “When a man reflects on the condition which France was in from the nature of her government, he will see other causes for revolt than those which immediately connect themselves with the person or character of Louis XVI. There were, if I may so express it, a thousand despotisms to be reformed in France, which had grown up under the hereditary despotism of the monarchy, and became so rooted as to be in a great measure independent of it. Between the monarchy, the parliament, and the church, there was a rivalship of despotism, besides the feudal despotism operating locally, and the ministerial despotism operating everywhere.”[37]

 

     So even parliament was despotic! Paine gives himself away here: his real target is not despotism, but hierarchy, every relationship in society which involves the submission of one person to another. He rejected the role of tradition in politics as radically as Luther and Calvin had rejected it in theology.

 

     “Every age and generation,” he wrote, “must be as free to act for itself, in all cases, as the ages and generations which preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave, is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies. Man has no property in man; neither has any generation property in the generations which are to follow. The parliament or the people of 1688, or of any other period, has no more right to dispose of the people of the present day, or to bind or to control those who are to live a hundred or a thousand years hence. Every generation is, and must be, competent to all the purposes which its occasions require. It is the living, and not the dead, that are to be accomodated. When man ceases to be, his power and his wants cease with him; and having no longer any participation in the concerns of this world, he has no longer any authority in directing who shall be its governors, or how its government shall be organized, or how administered…. I am contending for the rights of the living, and against their being willed away by the manuscript assumed authority of the dead…

 

     “The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is, that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other:

 

     “…If the mere name of antiquity is to govern the affairs of life, the people who are to live an hundred or a thousand years hence, may as well take us for a precedent, as we make a precedent of those who lived an hundred or a thousand years ago. The fact is, that portions of antiquity, by proving everything, establish nothing. It is authority against authority all the way, till we come to the divine origin of the rights of man at the creation. Here our inquiries find a resting-place, and our reason finds a home. If a dispute about the rights of man had arisen at the distance of an hundred years from the creation, it is to this same source of authority they must have referred, and it is to the same source of authority that we must now refer.

 

     “Though I mean not to touch upon any sectarian principle of religion, yet it may be worth observing, that the genealogy of Christ is traced to Adam. Why then not trace the rights of man to the creation of man? I will answer the question. Because there have been upstart governments, thrusting themselves between, and presumptuously working to un-make man.

 

     “If any generation of men ever possessed the right of dictating the mode by which the world should be governed for ever, it was the first generation that existed; and if that generation did it not, no succeeding generation can show any authority for doing it, nor can set any up. The illuminating and divine principle of the equal rights of man, (for it has its origin from the Maker of man) relates, not only to the living individuals, but to generations of men succeeding each other. Every generation is equal in rights to the generations which preceded it, by the same rule that every individual is born equal in rights with his contemporary.”[38]

 

     Paine had a point. Arguments based on merely human tradition are relative; one precedent from antiquity is cancelled out by another. Human tradition needs to be supported by Divine Tradition – that is, the Tradition handed down from God to His Chosen People and passed on by them from generation to generation in the Church.

 

     Burke had this problem not only in relation to Paine, but also in relation to other contemporary English radicals. If he claimed that British liberties “were an entailed inheritance peculiar to the inhabitants of the island” and going back to William the Conqueror, “his radical opponents, who were rather less keen on entails, claimed that their rights were derived from the alleged practices of free-born Englishmen before the days of the ‘Norman yoke’.”[39] And the precedent his opponents pointed to was both older and more noble; for, as Paine pointed out, if any ruler was a despot and usurper, - that is, a destroyer of tradition - it was William the Conqueror. And he was right: it had been William who, in 1066, cut off England from the One, True Church in the East and destroyed her traditions, both human and Divine.

 

     Again, since Burke accepted the legitimacy of both the English and American revolutions (while preferring to rest on their least revolutionary moments), he could not attack the French revolution from a position of basic principle (for its principles were not fundamentally different from those of its Anglo-Saxon predecessors), but only because it carried those principles “too far”. But if the principle itself is accepted, who is to say when the application of the principle has gone “too far”? In any case, both Burke and his English radical opponents (but not Paine) agreed that the rights they were talking about “did not rest on principle and had no relevance to foreigners”[40] - and so had no relevance to the French revolution, either.

 

     And yet Burke was not defending just the English way of doing things, which was relevant only to Englishmen (in other of his works he defended the rights of the Irish and the Indians to keep their own traditions within the British Empire). The French revolution attacked the very foundation of society – religion.

 

     So in defending the Christian religion Burke was defending a universal principle: “We know, and what is better, we feel inwardly[41], that religion is the basis of civil society, and the source of all good and of all comfort. In England we are so convinced of this, that there is no rust of superstition… that ninety-nine in a hundred of the people of England would not prefer to impiety… We know, and it is our pride to know, that man is by his constitution a religious animal; that atheism is against, not only our reason, but our instincts; and that it cannot prevail long. But if… we should uncover our nakedness, by throwing off that Christian religion which has hitherto been our boast and comfort, and one great source of civilisation amongst us, and among many other nations, we are apprehensive (being well aware that the mind will not endure a void) that some uncouth, pernicious, and degrading superstition might take the place of it.”[42]

 

     The very radicalism of Paine’s rejection of tradition and hierarchy undermined the validity of his argument. First, no society can exist without tradition or hierarchy – least of all revolutionary ones, which immediately act to fill the void they have created. Secondly, if sovereignty resides in the Nation, as Paine affirms, the question arises: what is the Nation if it has to be constantly re-inventing itself, holding nothing from the past as sacred and starting again from a tabula rasa with every new generation? A Nation defines itself precisely by its continuity over time and over many generations; there must be some loyalty to, and preservation of, the past if the Nation is to recognise itself as the same Nation throughout its transformations.

 

     But Paine, true revolutionary that he was, was as sweeping in his rejection of temporal tradition as he was of spatial hierarchy. Not surprisingly, therefore, he had little time for religion, the main guarantor of both the spatial and the temporal dimensions of society. “My country is the world,” he wrote, “and my religion is to do good”.[43] There was no one, true dogmatic religion for Paine, only conflicting human opinions which he made no attempt to evaluate: “With respect to what are called denominations of religion, if everyone is left to judge of his own religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is wrong; but if they are to judge of each other’s religion, there is no such thing as a religion that is right; and therefore, all the world is right, or all the world is wrong…”[44] “Every religion is good that teaches man to be good”. “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.”[45]

 

     Paine was not anti-religious as such; but in his attitude to religion there was more than a hint of contempt: “All religions are in their nature kind and benign [!], and united with principles of morality. They could not have made proselytes at first, by professing anything that was vicious, cruel, persecuting, or immoral. Like everything else, they had their beginning; and they proceeded by persuasion, exhortation, and example. How then is it that they lose their native mildness, and become morose and intolerant?

 

     “It proceeds from the connexion which Mr. Burke recommends. By engendering the church with the state, a sort of mule-animal, capable only of destroying, and not of breeding up, is produced, called The Church established by Law. It is a stranger, even from its birth, to any parent mother on which it is begotten, and whom in time it kicks out and destroys.”[46]

 

     On this principle, Paine should have been very happy in America, where he spent his last years, insofar as the American Constitution made a complete separation between Church and State. But where there is no persecution from the State, there can still be criticism from individuals – indeed, that is their right according to Paine’s own principles. And the Americans criticised him for his Deist views, so that Paine spent his last years in loneliness and misery.

 

     For all his Rousseauist iconoclasm, Paine’s revolutionary zeal was profoundly non-Rousseauist, Anglo-Saxon and individualist. Society exists, according to him, for the sake of the individual and his needs, especially his need to be free from various ills. There is no place in his system for a general will that is superior to the individual and which forces him to be free to be himself. “Civil power, properly considered as such, is made up of the aggregate of that class of the natural rights of man, which becomes defective in the individual in point of power, and answers not to his purpose; but when collected to a focus, becomes competent to the purpose of every one.”[47] In other words, the State has no special rights over an individual unless he interferes with the rights of other individuals; it simply exists to service the individual(s), to help him to do things he would not be able to do on his own.

 

     Paine was more influential than Burke, and even the stolid and traditionalist British found themselves moving along the path that he indicated. Thus, as Hampson points out, “it was the British who moved towards the attitudes proclaimed by the French Revolution… After 1832 it was conceded that, irrespective of precedent and tradition, whole categories of Englishmen had a right to vote.”[48] Moreover, Paine’s vision of a welfare state outlined in part two of The Rights of Man was to inspire generations of British and American radicals.

 

     And yet, it was Burke, not Paine, who was right on the Revolution…

 

The American Constitution and Slavery

 

     The success of the American revolution had provided an inspiration for the French revolution in its first phase; and the French revolution in its turn influenced the further development of the American. The debate between Burke and Paine had its analogues in the controversies among the Founding Fathers. Some, such as Alexander Hamilton and George Washington, still looked towards the more conservative and authoritarian British model of democracy, in spite of the experience of the War of Independence; while others, such as Thomas Jefferson, drew inspiration from the French revolution even in its later, Jacobin phase in his almost anarchical drive to “rekindle the old spirit of 1776”.

 

     Thus Hamilton said to the Constitutional Convention in 1787: “I believe the British government forms the best model the world ever produced… All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and well born, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second… Nothing but a permanent body can check the impudence of democracy.”[49]

 

     Jefferson, on the other hand, believed that a rebellion every 20 years or so was necessary to stop the arteries of freedom from becoming sclerotic. As he wrote to William Stephens Smith in 1787: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is its natural manure.”[50] And to James Madison he wrote in the same year: “I hold it, a little rebellion now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical… It is a medicine for the sound health of government.”[51]

 

     These different understandings of democracy were reflected in different views on the two most important issues of the day: the relative powers of the central government and the states, and slavery.

 

     With regard to the first issue, the champions of a strong central government, the federalists, believed that a strong central government was necessary in order to preserve the gains of the revolution, to guarantee taxation income, and preserve law and order. As George Washington put it: “Let then the reins of government be braced and held with a steady hand, and every violation of the Constitution be reprehended. If defective, let it be amended, but not suffered to be trampled on whilst it has an existence.”[52]

 

     Not surprisingly, many of the antifederalists thought that Washington himself was substituting his own style of monarchy for the British king. As Joseph J. Ellis writes, they were haunted by “the ideological fear, so effective as a weapon against the taxes imposed by Parliament and decrees of George III, that once arbitrary power was acknowledged to reside elsewhere [than in the states], all liberty was lost. And at a primal level it suggested the unconscious fear of being completely consumed, eaten alive.”[53]

 

     With regard to slavery, there can be no question that the main thrust of the ideology of the American revolution was against it. The Declaration of Independence in 1776 declared that it was “not possible that one man should have property in person of another”. “Removing slavery, however, was not like removing British officials or revising constitutions. In isolated pockets of New York and New Jersey, and more panoramically in the entire region south of the Potomac, slavery was woven into the fabric of American society in ways that defied appeals to logic and morality. It also enjoyed the protection of one of the Revolution’s most potent legacies, the right to dispose of one’s property without arbitrary interference from others, especially when the others resided far away or claimed the authority of some distant government. There were, to be sure, radical implications latent in the ‘principles of ‘76’ capable of challenging privileged appeals to property rights, but the secret of their success lay in their latency – that is, the gradual and surreptitious ways they revealed their egalitarian implications over the course of the nineteenth century. If slavery’s cancerous growth was to be arrested and the dangerous malignancy removed, it demanded immediate surgery. The radical implications of the revolutionary legacy were no help at all so long as they remained only implications.

 

     “The depth and apparent intractability of the problem became much clearer during the debates surrounding the drafting and ratification of the Constitution. Although the final draft of the document was conspicuously silent on slavery, the subject itself haunted the closed-door debates. No less a source than Madison believed that slavery was the central cause of the most elemental division in the Constitutional Convention: ‘the States were divided into different interests not by their difference of size,’ Madison observed, ‘but principally from their having or not having slaves… It did not lie between the large and small States: it lay between the Northern and Southern.’

 

     “The delegates from New England and most of the Middle Atlantic states drew directly on the inspirational rhetoric of the revolutionary legacy to argue that slavery was inherently incompatible with the republican values on which the American Republic had been based. They wanted an immediate end to the slave trade, an explicit statement prohibiting the expansion of slavery into the western territories as a condition for admission into the union, and the adoption of a national plan for gradual emancipation analogous to those state plans already adopted in the North…

 

     “The southern position might more accurately be described as ‘deep southern’, since it did not include Virginia. Its major advocates were South Carolina and Georgia, and the chief burden for making the case in the Constitutional Convention fell almost entirely on the South Carolina delegation. The underlying assumption of this position was most openly acknowledged by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina – namely, that ‘South Carolina and Georgia cannot do without slaves’. What those from the Deep South wanted was open-ended access to African imports to stock their plantations. They also wanted equivalently open access to western lands, meaning no federal legislation restricting the property rights of slave owners…

 

     “Neither side got what it wanted at Philadelphia in 1787. The Constitution contained no provision that committed the newly created federal government to a policy of gradual emancipation, or in any clear sense placed slavery on the road to ultimate extinction. On the other hand, the Constitution contained no provisions that specifically sanctioned slavery as a permanent and protected institution south of the Potomac or anywhere else. The distinguishing feature of the document when it came to slavery was its evasiveness. It was neither a ‘contract with abolition’ nor a ‘covenant with death’, but rather a prudent exercise in ambiguity. The circumlocutions required to place a chronological limit on the slave trade or to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of representation in the House, all without ever using the forbidden word, capture the intentionally elusive ethos of the Constitution. The underlying reason for this calculated orchestration of non-commitment was obvious: Any clear resolution of the slavery question one way or the other rendered ratification of the Constitution virtually impossible…”[54]

 

     Even Washington was silent about slavery when he came to make his retirement address in 1796. “His silence on the slavery question was strategic, believing as he did that slavery was a cancer on the body politic of America that could not at present be removed without killing the patient…”[55] And with reason; for by 1790 the slave population was 700,000, up from about 500,000 in 1776. This, and the implicit threat that South Carolina and Georgia would secede from the Union if slavery were outlawed, made it clear that abolition was impractical as politics (but not on a personal level – Washington decreed in his will that all his slaves should be freed after his wife’s death). And so “the effort to make the Revolution truly complete seemed diametrically opposed to remaining a united nation.”[56]

 

Illuminism

 

     In order to understand how the French Revolution passed from its first, democratic and relatively non-violent phase to the second, proto-communistic and exceedingly bloody phase, it is necessary to study the history of the secret society known as the Illuminati. Illuminism arose as a kind of parasite feeding on the body of Masonry. Its appearance was preceded by an astonishing increase in the number of masonic lodges in France. Zamoyski writes that “there were 104 lodges in France in 1772, 198 by 1776, and a staggering 629 by 1789. Their membership included virtually every grandee, writer, artist, lawyer, soldier or other professional in the country, as well as notable foreigners such as Franklin and Jefferson – some 30,000 people.”[57]

 

     “Between 800 and 900 masonic lodges,” writes Doyle, “were founded in France between 1732 and 1793, two-thirds of them after 1760. Between 1773 and 1779 well over 20,000 members were recruited. Few towns of any consequence were without one or more lodges by the 1780s and, despite several papal condemnations of a deistic cult that had originated in Protestant England, the élite of society flocked to join. Voltaire was drafted in on his last visit to Paris, and it was before the assembled brethren of the Nine Sisters Lodge that he exchanged symbolic embraces with Franklin.”[58]

 

     Franklin, as we have seen, was an American mason, a famous scientist, and a major player in the American revolution in which French and Americans had co-operated in overthrowing British monarchical rule. The American revolution had demonstrated that the ideas of the philosophes were not just philosophical theory, but could be translated into reality. And the meeting of Franklin and Voltaire showed that science and philosophy could meet in the womb of Masonry to bring forth the common dream - liberty and “the pursuit of happiness”.

 

     But just as the American Revolution was child’s play compared with the savagery and radicalism of the French Revolution, so these earlier masonic lodges and orders were innocent by comparison with the profound evil of Illuminism, which was founded on May 1, 1776[59] by a Bavarian professor called Weishaupt, who assumed the name of “Spartacus” (from the slave who rebelled against Rome in the first century BC). It appears to have arisen out of the dissatisfaction of a group of Masons with the general state of Masonry. Thus another founder member, the famous Count Mirabeau, noted in his Memoir in the same year of 1776: “The Lodge Theodore de Bon Conseil at Munich, where there were a few men with brains and hearts, was tired of being tossed about by the vain promises and quarrels of Masonry. The heads resolved to graft on to their branch another secret association to which they gave the name of the Order of the Illuminés. They modelled it on the Society of Jesus, whilst proposing to themselves diametrically opposed.”[60]

 

     “Our strength,” wrote Weishaupt, “lies in secrecy. Therefore we must without hesitation use as a cover some innocent societies. The lodges of blue masonry are a fitting veil to hide our real aims, since the world is accustomed to expecting nothing important or constructive from them. Their ceremonies are considered pretty trifles for the amusement of big children. The name of a learned society is also a magnificent mask behind which we can hide our lower degrees.”[61]

 

     “Weishaupt construced his organization on several levels, revealing his most radical plans only to his chosen co-workers. Weishaupt chose the members of his organization mainly amidst young people, carefully studying each candidature.

 

     “Having sifted out the unreliable and dubious, the leaders of the order performed on the rest a rite of consecration, which took place after a three-day fast in a dark basement. Every candidate was consecrated separately, having first had his arms and legs bound. [Then] from various corners of the dark basement the most unexpected questions were showered upon the initiate.

 

     “Having replied to the questions, he swore absolute obedience to the leaders of the order. Every new member signed that he would preserve the secrets of the organization under fear of the death penalty.

 

     “However, the newcomer was not yet considered to be a full member of the organization, but received the status of novice and for one to three months had to be under the observation of an experienced illuminé. He was told to keep a special diary and regularly present it to the leaders. The novice filled in numerous questionnaires, and also prepared monthly accounts of all matters linking him with the order. Having passed through all the trials, the novice underwent a second initiation, now as a fully-fledged member.

 

     “After his initiation the new member was given a distinguishing sign, gesture and password, which changed depending on the rank he occupied.

 

     “The newcomer received a special pseudonym (order’s name), usually borrowed from ancient history…, and got to know an ancient Persian method of timekeeping, the geography of the order, and also a secret code.

 

     “Weishaupt imposed into the order a system of global spying and mutual tailing.

 

     “Most of the members were at the lowest level of the hierarchy.

 

     “No less than a thousand people entered the organization, but for conspiratorial purposes each member knew only a few people. As Weishaupt himself noted, ‘directly under me there are to, who are completely inspired by me myself, while under each of them are two, etc. Thus I can stir up and put into motion a thousand people. This is how one must command and act in politics.”[62]

 

     “Do you realize sufficiently,” he wrote in the discourse of the reception of the Illuminatus Dirigens, “what it means to rule – to rule in a secret society? Not only over the lesser or more important of the populace, but over the best men, over men of all ranks, nations, and religions, to rule without external force, to unite them indissolubly, to breathe one spirit and soul into them, men distributed over all parts of the world?” [63]

 

     The supposed aim of the new Order was to improve the present system of government and to abolish “the slavery of the peasants, the servitude of men to the soil, the rights of main morte and all the customs and privileges which abase humanity, the corvées under the condition of an equitable equivalent, all the corporations, all the maîtrises, all the burdens imposed on industry and commerce by customs, excise duties, and taxes… to procure a universal toleration for all religious opinions… to take away all the arms of superstitions, to favour the liberty of the press, etc.”[64] This was almost exactly the same programme as that carried out by the Constituent Assembly at the beginning of the French revolution in 1789-91 under the leadership of, among others, the same Count Mirabeau – a remarkable coincidence!

 

     However, this liberal democratic programme was soon forgotten when Weishaupt took over control of the Order. For “Spartacus” had elaborated a much more radical programme, a programme that was to resemble the socialism of the later, more radical stages of the revolution.

 

     “Weishaupt had made into an absolute theory the misanthropic gibes [boutades] of Rousseau at the invention of property and society, and without taking into account the statement so distinctly formulated by Rousseau on the impossibility of suppressing property and society once they had been established, he proposed as the end of Illuminism the abolition of property, social authority, of nationality, and the return of the human race to the happy state in which it formed only a single family without artificial needs, without useless sciences, every father being priest and magistrate. Priest of we know not what religion, for in spite of their frequent invocations of the God of Nature, many indications lead us to conclude that Weishaupt had, like Diderot and d’Holbach, no other God than Nature herself…”[65]

 

     Weishaupt proceeded to create an inner secret circle concealed within Masonry. He used the religious forms of Masonry, and invented a few “mysteries” himself. But his aim was the foundation of a political secret organisation controlled by himself.

 

     His political theory, according to Webster, was “no other than that of modern Anarchy, that man should govern himself and rulers should be gradually done away with. But he is careful to deprecate all ideas of violent revolution – the process is to be accomplished by the most peaceful methods. Let us see how gently he leads up to the final conclusion:

 

     “’The first stage in the life of the whole human race is savagery, rough nature, in which the family is the only society, and hunger and thirst are easily satisfied… in which man enjoys the two most excellent goods, Equality and Liberty, to their fullest extent. … In these circumstances… health was his usual condition… Happy men, who were not yet enough enlightened to lose their peace of mind and to be conscious of the unhappy mainsprings and causes of our misery, love of power… envy… illnesses and all the results of imagination.’

 

      “The manner in which man fell from this primitive state of felicity is then described:

 

      “’As families increased, means of subsistence began to lack, the nomadic life ceased, property was instituted, men established themselves firmly, and through agriculture families drew near each other, thereby language developed and through living together men began to measure themselves against each other, etc… But here was the cause of the downfall of freedom; equality vanished. Man felt new unknown needs…’

 

     “Thus men became dependent like minors under the guardianship of kings; the human must attain to majority and become self-governing:

 

     “’Why should it be impossible that the human race should attain to its highest perfection, the capacity to guide itself? Why should anyone be eternally led who understands how to lead himself?’

 

     “Further, men must learn not only to be independent of kings but of each other:

 

     “’Who has need of another depends on him and has resigned his rights. So to need little is the first step to freedom; therefore savages and the most highly enlightened are perhaps the only free men. The art of more and more limiting one’s needs is at the same time the art of attaining freedom…’

 

     “Weishaupt then goes on to show how the further evil of Patriotism arose:

 

     “’With the origin of nations and peoples the world ceased to be a great family, a single kingdom: the great tie of nature was torn… Nationalism took the place of human love…. Now it became a virtue to magnify one’s fatherland at the expense of whoever was not enclosed within its limits, now as a means to this narrow end it was allowed to despise and outwit foreigners or indeed even to insult them. This virtue was called Patriotism…’

 

     “And so by narrowing down affection to one’s fellow-citizens, the members of one’s own family, and even to oneself:

 

     “’There arose out of Patriotism, Localism, the family spirit, and finally Egoism… Diminish Patriotism, then men will learn to know each other again as such, their dependence on each other will be lost, the bond of union will widen out…’

 

     “… Whilst the ancient religions taught the hope of a Redeemer who should restore man to his former state, Weishaupt looks to man alone for his restoration. ‘Men,’ he observes, ‘no longer loved men but only such and such men. The word was quite lost…’ Thus in Weishaupt’s masonic system the ‘lost word’ is ‘Man,’ and its recovery is interpreted by the idea that Man should find himself again. Further on Weishaupt goes on to show how ‘the redemption of the human race is to be brought about’:

 

     “’These means are secret schools of wisdom, these were from all time the archives of Nature and of human rights, through them will Man be saved from his Fall, princes and nations will disappear without violence from the earth, the human race will become one family and the world the abode of reasonable men. Morality alone will bring about this change imperceptibly. Every father of a family will be, as formerly Abraham and the patriarchs, the priest and unfettered lord of his family, and Reason will be the only code of Man. This is one of our greatest secrets…’

 

     “… His first idea was to make Fire Worship the religion of Illuminism; the profession of Christianity therefore appears to have been an after-thought. Evidently Weishaupt discovered, as others have done, that Christianity lends itself more readily to subversive ideas than any other religion. And in the passages which follow we find adopting the old ruse of representing Christ as a Communist and as a secret-society adept. Thus he goes on to explain that ‘if Jesus preaches contempt of riches, He wishes to teach us the reasonable use of them and prepare for the community of goods introduced by Him,’ and in which, Weishaupt adds later, He lived with His disciples. But this secret doctrine is only to be apprehended by initiates…

 

     “Weishaupt thus contrives to give a purely political interpretation to Christ’s teaching:

 

     “’The secret preserved through the Disciplinam Arcani, and the aim appearing through all His words and deeds, is to give back to men their original liberty and equality… Now one can understand how far Jesus was the Redeemer and Saviour of the world.’

 

     “The mission of Christ was therefore by means of Reason to make men capable of freedom: ‘When at last reason becomes the religion of man, so will the problem be solved.’

 

     “Weishaupt goes on to show that Freemasonry can be interpreted in the same manner. The secret doctrine concealed in the teaching of Christ was handed down by initiates who ‘hid themselves and their doctrine under the cover of Freemasonry,’ and in a long explanation of Masonic hieroglyphics he indicates the analogies between the Hiramic legend and the story of Christ. ‘I say then Hiram is Christ.’… In this manner Weishaupt demonstrates that ‘Freemasonry is hidden Christianity… But this is of course only the secret of what Weishaupt calls ‘real Freemasonry’ in contradistinction to the official kind, which he regards as totally unenlightened.”[66]

 

     But the whole of this religious side of Weishaupt’s system is in fact simply a ruse, a cover, by which to attract religious men. Weishaupt himself despised religion: “You cannot imagine,” he wrote, “what consideration and sensation our Priest’s degree is arousing. The most wonderful thing is that great Protestant and reformed theologians who belong to Q [Illuminism] still believe that the religious teaching imparted in it contains the true and genuine spirit of the Christian religion. Oh! men, of what cannot you be persuaded? I never thought that I should become the founder of a new religion.”[67]

 

     Only gradually, and only to a very few of his closest associates, did Weishaupt reveal the real purpose of his order – the revolutionary overthrow of the whole of society, civil and religious. Elements of all religions and philosophical systems, including Christianity and Masonry, were used by Weishaupt to enrol a body of influential men (about 2500 at one time[68]) who would obey him in all things while knowing neither him personally nor the real aims of the secret society they had been initiated into. The pyramidal structure of his organization, whereby nobody on a lower level knew what was happening on the one above his, while those on the higher levels knew everything about what was happening below them, was copied by all succeeding revolutionary organizations.

 

     Weishaupt was well on the way to taking over Freemasonry (under the guise of its reform) when, in July, 1785, an Illuminatus was struck by lightning and papers found on him led to the Bavarian government banning the organisation. However, both Illuminism and Weishaupt continued in existence – only France rather than Germany became the centre of their operations. Thus the Parisian lodge of the Amis Réunis, renamed the Ennemis Réunis, gathered together all the really radical Masons from various other lodges, many of which were still royalist, and turned them, often unconsciously, into agents of Weishaupt. These adepts included no less than thirty princes. For it was characteristic of the revolution that among those who were most swept up by the madness of its intoxication were those who stood to lose most from it.

 

     Some far-sighted men, such as the Apostolic Nuncio in Vienna and the Marquis de Luchet, warned against Illuminism, and de Luchet predicted almost exactly the course of events that the revolution would take on the basis of his knowledge of the order. But no one paid any attention. But then, in October, 1789 a pamphlet was seized in the house of the wife of Mirabeau’s publisher among Mirabeau’s papers and published two years later.

 

     “Beginning with a diatribe against the French monarchy,” writes Webster, “the document goes on to say that ‘in order to triumph over this hydra-headed monster these are my ideas’:

 

     “’We must overthrow all order, suppress all laws, annul all power, and leave the people in anarchy. The law we establish will not perhaps be in force at once, but at any rate, having given back the power to the people, they will resist for the sake of the liberty which they will believe they are preserving. We must caress their vanity, flatter their hopes, promise them happiness after our work has been in operation; we must elude their caprices and their systems at will, for the people as legislators are very dangerous, they only establish laws which coincide with their passions, their want of knowledge would besides only give birth to abuses. But as the people are a lever which legislators can move at their will, we must necessarily use them as a support, and render hateful to them everything we wish to destroy and sow illusions in their path; we must also buy all the mercenary pens which propagate our methods and which will instruct the people concerning their enemies which we attack. The clergy, being the most powerful through public opinion, can only be destroyed by ridiculing religion, rendering its ministers odious, and only representing them as hypocritical monsters… Libels must at every moment show fresh traces of hatred against the clergy. To exaggerate their riches, to makes the sins of an individual appear to be common to all, to attribute to them all vices; calumny, murder, irreligion, sacrilege, all is permitted in times of revolution.’

 

     “’We must degrade the noblesse and attribute it to an odious origin, establish a germ of equality which can never exist but which will flatter the people; [we must] immolate the most obstinate, burn and destroy their property in order to intimidate the rest, so that if we cannot entirely destroy this prejudice we can weaken it and the people will avenge their vanity and their jealousy by all the excesses which will bring them to submission.’

 

     “After describing how the soldiers are to be seduced from their allegiance, and the magistrates represented to the people as despots, ‘since the people, brutal and ignorant, only see the evil and never the good of things,’ the writer explains they must be given only limited power in the municipalities.

 

     “’Let us beware above all of giving them too much force; their despotism is too dangerous, we must flatter the people by gratuitous justice, promise them a great diminution in taxes and a more equal division, more extension in fortunes, and less humiliation. These phantasies [vertiges] will fanaticise the people, who will flatten out all resistance. What matter the victims and their numbers? Spoliations, destructions, burnings, and all the necessary effects of a revolution? Nothing must be sacred and we can say with Machiavelli: “What matter the means as long as one arrives at the end?”’”[69]

 

     The early phase of the revolution appears to have been driven by the more idealistic kind of Freemasons – men such as the Duc d’Orléans. But its later stages were controlled by the Illuminati with their more radically destructive plans. Thus “according to Lombard de Langres [writing in 1820]: ’France in 1789 counted more than 2,000 lodges affiliated to the Grand Orient; the number of adepts was more than 100,000. The first events of 1789 were only Masonry in action. All the revolutionaries of the Constituent Assembly were initiated into the third degree. We place in this class the Duc d’Orléans, Valence, Syllery, Laclos, Sièyes, Pétion, Menou, Biron, Montesquiou, Fauchet, Condorcet, Lafayette, Mirabeau, Garat, Rabaud, Dubois-Crancé, Thiébaud, Larochefoucauld, and others.’

 

     “Amongst these others [continues Webster] were not only the Brissotins, who formed the nucleus of the Girondin party, but the men of the Terror – Marat, Robespierre, Danton, and Desmoulins.

 

     “It was these fiercer elements, true disciples of the Illuminati, who were to sweep away the visionary Masons dreaming of equality and brotherhood. Following the precedent set by Weishaupt, classical pseudonyms were adopted by these leaders of the Jacobins, thus Chaumette was known as Anaxagoras, Clootz as Anacharsis, Danton as Horace, Lacroix as Publicola, and Ronsin as Scaevola; again, after the manner of the Illuminati, the names of towns were changed and a revolutionary calendar was adopted. The red cap and loose hair affected by the Jacobins appear also to have been foreshadowed in the lodges of the Illuminati.

 

     “Yet faithfully as the Terrorists carried out the plan of the Illuminati, it would seem that they themselves were not initiated into the innermost secrets of the conspiracy. Behind the Convention, behind the clubs, behind the Revolutionary Tribunal, there existed, says Lombard de Langres, that ‘most secret convention [convention sécrétissime] which directed everything after May 31, an occult and terrible power of which the other Convention became the slave and which was composed of the prime initiates of Illuminism. This power was above Robespierre and the committees of the government,… it was this occult power which appropriated to itself the treasures of the nation and distributed them to the brothers and friends who had helped on the great work.’”[70]

 

     Illuminism represents perhaps the first clearly organised expression of that philosophy which Hieromonk Seraphim Rose called “the Nihilism of Destruction”.[71] Fr. Seraphim considered that this philosophy was unique to the twentieth century; but the evidence for its existence already in the eighteenth century is overwhelming. With Illuminism, therefore, we enter the atmosphere of the twentieth-century totalitarian revolutions....

 

The French Revolution: (2) The Jacobin Terror

 

     In June, 1791 Louis XVI tried, unsuccessfully, to flee abroad, and in August the monarchs of Austria and Prussia met at Pillnitz to co-ordinate action against the Revolution. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden and Catherine of Russia also prepared to crush the “orang-outangs of Europe”. From the summer of 1791 to the summer of 1792 power steadily slipped away from the elected Constituent Assembly, which was still broadly in favour of a constitutional monarchy, and into the hands of the mob, or the Paris Commune. Their passionate hatred of refractory priests and monarchists inside the country was inflamed by the first attempts of the foreign powers to invade France and restore legitimate authority from outside.

 

     The rhetoric became increasingly bloody. Thus on April 25, 1792 the “Marseillaise” was composed for the army of the Rhine; “impure blood, it exulted, would drench the tracks of the conquering French armies.”[72] And on the same day the new invention of the Guillotine claimed its first victim…

 

     On June 20 the mob or sansculottes (without breeches), invaded the Tuileries. “By sheer weight of numbers,” writes Zamoyski, “the crowd pushed through the gates of the royal palace and came face to face with Louis XVI in one of the upstairs salons, where the defenceless monarch had to endure the abuse of the mob. Pistols and drawn sabres were waved in his face, and he was threatened with death. More significantly, he was made to don a red cap [symbol of the revolution] and drink the health of the nation – and thereby to acknowledge its sovereignty. By acquiescing, he toasted himself off the throne.”[73]

 

     For a brief moment, on July 14, the third anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, it looked as if constitutional monarchy could be saved. Louis was called  “king of the French” and “father of his country”. But on the same day Marie Antoinette’s nephew, Francis II, was crowned Holy Roman Emperor in Frankfurt in a ceremony that reaffirmed with great splendour the principle of autocratic monarchy. Between the revolution celebrated in France and the autocracy celebrated in Germany there could be no permanent compromise. The centre, constitutional monarchy, could not hold…

 

     Pressure mounted on the Assembly to declare the dethronement of the king. Finally, on August 10, the Tuileries was again invaded, 600 Swiss guards were brutally massacred, and the king was imprisoned. The Assembly “had little alternative but to ‘invite’ the French people to form a convention ‘to assure the sovereignty of the people and the reign of liberty and equality. The next day it decreed that the new assembly was to be elected by manhood suffrage, without distinction between citizens. Only servants and the unemployed had no vote.”[74]

 

     Paris was ruled by the mob now. In September the prisons were opened and suspected royalists were slaughtered. On September 20 the Prussian army was defeated at Valmy, and the next day the monarchy was officially abolished.[75]

 

     The newly elected Convention’s task was to legislate for a new republican Constitution. It was divided between “Montagnards” (Jacobins) on the left, led by Marat, Danton, Robespierre and the Parisian delegates, and the “Girondins” on the right, led by Brissot, Vergniaud and the “faction of the Gironde”. The Montagnards were identified with the interests of the Paris mob and the most radical ideas of the Revolution; the Girondins – with the interests of the provinces and the original liberal ideals of 1789. The Montagnards stood for disposing of the king as soon as possible; the Girondins wanted a referendum of the whole people to decide.

 

     The Montagnard Saint-Just said that a trial was unnecessary; the people had already judged the king on August 10; it remained only to punish him. For “there is no innocent reign… every King is a rebel and a usurper.”[76] Robespierre had voted against the death penalty in the Assembly, but now he said that “Louis must die that the country may love”. And he agreed with Saint-Just: “Louis cannot be judged, he has already been judged. He has been condemned, or else the Republic is not blameless. To suggest putting Louis XVI on trial, in whatever way, is a step back towards royal and constitutional despotism; it is a counter-revolutionary idea; because it puts the Revolution itself in the dock. After all, if Louis can still be put on trial, Louis can be acquitted; he might be innocent. Or rather, he is presumed to be until he is found guilty. But if Louis can be presumed innocent, what becomes of the Revolution?”[77]

 

     There was a certain logic in these words: since the Revolution undermined all the foundations of the ancien régime, the possibility that the head of that régime might be innocent implied that the Revolution might be guilty. So “revolutionary justice” required straight execution rather than a trial; it could not afford to question the foundations of the Revolution itself. It was the same logic that led to the execution without trial of Tsar Nicholas II in 1917.

 

     But the majority of the deputies were not yet as “advanced” in their thinking as Robespierre. So “during the third week of January 1793,” writes Ridley, “the Convention voted four times on the issue. A resolution finding Louis guilty of treason, and rejecting the idea of an appeal to the people by a plebiscite [so much for Rousseauist democracy!], was carried by 426 votes to 278; the decision to impose the death penalty was carried by 387 to 314. Philippe Egalité [the Duke of Orléans and cousin of the king who became Grand Master of the Masons, then a Jacobin, renouncing his title for the name ‘Philippe Egalité’] voted to convict Louis and for the death penalty. A deputy then proposed that the question of what to do with Louis should be postponed indefinitely. This was defeated by 361 to 360, a single vote. Philippe Egalité voted against the proposal, so his vote decided the issue. On 20 January a resolution that the death sentence should be immediately carried out was passed by 380 to 310, and Louis was guillotined the next day.”[78]

 

     After the execution a huge old man with a long beard who had been prominent in the murdering of priests during the September riots mounted the scaffold, plunged both hands into the kind’s blood and sprinkled the people with it, shouting: “People of France! I baptise you in the name of Jacob and Freedom!”[79]

 

     “Traditionally,” writes Zamoyski, “the death of a king of France was announced with the phrase: ‘Le Roi est mort, vive le Roi!’, in order to stress the continuity of the institution of monarchy. When the king’s head, was held aloft on that sunless day, the crowd assembled around the scaffold shouted: ‘Vive la Nation!’ The message was unequivocal. The nation had replaced the king as the sovereign and therefore as the validating element in the state. The dead king’s God had been superseded by ‘Our Lord Mankind’, to use the words of one prominent revolutionary.”[80]

 

     “The condemnation of the king,” wrote Camus, “is the crux of contemporary history. It symbolizes the secularization of our history and the disincarnation of the Christian God. Up to now, God played a part in history through the medium of kings. But His representative in history has been killed…”[81]

 

     The execution of the king was the signal for the abandonment of all restraint. The cause of the Revolution became the absolute value to which every other value was to be subordinated and sacrificed. In February, 1793, after the British broke off relations because of the execution of the king, the Convention declared war on the British and the Dutch, and in effect “bade defiance to the whole of Europe. ‘They threaten you with kings!’ roared Danton to the Convention. ‘You have thrown down your gauntlet to them, and this gauntlet is a king’s head, the signal of their coming death.’ ‘We cannot be calm,’ claimed the ever-bombastic Brissot, ‘until Europe, all Europe, is in flames.’ In token of this defiance, annexations were now vigorously pursued…”[82] No matter that the Declaration of the Rights of Man had declared for the freedom of every nation: revolutionary casuistry interpreted sovereignty to be the right only of revolutionary nations; all others deserved to become slaves of the Republic.

 

     Moreover, on December 15, 1792 “generals were authorized in all occupied territories to introduce the full social programme of the French Republic. All existing taxes, tithes, feudal dues, and servitudes were to be abolished. So was nobility, and all types of privilege. The French motto would be, declared some deputies, War on the castles, peace to the cottages! In the name of peace, help, fraternity, liberty and equality, they would assist all people to establish ‘free and popular’ governments, with whom they would then co-operate.”[83]

 

     But practice did not match theory: the theory of cosmopolitan universalism too often gave way to the practice of imperialist nationalism. Thus when Holland was conquered by the revolutionary armies, “it was compelled to cede various southern territories, including control of the mouth of the Scheldt, and pay for the upkeep of a French occupying army of 25,000 men. Finally, it was forced to conclude an alliance with the French Republic whose chief attraction was to place the supposedly formidable Dutch navy in the balance against Great Britain. This, then, was what the fraternity and help of the French Republic actually meant: total subordination to French needs and purposes.”[84]

 

     Imperialism abroad was matched by despotism at home, forced conscription and crippling taxes. And now for the first time there was massive resistance. First came the peasant counter-revolution in the western regions of Brittany and the Vendée, which was crushed with great cruelty[85] with the loss of about 250,000 lives, about ten times more than were claimed by the guillotine. At about the same time the revolutionary army under Dumouriez was defeated by the Austrians at Neerwinden. Dumouriez then changed sides, and it was only the army’s refusal to co-operate that prevented him from marching on Paris to restore the constitution of 1791 with Louis XVII as king.[86]

 

     The peasant revolt in the Vendée was by far the most serious and prolonged that the revolutionaries had to face, and it is significant that it was fought under the banner of the restoration of the king and the Church. The rebels wore “sacred hearts, crosses, and the white cockade of royalism. ‘Long live the king and our good priests,’ was their cry. ‘We want our king, our priests and the old regime.’”[87]

 

     However, the counter-revolution in other parts of the country, and especially among the bourgeoisie of such large cities as Marseilles, Lyons and Bourdeaux, was less principled and therefore much less effective. As one general reported of the Bordelais: “They appeared to me determined not to involve themselves in Parisian affairs, but more determined still to retain their liberty, their property, their opulence… They don’t want a king: they want a republic, but a rich and tranquil republic.”[88]

 

     This difference in motivation between different parts of the counter-revolution, and the failure of many of its leaders to condemn the revolution in toto and as such, and not just some of its wilder excesses, doomed it to failure in the long term. As long as the revolutionaries held the centre, and were able to use the methods of terror and mass conscription to send large armies into the field against their enemies, the advantage lay with them. And their position was strengthened still further by the coup against the Girondist deputies carried out between May 31 and June 2, 1793.

 

     “In July 1793,” writes Ridley, “a young Girondin woman, Charlotte Corday, gained admission to Marat’s house by pretending that she wished to give him a list of names of Girondins to be guillotined. She found him sitting as usual in his bath to cure his skin disease, and she stabbed him to death.[89] She was guillotined, and the Girondin party was suppressed.

 

     “In Lyons, the Girondins had gained control of the Freemasons’ lodges. In the summer of 1793 the Girondins there defied the authority of the Jacobin government in Paris, and guillotined one of the local Jacobin leaders. The Lyons Freemasons played a leading part in the rising against the Paris Jacobins; but the Jacobins suppressed the revolt, and several of the leading Girondin Freemasons of Lyons were guillotined.”[90]

 

     And so the Revolution was frenziedly devouring its own children.[91] Or rather, the Masons were devouring their own brothers; for the struggle between the Girondists and the Montagnards was in fact, according to Lev Tikhomirov, a struggle between different layers of Masonry.[92] “However, in the period of the terror the majority of Masonic lodges were closed. As Louis Blanc explains, a significant number of Masons, though extremely liberal-minded, could still not, in accordance with their personal interests, character and public position, sympathise with the incitement of the maddened masses against the rich, to whom they themselves belonged. In the hottest battle of the revolution it was those who split off into the highest degrees who acted. The Masonic lodges were replaced by political clubs, although in the political clubs, too, there began a sifting of the revolutionaries into the more moderate and the extremists, so that quite a few Masons perished on the scaffolds from the hands of their ‘brothers’. After the overthrow of Robespierre on 9 Thermidor the Masonic lodges were again opened.”[93]

 

     Now the Terror went into overdrive. The guillotine was used to eliminate traitors, backsliders, suspects, speculators and “egoists”. “The spirit of moderation,” declared Leclerc, needed to be expunged.[94]

 

     On September 17 a comprehensive Law of Suspects was passed, which empowered watch committees “to arrest anyone who ‘either by their conduct, their contacts, their words or their writings, showed themselves to be supporters of tyranny, of federalism, or to be enemies of liberty’, as well as a number of more specific categories such as former nobles ‘who have not constantly manifested their attachment to the revolution.’ Practically anybody might fall foul of such a sweeping law. In the weeks following even everyday speech acquired a sansculotte style. Those who refused to call each other ‘citizen’ rather than the deferential ‘Monsieur’, and to use the familiar form of address (tutoiement), fell under automatic suspicion. Then on 29 September the Convention passed a General Maximum Law which imposed price controls on a wide range of goods defined as of first necessity from food and drink to fuel, clothing, and even tobacco. Those who sold them above the maximum would be fined and placed on the list of suspects. The Revolutionary Army was at last set on foot…”[95]

 

     The Committee of Public Safety now took over control of the government, subject only to the oversight of the Convention. This anti-democratic move was said to be temporary and justified by the emergency situation. “It is impossible,” said Saint-Just in the Committee’s name, “for revolutionary laws to be executed if the government itself is not constituted in a revolutionary way.”[96]

 

     The revolutionary government now took terrible revenge on its defeated enemies. On October 12 the Committee “moved a decree that Lyons should be destroyed. Its very name was to disappear, except on a monument among the ruins which would proclaim ‘Lyons made war on Liberty. Lyons is no more.’”[97] Lyons was not completely destroyed, but whole ranges of houses were burnt and thousands were guillotined and shot. “The effect… was designed to be a salutory one. ‘What cement for the Revolution,’ gloated Achard in a letter to Paris.”[98]

 

     In order to carry out its totalitarian programme of control of the whole population, the government issued “certificates of civisme – identity cards and testimonials of public reliability all in one. Originally only foreigners had been required to carry these documents, but the Law of Suspects made the requirement general [thereby showing that for the revolutionary government all citizens were aliens]. Those without them were liable to arrest and imprisonment; and in fact up to half a million people may have been imprisoned as suspects of one sort or another during the Terror. Up to 10,000 may have died in custody, crowded into prisons never intended for such numbers, or makeshift quarters no better equipped. These too deserve to be numbered among the victims of the Terror, although not formally condemned. So do those who were murdered or lynched without trial or official record during the chaotic, violent autumn of 1793, when the supreme law of public safety seemed to override more conventional and cumbersome procedures. Altogether the true total of those who died under the Terror may have been twice the official figure – around 30,000 people in just under a year… Nor is it true that most of those killed in the Terror were members of the former ‘privileged orders’, whatever the Revolution’s anti-aristocratic rhetoric might suggest. Of the official death sentences passed, less than 9 per cent fell upon nobles, and less than 7 per cent on the clergy. Disproportionately high as these figures may have been relative to the numbers of these groups in the population as a whole, they were not as high as the quarter of the Terror’s victims who came from the middle classes. And the vast majority of those who lost their lives in the proscriptions of 1793-4 – two-thirds of those officially condemned and doubtless a far higher proportion of those who disappeared unofficially – were ordinary people caught up in tragic circumstances not of their own making, who made wrong choices in lethal times, when indifference itself counted as a crime.”[99]

 

     The incarnation of the revolution in this, its bloodiest phase was the lawyer Maximilien Robespierre. Uniting in his own person the despotism of Louis XIV and the freedom-worship of Rousseau, he said: “I am not a flatterer, a conciliator, an orator, a protector of the people; I myself am the people.” Again, uniting opposites in thoroughly Hegelian fashion, he said: “The impulse behind the people’s revolutionary government is virtue and terror: virtue without which terror is pernicious; terror without which virtue is impotent… The government of the Revolution is the despotism of liberty over tyranny…”[100]

 

     As the Girondin Manon Roland said just before his execution: “Oh, Liberty! How many crimes are committed in thy name!”[101]

 

The Revolution and Religion

 

     The institution which suffered most in the years 1789-91 was the Catholic Church. It lost its feudal dues in August and its lands in October, 1789. In February, 1790 all monasteries and convents, except those devoted to educational and charitable work, were dissolved, and new religious vows were forbidden. The Assembly then “replaced the 135 bishops with 85, one for each départment, and provided one curé for every 6,000 inhabitants. Bishops were henceforth to be elected (by an electorate including non-believers, Protestants and Jews) without reference to Rome.”[102]

 

     The weakened position of the Church encouraged the Protestants, and in June 300 died in clashes between Catholics and Protestants in Nîmes. Meanwhile, 150,000 papal subjects living in Avignon and the Comtat agitated for integration with France. Pope Pius VI rejected this, and on March 29 he also rejected the Declaration of the Rights of Man and all the religious legislation so far passed in the Assembly. On July 12 a Civil Constitution for the Clergy was passed, rationalising the Church’s organisation, putting all the clergy on the State’s pay-roll and decreeing the election of the clergy by lay assemblies who might included Protestants and Jews as well as Catholics. The Pope had already, on July 10, pleaded with the King to veto the Civil Constitution, but the king, advised by weak bishops, had already given his preliminary sanction.

 

     With the Pope against the Civil Constitution, its acceptance or rejection became a test of faith for Catholics. As opinion polarised, on October 30 thirty bishops from the Assembly signed an Exposition of Principles, explaining that, as Doyle writes, “they could not connive at such radical changes without consulting the Church through either a council or the Pope. Nevertheless patriots saw it as an incitement to disobey the law, and local authorities, clamorously supported by Jacobin clubs, began to enforce it. Bishops began to be expelled from suppressed sees; chapters were dissolved. In October and early November the first departmental bishops were elected. But this time the clergy did not meekly accept its fate. There were protests. ‘I can no more’, declared the incumbent of the doomed see of Senez, ‘renounce the spiritual contract which binds me to my Church than I can renounce the promises of my baptism… I belong to my flock in life and in death… If God wishes to test his own, the eighteenth century, like the first century, will have its martyrs.’ The first elected bishop, the deputy Expilly, who was chosen by the Finistère department, was refused confirmation by the archbishop of Rennes. In Soissons, the bishop was dismissed by the departmental authorities for denouncing the Civil Constitution. It was impossible to dismiss all the 104 priests of Nantes who did the same, but their salaries were stopped. Evidently there was to be no peaceful transition to a new ecclesiastical order, and indignant local authorities bombarded the Assembly with demands for action. Eventually, on 27 November, action was taken. The deputies decided, after two days of bitter debate, to dismiss at once all clerics who did not accept the new order unequivocally. And to test this acceptance they imposed an oath. All beneficed clergy were to swear after mass on the first available Sunday ‘to be faithful to the nation, the King and the law, and to uphold with all their power the constitution declared by the National Assembly and accepted by the king.’ All who refused were to be replaced at once through the procedures laid down in the Civil Constitution.

 

     “The French Revolution had many turning-points: but the oath of the clergy was, if not the greatest, unquestionably one of them. It was certainly the Constituent Assembly’s most serious mistake. For the first time the revolutionaries forced fellow citizens to choose; to declare themselves publicly for or against the new order… With no word from Rome, the king sanctioned the new decree of 26 December, so that oath-taking (or refusal) dominated public life throughout the country in January and February 1791. The clergy in the Assembly themselves set the pattern, in that they were completely divided. Only 109 took the oath, and only two bishops, one of them Talleyrand. As the deadline approached on 4 January the Assembly was surrounded by crowds shouting for nonjurors to be lynched; and the patriots, led unpersuasively by the Protestant Barnave, used every possible argument and procedural ploy to sway waverers. But there were none. And faced with this example from the majority of clerical deputies, it is little wonder that so many clerics in the country at large became refractories (as nonjurors were soon being called)… Above all, there was a massive refusal of the oath throughout the west…In the end, about 54 per cent of the parish clergy took the oath. This suggests that well over a third of the country was now prepared to signal that the Revolution had gone far enough…”[103]

 

     There is a bitter irony in these events. How often, since 1066 and the Investitures Conflict, had Popes bent western kings to their evil will! However, as present events now demonstrated, these were pyrrhic victories, which, in weakening the Monarchy, ultimately weakened the Church, too, in that Church and Monarchy are the two essential pillars of every Christian society. Right up to the Reformation the Popes had failed to understand that attacks on the throne were also attacks on the altar, and that an accusation of “royal despotism” would almost invariably be linked with one of “episcopal despotism”. The Counter-Reformation Popes were more careful to respect monarchical authority, and Louis XIV’s abrupt about-turn from Gallicanism to Ultramontanism witnessed to their continuing influence. But the constant political intrigues of the papal society of the Jesuits, which made them a kind of “state within the state”, led to their being banned by all the governments of Western Europe - a severe blow from which the power of the Popes never fully recovered and which was an important condition of the success of the revolution. The Masons and even more radical groups like the “Illuminati” (see below) were quick to take the place of the Jesuits as the main threat to established authority, while using the Jesuits’ methods. And now, at the end of the eighteenth century, when papism was in full retreat before the onslaught of enlightened despots like Joseph II and revolutionary democrats like the French National Assembly, and the Popes were desperately in need of the support of “Most Catholic Kings” such as Louis XVI, they paid the price for centuries of papal anti-monarchism. Indeed, since it was Papism that destroyed the Orthodox symphony of powers, and thereby created the conditions for the revolution, there was some sense in Catherine II’s suggestion that the European powers “embrace the Greek religion to save themselves from this immoral, anarchic, wicked and diabolical plague…”[104]

 

     In its second, Jacobin phase the revolution revealed its anti-Christian essence most clearly. Thus at the funeral of Marat in July, 1793, the following eulogy was given: “O heart of Marat, sacré coeur can the works and benevolence of the son of Mary be compared with those of the Friend of the People and his apostles to the Jacobins of our holy Mountain?… Their Jesus was but a false prophet but Marat is a god…”[105]

 

     The revolution was in essence anti-Christian because it came to provide a new faith instead of Christianity: the cult of the nation. Let us recall the earlier stages in the rise of the cult of the nation: the oath to the nation that Rousseau provided for Napoleon’s native Corsica; the speech of the Polish marshal, Josef Pulaski at Bar in 1768, when he said: “We are to die so that the motherland may live; for while we live the motherland is dying”[106]; the birth of the American nation in 1776; the abortive Irish revolution of 1783; the abortive Dutch revolution of 1785, which declared liberty the “inalienable right” of every citizen, and whose “Leiden draft” declared: “the Sovereign is no other than the vote of the people”.[107]

 

     But these were merely dress-rehearsals for the full emergence of the new nationalist faith, whose foundation stone, as we have seen, was the third of the Rights of Man declared by the French National Assembly on August 26, 1789: “The principle of all sovereignty lies in the nation. No body of men, and no individual, can exercise authority which does not emanate directly therefrom.”

 

     It should be understood that this was not simply an expression of patriotism, but precisely a new faith to replace all existing faiths. For “the nation, as Abbé Siéyès put it, recognized no interest on earth above its own, and accepted no law or authority other than its own – neither that of humanity at large nor of other nations”[108] – nor, it goes without saying, of God. The nation therefore stood in the place of God; in the strict sense of the word, it was an idol. So Hobsbawm rightly comments: “’The people’ identified with ‘the nation’ was a revolutionary concept; more revolutionary than the bourgeois-liberal programme which purported to express it.”[109]

 

     But what precisely was the nation, and how was it revealed? To this question the most revolutionary of the philosophes and the prophet of nationalism, Rousseau, had provided the answer. The nation, he said, is revealed in the general will, which was not to be identified with the will of any individual, such as the king, or group, such as a parliamentary majority, but only in some spontaneous, mystical upswelling of emotion that carried all before it and was not to be questioned or criticised by any rational considerations. It was a “holy madness”, to use Lafayette’s phrase.[110]

 

     “’He who would dare to undertake to establish a nation would have to feel himself capable of altering, so to speak, human nature, to transform each individual, who by his very nature is a unique and perfect whole, into a mere part of a greater whole, from which this individual would in a sense receive his life and his being,’ Rousseau had written. He understood that any polity, however logical, simple, elegant, poetic or modern, would be inadequate to replace the layered sacrality of something like the Crown of France and the whole theological and mythical charge of the Catholic Church. Human emotions needed something richer to feed on than a mere ‘system’ if they were to be engaged. And engaged they must be, for if one removed religious control of social behaviour and the monarch’s role as ultimate arbiter, the very fount-head of civil sanction would dry up. Something had to be put in their place. The question was ultimately how to induce people to be good in a godless society.

 

     “As it was the people themselves who gave the state its legitimacy, it was they who had to be invested with divinity. The monarch would be replaced by a disembodied sovereign in the shape of the nation, which all citizens must be taught to ‘adore’. ‘It is education that must give to the souls of men the national form, and so direct their thoughts and their tastes, that they will be patriotic by inclination, by passion, by necessity,’ Rousseau explained. This education included not only teaching but also sport and public ceremonies designed to inculcate the desired values. ‘From the excitement caused by this common emulation will be born that patriotic intoxication which alone can elevate men above themselves, and without which liberty is no more than an empty word and legislation but an illusion.’

 

     “A precondition of this was the the total elimination of Christianity. Being a sentimental person, Rousseau could not remain entirely unmoved by what he saw as the ‘sublime’ core of Christianity. But the existence of a morally independent religion alongside the civil institutions was bound to be destructive. ‘Far from binding the hearts of the citizens to the state, it detaches them from it, as from all earthly things,’ he writes: ‘I can think of nothing more contrary to the social spirit.’ It forced on people ‘two sets of laws, two leaders, two motherlands’, subjecting them to ‘contradictory duties’ and preventing them from being ‘both devout practitioners and good citizens’. Christianity demanded self-denial and submission, but only to God, and not to any creation of Man’s. A Christian’s soul could not be fused with the ‘collective soul’ of the nation, challenging the very basis of Rousseau’s proposition. His assertion that ‘a man is virtuous when his particular will is in accordance in every respect with the general will’, was heresy in Christian terms, according to which virtue consists in doing the will of God. There was no room for someone whose ultimate loyalty was to God in Rousseau’s model, which substituted the nation for God.”[111]

 

     Zamoyski continues: “Anthropologically visualized as a universal ideal female, the nation kindled desire for selfless sacrifice in its cause, and that was the great strength of the French revolution. ‘Since it appeared to be more concerned with the regeneration of the human race than with reforming France, it aroused feelings that no political revolutions had hitherto managed to inspire,’ explained Tocqueville. ‘It inspired proselytism and gave birth to the propagande,’ he continued, and, ‘like Islam, flooded the whole world with its soldiers, its apostles and its martyrs.’”[112]

 

     A programme known as de-christianization was now launched. The calendar and festivals of the old religion were replaced by those of the new, civic religion of the nation. Thus July 14, August 10, January 21 (the day of the execution of Louis XVI) and May 31 (the day of the establishment of the Jacobin tyranny) were commanded to be celebrated as feast-days.

 

     Bamber Gascoigne writes: “August 10th was the first anniversary of the day on which the Paris mob had stormed the Tuileries and had put an effective end to the monarchy. The occasion was celebrated with a Festival of Regeneration, also known by the even more uninspiring name of Festival of the Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic. Among the ruins of the Bastille Jacques-Louis David had built a huge figure of a seated woman. She was Mother Nature. From her breasts there spurted two jets of water, at which delegates filled their cups and drank libations. Three months later there was a Festival of Reason, in which an actress from the opera played the Goddess of Reason and was enthroned in the cathedral of Notre-Dame – with the red bonnet of Liberty on her head and a crucifix beneath one of her elegant feet.”[113]

 

     All the churches in Paris were closed, and the royal tombs were destroyed. Then there arrived in the Nièvre in September, 1793 the representative Fouché, who “transformed it into a beacon of religious terror. Fouché, himself a former priest, came from the Vendée, where he had witnessed the ability of the clergy to inspire fanatical resistance to the Revolution’s authority. Christianity, he concluded, could not coexist in any form with the Revolution and, brushing aside what was left of the ‘constitutional’ Church, he inaugurated a civic religion of his own devising with a ‘Feast of Brutus’ on 22 September at which he denounced ‘religious sophistry’. Fouché particularly deplored clerical celibacy: it set the clergy apart, and in any case made no contribution to society’s need for children. Clerics who refused to marry were ordered to adopt and support orphans or aged citizens. The French people, Fouché declared in a manifesto published on 10 October, recognized no other cult but that of universal morality; and although the exercise of all creeds was proclaimed to be free and equal, none might henceforth be practised in public. Graveyards should exhibit no religious symbols, and at the gate of each would be an inscription Death is an eternal sleep. Thus began the movement known as dechristianization. Soon afterwards Fouché moved on to Lyons; but during his weeks in Nevers his work had been watched by Chaumette, visiting his native town from Paris. He was to carry the idea back to the capital, where it was energetically taken up by his colleagues at the commune.

 

     “Other representatives on mission, meanwhile, had also taken to attacking the outward manifestations of the Catholic religion. At Abbeville, on the edge of priest-ridden Flanders, Dumont favoured forced public abjuration of orders, preferably by constitutional clergy whose continued loyalty to the Revolution could only now be proved by such gestures. On October 7 in Rheims, Ruhl personally supervised the smashing of the phial holding the sacred oil of Clovis used to anoint French kings. None of this was authorized by the Convention: on the other hand the adoption on 5 October of a new republican calendar marked a further stage in the divorce between the French State and any sort of religion. Years would no longer be numbered from the birth of Christ, but from the inauguration of the French Republic on 22 September 1792.  Thus it was already the Year II. There would be twelve thirty-day months with evocative, seasonal names; each month would have three ten-day weeks (décades) ending in a rest-day (décadi). Sundays therefore disappeared and could not be observed unless they coincided with the less-frequent décadis. The introduction of the system at this moment only encouraged representatives on mission to intensify their lead; and dechristianization became an important feature of the Terror in all the former centres of rebellion when they were brought to heel. Once launched it was eminently democratic. Anybody could join in smashing images, vandalizing churches (the very word was coined to describe this outburst of iconoclasm), and theft of vestments to wear in blasphemous mock ceremonies. Those needing pretexts could preach national necessity when they tore down bells or walked off with plate that could be recast into guns or coinage. Such activities were particular favourites among the Revolutionary Armies. The Parisian detachments marching to Lyons left a trail of pillaged and closed churches, and smouldering bonfires of ornaments, vestments, and holy pictures all along their route. Other contributions took more organization, but Jacobin clubs and popular societies, not to mention local authorities, were quite happy to orchestrate festivals of reason, harmony, wisdom, and other such worthy attributes to former churches; and to recruit parties of priests who, at climactic moments in these ceremonies, would renounce their vows and declare themselves ready to marry. If their choice fell on a former nun, so much the better.

 

     “When Chaumetter returned from Nevers, the Paris Commune made dechristianization its official policy. On 23 October the images of kings on the front of Notre-Dame were ordered to be removed: the royal tombs at Saint-Denis had already been emptied and desecrated by order of the Convention in August. The word Saint began to be removed from street names, and busts of Marat replaced religious statues. Again the Convention appeared to be encouraging the trend when it decreed, on 20 October, that any priest (constitutional or refractory) denounced for lack of civisme by six citizens would be subject to deportation, and any previously sentenced to deportation but found in France should be executed. Clerical dress was now forbidden in Paris, and on 7 November Gobel, the elected constitutional bishop, who had already sanctioned clerical marriage for his clergy, came with eleven of them to the Convention and ceremonially resigned his see. Removing the episcopal insignia, he put on a cap of liberty and declared that the only religion of a free people should be that of Liberty and Equality. In the next few days the handful of priests who were deputies followed his example. Soon Grégoire, constitutional bishop of Blois, was the only deputy left clinging to his priesthood and clerical dress. The sections meanwhile were passing anti-clerical motions, and on 12 November that of Gravilliers, whose idol had so recently been Jacques Roux, sent a deputation to the Convention draped in ‘ornaments from churches in their district, spoils taken from the superstitious credulity of our forefathers and repossessed by the reason of free men’ to announce that all churches in the section had been closed. This display followed a great public ceremony held in Notre-Dame, or the ‘Temple of Reason’, as it was now redesignated, on the tenth. On this occasion relays of patriotic maidens in virginal white paraded reverently before a temple of philosophy erected where the high altar had stood. From it emerged, at the climax of the ceremony, a red-capped female figure representing Liberty. Appreciatively described by an official recorder of the scene as ‘a masterpiece of nature’, in daily life she was an actress; but in her symbolic role she led the officials of the commune to the Convention, where she received the fraternal embrace of the president and secretaries.

 

     “However carefully choreographed, there was not much dignity about these posturings; and attacks on parish churches and their incumbents (who were mostly now popularly elected) risked making the Revolution more enemies than friends. Small-town and anti-religious Jacobin zeal, for example, provoked a minor revolt in the Brie in the second week in December. To shouts of Long live the Catholic Religion, we want our priests, we want the Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, crowds of peasants sacked the local club. Several thousands took up arms and joined the movement, and only a force of National Guards and sansculottes from the Revolutionary Army restored order in a district whose tranquillity was vital to the regular passage of food supplies to the capital from southern Champagne. But even before this the Committee of Public Safety was growing anxious about the counter-productive effects of dechristianization. Robespierre in particular, who [following his teacher, Rousseau] believed that religious faith was indispensable to orderly, civilized society, sounded the alarm. On November 21 he denounced anti-religious excesses at the Jacobin club. They smacked of more fanaticism than they extinguished.[114] The people believed in a Supreme Being, he warned, whereas atheism was aristocratic.[115] At the same time he persuaded the Committee to circularize popular societies warning them not to fan superstition and fanaticism by persecution. On 6 December, finally, the Convention agreed to reiterate the principle of religious freedom in a decree which formally prohibited all violence or threats against the ‘liberty of cults’. But by then it was too late. The example of Paris had encouraged Jacobin zealots everywhere, and with the repression of revolt in full swing and the role of priests in the Vendée particularly notorious, the remaining trappings of religion were too tempting a target to ignore. The commune’s response to Robespierre on 23 November had been to decree the closing of all churches in the capital; and soon local authorities were shutting them wholesale throughout the country. By the spring, churches were open for public worship only in the remotest corners of France, such as the Jura mountains. By then, perhaps 20,000 priests had been bullied into giving up their status, and 6,000 had given their renunciation the ultimate confirmation by marrying. In some areas, such as Provence, dechristianization only reached its peak in March or April 1794."[116]

 

     On October 31 the Girondists went to the guillotine. By the Law of 14 Frumaire (4 December) extreme centralisation was decreed, heralding the end of the Terror, but accelerating the Terror within the central administration itself. In March it was the turn of the Hébertists; in April – of the Dantonists. On March 27 the Revolutionary Army was disbanded. By the end of April the commune had been purged.

 

     Robespierre was still alive, preaching the new, revolutionary virtue and religion. By the Decree of 18 Floréal (7 May) it was declared that the French people recognised a Supreme Being and the immortality of the soul, and that a cult worthy of the Supreme Being was the fulfilment of a man’s civic duties. Thus the emphasis was still on man’s civic duties: religion had no independent function outside the State, in accordance with the words of Abbé Guillaume Raynal in 1780: “The State, it seems to me, is not made for religion, but religion for the State.”[117]

 

     It was the same with morality, which was now defined to include among the highest virtues “the hatred of bad faith and tyranny, the punishment of tyrants and traitors, help to the unhappy, respect for the weak, protection to the oppressed, to do all the good possible to others and to be unjust to nobody.”[118]

 

     On 20 Prairial (8 June), Robespierre moved that “the nation should celebrate the Supreme Being. Thus every locality was given a month to make its preparations. The fact that 8 June was also Whit Sunday may or may not have been a coincidence; if not, it could have been conceived either as a challenge or as an olive branch to Christianity. In the event little direction was given to the localities on how to organize the festival. Some adopted the props of all-too-recent festivals of reason, merely painting out old slogans with new ones. Others used the opportunity to allow mass to be said publicly for the first time in months. But in Paris the organization of the occasion was entrusted to the experienced hands of the painter David, himself a member of the Committee of General Security. He built an artificial mountain in the Champ de Mars, surmounted by a tree of liberty, and thither a mass procession made its way from the Tuileries. At its head marched the members of the Convention, led by their president, who happened that week to be Robespierre. He used the opportunity to deliver two more eulogies of virtue and republican religion, pointedly ignoring, though not failing to notice, the smirks of his fellow deputies at the posturings of this pseudo-Pope. Others found it no laughing matter. ‘Look at the bugger,’ muttered Thuriot, an old associate of Danton. ‘It’s not enough for him to be master, he has to be God.’”[119]

 

     Like the other gods of the revolution[120], Robespierre did not survive its terror. On 22 Prairial (10 June, 1794), witnesses and defending counsels were decreed to be no longer necessary in trials – so no one was safe. On 9 Thermidor (27 June) Robespierre fell from power. The next day, screaming in terror, he was executed.

 

     While the fall of Robespierre marked the end of the most fanatical phase in the revolution, normal life was not restored quickly. “On 18 September 1794, the Convention had carried the drift of the Revolution since 1790 to a logical conclusion when it finally renounced the constitutional Church. The Republic, it decreed, would no longer pay the costs or wages of any cult – not that it had been paying them in practice for a considerable time already. It meant the end of state recognition for the Supreme Being, a cult too closely identified with Robespierre. But above all it marked the abandonment of the Revolution’s own creation, the constitutional Church. For the first time ever in France, Church and State were now formally separated. To some this decree looked like a return to dechristianization, and here and there in the provinces there were renewed bursts of persecution against refractories. But most read it, correctly, as an attempt to deflect the hostility of those still faithful to the Church from the Republic. The natural corollary came with the decree of 21 February 1795 which proclaimed the freedom of all cults to worship as they liked. The tone of the law was grudging, and it was introduced with much gratuitous denigration of priestcraft and superstition. Religion was defined as a private affair, and local authorities were forbidden to lend it any recognition or support. All outward signs of religious affiliation in the form of priestly dress, ceremonies, or church bells remained strictly forbidden. The faithful would have to buy or rent their own places of worship and pay their own priests or ministers…”[121]

 

The French Revolution: (3) Babeuf and the Directory

 

     Let us summarise the effects of the revolution so far. “Where the Church was concerned,” writes Hampson, “the Civil Constitution of 1790 had the social effect of a Reformation, in the sense that it deprived a wealthy corporate institution of its autonomous position within the state. Politically, this was the opposite of a Reformation, since it destroyed the basis of the Gallican Church and made the French clergy dependent upon Rome.”[122]

 

     “Nobles were never proscribed as such and their property was not confiscated unless they went into exile or were condemned for political offences. Some noble families suffered very heavy casualties during the Terror; others survived without much difficulty. The ‘anti-feudal’ legislation of the Constituent Assembly bore heavily on those who income was derived mainly from manorial dues; those whose wealth came from their extensive acres may have gained more from the abolition of tithes than they lost from increased taxation. Some made profitable investments in church land which were the ‘best buy’ of the revolution since massive inflation reduced to a nominal figure the price paid by those who had opted to buy in instalments…Over the country as a whole the proportion of land owned by the nobility was somewhat reduced by the revolution but in most parts a substantial proportion of the landowners still came from the nobility, and the land was the most important source of wealth until well into the nineteenth century.”[123]

 

     “The urban radicals whom the more radical – but nevertheless gentlemanly – revolutionary leaders liked to eulogize as sans-culottes, fared badly… As an observer reported in 1793, ‘That class has suffered badly; it took the Bastille, was responsible for the tenth of August and so on… Hébert and Marat, two of the most extreme of the radical journalists, agreed that the sans-culottes were worse off than they had been in 1789. Soon, of course, all this was going to change… but it never did.”[124]

 

     “The revolution did not ‘give the land to the peasants’. They already possessed about a quarter of it, although most of them did not own enough to be self-sufficient. The Church lands were mostly snapped up by the wealthier farmers or by outside speculators… The prevailing economic theories persuaded the various assemblies to concentrate very heavily on direct taxation, most of which fell on the land. Requisitioning of food, horses and carts was borne exclusively by the peasants….

 

     “Once again the revolution greatly increased the impact of the state on the day-to-day life of the community. This was especially obvious where religion was concerned.”[125]

 

     After Thermidor and the execution of Robespierre, a new phase of the Revolution began. In 1795 a committee of five, the Directory, was established. Fearing coups from the royalist right as well as the Jacobin left, it continued the slow torture of the Dauphin (Louis XVII), who died in prison on June 10.

 

     “With the Directory,” writes Edmund Wilson, “the French Revolution had passed into the period of reaction which was to make possible the domination of Bonaparte. The great rising of the bourgeoisie, which, breaking out of the feudal forms of the monarchy, dispossessing the nobility and the clergy, had presented itself to society as a movement of liberation, had ended by depositing the wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of people and creating a new conflict of classes. With the reaction against the Terror, the ideals of the Revolution were allowed to go by the board. The five politicians of the Directory and the merchants and financiers allied with them were speculating in confiscated property, profiteering in army supplies, recklessly inflating the currency and gambling on the falling gold louis. And in the meantime, during the winter of 1795-96, the working people of Paris were dying of hunger and cold in the streets.”[126]

 

     This situation led to attempts to overthrow the government, the most significant of which was that of “Gracchus” Babeuf, who “rallied around him those elements of the Revolution who were trying to insist on its original aims. In his paper, The Tribune of the People, he denounced the new constitution of 1795, which had abolished universal suffrage and imposed a high property qualification. He demanded not merely political but also economic equality. He declared that he would prefer civil war itself to ‘this horrible concord which strangles the hungry’. But the men who had expropriated the nobles and the Church remained loyal to the principle of property itself. The Tribune of the People was stopped, and Babeuf and his associates were sent to prison.

 

     “While Babeuf was in jail, his seven-year-old daughter died of hunger. He had managed to remain poor all his life. His popularity had been all with the poor. His official posts had earned him only trouble. Now, as soon as he was free again, he proceeded to found a political club, which opposed the policies of the Directory and which came to be known as the Society of the Equals. They demanded in a Manifesto of the Equals  (not, however, at that time made public) that there should be ‘no more individual property in land; the land belonged to no one… We declare that we can no longer endure, with the enormous majority of men, labor and sweat in the service and for the benefit of a small minority. It is has now been long enough and too long that less than a million individuals have been disposing of that which belongs to more than twenty millions of their kind… Never has a vaster design been conceived or put into execution. Certain men of genius, certain sages, have spoken of it from time to time in a low and trembling voice. Not one of them has had the courage to tell the whole truth… People of France! Open your eyes and your heart to the fullness of happiness. Recognize and proclaim with us the Republic of Equals!’

 

     “The Society of Equals was also suppressed; Bonaparte himself closed the club. But, driven underground, they now plotted an insurrection; they proposed to set up a new directory. And they drafted a constitution that provided for ‘a great national community of goods’ and worked out with some precision the mechanics of a planned society. The cities were to be deflaed and the population distributed in villages. The State was to ‘seize upon the new-born individual, watch over his early moments, guarantee the milk and care of his mother and bring him to the maison nationale, where he was to acquire the virtue and enlightenment of a true citizen.’ There was thus to be equal education for all. All able-bodied persons were to work, and the work that was unpleasant or arduous was to be accomplished by everybody’s taking turns. The necessities of life were to be supplied by the government, and the people were to eat at communal tables. The government was to control all foreign trade and to pass on everything printed.

 

     “In the meantime, the value of the paper money had depreciated almost to zero. The Directory tried to save the situation by converting the currency into land warrants, which were at a discount of eight-two per cent the day they were issued; and there was a general belief on the part of the public that the government had gone bankrupt. There were in Paris along some five hundred thousand people in need of relief. The Babouvistes placarded the city with a manifesto…; they declared that Nature had given to every man an equal right to the enjoyment of every good, and it was the purpose of society to defend that right, that Nature had imposed on every man the obligation to work, and that no one could escape this obligation without committing a crime; that in ‘a true society’ there would be neither rich nor poor; that the object of the Revolution had been to destroy every inequality and to establish the well-being of all; that they Revolution was therefore ‘not finished’, and that those who had done away with the Constitution of 1793 were guilty of lese majesté against the people…

 

     “Babeuf’s ‘insurrectionary committee’ had agents in the army and the police, and they were doing such effective work that the government tried to send its troops out of Paris, and, when they refused to obey, disbanded them. During the early days of May, 1796, on the eve of the projected uprising, the Equals were betrayed by a stool pigeon and their leaders were arrested and put in jail. The followers of Babeuf made an attempt to rally a sympathetic police squadron, but were cut down by a new Battalion of the Guard which had been pressed into service for the occasion.

 

     “Babeuf was made a public example by being taken to Vendôme in a cage – an indignity which not long before had filled the Parisians with furty when the Austrians had inflicted it on a Frenchman…

 

     “[At this trial] the vote, after much disagreement, went against Babeuf. One of his sons had smuggled in to him a tin dagger made out of a candlestick, and when he heard the verdict pronounced, he stabbed himself in the Roman fashion, but only wounded himself horribly and did not die. The next morning (May 27, 1797) he went to the guillotine. Of his followers thirty were executed and many sentenced to penal servitude or deportation.”[127]

 

The French Revolution: (4) Napoleon Bonaparte

 

     Thus the revolution appeared to have lost its way, consumed in poverty, corruption and mutual blood-letting. It was saved by a young soldier, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was as sincerely faithful to the spirit of the revolution as Cromwell had been. Madame de Stael called Robespierre on horseback After all, he came from Corsica, which in 1755 had successfully rebelled from Genoa, and for which Rousseau wrote one of his most seminal works, Project de constitution pour la Corse, in 1765. But, like Cromwell (and Caesar), he found that in order to save the republic he had to take control of it and rule it like a king.

 

     His chance came on 19 Brumaire (November 10), 1799, when  he overthrew the Directory (he described parliamentarism as “hot air”), and frightened the two elective assemblies into submission. On December 13 a new constitution was proclaimed with Bonaparte as the first of three Consuls with full executive powers. And on December 15 the three Consuls declared: “Citizens, the Revolution is established upon its original principles: it is consummated…”[128]    

 

     Paul Johnson writes, “the new First Consul was far more powerful than Louis XIV, since he dominated the armed forces directly in a country that was now organized as a military state. All the ancient restraints on divine-right kingship – the Church, the aristocracy and its resources, the courts, the cities and their charters, the universities and their privileges, the guilds and their immunities – all had been swept away by the Revolution, leaving France a legal blank on which Bonaparte could stamp the irresistible force of his personality.”[129]

 

     But, again like Caesar and Cromwell, he could never confess to being a king in the traditional sense. Under him, in Davies’ phrase, “a pseudo-monarchy headed pseudo-democratic institutions; and an efficient centralized administration ran on a strange cocktail of legislative leftovers and bold innovation.”[130] So, as J.M. Roberts writes, while Napoleon reinstituted monarchy, “it was in no sense a restoration. Indeed, he took care so to affront the exiled Bourbon family that any reconciliation with it was inconceivable. He sought popular approval for the empire in a plebiscite and got it.[131]

 

     This was a monarchy Frenchmen had voted for; it rested on popular sovereignty, that is, the Revolution. It assumed the consolidation of the Revolution which the Consulate had already begun. All the great institutional reforms of the 1790s were confirmed or at least left intact; there was no disturbance of the land sales which had followed the confiscation of Church property, no resurrection of the old corporations, no questioning of the principle of equality before the law. Some measures were even taken further, notably when each department was given an administrative head, the prefect, who was in his powers something like one of the emergency emissaries of the Terror (many former revolutionaries became prefects)…”[132]

 

     Cromwell had eschewed the trappings and ceremonial of monarchy, but Napoleon embraced them with avidity. The trend towards monarchy and hierarchy was already evident elsewhere; and “earlier than is generally thought,” writes Philip Mansel, “the First Consul Bonaparte aligned himself with this monarchical trend, acquiring in succession a guard (1799), a palace (1800), court receptions and costumes (1800-02), a household (1802-04), a dynasty (1804), finally a nobility (1808)… The proclamation of the empire in May 1804, the establishment of the households of the Emperor, the Empress and the Imperial Family in July, the coronation by the pope in December of that year, were confirmations of an existing monarchical reality.”[133]

 

     Moreover, Napoleon spread monarchy throughout Europe. In the wake of his conquests, and excluding the direct annexations to the French Empire, the kingdoms and Grand Duchies of Italy, Venice, Rome, Naples, Lucca, Dubrovnik, Holland, Mainz, Bavaria, Württemburg, Saxony, Baden, Hesse-Darmstadt, Westphalia and Spain were all established or re-established with still greater monarchical power - and all ruled by Napoleon’s relations by blood or marriage. According to Stendhal, Napoleon’s court “totally corrupted” him “and exalted his amour propre to the state of a disease… He was on the point of making Europe one vast monarchy.”[134]

 

     “As one of his secretaries Baron Meneval wrote, he saw himself as ‘the pillar of royalty in Europe’. On January 18th, 1813, he wrote to his brother Jerome that his enemies, by appealing to popular feeling, represented ‘upheavals and revolutions… pernicious doctrines.’ In Napoleon’s opinion his fellow monarchs were traitors to ‘their own cause’ when in 1813 they began to desert the French Empire, or in 1814 refused to accept his territorial terms for peace…”[135]

 

     Jocelyn Hunt writes: “Kings before 1791 were said to be absolute but were limited by all kinds of constraints and controls. The Church had an almost autonomous status. Bonaparte ensured that the Church was merely a branch of the civil service. Kings were anointed by the Church, and thus owed their authority to God: Bonaparte took power through his own strength, camouflaged as ‘the General Will’ which, as Correlli Barnett acidly remarks, ‘became synonymous with General Bonaparte’.[136] Indeed, when he became emperor in 1804, he crowned himself...

 

     “The First Consul’s choice of ministers was a far more personal one than had been possible for the kings of France. Bonaparte established a system of meeting his ministers individually, in order to give his instructions. In the same way, Bonaparte chose which ‘ordinary’ citizens he would consult; kings of France had mechanisms for consulting ‘the people’ but these had fallen into disuse and thus, when the Estates General met in 1789, the effect was revolutionary. Bonaparte’s legislative body was, until 1814, submissive and compliant.…

 

     “Police control and limitations on personal freedom had been a focus of condemnation by the Philosophes before the Revolution, but had not been entirely efficient: a whole industry of importing and distributing banned texts had flourished in the 1770s and 1780s. Bonaparte’s police were more thorough, and so swingeing were the penalties that self-censorship rapidly became the safest path for a newspaper to take. Bonaparte closed down sixty of the seventy-three newspapers in Paris in January, 1800, and had a weekly summary prepared of all printed material, but he was soon able to tell his Chief of Police, Fouché, ‘They only print what I want them to.’[137] In the same way, the hated lettres de cachet appear limited and inefficient when compared to Bonaparte’s and Fouché’s record of police spies, trials without jury and imprisonment without trial. Bonaparte’s brief experience as a Jacobin leader in Ajaccio had taught him how to recognise, and deal with, potential opponents.[138]

 

     “The judiciary had stood apart from the kings of the ancien régime: while the King was nominally the supreme Judge, the training of lawyers and judges had been a matter for the Parlements, with their inherent privileges and mechanisms. The Parlements decided whether the King’s laws were acceptable within the fundamental laws of France. Under the Consulate, there were no such constraints on the legislator. The judges were his appointees, and held office entirely at his pleasure; the courts disposed of those who opposed or questioned the government, far more rapidly that had been possible in the reign of Louis XVI. Imprisonment and deportation became regularly used instruments of control under Bonaparte.

 

     “Kings of France were fathers to their people and had a sense of duty and service. Bonaparte, too, believed that he was essential to the good and glory of France, but was able to make his own decisions about what constituted the good of France in a way which was not open to the king. Finally, while the monarchy of France was hereditary and permanent, and the position of First Consul was supposed to be held for ten years, Bonaparte’s strength was demonstrated when he changed his own constitution, first to give him the role for life and then to become a hereditary monarch. All in all, no monarch of the ancien régime had anything approaching the power which Bonaparte had been permitted to take for himself…

 

     “When a Royalist bomb plot was uncovered in December, 1800, Bonaparte seized the opportunity to blame it on the Jacobins, and many were guillotined, with over a hundred more being exiled or imprisoned. The regime of the Terror had operated in similar ways to remove large numbers of potential or actual opponents. Press censorship and the use of police spies ensured that anti-government opinions were not publicly aired. The Declaration of the Rights of Man had guaranteed freedom of expression; but this freedom had already been eroded before Bonaparte’s coup. The Terror had seen both moral and political censorship, and the Directory had on several occasions exercised its constitutional right to censor the press. Bonaparte appears merely to have been more efficient…

 

     “Bonaparte certainly held power without consulting the French people; he took away many of the freedoms they had been guaranteed in 1789; he taxed them more heavily than they had been taxed before. [In 1803 he wrote:] ‘I haven’t been able to understand yet what good there is in an opposition. Whatever it may say, its only result is to diminish the prestige of authority in the eyes of the people’.”[139]

 

     In 1804, he even declared himself emperor with the name Napoleon, after which Beethoven tore out the title-page of his Eroica symphony, which had been dedicated to him, and said: “So he too is nothing but a man. Now he also will trample all human rights underfoot, and only pander to his own ambition; he will place himself above everyone else and become a tyrant…”[140] As Alexis de Tocqueville wrote: “Absolute government found huge scope for its rebirth [in] that man who was to be both the consummator and the nemesis of the Revolution.”[141] So Napoleon was undoubtedly a despot, but a despot who could claim many precedents for his despotism in the behaviour of the Jacobins and Directory. And if he was not faithful to the forms of the revolution in its early phase, replacing democracy (of a despotic kind) with monarchy (of a populist kind), he nevertheless remained faithful to its spirit.

 

     And what was that spirit? On the one hand, the principle that nobody and nothing should be independent of the State – in other words, the principle of totalitarianism. And on the other, the principle that the Nation was the supreme value, and serving and dying for the Nation the supreme glory. 

 

     And yet “at bottom,” as Johnson notes, “Bonaparte despised the French, or perhaps it would be more exact to say the Parisians, the heart of the ‘political nation’. He thought of them, on the basis of his experience during the various phases of the Revolution, as essentially frivolous.”[142] The truth is, therefore, that it was neither the State nor the Nation that Bonaparte exalted above all, – although he greatly increased the worship of both State and Nation in subsequent European history, – but himself.

 

     So the spirit that truly reigned in the Napoleonic era can most accurately be described as the spirit of the man-god, of the Antichrist, of whom Bonaparte himself, as the Russian Holy Synod quite rightly said, was the incarnation and forerunner. This antichristian quality is most clearly captured in Madame De Staël’s characterization: “I had the disturbing feeling that no emotion of the heart could ever reach him. He regards a human being like a fact or a thing, never as an equal person like himself. He neither hates nor loves… The force of his will resides in the imperturbable calculations of his egotism. He is a chess-master whose opponents happen to be the rest of humanity… Neither pity nor attraction, nor religion nor attachment would ever divert him from his ends… I felt in his soul cold steel, I felt in his mind a deep irony against which nothing great or good, even his own destiny, was proof; for he despised the nation which he intended to govern, and no spark of enthusiasm was mingled with his desire to astound the human race.”[143]

 

Napoleon and Catholicism

 

     The Revolution had already swept away all the complex structures of feudalism, thereby preparing the way for the totalitarian state. But Napoleon went further. Thus in addition to the measures discussed above, he abolished trade unions, introduced a standardised system of weights and measures, and a standardised system of education and legislation, the famous Code Napoléon. Everything, from religion and charity to economics and the government of friendly sister-republics, such as Holland, had to be controlled from the centre. And the centre was Napoleon.

 

     Napoleon’s attitude towards religion was on the one hand respectful and on the other hand manipulative and utilitarian. His respectfulness is revealed in the following remark: “There are only two forces in the world: the sword and the spirit; by spirit I mean the civil and religious institutions; in the long run the sword is always defeated by the spirit.”[144] On the other hand, his essentially unbelieving, utilitarian attitude is revealed in the following: “I see in religion not the mystery of the Incarnation but the mystery of order in society”.[145] “What is it that makes the poor man take it for granted that ten chimneys smoke in my palace while he dies of cold – that I have ten changes of raiment in my wardrobe while he is naked – that on my table at each meal there is enough to sustain a family for a week?  It is religion, which says to him that in another life I shall be his equal, indeed that he has a better chance of being happy there than I have.”[146]

 

     In other words, religion was powerful, and as such had to be respected. But it was powerful not because it was true, but because it was a – perhaps the – major means of establishing order in society. More particularly, it was the major means of establishing obedience to his rule – which is why he issued an Imperial Catechism whose purpose was to “bind by religious sanctions the conscience of the people to the august person of the Emperor”[147]:

 

Q: Why are we bound in all these duties towards our Emperor?

A: Because God… has made him the agent of His power on earth. Thus it is that to honour and serve our Emperor is to honour and serve God Himself.[148]

 

     Napoleon, writes Doyle, “never made the mistake of underestimating either the power of religion or the resilience of the Church. Under orders in the spring of 1796 to march on Rome to avenge the murder by a Roman mob of a French envoy, he was confronted by a Spanish emissary from the pontiff. ’I told him [the Spaniard reported], if you people take it into your heads to make the pope say the slightest thing against dogma or anything touching on it, you are deceiving yourselves, for he will never do it. You might, in revenge, sack, burn and destroy Rome, St. Peter’s etc. but religion will remain standing in spite of your attacks. If all you wish is that the pope urge peace in general, and obedience to legitimate power, he will willingly do it. He appeared to me captivated by this reasoning…’ Certainly he continued while in Italy to treat the Pope with more restraint than the Directory had ordered: and when, early the next year, the Cispadane Republic was established in territories largely taken from the Holy See, he advised its founders that: ‘Everything is to be done by degrees and with gentleness. Religion is to be treated like property.’ Devoid of any personal faith, in Egypt he even made parade of following Islam in the conviction that it would strengthen French rule. By the time he returned to Europe, it was clear that Pope Pius VI would not after all be the last…

 

     “This approach bore one important fruit: in his Christmas sermon for 1797 the new Pope, Pius VII, declared that Christianity was not incompatible with democracy – a very major concession to the revolution that later Popes would take back.

 

     “On his second entry into Milan, in June 1800, he convoked the city’s clergy to the great cathedral, and declared, even before Marengo was fought: ‘It is my firm intention that the Christian, Catholic and Roman religion shall be preserved in its entirety, that it shall be publicly performed… No society can exist without morality; there is no good morality without religion. It is religion alone, therefore, that gives to the State a firm and durable support…’”[149]

 

     Religious toleration was both in accordance with the ideals of democracy and politically expedient. Thus to the same clergy convocation he said: “The people is sovereign; if it wants religion, respect its will.” And to his own Council of State he said: “My policy is to govern men as the majority wish. That, I believe, is the way to recognize the sovereignty of the people. It was… by turning Muslim that I gained a hold in Egypt, by turning ultramontane that I won over people in Italy. If I were governing Jews, I should rebuild Solomon’s temple.”[150].

 

     It is in this astonishingly cynical attitude to religion that Napoleon reveals his modernity. It is what made him perhaps the closest forerunner to the Antichrist that had yet appeared on the stage of world history, and closer even, in some ways, than Lenin or Stalin. For the Antichrist will not – at first – persecute religion; he will rather try to be the champion of all religions – in order to subdue them all to his will. He will very likely be an ecumenist as Napoleon was. And he will rebuild Solomon’s temple…

 

     Napoleon’s first task in the religious sphere was to heal the breach between the Constitutional Church, which had accepted the revolution, and the non-jurors, who had rejected it. Only the non-jurors were recognised by the Pope, so an agreement had to be reached with Rome. Finally, on July 15, 1801, a Concordat was signed.

 

     “This document,” writes Cronin, “opens with a preamble describing Roman Catholicism as ‘the religion of the great majority of the French people’ and the religion professed by the consuls. Worship was to be free and public. The Pope, in agreement with the Government, was to re-map dioceses in such a way as to reduce their number by more than half to sixty. The holders of bishoprics were to resign and if they declined to do so, were to be replaced by the Pope. The First Consul was to appoint new bishops; the Pope was to invest them. The Government was to place at the disposal of bishops all the un-nationalized churches necessary for worship, and to pay bishops and curés a suitable salary.

 

     “The Concordat was an up-to-date version of the old Concordat, which had regulated the Church in France for almost 300 years. But it was less Gallican, that is, it gave the French hierarchy less autonomy. Napoleon conceded to the Pope not only the power of investing bishops, which he had always enjoyed, but the right, in certain circumstances, to depose them, which was something new. Napoleon did this in order to be able to effect a clean sweep of bishops.

 

     “Napoleon did not discuss the Concordat beforehand with his Council of State. When he did show it to them they criticized it as insufficiently Gallican. The assemblies, they predicted, would never make it law unless certain riders were added. Finally seventy ‘organic articles’ were drawn up and added to the Concordat. For example, all bulls from Rome were to be subject to the Government’s placet, one of which asserted that the Pope must abide by the decisions of an ecumenical council…”[151]

 

     In April, 1802, Napoleon reopened the churches in France, which proved to be one of his most popular measures, and it enabled him to enlist the Church in support of his government – as did, of course, his coronation by the Pope. Moreover, notes Johnson, “by making peace with the Church, he prepared the way for a reconciliation with the old landowners and aristocrats who had been driven into exile by the Revolution, and whom he wanted back to provide further legitimacy to his regime.”[152]

 

     “But even while seeking the Church’s support,” writes Cronin, “Napoleon kept firmly to the principle that the temporal and spiritual are two separate realms, and had to be kept separate in France. He might easily have used his growing authority to subordinate the Church to the State, but although he was occasionally tempted to do so, he quickly drew back… Equally, Napoleon refrained from subordinating the State to the Church. When bishops urged him to shut all shops and cabarets on Sundays so that the faithful should not be enticed from Mass, Napoleon replied: ‘The curé’s power resides in exhortations from the pulpit and in the confessional; police spies and prisons are bad ways of trying to restore religious practices.’”[153]

 

     However, while Napoleon wanted the Church to flourish, he was too fundamentally irreligious to allow it to escape the general control of the State. This was made abundantly clear at his coronation in 1804, when instead of allowing the Pope to crown him, he took the crown from his hands and crowned himself! “For the pope’s purposes,” he said to Cardinal Fesch, “I am Charlemagne… I therefore expect the pope to accommodate his conduct to my requirements. If he behaves well I shall make no outward changes; if not, I shall reduce him to the status of bishop of Rome…”[154] Not for nothing did Napoleon say: “If I were not me, I would like to be Gregory VII.” [155] Gregory had secularised the papacy by making it into a secular kingdom. Napoleon had done the same from the opposite direction…

 

     Again, he appointed a Minister of Religions to solve the day-to-day problems of the Church, and fixed the salary of curés at 500 francs. Then, in 1809, he occupied Rome and the Papal States and removed Pius from his position as ruler in exchange for a handsome salary. “Our Lord Jesus Christ,” he said, “although a descendant of David, did not want an earthly kingdom…” Pius then excommunicated Napoleon for his “blasphemy” and refused to invest his nominees to vacant bishoprics. Napoleon had still not tamed the rebellious priest by the time of his downfall…[156]

 

     Monsieur Emery, the director of Saint-Sulpice, defended the Pope, reminding Napoleon “that God had given the Pope spiritual power over all Christians. ‘But not temporal power,’ objected Napoleon. ‘Charlemagne gave him that, and I, as Charlemagne’s successor, intended to relieve him of it. What do you think of that, Monsieur Emery?’ ‘Sire, exactly what Bossuet thought. In his Declaration du clergé de France he says that he congratulates not only the Roman Church but the Universal Church on the Pope’s temporal sovereignty because, being independent, he can more easily exercise his functions as father of all the faithful.’ Napoleon replied that what was true for Bossuet’s day did not apply in 1811, when western Europe was ruled by one man, not disputed by several”.[157]

 

     Thus in France, as in England, the established Church survived the Revolution. The restoration of the one-man-rule went hand-in-hand with the restoration of the Church, if not to a position of independence, still less “symphony” with the State, at any rate of greater influence. In the longer term, however, the Catholic Church’s authority and influence continued to decline…

 

La Grande Nation

 

     With regard to the Nation, Napoleon managed to persuade his fellow-countrymen that everything he did was for the glory and honour of France, and that nothing was more important than the glory and honour of France. And so while his despotism angered some Frenchmen, the tickling of their pride was ample compensation, and enabled them reconcile themselves with the loss of their freedom. “As Frenchmen accorded more and more weight to Napoleon’s wishes, so the notion of honour came to the fore in the French Republic: honour and its sister concept, glory, patriotism à outrance and the chivalry that had made Napoleon crown Josephine…”[158]

 

     If the nation was the new Church, and Napoleon its new Christ, the revolution itself was the Holy Spirit. It blew where it wished, overthrowing kings, liberating subject peoples and making them into “real” nations. This liberation of nations was conceived as being a democratic, egalitarian process; it by no means implied the superiority of any one nation over the others, which would simply be a repetition, on the collective level, of the despotism that the revolution had come to destroy. The religion of the French revolution was a universalist religion based on equal rights for all men and all nations. It was believed that once the kings had been removed, the general will of each nation would reveal itself, spreading peace and harmony not only within, but also between, nations. Thus “sooner or later,” said Mirabeau to the National Assembly, “the influence of a nation that… has reduced the art of living to the simple notions of liberty and equality – notions endowed with irresistible charm for the human heart, and propagated in all the countries of the world – the influence of such a nation will undoubtedly conquer the whole of Europe for Truth, Moderation and Justice, not immediately perhaps, not in a single day…”[159]

 

     But it was not long before such noble sentiments were being transformed into a purely pagan pride. “’You are, among the nations, what Hercules was amongst the heroes,’ Robespierre assured his countrymen. ‘Nature has made you sturdy and powerful; your strength matches your virtue and your cause is that of the gods.’ France was unique in her destiny, she was La Grande Nation, and all interests were necessarily subordinate to hers. Her service was the highest calling, since it naturally benefited mankind.”[160]

 

     Soon it became evident to other nations, whether those bordering France or her overseas colonies, that the French believed not so much in the Nation (i.e. any and every nation) as the Nation (one particular nation, the only truly Great Nation) – which could only be France. Thus in 1802 Napoleon himself said: “Never will the French Nation give chains to men whom it has once recognized as free.”[161] And yet in the very same year, when the former French colony of Haiti became the first country to declare its freedom in the wake of the revolution, Napoleon tried to reintroduce slavery there, and his troops were defeated by black soldiers singing the Marseillaise...[162]

 

     And that was only the beginning. In the next thirteen years Napoleon created a swathe of suffering and destruction throughout Europe from Lisbon to Moscow that had not been seen since the invasions of the Huns and the Goths. In retrospect, the seemingly irrational and chaotic system of old Europe, whereby kings could buy and sell territories to which they were quite unrelated by birth or upbringing, turned out to have kept the peace far better than the system of more clearly defined, homogeneous nation-states that emerged as a result of the Napoleonic wars. This is not to say, of course, that there were no wars under the old system. But they tended to be short in duration, with relatively few casualties, which were mainly confined to the warrior class, and they were very quickly patched up by some redistribution of territories among the monarchs. By contrast, the revolutionary wars that began after 1792 were more like the religious wars of pre-1648 vintage: much bloodier and crueller, involving far greater casualties among the civilian populations.[163] Moreover, they never came to a real end, since the losers felt bound to recover the territories lost and avenge the wounds inflicted on their national or regional pride. After all, if the people, and not the king, was now sovereign, victory in war had to be won over the people (or rather, the “enemies” of “the people”) as well as the king. Thus as Napoleon exported the ideals of Freedom, Equality and Fraternity into neighbouring countries, their freedom was destroyed, their equality with their “brothers” who had “liberated” them was jettisoned, and the dream of universal brotherhood became the nightmare of universal war. For “abroad, liberty simply meant French rule.”[164]

 

     How did the internationalist dream turn into a nationalist nightmare? The problem was partly a conceptual one: it turned out to be notoriously difficult to define what “the nation” was, by what criteria it should be defined (territory? religion? blood? language?). Revolutionary definitions of who was a “patriot” – that is, the true member of the nation - invariably meant defining large sections of the population who did not accept this definition or did not come under it as being “aliens” or “traitors” or “enemies of the people”.

 

     But the problem went deeper: even when a certain degree of unanimity had been achieved in the definition of the nation, - as Napoleon achieved it for France, for example, in the period 1800-1813, - there were now no accepted limits on the national will, no authority higher than the nation itself. This inevitably resulted in nationalism in the evil sense of the word that has become so tragically familiar to us in twentieth-century fascism – not a natural pride in one’s own nation and its achievements, but the exaltation of the nation to the level of divinity, and of faith in the nation to the level of the true faith, the defence of which justified any and every sacrifice of self and others. If in “Dark Age” (i.e. Orthodox) and Medieval (i.e. Catholic) Europe, men had seen in the Church a higher, supranational authority which arranged “Truces of God” and served, at least in principle, as a higher court of appeal to which kings and nations submitted, this was now finally swept away by article three of the Rights of Man, which pitted the “general wills” of an ever-increasing number of sovereign nations against each other in apparently endless and irreconcilable hostility.

 

     Unless, that is, they all recognized France, the revolutionary nation par excellence, as their true nation. And there were some who did this; Thomas Jefferson, for example, American ambassador to Paris, said: “Every man has two countries – his own, and France.” Others, while not recognizing France as their own nation, nevertheless welcomed the conquering French armies into their own land Thus as late as 1806 the German philosopher Hegel called Napoleon “that world spirit” and hoped that he would defeat his opponents: “Everyone prays for the success of the French army”. Such a substitution of loyalty to the messianic revolutionary nation of the time rather than one’s own was to manifest itself again in the twentieth century, when millions of people around the world betrayed their own country for the sake of the greater glory of the Soviet Union…

 

     However, as captivation turned to captivity, pious internationalism (or French messianism) turned into violent xenophobia, and enthusiasm into disillusion. Among the nations that had been “forced to be free” by the French, only the Poles (conveniently protected by Germany from French invasion, and needing French support against Russia) remained faithful to the Napoleonic vision.

 

     Doyle writes: “An exuberant, uncompromising nationalism lay behind France’s revolutionary expansion in the 1790s: but when the French found, after this first impact of a nation in arms on its neighbours, was that the neighbours responded in kind. They found that the doctrine of the sovereignty of the nation, proclaimed by them at the outset of the Revolution in 1789, could be turned against them by other peoples claiming their own national sovereignty. In states long united by custom and language, such as the Dutch Republic, all the French example did was to reinforce patriotic sentiments already strong. In areas never before united, like Italy, it created a powerful national sentiment for the first time by showing that archaic barriers and divisions could be swept away. The first Italian nationalists placed their hopes in French power to secure their ends, but from the start their attitude was double-edged. ‘Italy,’ declared the winning entry for an essay competition on the best form of Italian government, sponsored by the new French regime in Milan in 1796, ‘has almost always been the patrimony of foreigners who, under the pretext of protecting us, have consistently violated our rights, and, while giving us flags and fine-sounding names, have made themselves masters of our estate. France, Germany and Spain have held lordship over us in turn… it is therefore best to provide… the sort of government capable of opposing the maximum of resistance to invasion.’ The tragedy for nationalistic Italian Jacobins was that, when popular revulsion against the French invaders swept the peninsula in 1798 and 1799, they found themselves identified with the hated foreigners. Elsewhere, peoples and intellectual nationalists found themselves more at one; and not the least of the reasons why France’s most inveterate enemies were able to resist her successfully was the strength of volunteering. An Austrian call for volunteers against the French produced 150,000 men in 1809. Three years later the Russians were able to supplement their normal armed forces with over 420,000 more or less willing recruits to drive out the alien invader. Only nationalism could successfully fight nationalism: and when it did, as Clausewitz… saw, it would be a fight to the death.”[165]

 

     Again, as Hobsbawm notes, the Anglo-French conflict had “a persistence and stubbornness unlike any other. Neither side was really – a rare thing in those days, though a common one today – prepared to settle for less than total victory”.[166] The main legacy of the revolution, therefore, was total war. War between classes, war between nations, war between religions.  Such was the “fraternity” the revolution of the revolution…

 

The Jews and the Revolution

 

     Of all the nationalisms stirred up by the revolution, the most important was that of the Jews. In fact, it was the French revolution that gave the Jews the opportunity to burst through into the forefront of world politics for the first time since the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. There were 39,000 of them in France in 1789; most (half according to one estimate, nine-tenths according to another[167]) were Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazim living in Alsace and Lorraine, which France had acquired under the terms of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.

 

     “It is important,” writes Nesta Webster, “to distinguish between these two races of Jews [the Ashkenazi and the Sephardim] in discussing the question of Jewish emancipation at the time of the Revolution. For whilst the Sephardim had shown themselves good citizens and were therefore subject to no persecutions, the Ashkenazim by their extortionate usury and oppressions had made themselves detested by the people, so that rigorous laws were enforced to restrain their rapacity. The discussions that raged in the National Assembly on the subject of the Jewish question related therefore mainly to the Jews of Alsace.”[168]

 

     The eighteenth century had already witnessed some important changes in the relationship between the State and Jewry. In England, the Jews had achieved emancipation de facto, if not de jure. This was helped by the small number of Jews in Britain, and the non-ideological, approach of the British government.

 

      It was a different matter on the continent, where a more ideological approach prevailed. In 1782 the Masonic Austrian Emperor Joseph II published his Toleranzpatent, whose purpose was that “all Our subjects without distinction of nationality and religion, once they have been admitted and tolerated in our States, shall participate in common in public welfare,… shall enjoy legal freedom, and encounter no obstacles to any honest way of gaining their livelihood and of increasing general industriousness… Existing laws pertaining to the Jewish nation… are not always compatible with these Our most gracious intentions.” Most restrictions on the Jews were removed, but these new freedoms applied only to the “privileged Jew” – that is, the Jew whom the State found “useful” in some way – and not to the “foreign Jew”. Moreover, even privileged Jews were not granted the right of full citizenship and craft mastership.[169] For Joseph wanted to grant tolerance to the Jews, but not full equality.

 

     As for France, “already, in 1784, the Jews of Bordeaux had been accorded further concessions by Louis XVI; in 1776 all Portuguese Jews had been given religious liberty and the permission to inhabit all parts of the kingdom. The decree of January 28, 1790, conferring on the Jews of Bordeaux the rights of French citizens, put the finishing touch to this scheme of liberation. [The Sephardic Jews of South-West France and papal Avignon, who were already more assimilated than their Ashkenazi co-religionists in Alsace, were given full citizenship in July, 1790.]  But the proposal to extend this privilege to the Jews of Alsace evoked a storm of controversy in the Assembly and also violent insurrections amongst the Alsace peasants.”[170]

 

     In their first debate on the subject, on September 28, 1789, they made a further important distinction between the nation and the individuals constituting the nation. Thus Stanislas Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre argued that “there cannot be a nation within a nation”, so “the Jews should be denied everything as a nation but granted everything as individuals.”[171] A separate nation of the Jews could not be allowed to exist within France. For “virtually all – moderates no less than radicals, Dantonists no less than Robespierrists, Christians as well as deists, pantheists, and atheists – held that equality of status in the state they were in their various ways intent on establishing was bound up of necessity with the elimination of all groups, classes, or corporations intermediate (and therefore mediating) between the state itself and the citizen.”[172]

 

     Vital writes: “The immediate issue before the Assembly was the admission of certain semi-pariah classes – among them actors and public executioners – to what came to be termed ‘active citizenship’. It was soon apparent, however, that the issues presented by the Jews were very different. It was apparent, too, that it would make no better sense to examine the Jews’ case in tandem with that of the Protestants. The latter, like the Jews, were non-Catholics, but their national identity was not in doubt, nor, therefore, their right to the new liberties being decreed for all. Whatever else they were, they were Frenchmen. No one in the National Assembly thought otherwise. But were the Jews Frenchmen? If they were not, could they become citizens? The contention of the lead speaker in the debate, Count Stanislaw de Clermont-Tonnerre, was that the argument for granting them full rights of citizenship needed to be founded on the most general principles. Religion was a private affair. The law of the state need not and ought not to impinge upon it. So long as religious obligations were compatible with the law of the state and contravened it in no particular it was wrong to deprive a person, whose conscience required him to assume such religious obligations, of those rights which it was the duty of all citizens qua citizens to assume. One either imposed a national religion by main force, so erasing the relevant clause of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen to which all now subscribed. Or else one allowed everyone the freedom to profess the religious opinion of his choice. Mere tolerance was unacceptable. ‘The system of tolerance, coupled.. to degrading distinctions, is so vicious in itself, that he who is compelled to tolerate remains as dissatisfied with the law as is he whom it has granted no more than such a form of tolerance.’ There was no middle way. The enemies of the Jews attacked them, and attacked him, Clermont-Tonnerre, on the grounds that they were deficient morally. It was also held of the Jews that they were unsociable, that their laws prescribed usury, that they were forbidden to mix with the French by marriage or at table or join them in defence of the country or in any other common enterprise. But these reproaches were either unjust or specious. Usury was blameworthy beyond a doubt, but it was the laws of France that had compelled the Jews to practise it. And so with most of the other charges. Once the Jews had title to land and a country of their own the practice of usury would cease. So would the unsociability that was held against them. So would much of their religious eccentricity [ces travers religieux]. As for the further argument, that they had judges and laws of their own, why so they did, and on this matter he, Clermont-Tonnerre, would say to his critics (coming to the passage in his address to the Assembly that would be quoted over and over again in the course of the two centuries that followed), that that indeed was impermissible.

 

     “’As a nation the Jews must be denied everything, as individuals they must be granted everything; their judges can no longer be recognized; their recourse must be to our own exclusively; legal protection for the doubtful laws by which Jewish corporate existence is maintained must end; they cannot be allowed to create a political body or a separate order within the state; it is necessary that they be citizens individually.’

 

     “There remained the question, what if, as some argued, it was the case that the Jews themselves had no interest in citizenship? Why in that case, he went on, ‘if they do not want it, let them say so, in which case expel them [s’ils veulent ne l’être pas, qu’ils le disent, et alors, qu’on les bannisse]’. The idea of a society of non-citizens within the state and a nation within a nation was repugnant to him. But in fact, the speaker concluded, that was not at all what the Jews wanted. The evidence was to the contrary. They wished to be incorporated into the nation of France.

 

     “Clermont-Tonnerre was promptly contradicted on this last, vital point by the abbé Maury. The term ‘Jew’, said the abbé did not denote a religious sect, but a nation, one which had laws which it had always followed and by which it wished to continue to abide. ‘To proclaim the Jews citizens would be as if to say that, without letters of naturalization and without ceasing to be English or Danish, Englishmen and Danes could become Frenchmen.’ But Maury’s chief argument was of a moral and social order. The Jews were inherently undesirable, socially as well as economically. They had been chased out of France, and then recalled, no less than seven times – chased out by avarice, as Voltaire had rightly put it, readmitted by avarice once more, but in foolishness as well.

 

     “’The Jews have passed seventeen centuries without mingling with the other nations. They have never engaged in anything but trade in money; they have been the plague of the agricultural provinces; not one of them has ever dignified [su ennoblir] his hands by driving a plough. Their laws leave them no time for agriculture; the Sabbath apart, they celebrate fifty-six more festivals than the Christians in each year. In Poland they possess an entire province. Well, then! While the sweat of Christian slaves waters the furrows in which the Jews’ opulence germinates they themselves, as their fields are cultivated, engage in weighing their ducats and calculating how much they can shave off the coinage without exposing themselves to legal penalties.’

 

     “They have never been labourers, Maury continued, not even under David and Solomon. And even then they were notorious for their laziness. Their sole concern was commerce. Would you make soldiers of them, the abbé asked. If you did, you would derive small benefit from them: they have a horror of celibacy and they marry young. He knew of no general who would wish to command an army of Jews either on the Sabbath – a day on which they never gave battle – or indeed at any other time. Or did the Assembly imagine that they could make craftsmen of them when their many festivals and sabbath days presented an insurmountable obstacle to such an enterprise. The Jews held 12 million mortgages in Alsace alone, he informed his colleagues. Within a month of their being granted citizenship they would own half the province outright. In ten years’ time they would have ‘conquered’ all of it, reducing it to nothing more than a Jewish colony – upon which the hatred the people of Alsace already bore for the Jews would explode.[173]

 

     “It was not that he, Maury, wished the Jews to be persecuted. ‘They are men, they are our brothers; anathema on whoever speaks of intolerance!’ Nor need their religious opinions disturb anyone [!!!]. He joined all others in agreeing that they were to be protected. But that did not mean that they could be citizens. It was as individuals that they were entitled to protection, not as Frenchmen.

 

     “Robespierre took the opposite line, supporting Clermont-Tonnerre. All who fulfilled the generally applicable conditions of eligibility to citizenship were entitled to the rights that derived from it, he argued, including the right to hold public office. And so far as the facts were concerned, much of what Maury had said about the Jews was ‘infinitely exaggerated’ and contrary to known history. Moreover, to charge the Jews themselves with responsibility for their own persecution at the hands of others, was absurd.

 

     “’Vices are imputed to them… But to whom should these vices be imputed if not to ourselves for our injustice?… Let us restore them to happiness, to country [patrie], and to virtue by restoring them to the dignity of men and citizens; let us reflect that it can never be politic, whatever anyone might say, to condemn a multitude of men who live among us to degradation and oppression.’”[174]

 

     Thus spoke the man who was soon to lead the most degrading and oppressive régime in European history to that date. Indeed, it is striking how those who spoke most fervently for the Jews – apart from leaders of the Jewish community such as the banker Cerfbeer and Isaac Beer – were Freemasons or Illuminati.

 

     Thus in the two years before the crucial debate on September 27, 1791, writes General Nechvolodov, “fourteen attempts were made to give the Jews civic equality and thirty-five major speeches were given by several orators, among them Mirabeau, Robespierre, Abbé Grégoire, Abbé Sièyes, Camille, Desmoulins, Vernier, Barnave, Lameth, Duport and others.

 

     “’Now there is a singular comparison to be made,’ says Abbé Lemann, ‘- all the names which we have just cited and which figure in the Moniteur as having voted for the Jews are also found on the list of Masons… Is this coincidence not proof of the order given, in the lodges of Paris, to work in favour of Jewish emancipation?’

 

     “And yet, in spite of the revolutionary spirit, the National Assembly was very little inclined to give equality of civil rights to the Jews. Against this reform there rose up all the deputies from Alsace, since it was in Alsace that the majority of the French Jews of that time lived….

 

     “But this opposition in the National Assembly did not stop the Jews. To attain their end, they employed absolutely every means.

 

     “According to Abbé Lemann, these means were the following:

 

     “First means: entreaty. A charm exercised over several presidents of the Assembly. Second: the influence of gold. Third means: logic. After the National Assembly had declared the ‘rights of man’, the Jews insisted that these rights should logically be applied to them, and they set out their ideas on this subject with an ‘implacable arrogance’.

 

     “Fourth means: recourse to the suburbs and the Paris Commune, so as to force the National Assembly under ‘threat of violence’ to give the Jews equality.

 

      “’One of their most thorough historians (Graetz),’ says Abbé Lemann, ‘did not feel that he had to hide this manoeuvre. Exhausted, he says, by the thousand useless efforts they had made to obtain civil rights, they thought up a last means. Seeing that it was impossible to obtain by reason and common sense what they called their rights, they resolved to force the National Assembly to approve of their emancipation.

 

     “’To this end, naturally, were expended vast sums, which served to establish the ‘Christian Front’ which they wanted.

 

     “’In the session of the National Assembly of January 18, 1791, the Duke de Broglie expressed himself completely openly on this subject: ‘Among them,’ he said, ‘there is one in particular who has acquired an immense fortune at the expense of the State, and who is spending in the town of Paris considerable sums to win supporters of his cause.’ He meant Cerfbeer.

 

     “At the head of the Christian Front created on this occasion were the lawyer Godard and three ecclesiastics: the Abbés Mulot, Bertoliot and Fauchet.

 

     “Abbé Fauchet was a well-known illuminatus, and Abbé Mulot – the president of the all-powerful Paris Commune, with the help of which the Jacobins exerted, at the time desired, the necessary pressure on the National and Legislative Assemblies, and later on the Convention.

 

     “What Gregory, curé of Embermeuil, was for the Jews in the heart of the National Assembly, Abbé Mulot was in the heart of the Commune.

 

     “However, although they were fanatical Jacobins, the members of the Commune were far from agreeing to the propositions of their president that they act in defence of Jewish rights in the National Assembly. It was necessary to return constantly to the attack, naturally with the powerful help of Cerfbeer’s gold and that of the Abbés Fauchet and Bertoliot. This latter declared during a session of the Commune on this question: ‘It was necessary that such a happy and unexpected event as the revolution should come and rejuvenate France… Let us hasten to consign to oblivion the crimes of our fathers.’

 

     “Then, during another session, the lawyer Godard bust into the chamber with fifty armed ‘patriots’ dressed in costumes of the national guard with three-coloured cockades. They were fifty Jews who, naturally provided with money, had made the rounds of the sections of the Paris Commune and of the wards of the town of Paris, talking about recruiting partisans of equality for the Jews. This had its effect. Out of the sixty sections of Paris fifty-nine declared themselves for equality (only the quartier des Halles abstained). Then the Commune addressed the National Assembly with an appeal signed by the Abbés Mulot, Bertoliot, Fauchet and other members, demanding that equality be immediately given to the Jews.

 

     “However, even after that, the National Assembly hesitated in declaring itself in the manner provided. Then, on September 27, the day of the penultimate session of the Assembly before its dissolution, the Jacobin deputy Adrien Duport posed the question of equality for the Jews in a categorical fashion. The Assembly knew Adrien Duport’s personality perfectly. It knew that in a secret meeting of the chiefs of Freemasonry which preceded the revolution, he had insisted on the necessity of resort to a system of terror. The Assembly yielded. There followed a decree signed by Louis XVI granting French Jews full and complete equality of rights…”[175]

 

     The power of the Jewish minority was revealed especially during the reign of terror under Robespierre. 2300 Catholic churches were converted into “temples of Reason”. And at that point some voices were raised, writes Tikhomirov, “demanding that the ban be spread onto the Jews also, and that circumcision be forbidden. These demands were completely ignored, and were not even put to the vote. In the local communes individual groups of especially wild Jacobins, who had not been initiated into higher politics, sometimes broke into synagogues, destroying the Torah and books, but it was only by 1794 that the revolutionary-atheist logic finally forced even the bosses to pose the question of the annihilation not only of Catholicism, but also of Jewry. At this point, however, the Jews were delivered by 9 Thermidor, 1794. Robespierre fell and was executed. The moderate elements triumphed. The question of the ban of Jewry disappeared of itself, while the Constitution of Year III of the Republic granted equal rights to the Jews.”[176]

 

     But this was not the end of the matter. In the late 1790s a new wave of Ashkenazis entered France from Germany, attracted by the superior status their French brothers now enjoyed. This was to lead to further disturbances in Alsace, which it was left to Napoleon to deal with…

 

     “Nevertheless,” as Paul Johnson writes, “the deed was done. French Jews were now free and the clock could never be turned back. Moreover, emancipation in some form took place wherever the French were able to carry the revolutionary spirit with their arms. The ghettos and Jewish closed quarters were broken into in papal Avignon (1791), Nice (1792) and the Rhineland (1792-3). The spread of the revolution to the Netherlands, and the founding of the Batavian republic, led to Jews being granted full and formal rights by law there (1796). In 1796-8 Napoleon Bonaparte liberated many of the Italian ghettos, French troops, young Jews and local enthusiasts tearing down the crumbling old walls.

 

     “For the first time a new archetype, who had always existed in embryonic form, began to emerge from the shadows: the revolutionary Jew. Clericalists in Italy swore enmity to ‘Gauls, Jacobins and Jews’. In 1793-4 Jewish Jacobins set up a revolutionary regime in Saint Esprit, the Jewish suburb of Bayonne. Once again, as during the Reformation, traditionalists saw a sinister link between the Torah and subversion.”[177]

 

     However, the above picture of the Jewish struggle for emancipation in Paris and, later, Bayonne should not obscure the fact that there was still very strong opposition to the idea of emancipation from within Jewry itself led especially by the rabbinic leaders of Ashkenazi Jewry in Poland.

 

     Thus Zalkind Hourwitz was a Polish Jew who won a prize for an essay advocating Jewish emancipation from the Royal Society for Arts and Sciences at Metz in 1787. Nevertheless, as Vital writes, he “made no bones about his view of the internal constraints to which Jews in all parts were subject through the workings of the rabbinical-Talmudic system: of the limits it set upon their worldly freedom, of the manner in which it effectively barred their entry into society on a basis of equality. The social liberation of the Jews was conditional, he believed, on the power that the rabbis and the parnassim [chief synagogue officials] jointly exercised over ordinary people in their daily lives being terminated – in great matters as in small. ‘Their rabbis and syndics [i.e. parnassim] must be strictly forbidden to assume the least authority over their fellows outside the synagogue, or refuse honours to those who have shaved off their beards, or curled their hair, or who dress like Christians, go to the theatre, or observe other customs that bear no actual relation to their religion, but derive from superstition alone as a means of distinguishing them from other peoples.’”[178]

 

     In France, it had been the less typical, socially marginalized Jews who had pressed for emancipation. Even the more acculturated Sephardic Jews of Bourdeaux and Bayonne had been slow to ask for emancipation, first, because they feared that they might have to pay for liberties which they already enjoyed de facto, and secondly, because they wanted to be clearly delineated from the Ashkenazi Jews of Alsace.

 

     The latter, continues Vital, “had been slower still to ask for liberation. There is no evidence of their authorized representatives pressing for anything remotely of the kind before the Revolution; and when they made their own first approach to the new National Assembly it was to ask for no more than an end to the special taxes laid upon them and the abolition of the residential, and travel restrictions to which they were subject. The greatest anxiety of the Alsatians was to retain their own internal communal autonomy – to which end, with only rare exceptions, they (at all events, their authorized representatives) were prepared to forgo emancipation altogether. Only when they learned that other branches of French Jewry, the small community in Paris among them, were prepared to yield to the demand that they give up their ancient corporate status did the Alsatians and Lorrainers fall, reluctantly, into line.”[179]

 

     The question: to emancipate or not to emancipate? was to cause bitter divisions in Jewry that have continued to the present day. It brought into sharp focus another question: was it possible for the Jews, while remain Jewish, ever to become an integral part of non-Jewish society? And if not, how were they to live – as a separate nation with its own homeland and language as the other Gentile nations, or in some other way?

 

     The extreme revolutionary zeal of many of the champions of Jewish emancipation, on the one hand, and the equally extreme bigotry and ghetto-creating mentality of the opponents of emancipation, on the other, suggested that there was no easy solution to this problem, even with the best intentions of the Gentile rulers.

 

     For, as Norman Stone points out, “Jewish emancipation was a double-edged operation. It required a fundamental change in the conduct and the attitudes both of the host societies and of the Jews themselves. It demanded the dismantling not only of the constraints imposed on Jews from outside but also of the ‘internal ghetto’ in Jewish minds. Modern concern with the roots of anti-Semitism sometimes overlooks the severity of the Jews’ own laws of segregation. Observant Jews could not hold to the 613 rules of dress, diet, hygience and worship if they tried to live outside their own closed community; and intermarriage was strictly forbidden. Since Judaic law taught that Jewishness was biologically inherited in the maternal line, Jewish women were jealously protected. A girl who dared to marry out could expect to be disowned by her family, and ritually pronounced dead. Extreme determination was needed to withstand such acute social pressures…”[180]

 

Napoleon and the Jews

 

     If the French revolution gave the Jews their first great political victory, Napoleon gave them their second. On May 22, 1799, Napoleon’s Paris Moniteur published the following report, penned from Constantinople on April 17: “Buonaparte has published a proclamation in which he invites all the Jews of Asia and Africa to come and place themselves under his flag in order to re-establish ancient Jerusalem. He has already armed a great number and their battalions are threatening Aleppo.”

 

     This was not the first time that the Jews had persuaded a Gentile ruler to restore them to Jerusalem. In the fourth century the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate allowed the Jews to return to Jerusalem and start rebuilding the Temple. However, fire came out from the foundations and black crosses appeared on the workers’ garments, forcing them to abandon the enterprise.[181]

 

     And the Jews were to be thwarted again. For British sea-power prevented Napoleon from reaching Jerusalem and making himself, as was reported to be his intention, king of the Jews. The Jews would have to wait over a century before another Gentile power – this time, the British – again offered them a return to Zion.

 

     Napoleon now learned what many rulers before and after had learned: that kindness towards the Jews does not make them more tractable. Nechvolodov writes: “Since the first years of the Empire, Napoleon I had become very worried about the Jewish monopoly in France and the isolation in which they lived in the midst of the other citizens, although they had received citizenship. The reports of the departments showed the activity of the Jews in a very bad light: ‘Everywhere there are false declarations to the civil authorities; fathers declare the sons who are born to them to be daughters… Again, there are Jews who have given an example of disobedience to the laws of conscription; out of sixty-nine Jews who, in the course of six years, should have formed part of the Moselle contingent, none has entered the army.’

 

     “By contrast, behind the army, they give themselves up to frenzied speculation.

 

     “’Unfortunately,’ says Thiers describing the entry of the French into Rome in his History of the Revolution, ‘the excesses, not against persons but against property, marred the entry of the French into the ancient capital of the world… Berthier had just left for Paris, Massena had just succeeded him. This hero was accused of having given the first example. He was soon imitated. They began to pillage the palaces, convents and rich collections. Some Jews in the rear of the army bought for a paltry price the magnificent objects which the looters were offering them.’

 

     “It was in 1805, during Napoleon’s passage through Strasbourg, after the victory of Austerlitz, that the complaints against the Jews assumed great proportions. The principal accusations brought against them concerned the terrible use they made of usury. As soon as he returned to Paris, Napoleon judged it necessary to concentrate all his attention on the Jews. In the State Council, during its session of April 30, he said, among other things, the following on this subject:

 

     “’The French government cannot look on with indifference as a vile, degraded nation capable of every iniquity takes exclusive possession of two beautiful departments of Alsace; one must consider the Jews as a nation and not as a sect. It is a nation within a nation; I would deprive them, at least for a certain time, of the right to take out mortgages, for it is too humiliating for the French nation to find itself at the mercy of the vilest nation. Some entire villages have been expropriated by the Jews; they have replaced feudalism… It would be dangerous to let the keys of France, Strasbourg and Alsace, fall into the hands of a population of spies who are not at all attached to the country.’”[182]

 

     Napoleon eventually decided on an extraordinary measure: to convene a 111-strong Assembly of Jewish Notables in order to receive clear and unambiguous answers to the following questions: did the Jewish law permit mixed marriages; did the Jews regard Frenchmen as foreigners or as brothers; did they regard France as their native country, the laws of which they were bound to obey; did the Judaic law draw any distinction between Jewish and Christian debtors? At the same time, writes Johnson, Napoleon “supplemented this secular body by convening a parallel meeting of rabbis and learned laymen, to advise the Assembly on technical points of Torah and halakhah. The response of the more traditional elements of Judaism was poor. They did not recognize Napoleon’s right to invent such a tribunal, let alone summon it…”[183]

 

     However, if some traditionalists did not welcome it, other Jews received the news with unbounded joy. “According to Abbé Lemann,” writes Nechvolodov, “they grovelled in front of him and were ready to recognize him as the Messiah. The sessions of the Sanhedrin [composed of 46 rabbis and 25 laymen from all parts of Western Europe] took place in February and March, 1807, and the Decision of the Great Sanhedrin began with the words:

 

     “’Blessed forever is the Lord, the God of Israel, Who has placed on the throne of France and of the kingdom of Italy a prince according to His heart. God has seen the humiliation of the descendants of ancient Jacob, and He has chosen Napoleon the Great to be the instrument of His mercy… Reunited today under his powerful protection in the good town of Paris, to the number of seventy-one doctors of the law and notables of Israel, we constitute a Great Sanhedrin, so as to find in us a means and power to create religious ordinances in conformity with the principles of our holy laws, and which may serve as a rule and example to all Israelites. These ordinances will teach the nations that our dogmas are consistent with the civil laws under which we live, an do not separate us at all from the society of men…’”[184]

 

     “Love of country is in the heart of Jews a sentiment so natural, so powerful, and so consonant with their religious opinions, that a French Jew considers himself in England, as among strangers, although he may be among Jews; and the case is the same with English Jews in France. To such a pitch is this sentiment carried among them, that during the last war, French Jews were fighting desperately against other Jews, the subject of countries then at war with France.”[185]

 

     “The Jewish delegates,” writes Platonov, “declared that state laws had the same obligatory force for Jews, that every honourable study of Jewish teaching was allowed, but usury was forbidden, etc. [However,] to the question concerning mixed marriages of Jews and Christians they gave an evasive, if not negative reply. ‘Although mixed marriages between Jews and Christians cannot be clothed in a religious form, they nevertheless do not draw upon them any anathema.”[186]

 

     On the face of it, the Decision of the Sanhedrin was a great triumph for Napoleon, who could now treat Jewry as just another religious denomination, and not a separate nation.[187] And indeed, as Douglas Reed says, “Orthodox Judaism, with the face of it turned towards the West, denied any suggestion that the Jews would form a nation within nations. Reform Judaism in time ‘eliminated every prayer expressing so much as even the suspicion of a hope or desire for any form of Jewish national resurrection’ (Rabbi Moses P. Jacobson).”[188]

 

     However, the Jews did not restrain their money-lending and speculative activities, as Napoleon had pleaded with them. On the contrary, only one year after the convening of the Great Sanhedrin, Napoleon was forced to adopt repressive measures against their financial excesses. Moreover, Napoleon created rabbinic consistories in France having disciplinary powers over Jews and granted rabbis the status of state officials – a measure that was strengthen the powers of the rabbis over their people. In time Jewish consistories were created all over Europe. They “began the stormy propaganda of Judaism amidst Jews who had partially fallen away from the religion of their ancestors, organised rabbinic schools and spiritual seminaries for the education of youth in the spirit of Talmudic Judaism.”[189]

 

     Moreover, as Tikhomirov points out, “no laws could avert the international links of the Jews. Sometimes they even appeared openly, as in Kol Ispoel Khaberim (Alliance Israelite Universelle), although many legislatures forbid societies and unions of their own citizens to have links with foreigners. The Jews gained a position of exceptional privilege. For the first time in the history of the diaspora they acquired greater rights than the local citizens of the countries of the dispersion. One can understand that, whatever the further aims for the resurrection of Israel might be, the countries of the new culture and statehood became from that time a lever of support for Jewry.”[190]

 

     Indeed, the main result of the Great Sanhedrin, writes Nechvolodov, “was to unite Judaism still more. “’Let us not forget from where we draw our origin,’ said Rabbi Salomon Lippmann Cerfbeer on July 26, 1808, in his speech for the opening of the preparatory assembly of the Sanhedrin:- ‘Let it no longer be a question of “German” or “Portuguese” Jews; although disseminated over the surface of the globe, we everywhere form only one unique people.’”[191]

 

     The emancipation of the Jews in France led to their emancipation in other countries under French influence, as we have seen. Even after the fall of Napoleon, on June 8, 1815, the Congress of Vienna decreed that “it was incumbent on the members of the German Confederation to consider an ‘amelioration’ of the civil status of all those who ‘confessed the Jewish faith in Germany.’”[192] Gradually, though not without opposition, Jewish emancipation spread throughout Europe.

 

Napoleon and the Latin American Revolutions

 

     Another kind of nationalism owed its origins to the impact of Napoleon, not on whole societies, but directly on certain individuals, who then tried to imitate Napoleon’s impact on society as a whole. Such individuals were generally ambitious adventurers who managed by hook or by crook to impose themselves on weakened government structures and then claim for themselves the mandate of the people, as if their individual will represented the “general will” of the people. Simple despotism, in other words, disguised as liberation from despotism. Very often these “liberated” peoples had no idea that they had been a distinct nation before, and would have been much happier without any “liberator”. They were indeed “forced to be free”, in Rousseau’s phrase.

 

     The most famous of the “liberators” was Simon Jose Antonio de la Santissima Trinidad de Bolivar. Bolivar is a good example of the terrible spiritual damage done to a whole generation of young men by the heroic image of Napoleon. Just as Napoleon himself stood between the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the passion of the Romantic age, uniting them in the image of himself fighting for both the ideals of the Enlightenment and the death-defying glory of the romantic hero, so did Bolivar and a host of similar adventurers in Central and South America aspire to unite national “liberation” with personal glory.

 

     “Bolivar arrived in the French capital just in time for Napoleon’s coronation as Emperor of the French, an event he watched with fascination. In March 1805 ... he saw Napoleon crown himself king of Italy. ‘I centred my attention on Napoleon and saw nothing but him out of that crowd of men,’ he wrote. He travelled on to Rome under the spell of this vision and there, after considering what he had seen, he ascended the Monte Sacro, where he fell on his knees and swore an oath before Rodriguez to liberate South America.”[193]

 

     Bolivar seized his chance after Napoleon deposed King Ferdinand VII of Spain, which eventually unleashed a strong nationalist backlash in Spain – but not before breaking the legal links between Spain and its colonies in the Americas. Returning to Venezuela, Boliva proceeded to win, lose and finally reconquer Caracas from the Spaniards in a series of civil wars distinguished by appalling savagery on both sides. Although the Venezuelan Republic had been proclaimed on a whites-only franchise in 1811, thereby excluding all Indians and blacks from “the nation”, and although Bolivar himself was a slave-owner and to all intents and purposes Spanish, on reconquering Caracas in 1813 he immediately likened all royalist Spaniards to wandering Jews, to be “cast out and persecuted”, and declared: “Any Spaniard who does not work against tyranny in favour of the just cause, by the most active and effective means, shall be considered an enemy and punished as a traitor to the country and in consequence shall inevitably be shot. Spaniards and Canarios, depend upon it, you will die, even if you are simply neutral, unless you actively espouse the liberation of America.”[194] Bolivar was as good as his word, and proceeded to slaughter the whole Spanish population of Caracas – whereupon the people he had supposedly come to liberate, the Indians and blacks, both free and slave, marched against him under the slogan of “Long live Ferdinand VII”! After murdering a further 1200 Spaniards in retaliation, Bolivar then harangued the inhabitants of Caracas, saying: “You may judge for yourselves, without partiality, whether I have not sacrificed my life, my being, every minute of my time in order to make a nation of you.”[195]

 

     Like his idol Napoleon, and many Latin American strongmen since, Bolivar did not like the people expressing its will in elections, which he called “the greatest scourge of republics [which] produce only anarchy”. The liberator of Mexico, Agustin de Iturbide, agreed, proclaiming himself Emperor in 1822. But such unrepublican immodesty was nothing compared to Bolivar’s, who “hung in the dining room of his villa outside Bogota a huge portrait of himself being crowned by two genii, with the inscription: ‘Bolivar is the God of Colombia’.”[196]

 

     Nor, in the end, did he have much time for the people he had liberated. Shortly after the assassination of his right-hand man, General José Antonio de Sucre, when he was in self-imposed exile in Europe, he admitted that independence was the only benefit he had brought “at the cost of everything else”, and declared: “America is ungovernable. He who serves the revolution ploughs the sea… This country will inexorably fall into the hands of uncontrollable multitudes, thereafter to pass under… tyrants of all colours and races. Those who have served the revolution have ploughed the sea. The only thing to do in America is emigrate.”[197] And again: “America can be ruled only by an able despotism.”[198]

 

     Despotism also prevailed in another “liberated” country of the region, Paraguay, where it became a “secular replacement” for the former “Jesuit communist empire”.[199]

 

     “After independence,” writes David Landes, “like other debris states of the great Hispanic empire, Paraguay had fallen almost immediately under the control of dictators. The laws said republic, but the practice was one-man rule – a mix of benevolent despotism and populist tyranny. The first of these dictators…, Dr. Gaspar Rodriguez de Francia, was something special. A Jacobin ideologue, and like many of the French variety, a lawyer by training, Francia was committed to a republic of equals and him more equal than the rest. He was he was the ‘organic leader’, the elitist embodying the popular will… Dr. Francia and his successors, Lopez father and son, would turn the country into an enlightened Sparta – egalitarian, literate, disciplined, and brave.”[200]

 

     “It is generally accepted,” writes Zamoyski, “that the former Spanish colonies never again achieved the wealth in which they had basked before 1810. Some maintain that they were also better governed, more lawful and more peaceful under Spanish rule than at any time since, and there is something to be said for this view.

 

     “Slavery was finally abolished in the former Spanish colonies in the late 1850s, but economic slavery remained endemic throughout the region. The manner in which independence and nationhood were forced upon these societies gave rise to systemic instability. The various Liberators could not count on devotion to a cause to animate their troops and supporters, as the cause was imaginary. Nor could they mobilize one whole section of the population on behalf of a specific interest for any length of time. And they certainly could not depend on colleagues, who were bound, sooner or later, to contest their authority. They therefore had to keep rearranging alliances and decapitating any faction that grew too strong. In order to enlist the loyalty and sympathy of the lower orders, they would make a point of drawing these into the army. But as such recruits became professionals, they cut their links with the classes they came from and grew into arrogant Praetorians who carried with them an element of incipient mutiny.”[201]

 

     There is a profound irony here. The cult of the nation introduced by article three of the Rights of Man was meant to unite the peoples, not disunite them. But in fact it divided and splintered the Americas, as it had divided and splintered Europe.

 

Romanticism and Nationalism

 

     Reference has already been made to that broader movement, known as Romanticism, which fed into the development of nationalism from the other side of the Rhine. Romanticism was born as a reaction to the Enlightenment and, more generally, to the whole classical concept of civilisation. If the English Enlightenment dominated the cultural life of the early 18th century, and the French Enlightenment - the later part of the century, then German Romanticism dominated the intellectual and cultural life of the 19th century.

 

     Hume had shown that the empirical, rationalist view of the world had, paradoxically, no rational foundations, for it led to a denial of the objective existence of God, the soul, morality and even of the external world. Kant desperately attempted to rescue something from Hume’s withering criticism. But ultimately he begat, not a rebirth of empiricism on rational foundations, but the German philosophy of idealism, which turned everything on its head by defining the world as spirit, the objective as the subjective.

 

     Romanticism is the counterpart in art to idealism in philosophy. Jacques Barzun attempts to define it thus: “In Romanticism thought and feeling are fused; its bent is toward exploration and discovery at whatever risk of error or failure; the religious emotion is innate and demands expression. Spirit is a reality but where it is placed varies and is secondary: the divine may be reached through nature or art. The individual self is a source of knowledge on which one must act; for one is embarked – engagé, as the 20C Existentialists say. To act, enthusiasm must overcome indifference or despair; impulse must be guided by imagination and reason. The search is for truths, which reside in particulars, not in generalities; the world is bigger and more complex than any set of abstractions, and it includes the past, which is never fully done with. Meditating on past and present leads to the estimate of man as great and wretched. But heroes are real and indispensable. They rise out of the people, whose own mind-and-heart provides the makings of high culture. The errors of heroes and peoples are the price of knowledge, religion, and art, life itself being a heroic tragedy.”[202]

 

     Sir Isaiah Berlin’s definition is also illuminating: “Since the Greeks, and perhaps long before them, men have believed that to the central questions about the nature and purpose of their lives, and of the world in which they lived, true, objective, universal and eternal answers could be found. If the answers could not be discovered by me, then perhaps by someone more expert or wiser than I; if not in the circumstances in which I found myself, then in others more propitious: in an innocent and happy past – a Garden of Eden from which our ancestors had for their sins been expelled, or perhaps in a golden age that still lay in the future, which posterity (perhaps after much labour and suffering) would, or at any rate could, one day reach. It was assumed that all the truly central problems were soluble in principle even if not in practice. Somewhere true answers to all genuine questions must exist, if not in the minds of men, then in the mind of an omniscient being – real or imaginary, material or ideal, a personal deity, or the universe come to full consciousness of itself.

 

     “This presupposition, which underlies most classical and Christian thought, orthodox and heretical, scientific and religious, was connected with the belief that, whether men knew it or not, the whole of life on earth was in some sense bound up with the search for answer to the great, tormenting questions of fact and of conduct; of what there is, was, will be, can be; of what to do, what to live by, what to seek, hope for, admire, fear, avoid; whether the end of life was happiness or justice or virtue or self-fulfilment or grace and salvation. Individuals, schools of thought, entire civilisations differed about what the answers were, about the proper method of discovering them, about the nature and place of moral or spiritual or scientific authority – that is to say, about how to identify the experts who are qualified to discover and communicate the answers. They argued about what constitutes such qualifications and justifies such claims to authority. But there was no doubt that the truth lay somewhere; that it could in principle be found. Conflicting beliefs were held about the central questions: whether the truth was to be found in reason or in faith, in the Church or the laboratory, in the insights of the uniquely privileged individual – a prophet, a mystic, an alchemist, a metaphysician – or in the collective consciousness of a body of men – the society of the faithful, the traditions of a tribe, a race, a nation, a social class, an academy of experts, an elite of uniquely endowed or trained beings – or, on the contrary, in the mind or heart of any man, anywhere, at any time, provided that he remained innocent and uncorrupted by false doctrines. What was common to all these views – incompatible enough for wars of extermination to have been fought in their name – was the assumption that there existed a reality, a structure of things, a rerum natura, which the qualified enquirer could see, study and, in principle, get right. Men were violently divided about the nature and identity of the wise – those who understood the nature of things – but not about the proposition that such wise men existed or could be conceived, and that they would know that which would enable them to deduce correctly what men should believe, how they should act, what they should live by and for.

 

     “This was the great foundation of belief which romanticism attacked and weakened. Whatever the differences between the leading romantic thinkers – the early Schiller and the later Fichte, Schelling and Jacobi, Tieck and the Schlegels when they were young, Chateaubriand and Byron, Coleridge and Carlyle, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Nietzsche, Baudelaire – there runs through their writings a common notion, held with varying degrees of consciousness and depth, that truth is not an objective structure, independent of those who seek it, the hidden treasure waiting to be found, but is itself in all its guises created by the seeker. It is not to be brought into being necessarily by the finite individual: according to some it is created by a greater power, a universal spirit, personal or impersonal, in which the individual is an element, or of which he is an aspect, an emanation, an imperfect reflection. But the common assumption of the romantics that runs counter to the philosophia perennis is that the answers to the great questions are not to be discovered so much as to be invented. They are not something found, they are something literally made. In its extreme Idealistic form it is a vision of the entire world. In its more familiar form, it confines itself to the realm of values, ideals, rules of conduct – aesthetic, religious, social, moral, political – a realm seen not as a natural or supernatural order capable of being investigated, described and explained by the appropriate method – rational examination or some more mysterious procedure – but as something that man creates, as he creates works of art; not by imitating, or even obtaining illumination from, pre-existent models or truths, or by applying pre-existent truths or rules that are objective, universal, eternal, unalterable but by an act of creation, the introduction into the world of something literally novel – the activity, natural or supernatural, human or in part divine, owing nothing to anything outside it (in some versions because nothing can be conceived as being outside it), self-subsistent, self-justified, self-fulfilling. Hence that new emphasis on the subjective and ideal rather than the objective and the real, on the process of creation rather than its effects, on motives rather than consequences; and, as a necessary corollary of all this, on the quality of the vision, the state of mind or soul of the acting agent – purity of heart, innocence of intention, sincerity of purpose rather than getting the answer right, that is, accurate correspondence to the ‘given’. Hence the emphasis on activity, movement that cannot be reduced to static segments, the flow that cannot be arrested, frozen, analysed without being thereby fatally distorted; hence the constant protest against the reduction of ‘life’ to dead fragments, of organism to ‘mere’ mechanical or uniform units; and the corresponding tendency towards similes and metaphors drawn from ‘dynamic’ sciences – biology, physiology, introspective psychology – and the worship of music, which, of all the arts, appears to have the least relation to universally observable, uniform natural order. Hence, too, the celebration of all forms of defiance directed against the ‘given’ – the impersonal, the ‘brute fact’ in morals or in politics – or against the static and the accepted, and the value placed on minorities and martyrs as such, no matter what the ideal for which they suffered.

 

     “This, too, is the source of the doctrine that work is sacred as such, not because of its social function, but because it is the imposition of the individual or collective personality, that is, activity, upon inert stuff. The activity, the struggle is all, the victory nothing: in Fichte’s words, ‘Frei sein ist nichts – frei werden ist der Himmel’ (‘To be free is nothing – to become free is very heaven’). Failure is nobler than success. Self-immolation for a cause is the thing, not the validity of the cause itself, for it is the sacrifice undertaken for its sake that sanctifies the cause, not some intrinsic property of it.

 

     “These are the symptoms of the romantic attitude. Hence the worship of the artist, whether in sound, or word, or colour, as the highest manifestation of the ever-active spirit, and the popular image of the artist in his garret, wild-eyed, wild-haired, poor, solitary, mocked-; but independent, free, spiritually superior to his philistine tormentors. This attitude has a darker side too: worship not merely of the painter or the composer or the poet, but of that more sinister artists whose materials are men – the destroyer of old societies, and the creator of new ones – no matter at what human cost: the superhuman leader who tortures and destroys in order to build on new foundations – Napoleon in his most revolutionary aspect. It is this embodiment of the romantic ideal that took more and more hysterical forms and in its extreme ended in violent irrationalism and Fascism. Yet this same outlook also bred respect for individuality, for the creative impulse, for the unique, the independent, for freedom to live and act in the light of personal, undictated beliefs and principles, of undistorted emotional needs, for the value of personal life, of personal relationships, of the individual conscience, of human rights. The positive and negative heritage of romanticism – on the one hand contempt for opportunism, regard for individual variety, scepticism of oppressive general formulae and final solutions, and on the other self-prostration before superior beings and the exaltation of arbitrary power, passion and cruelty – these tendencies, at once reflected and promoted by romantic doctrines, have done more to mould both the events of our century and the concepts in terms in which they are viewed and explained than is commonly recognised in most histories of our time.”[203]

 

     Romanticism was an individualist attitude par excellence: but it had its collectivist analogues, including nationalism, which may therefore be said to have been nurtured from the streams both of the French Enlightenment and of the German Romantic anti-Enlightenment. Thus “for Byronic romantics,” writes Berlin, “’I’ is indeed an individual, the outsider, the adventurer, the outlaw, he who defies society and accepted values, and follows his own – it may be to his doom, but this is better than conformity, enslavement to mediocrity. But for other thinkers ‘I’ becomes something much more metaphysical. It is a collective – a nation, a Church, a Party, a class, an edifice in which I am only a stone, an organism of which I am only a tiny living fragment. It is the creator; I myself matter only in so far as I belong to the movement, the race, the nation, the class, the Church; I do not signify as a true individual within this super-person to whom my life is organically bound. Hence German nationalism: I do this not because it is good or right or because I like it – I do it because I am a German and this is the German way to live. So also modern existentialism – I do it because I commit myself to this form of existence. Nothing makes me; I do not do it because it is an objective order which I obey, or because of universal rules to which I must adhere; I do it because I create my own life as I do; being what I am, I give it direction and I am responsible for it. Denial of universal values, this emphasis on being above all an element in, and loyal to, a super-self, is a dangerous moment in European history, and has led to a great deal that has been destructive and sinister in modern times; this is where it begins, in the political ruminations and theories of the earliest German romantics and their disciples in France and elsewhere.”[204]

 

German Nationalism

 

     Thus modern European nationalism is the fruit of the union of two ideas coming from two different directions: the French Enlightenment idea of the sovereignty and rights of the Nation, and the German Romantic idea of the uniqueness and self-justification of the Nation. However, if these were the general ideological sources of modern nationalism, in the particular cases of French and German nationalism the immediate causes were more mundane: in the French case, pride, the pride of knowing that France was the first nation to proclaim and realise the ideals of the revolution, and in the German case wounded pride, “some form of collective humiliation"[205] as a result of Napoleon’s victories.

 

     In its early stages Kant, Hegel and Goethe had all praised the Revolution; and Kant’s disciple, Fichte, had even declared that “henceforth the French Republic alone can be the country of the Just”. “But,” writes Zamoyski, “as the revolution progressed, the feeling grew in Germany that the French, with their habitual shallowness, had got it all wrong. They had allowed the pursuit of liberty to degenerate into mob rule and mass slaughter of innocent people because they perceived liberty in mechanical terms. German thinkers were more interested in ‘real liberty', and many believed that it was the ‘corrupt’ nature of the French that had doomed the revolution to failure. Such conclusions allowed for a degree of smugness, suggesting as they did that the French Enlightenment, for all its brilliance, had been flawed, while German intellectual achievements had been more profound and more solid.

 

     “Fichte identified Germany’s greatness as lying in her essentially spiritual destiny. She would never stoop to conquer others, and while nations such as the French, the English or the Spanish scrambled for wealth and dominance, Germany’s role was to uphold the finest values of humanity.[206] Similar claims to a moral mission for Germany were made by Herder, Hölderlin, Schlegel and others…

 

     “It had been central to Herder’s argument that each nation, by virtue of its innate character, had a special role to play in the greater process of history. One after another, nations ascended the world stage to fulfil their ordained purpose. The French were crowding the proscenium, but there was a growing conviction that Germany’s time was coming, and her destiny was about to unfold. The Germans certainly seemed ready for it. The country was awash with under-employed young men, and since the days of the proto-romantic movement of Sturm und Drang the concept of action, both as a revolt against stultifying rational forces and as a transcendent act of self-assertion, had become well established. Fichte equated virtually any action, provided it was bold unfettered, with liberation.

 

     “The problem was that the nation was still not properly constituted. Some defined it by language and culture, or, like Fichte, by a level of consciousness. The Germans were, according to him, more innately creative than other nations, being the only genuine people in Europe, an Urvolk, speaking the only authentic language, Ursprache. Others saw the nation as a kind of church, defined by the ‘mission’ of the German people. Adam Müller affirmed that this mission was to serve humanity with charity, and that any man who dedicated himself to this common purpose should be considered a German. In his lectures of 1806, Fichte made the connection between committed action and nationality. Those who stood up and demonstrated their vitality were part of the Urvolk, those who did not were un-German. Hegel saw the people as a spiritual organism, whose expression, the collective spirit or Volksgeist, was its validating religion. The discussion mingled elements of theology, science and metaphysics to produce uplifting and philosophically challenging confusion.

 

     “But in the absence of clear geographical or political parameters, Germany’s national existence was ultimately dependent on some variant of the racial concept. And this began to be stated with increasing assertiveness. ‘In itself every nationality is a completely closed and rounded whole, a common tie of blood relationship unites all its members; all… must be of one mind and must stick together like one man’, according to Joseph Görres, who had once been an enthusiastic internationalist. ‘This instinctive urge that binds all members into a whole is a law of nature which takes preference over all artificial contracts… The voice of nature in ourselves warns us and points to the chasm between us and the alien’.

 

     “The location and identification of this ‘closed and rounded whole’ involved not just defining German ethnicity, but also delving into the past in search of a typically German and organic national unit to set against the old rationalist French view of statehood based on natural law and the rights of man. The bible of this tendency was Tacitus’s Germania. Placed in its own time, this book is as much about Rome as about Germanic tribes. It imagines the ultimate non-Rome, a place that had not been cleared and cultivated, and a people innocent of the arts of industry and leisure. The forest life it describes is the antithesis to the classical culture of Rome. It is also in some ways the original noble savage myth, representing everything that decadent Rome had lost; beneath Tacitus’s contempt for the savage denizens of the forest lurks a vague fear that by gaining in civilization the Romans had forfeited certain rugged virtues.

 

     “The German nationalists picked up this theme, which mirrored their relation to French culture. Roma and Germania, the city and the forest, corruption and purity, could stand as paradigms for the present situation. The ancient Teutonic hero Arminius (Hermann) had led the revolt of the German tribes against Rome and defeated the legions in the Teutoburg Forest. His descendants who aspired to throw off the ‘Roman’ universalism of France could take heart.”[207]

 

     Dostoyevsky developed the theme of Germany versus Rome: “Germany’s aim is one; it existed before, always. It is her Protestantism – not that single formula of Protestantism which was conceived in Luther’s time, but her continual Protestantism, her continual protest against the Roman world, ever since Arminius, - against everything that was Rome and Roman in aim, and subsequently – against everything that was bequeathed by ancient Rome to the new Rome and to all those peoples who inherited from Rome her idea, her formula and element; against the heir of Rome and everything that constitutes this legacy…

 

     “Ancient Rome was the first to generate the idea of the universal unity of men, and was the first to start thinking of (and firmly believing in) putting it practically into effect in the form of universal empire. However, this formula fell before Christianity – the formula but not the idea. For this idea is that of European mankind; through this idea its civilization came into being; for it alone mankind lives.

 

     “Only the idea of the universal Roman empire succumbed, and it was replaced by a new ideal, also universal, of a communion in Christ. This new ideal bifurcated into the Eastern ideal of a purely spiritual communion of men, and the Western European, Roman Catholic, papal ideal diametrically opposed to the Eastern one.

 

     “This Western Roman Catholic incarnation of the idea was achieved in its own way, having lost, however, its Christian, spiritual foundation and having replaced it with the ancient Roman legacy. [The] Roman papacy proclaimed that Christianity and its idea, without the universal possession of lands and peoples, are not spiritual but political. In other words, they cannot be achieved without the realization on earth of a new universal Roman empire now headed not by the Roman emperor but by the Pope. And thus it was sought to establish a new universal empire in full accord with the spirit of the ancient Roman world, only in a different form.

 

     “Thus, we have in the Eastern ideal – first, the spiritual communion of mankind in Christ, and thereafter, in consequence of the spiritual unity of all men in Christ and as an unchallenged deduction therefrom – a just state and social communion. In the Roman interpretation we have a reverse situation: first it is necessary to achieve firm state unity in the form of a universal empire, and only after that, perhaps, spiritual fellowship under the rule of the Pope as the potentate of this world.

 

     “Since that time, in the Roman world this scheme has been progressing and changing uninterruptedly, and with its progress the most essential part of the Christian element has been virtually lost. Finally, having rejected Christianity spiritually, the heirs of the ancient Roman world likewise renounced [the] papacy. The dreadful French revolution has thundered. In substance, it was but the last modification and metamorphosis of the same ancient Roman formula of universal unity. The new formula, however, proved insufficient. The new idea failed to come true. There even was a moment when all the nations which had inherited the ancient Roman tradition were almost in despair. Oh, of course, that portion of society which in 1789 won political leadership, i.e. the bourgeoisie, triumphed and declared that there was no necessity of going any further. But all those minds which by virtue of the eternal laws of nature are destined to dwell in a state of everlasting universal fermentation seeking new formulae of some ideal and a new word indispensable to the progress of the human organism, - they all rushed to the humiliated and the defrauded, to all those who had not received their share in the new formula of universal unity proclaimed by the French revolution of 1789. These proclaimed a new word of their own, namely, the necessity of universal fellowship not for the equal distribution of rights allotted to a quarter, or so, of the human race, leaving the rest to serve as raw material and a means of exploitation for the happiness of that quarter of mankind, but, on the contrary – for universal equality, with each and every one sharing the blessings of this world, whatever these may prove. It was decided to put this scheme into effect by resorting to all means, i.e., not by the means of Christian civilisation – without stopping at anything.

 

     “Now, what has been Germany’s part in this, throughout these two thousand years? The most characteristic and essential trait of this great, proud and peculiar people – ever since their appearance on the historical horizon – consisted of the fact that they never consented to assimilate their destiny and their principles to those of the outermost Western world, i.e. the heirs of the ancient Roman tradition. The Germans have been protesting against the latter throughout these two thousand years. And even though they did not (never did so far) utter ‘their word’, or set forth their strictly formulated ideal in lieu of the ancient Roman idea, nevertheless, it seems that, within themselves, they always were convinced that they were capable of uttering this ‘new word’ and of leading mankind. They struggled against the Roman world as early as the times of Arminius, and during the epoch of Roman Christianity they, more than any other nation, struggled for the sovereign power against the new Rome.

 

     “Finally, the Germans protested most vehemently, deriving their formula of protest from the innermost spiritual, elemental foundation of the Germanic world: they proclaimed the freedom of inquiry, and raised Luther’s banner. This was a terrible, universal break: the formula of protest had been found and filled with a content; even so it still was a negative formula, and the new, positive word was not yet uttered.

 

     “And now, the Germanic spirit, having uttered this ‘new word’ of protest, as it were, fainted for a while, quite parallel to an identical weakening of the former strictly formulated unity of the forces of his adversary. The outermost Western world, under the influence of the discovery of America, of new sciences and new principles, sought to reincarnate itself in a new truth, in a new phase.

 

     “When, at the time of the French revolution, the first attempt at such a reincarnation took place, the Germanic spirit became quite perplexed, and for a time lost its identity and faith in itself. It proved impotent to say anything against the new ideas of the outermost Western world. Luther’s Protestantism had long outlived its time, while the idea of free inquiry had long been accepted by universal science. Germany’s enormous organism more than ever began to feel that it had no flesh, so to speak, and no form for self-expression. It was then that the pressing urge to consolidate itself, at least outwardly, into a harmonious organism was born in Germany in anticipation of the new future aspects of her eternal struggle against the outermost Western world…”[208]

 

     This “pressing urge” could only be satisfied by the creation of a powerful state, the German Reich. For, wrote Fichte: “Though… the bones of our national unity… may have bleached and died in the storms and rains and burning suns of several centuries, yet the reanimating breath of the spirit world has not ceased to inspire. It will yet raise the dead bones of our national body and join them bone to bone so that they shall stand forth grandly with a new life… No man, no god, nothing in the realm of possibility can help us, but we alone must help ourselves, as long as we deserve it.”[209]

 

     Striking here is the Biblical imagery on the one hand (the vision of the dead bones from Ezekiel 37), and the explicit affirmation that “no man, no god” can help the German nation in its quest for resurrection. How different this quasi-Christian, but in fact pagan call was from the much more Christian call to arms issued by the Russian Church and State to its people only five years later! This shows that the revival of German nationalism owed less to the resurrection of Christian faith than to the resurrection of paganism, and of the myths of the pagan German gods; whose final burial would come over a century later, in the ruins of Nazi Berlin…

 

     “Fichte,” writes Paul Johnson, “was much impressed by Niccolò Machiavelli and saw life as a continuing struggle for supremacy among the nations. The nation-state most likely to survive and profit from this struggle was the one which extended its influence over the lives of its people most widely. And such a nation-state – Germany was the obvious example – would naturally be expansive. ‘Every nation wants to disseminate as widely as possible the good points which are peculiar to it. And, in so far as it can, it wants to assimilate the entire human race to itself in accordance with an urge planted in men by God, an urge on which the community of nations, the friction between them, and their development towards perfection rest.’

 

     “This was a momentous statement because it gave the authority of Germany’s leading academic philosopher to the proposition that the power impulse of the state was both natural and healthy, and it placed the impulse in the context of a moral world view. Fichte’s state was totalitarian and expansive, but it was not revolutionary. Its ‘prince” ruled by hereditary divine right. But ‘the prince belongs to his nation just as wholly and completely as it belongs to him. Its destiny under divine providence is laid in his hands, and he is responsible for it.’ So the prince’s public acts must be moral, in accordance with law and justice, and his private life must be above reproach. In relations between states, however, ‘there is neither law nor justice, only the law of strength. This relationship places the divine, sovereign fights of fate and of world rule in the prince’s hands, and it raises him above the commandments of personal morals and into a higher moral order whose essence is contained in the words, Salus et decus populi suprema lex esto.’ This was an extreme and menacing statement that justified any degree of ruthlessness by the new, developing nation-state in its pursuit of self-determination and self-preservation. The notion of a ‘higher moral order’, to be determined by the state’s convenience, was to find expression, in the 20th century, in what Lenin called ‘the Revolutionary Conscience’ and Hitler ‘the Higher Law of the Party’. Moreover, there was no doubt what kind of state Fichter had in mind. It was not only totalitarian but German. In his Addresses to the German Nation (1807), he laid down as axiomatic that the state of the future can only be the national state, in particular the German national state, the German Reich.”[210]

 

The German War of Liberation

 

     It was the German Masons who first changed towards Napoleon. As Tikhomirov writes, “having betrayed their fatherland at first, they raised their voices against the French, by virtue of which the German national movement arose.”[211] The stimulus to this was undoubtedly, as Zamoyski writes, “Napoleon’s crushing defeat of the Prussians at the Battle of Jena in 1806. The humiliation of seeing the prestigious army created by the great Frederick trounced by the French led to painful self-appraisal and underlined the need for regeneration. But it also stung German pride and dispelled the last shreds of sympathy for France – and, with them, the universalist dreams of the previous decade.

 

     “The French became villains, and Napoleon himself was even portrayed as the Antichrist, a focus for the crusading struggle of deliverance that would regenerated Germany. Poets composed patriotic verse and anti-Napoleonic songs…

 

     “An analogous wave of renewal swept through society. In 1808 the Tugenbund or League of Virtue, a society for the propagation of civic virtue, was formed in Königsberg and quickly ramified through Prussia. In 1809 Ludwig Jahn founded the more middle-class Deutsche Bund, based in Berlin. Joseph Görres demanded that all foreign elements be expunged from national life, so that essential German characteristics might flourish, and declared that no power could stand in the way of a nation intent on defending its soul. ‘That to which the Germans aspire will be granted to them, the day when, in their interior, they will have become worthy of it.’ Even the archetypically Enlightenment cosmopolitan Wilhelm von Humboldt was turning into a Prussian patriot. He was reorganizing the state education system at the time, and manage to transform it into a curiously spiritual one in which education and religion of state are inextricably intertwined.

 

    “But while the mood changed, reality had not. Germany was still divided and cowered under French hegemony. To the deep shame of much of her officer corps, Prussia was still an ally of France when Napoleon invaded Russia in 1812. Her forces, which did not take part in the march on Moscow, were to support the French and secure their flank in East Prussia. And it was when the frozen remnants were trudging back into Prussia and Poland that this support would have been most welcome. But it was precisely then that the Prussian military judged it safe to show their colours. General von Yorck, in command of 14,000 men in East Prussia, found himself in a pivotal position. With his support, Marshal Macdonald would be able to hold the line of the River Niemen and keep the Russians out of Poland; without it, he had no option but full retreat. The Prussian general had been in touch with the Russians for some time, through the intermediary of a young German officer in Russian service by the name of Carl von Clausewitz. On Christmas Day 1812 Yorck met the commander of the Russian advance guard and, by a convention he signed with them at Tauroggen, repudiated Prussia’s alliance with France. It was an act of mutiny, the first in a series of acts by the German army to ‘save’ the fatherland against the orders of its political leaders. It was also the signal for all the nationalists to come out into the open.

 

     “The irascible Ernst Moritz Arndt was well to the fore. ‘Oh men of Germany!’ he exhorted, ‘feel again your God, hear and fear the eternal, and you heard and fear also your Volk; you feel again in God the honour and dignity of your fathers, their glorious history rejuvenates itself again in you, their firm and gallant virtue reblossoms in you, the whole German Fatherland stands again before you in the august halo of past centuries… One faith, one love, one courage, and one enthusiasm must gather again the whole German Volk in brotherly community… Be Germans, be one, will to be one by love and loyalty, and no devil will vanquish you.’

 

     “The king of Prussia did not feel quite brave enough to ‘be German’ yet. He ordered the arrest of Yorck, and then moved to Breslau, where he was out of reach of the French. In March 1813, when he saw that it was safe for him to jump on the anti-Napoleon bandwagon, Frederick William announced the formation of citizens’ volunteer forces, the Landwehr and the Landsturm. On 17 March he issued a proclamation to the effect that his soldiers would ‘fight for our independence and the honour of the Volk’, and summoned every son of the fatherland to participate. ‘My cause is the cause of my Volk,’ he concluded, less than convincingly. But nobody was looking too closely at anyone’s motives in the general excitement. The cause of the German fatherland justified everything. ‘Strike them dead!’ Heinrich von Kleist had urged the soldiers setting off to war with the French. ‘At the last judgement you will not be asked for your reasons!’

 

     “The campaign of 1813, when the patched-up Napoleonic forces attempted to stand up to the combined armies of Russia, Prussia, Sweden and Austria, and finally succumbed at Leipzig, should, according to Chateaubriand, go down in history as ‘the campaign of young Germany, of the poets’. That was certainly the perception. The by no means young Fichte finished his lecture on the subject of duty and announced to his students at Berlin that the course was suspended until they gained liberty or death. He marched out of the hall amid wild cheers, and led the students off to put their names down for the army…

 

     “The War of Liberation, Freiheitskrieg, was, above all, a war of purification and self-discovery. It did not stop with the expulsion of French forces from Germany in 1813. If anything, it was in the course of 1814, when Napoleon's forces were fighting for survival on French soil, that the War of Liberation really got going in Germany…

 

     “But the War of Liberation was being waged no less vehemently at the cultural level. The poets were not squeamish when it came to singing of the national crusade, while the painters rallied to the cause in a memorable way. Caspar David Friedrich, who had already done so much to represent the symbolic German landscape as an object of worship through a series of paintings in which people are depicted contemplating its wonder like so many saints adoring the nativity in a medieval triptych, now turned to glorifying the nation. He painted several representations of an imaginary tomb of Hermann, evocatively set among craggy boulders and fir trees. And he also produced various set-pieces representing the war. Other painters depicted groups of patriotic German volunteers going forth in their hats to free the fatherland. Joseph Görres led a movement demanding the completion of Cologne Cathedral as a sign of German regeneration. ‘Long shall Germany live in shame and humiliation, a prey to inner conflict and alien arrogance, until her people return to the ideals from which they were seduced by selfish ambition, and until true religion and loyalty, unity of purpose and self-denial shall again render them capable of erecting such a building as this,’ he wrote.”[212]

 

     And yet the majority of the German people no longer believed either in the Catholicism that had erected Cologne cathedral, nor in the Protestantism that had first raised the word of protest against the Franco-Roman world and civilisation. As so often happens with nationalistic movements, the attempt to resurrect the past was actually a sign that the past was definitely dead. Thus European nationalism, of which German nationalism was perhaps the most characteristic example, was a new, degenerate religion taking up the void in the European soul that was left by the death of Christianity.

 

     “The nation,” writes Mosse, “was the intermediary between the individual and a personal scheme of values and ethics; outside the nation no life or creativity was possible.”[213]

 

     Görres put it as follows: “Let the nation learn to trace itself to its source, delve into its roots: it will find in its innermost being a fathomless well-spring which rises from subterranean treasure; many minds have already been enriched by drawing on the hoard of the Niebelungen; and still it lies there inexhaustible, in the depths of its lair.”[214]

 

     From now on, European man would only rarely be induced to die for God or Church or Sovereign. But he could be induced to die for his country. And that not simply because it is natural to die for hearth and home, but because the nation was now seen to incarnate the highest value, whether that value was defined as simply racial superiority (Germany), or cultural eminence (France), or the rule of law in freedom (England).

 

     However, Mosse argues, “it must never be forgotten that the vision of a better life was a part of all nationalisms. In none of the [nationalist] ideologies discussed was the worship of the nation something in and of itself; it was always the necessary way to a better life, a new freedom… All believed that once they had been united by a true national spirit greater happiness for everybody would be the result.”[215]

 

The Ideology of Counter-Revolution

 

     “European politics in the nineteenth century,” writes Golo Mann, “fed on the French Revolution. No idea, no dream, no fear, no conflict appeared which had not been worked through in that fateful decade: democracy and socialism, reaction, dictatorship, nationalism, imperialism, pacifism.”[216]

 

     However, of these ideas the one that dominated immediately after the defeat of Napoleon was reaction.

 

     Napoleon’s escape from Elba in 1814, and the closeness of the struggle that finally succeeded in overthrowing him in 1815, meant that, as Davies writes, the Congress of Vienna that reconvened after Waterloo “met in chastened mood. The representatives of the victorious powers could not be accused, as in the previous year, of ‘dancing instead of making progress’. They were ready to risk nothing. They were determined, above all, to restore the rights of monarchy – the sacred institution considered most threatened by the Revolution. In so doing they, with the partial exception of Tsar Alexander, as we shall see in the next chapter, paid little attention to the claims either of democracy or of nationality….

 

     “The spirit of the settlement, therefore, was more than conservative: it actually put the clock back. It was designed to prevent change in a world where the forces of change had only been contained by a whisker. The Duke of Wellington’s famous comment on Waterloo was: ‘a damned nice thing, the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life’. Such was the feeling all over Europe. The issue between change and no change was so close that the victors felt terrified of the least concession. Even limited, gradual reform was viewed with suspicion. ‘Beginning reform,’ wrote the Duke in 1830, ‘is beginning revolution.’ What is more, France, the eternal source of revolutionary disturbances, had not been tamed. Paris was to erupt repeatedly – in 1830, 1848, 1851, 1870. ‘When Paris sneezes,’ commented the Austrian Chancellor, Metternich, ‘Europe catches cold.’ French-style democracy was a menace threatening monarchy, Church, and property – the pillars of everything he stood for. It was, he said, ‘the disease which must be cured, the volcano which must be extinguished, the gangrene which must be burned out with a hot iron, the hydra with jaws open to swallow up the social order’.

 

     “In its extreme form, as embodied by Metternich, the reactionary spirit of 1815 was opposed to any sort of change which did not obtain prior approval. It found expression in the first instance in the Quadruple Alliance of Russia, Prussia, Austria, and Britain, who agreed to organize future congresses whenever need arose, and then in a wider ‘Holy Alliance’ organized by the Tsar. The former produced the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle (1818), which readmitted France to the concert of respectable nations. The latter produced the proposal that the powers should guarantee existing frontiers and governments in perpetuity.”[217]

 

     France readmitted to the concert of nations because the victorious powers judged that it was an ideology, Jacobinism, rather than a nation, France, that was the real enemy, while former revolutionaries who no longer practised revolution could be forgiven (the reverse judgement was made in 1919). For, as Eric Hobsbawn writes, “it was now known that revolution in a single country could be a European phenomenon; that its doctrines could spread across the frontiers and, what was worse, its crusading armies could blow away the political systems of a continent. It was now known that social revolution was possible; that nations existed as something independent of states, peoples as something independent of their rulers, and even that the poor existed as something independent of the ruling classes. ‘The French Revolution,’ De Bonald had observed in 1796, ‘is a unique event in history.’ The phrase is misleading: it was a universal event.[218] No country was immune from it. The French soldiers who campaigned from Andalusia to Moscow, from the Baltic to Syria – over a vaster area than any body of conquerors since the Mongols, and certainly a vaster area than any previous single military force in Europe except the Norsemen – pushed the universality of their revolution home more effectively than anything else could have done. And the doctrines and institutions they carried with them, even under Napoleon, from Spain to Illyria, were universal doctrines, as the governments knew, and as the peoples themselves were soon to know. A Greek bandit and patriot expressed their feelings completely: “’According to my judgement,’ said Koloktrones, ‘the French Revolution and the doings of Napoleon opened the eyes of the world. The nations knew nothing before, and the people thought that kings were gods upon the earth and that they were bound to say that whatever they did was well done. Through this present change it is more difficult to rule the people.’”[219]

 

     The French revolution had another long-term effect: it justified all kinds of crime in the name of politics.

 

     As Paul Johnson writes: “Perhaps the most significant characteristic of the dawning modern world, and in this respect it was a true child of Rousseau, was the tendency to relate everything to politics. In Latin America, every would-be plunderer or ambitious bandit now called himself a ‘liberator’; murderers killed for freedom, thieves stole for the people. In Spain, during the 1820s, believers and nonbelievers, those who liked kings and those who hated them, began to regard their faith, or lack of it, as a justification for forming private armies which defied the lawful authorities. Organized crime now took a party label and put forward a program and thereby became better organized and a more formidable threat to society.

 

     “Thus violence acquired moral standing and the public was terrorized for its own good. Many years before, Samuel Johnson, in upholding the rights of authority, had qualified his defense by pointing to a corresponding and inherent human right to resist oppresssion: ‘Why all this childish jealousy of the power of the Crown?… In no government can power be abused long. Mankind will not bear it. If a sovereign oppresses his people to a great degree, they will rise and cut off his head.’ The French Revolution had lowered the threshold of abuse at which men rose. It proved that cutting off royal heads was easier than had previously been thought and did not bring down the heavens. That undoubted fact was now a permanent temptation to every enemy of society who wished to acquire moral respectability for his crimes. It operated, in particular, throughout the Mediterranean area, where every government oppressed its subjects to some degree and there were usually no lawful forms of redress. In the past, men with a grievance had suffered in silence or taken to the hills and robbed. Now the hitherto resigned joined secret societies, and the bandits called themselves politicians.”[220]

 

     These secret societies continued the revolution on an international scale. Johnson again: “Like the Comintern in the 1930s, they were a European phenomenon and, to some extent, coordinated and centrally directed. But unlike the Comintern, they did not have an ultimate national base, where they could be trained and from which money and arms could flow.

 

     “The most important figure, or so it was supposed, was Filipo Michele Buonarrotti (1761-1837), a Pisan by birth, and proud of his descent from Michelangelo. Becoming a naturalized French citizen, he took part in the French Revolution and was imprisoned and deported for his part in the conspiracy organized by François-Emile Babeuf, the proto-communist who tried to overthrow the Directory. He came out of prison in 1809 and immediately resumed underground work in northern Italy with Republican elements in the French occupation and local malcontents and ‘patriots’. He founded a network called the Adelphi, which migrated to Geneva when the Austrians took over Lombardy and changed its name to the Sublime Perfect Masters.

 

     “The Sublime Perfect Masters combined illuminism, freemasonry and radical politics with a good deal of pretentious symbolism. Its structure was hierarchical, only the most senior levels knowing its inner secrets, and Buonarrotti came closer to the isolated cell system of modern terrorist groups, which makes them so difficult to destroy, even if penetrated. The various police forces never discovered much about his apparatus, which is the reason we know so little about it. In theory it was formidable, since it had links with a Directive Committee in Paris which coordinated Orléanist, Jacobin, Bonapartist, and Republican subversion, with various German groups, such as the Tugendbund and the Unbedingren; with Spanish Masons and communeros; and even with a Russian group called the Union of Salvation, the whole supposedly existing under a mysterious body, also in Geneva, called the Grand Firmament. In Italy, the Sublime Perfect Masters had links with the Carbonari, which operated in the center and the south. Contact was maintained by special handshakes, secret codes, invisible ink and other devices… But it is a notable fact that Buonarrotti, in particular, and the networks, in general, never once succeeded in organizing a successful conspiracy or one which can fairly be said to have got off the ground. Moreover when uprisings did take place and governments were overthrown, as in Spain in 1820, Buonarrotti – like Marx, and indeed Lenin, later – was taken completely by surprise…”[221]

 

     The major powers had many problems in their struggle against the revolution. One was that it required large resources and in particular a much larger police (and secret police) apparatus than any state had hitherto possessed. Secondly, the powers were not united amongst themselves. France was still distrusted; Austria did not want Russian Cossacks settling problems on her territory; Britain, which had played such an important role in defeating Napoleon, was nevertheless not averse to helping this or that revolutionary movement (particularly in the Iberian Peninsula[222] and South America) if this suited her balance-of-power politics, and was opposed to “interventionism on ideological grounds, as practiced by the Holy Alliance, because its object was to impose or sustain a particular type of government, which ran directly counter to the Zeitgeist”.[223]

 

     The Zeitgeist was anti-monarchist; and even the absolutist rulers felt they could not go completely against it. They made their first compromise with it in the conditions they imposed on France in 1818. For, as Hobsbawm writes, while “the Bourbons were restored,… it was understood that they had to make concessions to the dangerous spirit of their subjects. The major changes of the Revolution were accepted, and that inflammatory device, a constitution, was granted to them – though of course in an extremely moderate form – under the guise of a Charter ‘freely conceded’ by the returned absolute monarch, Louis XVIII.”[224] Another compromise was the granting of senior posts to former revolutionaries, “reconciling”, if that were possible, the reactionary King Louis XVIII with some of the men who had caused his brother Louis XVI’s death.[225]

 

     Making concessions to the Zeitgeist was only a short-term solution. For appeasement, as rulers from Ethelred the Unready to Joseph Chamberlain have discovered, can never tame a really determined enemy, but rather whets his appetite for more. As Friedrich von Gentz to the Laibach Congress of the Holy Alliance, 1821: “Revolution must be fought with flesh and blood. Moral weapons are manifestly powerless.”[226]

 

     What was needed was another, more powerful spirit to oppose the corrupt spirit of the times, a positive doctrine of religious and political authority that was deeper and truer than the revolutionary doctrine. But none of the great powers was able to provide a positive teaching to reinforce and justify their alternately conciliatory and repressive measures, for the simple reason that none of them – with the exception of Russia – was Orthodox, and very few, even in Russia, were capable of communicating that positive message to those infected with the revolutionary contagion. What the great powers did have was a negative teaching, a teaching on the evil of the revolution that had some truth in it, but, precisely because it was only negative, little effectiveness. The most fervently anti-revolutionary power, as was to be expected, was the Vatican, which was trying to make up for its lapse in the time of Napoleon. Thus in his encylical Mirari vos (1832), Pope Gregory XVI declared that anti-monarchism was a crime against the faith, and that liberty of conscience flowed from “the most fetid fount of indifferentism”.

 

     But the most eloquent defenders of the old order were two French aristocrats, Count Joseph de Maistre, a former envoy of Sardinia to Russia, and Viscount Louis de Bonald. De Maistre wrote: “All grandeur, all power, all subordination rests on the executioner: he is the horror and bond of human association. Remove this incomprehensible agent from the world, and at that moment order gives way to chaos, thrones topple, and society disappears. God, Who is the author of sovereignty, is the author also of punishment.”[227]

 

     De Bonald wrote: “Today… who does not see the danger of granting anyone and everyone… the terrible liberty to indoctrinate, in religion and in politics, a public which everywhere is made up largely of mistaken, ignorant, and violent men?… There is no true liberty of the press… except under the guarantee of censorship to prevent licence of thought. There is no civil liberty without laws to prevent actions that create disorder.”[228]

 

     Berlin writes on these deeply conservative authors: “What the entire Enlightenment has in common is denial of the central Christian doctrine of original sin, believing instead that man is born either innocent and good, or morally neutral and malleable by education or environment, or, at worst, deeply defective but capable of radical and indefinite improvement by rational education in favourable circumstances, or by a revolutionary reorganisation of society as demanded, for example, by Rousseau. It is this denial of original sin that the Church condemned most severely in Rousseau’s Émile, despite its attack on materialism, utilitarianism and atheism. It is the powerful reaffirmation of this Pauline and Augustinian doctrine that is the sharpest single weapon in the root-and-branch attack on the entire Enlightenment by the French counter-revolutionary writers Maistre, Bonald and Chateaubriand, at the turn of the century.

 

     “… The doctrines of Joseph de Maistre and his followers and allies… formed the spearhead of the counter-revolution in the early nineteenth century in Europe. Maistre held the Enlightenment to be one of the most foolish, as well as the most ruinous, forms of social thinking. The conception of man as naturally disposed to benevolence, co-operation and peace, or, at any rate, capable of being shaped in this direction by appropriate education or legislation, is for him shallow and false. The benevolent Dame Nature of Hume, Holbach and Helvétius is an absurd figment. History and zoology are the most reliable guides to nature: they show her to be a field of unceasing slaughter. Men are by nature aggressive and destructive; they rebel over trifles – the change to the Gregorian calendar in the mid-eighteenth century, or Peter the Great’s decision to shave the boyars’ beards, provoke violent resistance, at times dangerous rebellions. But when men are sent to war, to exterminate beings as innocent as themselves for no purpose that either army can grasp, they go obediently to their deaths and scarcely ever mutiny. When the destructive instinct is evoked men feel exalted and fulfilled. Men do not come together, as the Enlightenment teaches, for mutual co-operation and peaceful happiness; history makes it clear that they are never so united as when given a common altar upon which to immolate themselves. This is so because the desire to sacrifice themselves or others is at least as strong as any pacific or constructive impulse.

 

     “Maistre felt that men are by nature evil, self-destructive animals, full of conflicting drives, who do not know what they want, want what they do not want, do not want what they want, and it is only when they are kept under constant control and rigorous discipline by some authoritarian elite – a Church, a State, or some other body from whose decisions there is no appeal – that they can hope to survive and be saved. Reasoning, analysis, criticism shake the foundations and destroy the fabric of society. If the source of authority is declared to be rational, it invites questioning and doubt; but if it is questioned it may be argued away; its authority is undermined by able sophists, and this accelerates the forces of chaos, as in France during the reign of the weak and liberal Louis XVI. If the State is to survive and frustrate the fools and knaves who will always seek to destroy it, the source of its authority must be absolute, so terrifying, indeed, that the least attempt to question it must entail immediate and terrible sanctions: only then will men learn to obey it. Without a clear hierarchy of authority – awe-inspiring power – men’s incurably destructive instincts will breed chaos and mutual extermination. The supreme power – especially the Church – must never seek to explain or justify itself in rational terms; for what one man can demonstrate, another may be able to refute. Reason is the thinnest of walls against the raging seas of violent emotion: on so insecure a basis no permanent structure can ever be erected. Irrationality, so far from being an obstacle, has historically led to peace, security and strength, and is indispensable to society: it is rational institutions – republics, elective monarchies, democracies, associations founded on the enlightened principles of free love – that collapse soonest; authoritarian Churches, hereditary monarchies and aristocracies, traditional forms of life, like the highly irrational institutions of the family, founded on life-long marriage – it is they that persist.

 

     “The philosophes proposed to rationalise communications by inventing a universal language free from the irrational survivals, the idiosyncratic twists and turns, the capricious peculiarities of existing tongues; if they were to succeed, this would be disastrous, for it is precisely the individual historical development of a language belonging to a people that absorbs, enshrines and encapsulates a vast wealth of half-conscious, half-remembered collective experience. What men call superstition and prejudice are but the crust of custom which by sheer survival has shown itself proof against the ravages and vicissitudes of its long life; to lose it is to lose the shield that protects men’s national existence, their spirit, the habits, memories, faith that have made them what they are. The conception of human nature which the radical critics have promulgated and on which their whole house of cards rests is an infantile fantasy. Rousseau asks why it is that man, who was born free, is nevertheless everywhere in chains; Maistre replies, ‘This mad pronouncement, Man is born free, is the opposite of the truth.’ ‘It would be equally reasonable,’ adds the eminent critic Émile Faguet in an essay on Maistre, ‘to say that sheep are born carnivorous, and everywhere nibble grass.’ Men are not made for freedom, nor for peace. Such freedom and peace as they have had were obtained only under wisely authoritarian governments that have repressed the destructive critical intellect and its socially disintegrating effects. Scientists, intellectuals, lawyers, journalists, democrats, Jansenists, Protestants, Jews, atheists – these are the sleepless enemy that never ceases to gnaw at the vitals of society. The best government the world has ever known was that of the Romans: they were too wise to be scientists themselves; for this purpose they hired the clever, volatile, politically incapable Greeks. Not the luminous intellect, but dark instincts govern man and societies; only elites which understand this, and keep the people from too much secular education, which is bound to make them over-critical and discontented, can give to men as much happiness and justice and freedom as, in this vale of tears, men can expect to have. But at the back of everything must lurk the potentiality of force, of coercive power.

 

     “In a striking image Maistre says that all social order in the end rests upon one man, the executioner. Nobody wishes to associate with this hideous figure, yet on him, so long as men are weak, sinful, unable to control their passions, constantly lured to their doom by evil temptations or foolish dreams, rest all order, all peace, all society. The notion that reason is sufficient to educate or control the passions is ridiculous. When there is a vacuum, power rushes in; even the bloodstained monster Robespierre, a scourge sent by the Lord to punish a country that had departed from the true faith, is more to be admired – because he did hold France together and repelled her enemies, and created armies that, drunk with blood and passion, preserved France – than liberal fumbling and bungling. Louis XIV ignored the clever reasoners of his time, suppressed heresy, and died full of glory in his own bed. Louis XVI played amiably with subversive ideologists who had drunk at the poisoned well of Voltaire, and died on the scaffold. Repression, censorship, absolute sovereignty, judgements from which there is no appeal, these are the only methods of governing creatures whom Maistre described as half men, half beasts, monstrous centaurs at once seeking after God and fighting him, longing to love and create, but in perpetual danger of falling victims to their own blindly destructive drives, held in check by a combination of force and traditional authority and, above all, a faith incarnated in historically hallowed institutions that reason dare not touch.

 

     “Nation and race are realities; the artificial creations of constitution-mongers are bound to collapse. ‘Nations,’ said Maistre, ‘are born and die like individuals’; they ‘have a common soul’, especially visible in their language. And since they are individuals, they should endeavour to remain of one race. So too Bonald, his closest intellectual ally, regrets that the French nation has abandoned its racial purity, thus weakening itself. The question of whether the French are descended from Franks or Gauls, whether their institutions are Roman or German in origin, with the implication that this could dictate a form of life in the present, although it has its roots in political controversies in the sixteenth, seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, now takes the colour of mystical organicism, which transcends, and is proof against, all forms of discursive reasoning. Natural growth alone is real for Maistre. Only time, only history, can create authority that men can worship and obey: mere military dictatorship, a work of individual human hands, is brutal force without spiritual power; he calls it bâtonocratie, and predicts the end of Napoleon.

 

     “In similar strain Bonald denounce individualism whether as a social doctrine or an intellectual method of analysing historical phenomena. The inventions of man, he declared, are precarious aids compared to the divinely ordained institutions that penetrate man’s very being – language, family, the worship of God. By whom were they invented? Whenever a child is born there are father, mother, family, language, God; this is the basis of all that is genuine and lasting, not the arrangements of men drawn from the world of shopkeepers, with their contracts, or promises, or utility, or material goods. Liberal individualism inspired by the insolent self-confidence of mutinous intellectuals has led to the inhuman competition of bourgeois society, in which the strongest and the fastest win and the weak go to the wall. Only the Church can organise a society in which the ablest are held back so that the whole of society can progress and the weakest and least greedy also reach the goal.

 

     “These gloomy doctrines became the inspiration of monarchist politics in France, and together with the notion of romantic heroism and the sharp contrast between creative and uncreative, historic and unhistoric, individuals and nations, duly inspired nationalism, imperialism, and finally, in their most violent and pathological form, Fascist and totalitarian doctrines in the twentieth century.” [229]

 

     And yet Berlin is wrong in attributing both fascism and communism to the monarchical backlash against the French Revolution. Fascism, it is true, was based on worship of the people, its historical tradition and its State. However, the Russian and other communist revolutions were in every way the descendants of the universalist and internationalist French Revolution, whose catastrophic failure they failed to study properly (not considering it to be a failure, but a glorious success!) and which they were therefore condemned to repeat on a still vaster and bloodier scale.

 

     But de Maistre was also wrong in thinking that the Catholic idea, the idea that the evil passions can be tamed by blind obedience to an unquestioned, absolute authority, could stop the revolution. The Catholic idea was now dead – Napoleon killed it when he took the crown from the Pope and crowned himself. Only the Orthodox idea, the idea brought to Paris by the Russian Tsar, remained…


2. THE EAST: THE MAN-GOD DEFEATED

 

Fear God, honour the king.

I Peter 2.17.

 

In the reign of Alexander I Masonry tried finally to substitute for Orthodoxy a certain ‘true Church’, or ‘inner Christianity’, in the system of State power, leaving the former religion only for governing ‘the plebs’.

Valery Baidin.[230]

 

The not-born-in-the-purple emperor, who wanted to be a not-yet-anointed prophet, did not foresee that, besides physical and political forces, states are inspired and act through higher moral forces, that violence elicits against itself those same forces which are in submission to it, that cunning can be outwitted or destroyed by desperation, and that right by its firmness and foresight is always more powerful than craftiness and spite. 

Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow (1813).[231]

 

     Napoleon never conquered two of his enemies: Britain and Russia; and it is tempting to see in these nations two principles that the revolution failed to subordinate to itself in the way that it had (at least temporarily) subordinated Catholicism to itself. These were, first: the love of freedom - not the ecstatic, collectivist, Rousseauist “freedom to” that the revolution represented, but the more sober, individualist, Lockean “freedom from” that was ingrained especially in the stubborn spirit of the island race. In the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the revolution made considerable inroads into English life, but never destroyed its restraining, individualistic, anti-despotic influence completely. The second, and far greater, principle was the love of God in Orthodoxy, which inspired Russia to drive the Grande Armée all the way from burning Moscow to the streets of Paris. Throughout the nineteenth century Russia remained the main bulwark of civilisation against the revolution, but finally succumbed to it in the catastrophe of 1917.

 

Tsar Paul I of Russia

 

     Beginning with Tsar Paul I, the son of Emperor Peter III and Empress Catherine II, Russia began, slowly and hesitantly, to recover from the abyss of westernism and absolutism initiated by Peter the Great.

 

     St. John Maximovich writes: “The Tsarevich Paul Petrovich, who spent his childhood at the court of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, - his mother could not exercise an immediate influence on him, - was very different in his character and convictions from the Empress Catherine. Catherine II preferred to remove her son from the inheritance and make her eldest grandson, Alexander Pavlovich, her heir… At the end of 1796 Catherine II finally decided to appoint Alexander as her heir, passing Paul by, but she suddenly and unexpectedly died. The heir, Tsarevich Paul Petrovich, ascended the throne…”[232]

 

     Tsar Paul, who had been educated by Metropolitan Platon of Moscow, and shared his teacher’s devotion to pre-Petrine Russia, witnessed to the terrible condition the eighteenth-century tsars had brought Russia: “On ascending the throne of All-Russia, and entering in accordance with duty into various parts of the state administration, at the very beginning of the inspection We saw that the state economy, in spite of the changes in income made at various times, had been subjected to extreme discomforts from the continuation over many years of unceasing warfar and other circumstances. Expenses exceeded income. The deficit was increasing from year to year, multiplying the internal and external debts; in order to make up a part of this deficit, large sums were borrowed, which brought great harm and disorder with them…”[233]

 

     The coronation took place in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow on April 5, 1797, the first day of Holy Pascha. The rite moved a significant step away from the symbolism of the First Rome, which had been the model of the eighteenth-century Tsars, and back to the symbolism of the New Rome of Constantinople, the Mother-State of Holy Rus’. For before putting on the purple, Paul ordered that he be vested in the dalmatic, one of the royal vestments of the Byzantine emperors…

 

     Then, writes Protopriest Lev Lebedev, “he himself read out a new law [Uchrezhdenie] on the Imperial Family which he had composed together with [the Tsaritsa] Maria Fyodorovna. By this law he abolished Peter I’s decree of 1722 on the right of the Russian Autocrat to appoint the Heir to the Thone according to his will and revived the Basic Act of 1613. From now on and forever (!) a strict order of succession was established according to which the eldest son became his father’s heir, and in the case of childlessness – his elder brother. The law also foresaw various other cases, determining the principles of the succession to the Throne in accordance with the ancient, pre-Petrine (!) Russian customs and certain important new rules (for example, a Member of the Imperial Family wanting to preserve his rights to the succession must enter only into an equal by blood marriage with a member of a royal or ruling house, that is, who is not lower than himself by blood). Paul I’s new law once and for all cut off the danger in Russia of those ‘revolution’-coups which had taken place in the eighteenth century. And it meant that the power of the nobility over the Russian Tsars was ending; now they could be independent of the nobility’s desires and sympathies. The autocracy was restored in Russia! Deeply wounded and ‘offended’, the nobility immediately, from the moment of the proclamation of the law ‘On the Imperial Family’ entered into opposition to Paul I. The Tsar had to suffer the first and most powerful blow of the opposition. This battle between the Autocrat and the nobility was decisive, it determined the future destiny of the whole state. It also revealed who was who in Great Russia. All the historians who hate Paul I are not able to diminish the significance of the Law of 1797, they recognise that it was exceptionally important and correct, but they remark that it was the only outstanding act of this Emperor (there were no others supposedly). But such an act would have been more than sufficient for the whole reign! For this act signified a radical counter-coup – or, following the expression of the time, counter-revolution - to that which Catherine II had accomplished.

 

     “However, the haters lie here, as in everything else! The law was not the only important act of his Majesty. On the same day of 1797 Paul I proclaimed a manifesto in which for the first time the serf-peasants were obliged to make an oath of allegiance to the Tsars and were called, not ‘slaves’, but ‘beloved subjects’, that is, they were recognised as citizens of the State! There is more! Paul I issued a decree forbidding landowners to force serfs to work corvée for more than three days in the week: the other three days the peasants were to work for themselves, and on Sundays – rest and celebrate ‘the day of the Lord’, like all Christians.[234] Under the threat of severe penalties it was confirmed that masters were forbidden to sell families of peasants one by one. It was forbidden to subject serfs older than seventy to physical punishments. (And at the same time it was permitted to apply physical punishments to noblemen who had been condemned for criminal acts.) All this was nothing other than the beginning of the liberation of the Russian peasants from serfdom! In noble circles of the time it was called a ‘revolution from above’, and for the first time they said of about their Emperor: ‘He is mad!’ Let us recall that this word was used in relation to the ‘peasant’ politics of Paul I. He even received a special ‘Note’ from one assembly of nobles, in which it was said that ‘the Russian people has not matured sufficiently for the removal of physical punishments’.”[235]

 

     “We know of a case when the Tsar came to the defence of some peasants whose landowner was about to sell them severally, without their families and land, so as to make use of the peasants’ property. The peasants refused to obey, and the landowner informed the governor of the rebellion. But the governor did not fail to carry out his duty and quickly worked out what was happening. On receiving news about what was happening, Tsar Paul declared the deal invalid, ordered that the peasants be left in their places, and that the landowner be severely censured in his name. The landowner’s conscience began to speak to him: he gathered the village commune and asked the peasants for forgiveness. Later he set off for St. Petersburg and asked for an audience with his Majesty. ‘Well, what did you sort out with your peasants, my lord? What did they say?’ inquired the Emperor of the guilty man. ‘They said to me, your Majesty: God will forgive…’ ‘Well, since God and they have forgiven you, I also forgive you. But remember from now on that they are not your slaves, but my subjects just as you are. You have just been entrusted with looking after them, and you are responsible for them before me, as I am for Russia before God…’ concluded the Sovereign.”[236]

 

     The Tsar also acted to humble the pride of the Guards regiments which, together with the nobility, had acted the role of king-makers in the eighteenth century. “He forbade the assigning of noblemen’s children, babies, into the guards (which had been done before him to increase ‘the number of years served’). The officers of the guards were forbidden to drive in four- or six-horse carriages, to hide their hands in winter in fur muffs, or to wear civilian clothing in public. No exception was made for them by comparison with other army officers. At lectures and inspections the Guards were asked about rules and codes with all strictness. How much, then and later, did they speak (and they still write now!) about the ‘cane discipline’ and the amazing cruelties in the army under Paul I, the nightmarish punishments which were simply means of mocking the military…. Even among the historians who hate Paul I we find the admission that the strictnesses of the Emperor related only to the officers (from the nobility), while with regard to the soldiers he was most concerned about their food and upkeep, manifesting a truly paternal attentiveness. By that time the ordinary members of the Guards had long been not nobles, but peasants. And the soldierly mass of the Guards of Paul I very much loved him and were devoted to him. Officers were severely punished for excessive cruelty to soldiers… On the fateful night of the murder of Paul I the Guards soldiers rushed to support him. The Preobrazhensky regiment refused to shout ‘hurrah!’ to Alexander Pavlovich as to the new Emperor, since they were not sure whether his Majesty Paul I was truly dead. Two soldiers of the regiment demanded that their commanders give them exact proof of the death of the former Emperor. These soldiers were not only not punished, but were sent as an ‘embassy’ of the Preobrazhensky to the grave of Paul I. On their return the regiment gave the oath of allegiance to Alexander I. That was the real situation of the Russian soldier of Paul’s times, and not their fictitious ‘rightlessness’!”[237]

 

     “The Emperor Paul’s love for justice and care for the simple people was expressed also in the accessibility with which he made his subjects happy, establishing the famous box in the Winter palace whose key was possessed by him personally and into which the first courtier and the last member of the simple people could cast their letters with petitions for the Tsar’s immediate defence or mercy. The Tsar himself emptied the box every day and read the petitions, leaving not a single one of them unanswered.

 

     “There was probably no sphere in the State which did not feel the influence of the industrious Monarch. Thus he ordered the minting of silver rubles to struggle against he deflation in the value of money. The Sovereign himself sacrificed a part of the court’s silver on this important work. He said that he himself would eat on tin ‘until the ruble recovers its rate’. And the regulation on medical institutions worked out by the Emperor Paul could be used in Russia even in our day.”[238]

 

     “Paul I gave hierarchs in the Synod the right themselves to choose a candidate for the post of over-procurator, took great care for the material situation of the clergy, and the widows and orphans of priests, and forbade physical punishments for priests before they had been defrocked.”[239]

 

     He also increased the lands of hierarchical houses and the pay of the parish clergy, and freed the clergy from being pressed into army service. The power of bishops was extended to all Church institutions and to all diocesan servers.[240] In general, as K.A. Papmehl writes, “Paul proved to be much more generous and responsive to the Church’s financial needs than his mother. Although this may to some – perhaps considerable – extent be attributed to his general tendency to reverse her policies, it was probably due, in at least equal measure, to his different attitude toward the Church based, as it undoubtedly was, on sincere Christian belief…. One symptom of this different attitude was that, unlike his predecessor – or, indeed, successor, Paul dealt with the Synod not through the Ober-Prokurator, but through the senior ecclesiastical member: first Gavriil and later Amvrosii.”[241]

 

      “One of the Tsar’s contemporaries, N.A. Sablukov, who had the good fortune, thanks to his service at the Royal Court, to know the Emperor personally, remembered the Emperor Paul in his memoirs as ‘a deeply religious man, filled with a true piety and the fear of God…. He was a magnanimous man, ready to forgive offences and recognise his mistakes. He highly prized righteousness, hated lies and deceit, cared for justice and was merciless in his persecution of all kinds of abuses, in particular usury and bribery.’

 

     “The well-known researcher of Paul, Shabelsky-Bork, writes: ‘While he was Tsarevich and Heir, Paul would often spend the whole night in prayer. A little carpet is preserved in Gatchina; on it he used to pray, and it is worn through by his knees.’ The above-mentioned N.A. Sablukov recounts, in agreement with this: ‘Right to the present day they show the places on which Paul was accustomed to kneel, immersed in prayer and often drenched in tears. The parquet is worn through in these places. The room of the officer sentry in which I used to sit during my service in Gatchina was next to Paul’s private study, and I often heard the Emperor’s sighs when he was standing at prayer.’

 

     “The historical records of those years have preserved a description of the following event: ‘A watchman had a strange and wonderful vision when he was standing outside the summer palace… The Archangel Michael stood before the watchman suddenly, in the light of heavenly glory, and the watchman was stupefied and in trembling from this vision… And the Archangel ordered that a cathedral should be raised in his honour there and that this command should be passed on to the Emperor Paul immediately. The special event went up the chain of command, of course, and Paul Petrovich was told about everything. But Paul Petrovich replied: “I already know”: he had seen everything beforehand, and the appearance to the watchman was a kind of repetition…’ From this story we can draw the conclusion that Tsar Paul was counted worthy also of revelations from the heavenly world…”[242]

 

The Annexation of Georgia and the Edinoverie

 

     Tsar Paul’s love for the Church found expression in two important events in year 1800 that strengthened, respectively, the security of the Orthodox world against the external foe, and its internal unity: the annexation of Georgia and the reunion of some of the Old Believers with the Orthodox Church on a “One Faith” (Edinoverie) basis.

 

     Since the Georgians made their first appeal for Russian protection in 1587, they had suffered almost continual invasions from the Persians and the Turks, leading to many martyrdoms, of which the most famous was that of Queen Ketevan in 1624. One king, Rostom, even adopted Islam and persecuted Orthodoxy. In fact, from 1634 until the ascent of the throne by King Wakhtang in 1701, all the sovereigns of Georgia were Muslim. The eighteenth century saw only a small improvement, and in 1762 King Teimuraz II travelled to Russian for help. In 1783 protection was formally offered to King Heraclius II of Kartli-Kakhetia, and the Catholicos of Georgia became a member of the Russian Holy Synod while retaining his title. 

 

     “The last most heavy trial for the Church of Iberia,” writes P. Ioseliani, was the irruption of Mahomed-Khan into the weakened state of Georgia, in the year 1795. In the month of September of that year the Persian army took the city of Tiflis, seized almost all the valuable property of the royal house, and reduced the palace and the whole of the city into a heap of ashes and of ruins. The whole of Georgia, thus left at the mercy of the ruthless enemies of the name of Christ, witnessed the profanation of everything holy, and the most abominable deeds and practices carried on in the temples of God. Neither youth nor old age could bring those cruel persecutors to pity; the churches were filled with troops of murderers and children were killed at their mothers’ breasts. They took the Archbishop of Tiflis, Dositheus, who had not come out of the Synod of Sion, made him kneel down before an image of [the most holy Mother of God], and, without mercy on his old age, threw him from a balcony into the river Kur; then they plundered his house, and set fire to it. The pastors of the Church, unable to hide the treasures and other valuable property of the Church, fell a sacrifice to the ferocity of their foes. Many images of saints renowned in those days perished for ever; as, for instance, among others, the image of [the most holy Mother of God] of the Church of Metekh, and that of the Synod of Sion. The enemy, having rifled churches, destroyed images, and profaned the tombs of saints, revelled in the blood of Christians; and the inhuman Mahomed-Khan put an end to these horrors only when there remained not a living soul in Tiflis.

 

     “King George XIII, who ascended the throne of Georgia (A.D. 1797-1800) only to see his subjects overwhelmed and rendered powerless by their incessant and hopeless struggles with unavoidable dangers from enemies of the faith and of the people, found the resources of the kingdom exhausted by the constant armaments necessary for its own protection; before his eyes lay the ruins of the city, villages plundered and laid waste, churches, monasteries, and hermitages demolished, troubles within the family, and without it the sword, fire, and inevitable ruin, not only of the Church, but also of the people, yea, even of the very name of the people. In the fear of God, and trusting to His providence, he made over Orthodox Georgia in a decided manner to the Tzar of Russia, his co-religionist; and thus obtained for her peace and quiet. It pleased God, through this king, to heal the deep wounds of an Orthodox kingdom.

 

     “Feeling that his end was drawing near, he, with the consent of all ranks and of the people, requested the Emperor Paul I to take Georgia into his subjection for ever (A.D. 1800). The Emperor Alexander I, when he mounted the throne, promised to protect the Georgian people of the same faith with himself, which had thus given itself over unreservedly and frankly to the protection of Russia. In his manifesto to the people of Georgia (A.D. 1801) he proclaimed the following:- ‘One and the same dignity, one and the same honour, and humanity laid upon us the sacred duty, after hearing the prayers of sufferers, to grant them justice and equity in exchange for their affliction, security for their persons and for their property, and to give to all alike the protection of the law.’”[243]

 

     What we have called “Georgia” was in fact the kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti in Eastern Georgia. But there was another independent Georgian kingdom in the West, Imeretia. After the annexation of the eastern kingdom, “the Russian government,” as we read in the Life of Hieroschemamonk Hilarion the Georgian of Mount Athos, “initiated correspondence with the Imeretian king concerning the uniting of his nation with Russia. King Solomon II sought the counsel of his country’s foremost nobles, and in 1804, due to pressure from Russia, he was left with little choice but to set forth the following: since the kind did not have an heir to the throne, Imeretia would retain her indepedence until his death, remaining in brotherly relations with Russia as between two realms of the same faith. The Russian army had free passage across Imeretian territory to the Turkish border, and the Imeretian army was required to render them aid. The relations of the two countries were to be upheld in those sacred terms which are proper to God’s anointed rulers and Christian peoples united in an indivisible union of soul – eternally and unwaveringly. But after the king’s death the legislation of the Russian Empire would be introduced. The resolution was then sent to the Governor-General of the Caucasus in Tbilisi for forwarding to Tsar Alexander I.

 

     “Despite the general approval of the resolution by the king’s subjects, one nobleman, Prince Zurab Tsereteli, began plotting how he could seize the Imeretian throne for himself. He first attempted to erode the friendly relations between the two monarchs by slandering each to the other. Unable to sow discord, he began a communication with the Russian governor-general of the Caucasus, Alexander Tormasov. Depicting the royal suite in the darkest colors to the governor-general, after repeated intrigues he finally succeeded in his designs. Eventually, the report reached the tsar. He, believing the slander, ordered Tormasov to lure Solomon II to Tbilisi and escort him to Russia, where he would remain a virtual prisoner.

 

     “Not able to believe that others could be so base, treacherous and ignoble, the king fell into the trap set by Tormasov and Prince Zurab. Fr. Ise [the future Hieroschemamonk Hilarion] had initially warned the king of Prince Zurab’s disloyalty. However, upon learning of his wife’s reposed he returned to Kutaisi and was unable to furthr counsel the king.

 

     “King Solomon II and his entire retinue were eventually coaxed all the way to Tbilisi. There they were put under house arrest; the plan being to send the king to live out his days in a palace in St. Petersburg. Preferring exile to imprisonment, the king and his noblemen conceived a plan of escape and fled across the border to Turkey. There, with Fr. Ise and his retinue, he lived out the remainder of his life. After great deprivations and aborted attempts to reclaim the Imeretian Kingdom from Russia, King Solomon II reposed at Trebizond on February 19, 1815, in his forty-first year…

 

     “After the king’s death, Fr. Ise intended to set out for Imeretia (then annexed to Russia) no matter what the consequences. He informed all the courtiers, who numbered about six hundred men, and suggested that they follow his example. Many of them accepted his decision joyfully, but fear of the tsar’s wrath hampered this plan. Fr. Ise reassured everyone, promising to take upon himself the task of mediating before the tsar. He immediately wrote out a petition in the name of all the princes and other members of the retinue, and sent it to the tsar. The sovereign graciously received their petition, restored them to their former ranks, and returned their estates…”[244]

 

     The annexation of Georgia marked an important step forward in Russia’s progress to becoming the Third Rome. In the eighteenth century the gathering of the Russian lands had been completed, and the more or less continuous wars with Turkey demonstrated Russia’s determination to liberate the Orthodox of the Balkans and the Middle East. Georgia was the first non-Russian Orthodox nation to enter the empire of the Third Rome on a voluntary basis…

 

     At the same time, however, there was a large community of believers within Russia, the Old Believers, that rejected the right of the Russian Church and State to lead Orthodoxy. But a movement began among some Old Believer communities towards union with the Orthodox on the basis of edinoverie, or “One Faith”  – that is, agreement on dogmas and the authority of the Orthodox hierarchy, but with the former Old Believers allowed to retain the pre-Niconian rites.

 

     “Before 1800,” writes K.V. Glazkov, “almost all the Old Believer communities had united with the Orthodox Church on their own conditions. Besides, there were quite a few so-called crypto-Old Believers, who formally belonged to the ruling Church, but who in their everyday life prayed and lived according the Old Believer ways (there were particularly many of these amidst the minor provincial nobility and merchant class). This state of affairs was evidently not normal: it was necessary to work out definite rules, common for all, for the union of the Old Believers with the Orthodox Church. As a result of negotiations with the Muscovite Old Believers the latter in 1799 put forward the conditions under which they would agree to accept a priesthood from the Orthodox Church. These conditions, laid out in 16 points, partly represented old rules figuring in the 1793 petition of the Starodub ‘agreers’, and partly new ones relating to the mutual relations of the ‘one-faithers’ with the Orthodox Church. These relations required the union of the ‘one-faithers’ with the Orthodox Church, but allowed for their being to a certain degree isolated. On their basis the Muscovite Old Believers submitted a petition to his Majesty for their reunion with the Orthodox Church, and Emperor Paul I wrote at the bottom of this document: ‘Let this be. October 27, 1800.’ This petition with the royal signature was returned to the Muscovite Old Believers and was accepted as complete confirmation of their suggested conditions for union, as an eternal act of the recognition of the equal validity and honour of Old Believerism and Orthodoxy.

 

     “But on the same day, with the remarks (or so-called ‘opinions’) of Metropolitan Plato of Moscow, conditions were confirmed that greatly limited the petition of the Old Believers. These additions recognised reunited Old Believerism as being only a transitional stage on the road to Orthodoxy, and separated the ‘old-faith’ parishes as it were into a special semi-independent ecclesiastical community. Wishing to aid a change in the views of those entering into communion with the Church on the rites and books that they had acquired in Old Believerism, and to show that the Old Believers were falsely accusing the Church of heresies, Metropolitan Plato called the ‘agreers’ ‘one-faithers’…

 

     “The one-faithers petitioned the Holy Synod to remove the curses [of the Moscow Council of 1666-1667] on holy antiquity, but Metropolitan Plato replied in his additional remarks that they were imposed with justice. The Old Believers petitioned for union with the Church while keeping the old rites, but Metropolitan Plato left them their rites only for a time, only ‘in the hope’ that with time the reunited would abandon the old rites and accept the new…

 

     “Amidst the hierarchy of the Russian Orthodox Church the view became more and more established that the ‘One Faith’ was a transitional step towards Orthodoxy. But in fact the One Faith implies unity in dogmatic teaching and the grace of the Holy Spirit with the use in the Divine services of various Orthodox rites. But the old rite continued to be perceived as incorrect, damaged and in no way blessed by the Church, but only ‘by condescension not forbidden’ for a time.”[245]

 

The Murder of Tsar Paul

 

     In the last part of the reign of Catherine II, following the excesses of Jacobinism in France, a reaction had set in against Masonry. Catherine backed away from her Enlightenment ideas when she saw the effect they produced in the revolution. “’Yesterday I remembered,” she wrote to Grimm in 1794, “that you told me more than once: this century is the century of preparations. I will add that these preparations consisted in preparing dirt and dirty people of various kinds, who produce, have produced and will produce endless misfortunes and an infinite number of unfortunate people.’

 

     “The next year she categorically declared that the Encyclopédie had only two aims: the one – to annihilate the Christian religion, and the other – royal power. ‘I will calmly wait for the right moment when you will see how right is my opinion concerning the philosophers and their hangers-on that they participated in the revolution…, for Helvétius and D’Alambert both admitted to the deceased Prussian king that this book had only two aims: the first – to annihilate the Christian religion, and the second – to annihilate royal power. They spoke about this already in 1777.”[246]

 

     In his estimate of Masonry and French influence, if in little else, Tsar Paul was in agreement with his mother. Well-known Masons were required to sign that they would not open lodges (the rumour that Paul himself became a Mason in the house of I.P. Elagin in 1778 is false), and the great General Suvorov was sent to Vienna to join Austria and Britain in fighting the French.[247] But the French continued to advance through Europe, and when, in 1797, Napoleon threatened the island of Malta, the knights of the Order of the Maltese Cross, who had ruled the island since the 16th century, appealed to the protection of Tsar Paul. Paul accepted the responsibility, and in gratitude the Maltese offered that he become their Grand Master. The Order was Catholic, but anti-French and anti-revolutionary, so Paul accepted.[248]

 

     In 1798 Napoleon seized Malta. Paul then entered into an alliance union with Prussia, Austria and England against France. A Russian fleet entered the Mediterranean, and in 1799 a Russian army under Suvorov entered Northern Italy, liberating the territory from the French.

 

     However, writes Lebedev, “in 1800 England seized the island of Malta, taking it away from the French and not returning it to the Maltese Order. Paul I sent Suvorov with his armies back to Russia and demanded that Prussia take decisive measures against England (the seizure of Hanover), threatening to break relations and take Hanover, the homeland of the English monarchs, with Russian forces. But at the same time there began direct relations between Paul and Napoleon. They began in an unusual manner. Paul challenged Napoleon to a duel so as to decide State quarrels by means of a personal contest, without shedding the innocent blood of soldiers. Bonaparte declined from the duel, but had a high opinion of Paul I’s suggestion, and as a sign of respect released his Russian prisoners without any conditions, providing them with all that they needed at France’s expense. Paul I saw that with the establishment of Napoleon in power, an end had been put to the revolution in France.[249] Therefore he concluded a union with Napoleon against England (with the aim of taking Malta away from her and punishing her for her cunning), and united Russia to the ‘continental blockade’ that Napoleon had constructed against England, undermining her mercantile-financial might.[250] Moreover, in counsel with Napoleon, Paul I decided [on January 12, 1801] to send a big Cossack corps to India – the most valuable colony of the English.[251] To this day his Majesty’s order has been deemed ‘mad’ and ‘irrational’. But those who say this conceal the fact that the plan for this Russian expedition against India did not at all belong to Paul I: it arose under Catherine II and was seriously considered by her (Paul I only put it into action).

 

     “Russia’s break with England and the allies signified for them catastrophe and in any case an irreparable blow to the British pocket, and also to the pocket of the major Russian land-owners and traders (English trade in Russia had been very strong for a long time!). From the secret masonic centres of England and Germany an order was delivered to the Russian Masons to remove the Empeor and as quickly as possible!

 

      “Long disturbed by Paul I’s attitude, the Russian nobility were quick to respond to the Masonic summons. Even before this,… in 1798 the Russian Masons had succeeded in sowing dissension in the Royal Family. They slandered the Tsaritsa Maria Fyodorovna of supposedly trying to rule her husband and instead of him. At the same time he was ‘set up with’ the beauty Lopukhina, the daughter of a very powerful Mason, and a faithful plotter. But the affair was foiled through the nobility of the Emperor. Learning that Lopukhina loved Prince Gagarin, Paul I arranged their marriage, since he was just good friends with Lopukhina. The Masons had to save the situation in such a way that Prince Gagarin himself began to help his own wife come closer to Paul I. She settled in the Mikhailov palace and became a very valuable agent of the plotters. From the autumn of 1800 the plot rapidly acquired a systematic character. Count N.P. Panin (the college of foreign affairs) was drawn into it, as was General Count Peter Alexeyevich von der Pahlen, the governor of Petersburg and a very close advisor of the Tsar, General Bennigsen (also a German), Admiral Ribas (a native of the island of Malta), the brothers Plato, Nicholas and Valerian Zubov and their sister, in marriage Princes Zherbtsova, the senators Orlov, Chicherin, Tatarinov, Tolstoy, Torschinsky, Generals Golitsyn, Depreradovich, Obolyaninov, Talysin, Mansurov, Uvarov, Argamakov, the officers Colonel Tolbanov, Skaryatin, a certain Prince Yashvil, Lieutenant Marin and very many others (amongst them even General M.I. Kutuzov, one of the prominent Masons of those years). At the head of the conspiracy stood the English consul in Petersburg, Sir Charles Whitford. According to certain data, through him England paid the plotters two million rubles in gold.

 

     “The most important plotters were the Mason-Illuminati, who acted according to the principle of their founder Weishaupt: ‘slander, slander – something will stick!’ Floods of slanderous inventions poured onto the head of the Emperor Paul I. Their aim was to ‘prove’ that he was mad, mentally ill and therefore in the interests of the people (!) and dynasty (!) he could not remain in power. The slander was strengthened by the fact that the Emperor’s orders either were not carried out, or were distorted to an absurd degree, or in his name instructions of a crazy character were given out. Von Pahlen was especially successful in this. He began to insinuate to Paul I that his son Alexander Pavlovich (and also Constantine), with the support of the Empress, wanted to cast him from the throne. And when Paul I was upset by these communications, it was insinuated to his sons and Alexander and Constantine that the Emperor by virtue of a paranoid illness was intending to imprison them together with their mother for good, while he was supposedly intending to place the young Prince Eugene of Wurtemburg, who had then arrived in Russia, on the throne. Noble society was frightened by the fact that Paul I in a fit of madness [supposedly] wanted to execute some, imprison others and still others send to Siberia. Pahlen was the person closest to the Tsar and they could not not believe him! While he, as he later confessed, was trying to deceive everyone, including Great Prince Alexander. At first the latter was told that they were talking about removing his father the Emperor from power (because of his ‘illness’), in order that Alexander should become regent-ruler. Count N.P. Panin sincerely believed precisely in this outcome of the affair, as did many other opponents of Paul I who had not lost the last trace of humanity. At first Alexander did not at all agree with the plot, and prepared to suffer everything from his father to the end. But Panin, and then Pahlen convinced him that the coup was necessary for the salvation of the Fatherland! Alexander several times demanded an oath from the plotters that they would not allow any violence to his father and would preserve his life. These oaths were given, but they lied intentionally, as Pahlen later boasted, only in order to ‘calm the conscience’ of Alexander.[252] They convinced Constantine Pavlovich in approximately the same way. The coup was marked for the end of March, 1801. Before this Ribas died, and Panin landed up in exile, from which he did not manage to return. The whole leadership of the plot passed to Pahlen, who from the beginning wanted to kill the Emperor. Many people faithful to his Majesty knew about this, and tried to warn him. Napoleon also heard about all this through his own channels, and hastened to inform Paul I in time…. On March 7, 1801 Paul I asked Pahlen directly about the plot. He confirmed its existence and said that he himself was standing at the head of the plotters, since only in this way could he know what was going on and prevent it all at the necessary moment… This time, too, Pahlen succeeded in deceiving the Tsar, but he felt that it would not do that for long, and that he himself ‘was hanging by a thread’. He had to hurry, the more so in that many officials, generals and especially all the soldiers were devoted to Paul I. Besides, the Jesuits, who were at war with the Illuminati, knew everything about the plot in advance. In the afternoon of March 11, in the Tsar’s reception-room, Pater Gruber appeared with a full and accurate list of the plotters and data on the details. But they managed not to admit the Jesuit to an audience with Paul I. Palen told Alexander that his father had already prepared a decree about his and the whole Royal Family’s incarceration in the Schlisselburg fortress, and that for that reason it was necessary to act without delay. Detachments of units loyal to Paul I were removed from the Mikhailov castle, where he lived. On March 11, 1801 the father invited his sons Alexander and Constantine and personally asked them whether they had any part in the conspiracy, and, having received a negative reply, considered it necessary that they should swear as it were for a second time to their faithfulness to him as to their Tsar. The sons swore, deceptively… On the night of the 11th to 12th of March, 1801, an English ship entered the Neva with the aim of taking the conspirators on board in case they failed. Before that Charles Whitford had been exiled from Russia. Zherebtsova-Zubova was sent to him in England so as to prepare a place for the conspirators there if it proved necessary to flee. On the night of the 12th March up to 60 young officers who had been punished for misdemeanours were assembled at Palen’s house and literally pumped with spirits. One of them drunkenly remarked that it would be good for Russia if all the members of the Royal Family were slaughtered at once! The rest rejected such an idea with horror, but it spoke volumes! After much drinking they all moved by night across Mars field to the Mikhailov castle. There the brave officers were scared to death by some crows which suddenly took wing at night in an enormous flock and raised a mighty cry. As became clear later, some of the young officers did not even know where they were being led and why! But the majority knew. One by one (and frightening each other), they managed to enter in two groups into Paul I’s bedroom, having killed one faithful guard, a chamber-hussar at the doors (the second ran for the sentry). Paul I, hearing the noise of a fight, tried to run through a secret door, but a tapestry, ‘The School in Athens’, a gift from the murdered king and queen of France, fell on top of him. The plotters caught the Tsar. Bennigsen declared to him that they were arresting him and that he had to abdicate from the throne, otherwise they could not vouch for the consequences. The greatly disturbed Paul I did not reply. He rushed to a room where a gun was kept, trying to break out of the ring of his murderers, but they formed a solid wall around him, breathing in the face of the Emperor, reeking of wine and spitefulness. Where had the courtier nobles disappeared! ‘What have I done to you?’ asked Paul I. ‘You have tormented us for four years!’ was the reply. The drunken Nicholas Zubov took hold of the Emperor by the hand, but the latter struck the scoundrel on the hand and repulsed him. Zubov took a swing and hit the Tsar on the left temple with a golden snuff-box given by Catherine II, wounding his temple-bone and eyes. Covered with blood, Paul I fell to the ground. The brutalized plotters hurled themselves at him, trampled on him, beat him, suffocated him. Special zeal was displayed by the Zubovs, Skoriatin, Yashvil, Argamakov and, as people think, Pahlen (although there are reasons for thinking that he took no personal part in the fight). At this point the sentries made up of Semenovtsy soldiers faithful to Alexander appeard (the soldiers had not been initiated into the plot). Bennigsen and Pahlen came out to them and said that the Tsar had died from an attack of apoplexy and now his son Alexander was on the throne. Pahlen rushed into Alexander’s rooms. On hearing of the death of his father, Alexander sobbed. ‘Where is your oath? You promised not to touch my father!’ he cried. ‘Enough of crying! They’re going to lift all of us on their bayonets! Please go out to the people!’ shouted Pahlen. Alexander, still weeping, went out and began to say something to the effect that he would rule the state well… The sentries in perplexity were silent. The soldiers could not act against the Heir-Tsarevich, but they could also not understand what had happened. But the simple Russian people, then and later and even now (!) understood well. To this day (since 1801) believing people who are being oppressed by the powerful of this world in Petersburg (and recently also in Leningrad) order pannikhidas for ‘the murdered Paul’, asking for his intercession. And they receive what they ask for!...

 

     “And so the plot of the Russian nobles against the Emperor they did not like succeeded. Paul I was killed with the clear connivance of his sons. The eldest of them, Alexander, became the Tsar of Russia. In the first hours and days nobody yet suspected how all this would influence the destiny of the country in the future and the personal destiny and consciousness of Alexander I himself. All the plotters had an evil end. Some were removed by Alexander I, others were punished by the Lord Himself. The main regicide Pahlen was quickly removed from all affairs and sent into exile on his estate. There he for a long time went mad, becoming completely irresponsible. Nicholas Zubov and Bennigsen also went mad (Zubov began to eat his own excreta). Having falsely accused Paul I of being mentally ill, they themselves became truly mentally ill! God is not mocked. ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay’, He said. The joy of the Russian nobility was not especially long-lived. Alexander I and then Nicholas I were nevertheless sons of their father! Both they and the Emperors who followed them no longer allowed the nobility to rule them. Immediately the Russian nobility understood this, that is, that they no longer had any power over the Autocracy, they began to strive for the annihilation of the Autocracy in Russia altogether, which they succeeded in doing, finally, in February, 1917 – true, to their own destruction!.. Such was the zig-zag of Russian history, beginning with Catherine I and ending with Nicholas II.

 

     “The reign of Emperor Paul Petrovich predetermined the following reigns in the most important thing. As we have seen, this Tsar ‘turned his face’ towards the Russian Orthodox Church, strengthened the foundations of the Autocracy and tried to make it truly of the people. Personally this cost him his life. But thereby the later foundations were laid for the State life of Russia in the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries: ‘Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality!’ Or, in its military expression – ‘For the Faith, the Tsar and the Fatherland!’”[253]

 

     “The prophecy of the clairvoyant monk Abel was completely fulfilled. He personally foretold to the Emperor Paul: ‘Your reign will be short, and I, the sinner, see your savage end. On the feast of St. Sophronius of Jerusalem you will receive a martyric death from unfaithful servants. You will be suffocated in your bedchamber by evildoers whom you warm on your royal breast… They will bury you on Holy Saturday… But they, these evildoers, in trying to justify their great sin of regicide, will proclaim that you are mad, and will blacken your good memory.… But the Russian people with their sensitive soul will understand and esteem you, and they will bring their sorrows to your grave, asking for your intercession and the softening of the hears of the unrighteous and cruel.’ This part of the prophecy of Abel was also fulfilled. When Paul was killed, for many years the people came to his grave to pray, and he is considered by many to be an uncanonised saint.”[254]

 

The Golden Age of Masonry

 

     Monk Abel prophesied the following about Paul’s son and successor, Tsar Alexander I: “Under him the French will burn down Moscow, but he will take Paris from them and will be called the Blessed. But his tsar’s crown will be heavy for him, and he will change the exploit of service as tsar for the exploit of fasting and prayer, and he will be righteous in God’s eyes.”[255]

 

     The reign of Tsar Alexander can be divided into three phases: a first phase until 1812, when he was strongly influenced by the ideas of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment; a second phase from 1812 to about 1822, when the main influence on him was a kind of romantic mysticism; and a third phase until his death, when he returned to True Orthodoxy. Tsar Alexander faced, in a particularly acute form, the problems faced by all the “enlightened despots” of the eighteenth century – that is, how to relieve the burdens of his people without destroying the autocratic system that held the whole country together. Like his fellow despots, Alexander was strongly influenced by the ideals of the French revolution and by the masonic ferment that, as we have seen, had penetrated the nobility of Russia no less than the élites of Western Europe. So it is not surprising that he should have wavered between the strictly autocratic views of his mother the Dowager Empress Maria Fyodorovna, the Holy Synod and the court historian Nicholas Karamzin, on the one hand, and the liberalism of the Masons that surrounded him, on the other.

 

     Only ten days after the death of his father, Alexander returned to the Winter Palace one night to find an anonymous letter on his desk, full of liberal, anti-autocratic sentiments of the kind that Alexander had espoused in his youth. [256] “Is it possible,” it asked, “to set aside the hope of nations in favour of the sheer delight of self-rule?… No! He will at last open the book of fate which Catherine merely perceived. He will give us immutable laws. He will establish them for ever by an oath binding him to all his subjects. To Russia he will say, ‘Here lie the bounds to my autocratic power and to the power of those who will follow me, unalterable and everlasting.’”

 

     The author turned out to be a member of the chancery staff, Karazin. “There followed,” writes Palmer, “an episode which anywhere except Russia would have seemed fantastic. When summoned to the Tsar’s presence, Karazin feared a severe rebuke for his presumption. But Alexander was effusively magnanimous. He embraced Karazin warmly and commended his sense of patriotic duty. Karazin, for his part, knelt in tears at Alexander’s feet, pledging his personal loyalty. Then the two men talked at length about the problems facing the Empire, of the need to safeguard the people from acts of arbitrary tyranny and to educate them so that they could assume in time the responsibilities of government…”[257]

 

     Alexander was further hindered in breaking with his liberal past by the guilt he felt at not stopping his father’s murder, and by the fact that in the early part of his reign he was still surrounded by many of those Masons who had murdered his father. The result was a continual increase in the power of Masonry. “The movement was encouraged,” writes Hartley, “by the rumours, which cannot be substantiated, that Alexander I became a mason (he certainly visited lodges in Russia and Germany)[258]; his younger brother Constantine certainly was a mason. Regional lodges continued to flourish and young army officers who accompanied Russian forces through Europe in 1813 and 1814 also attended, and were influenced by, lodges in the territory through which they passed. The constitutions of secret societies which were formed by army officers in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, like the Order of the Russian Knights and the Union of Salvation and Welfare, copied some of their rules and hierarchical organization from masonic lodges. In 1815, the higher orders of masonry in Russia were subordinated to the Astrea grand lodge.”[259]

 

     In January, 1800 A.F. Labzin opened the “Dying Sphinx” lodge in Petersburg. The members of the order were sworn to sacrifice themselves and all they had to the aims of the lodge, whose existence remained a closely guarded secret. In 1806 Labzin founded The Messenger of Zion as the vehicle of his ideas. Suppressed at first by the Church hierarchy, it was allowed to appear by the synodal over-procurator Prince Golitsyn in 1817.

 

     The Messenger of Zion,” writes Walicki, “preached the notion of ‘inner Christianity’ and the need for a moral awakening. It promised its readers that once they were morally reborn and vitalized by faith, they would gain suprarational powers of cognition and be able to penetrate the mysteries of nature, finding in them a key to a superior revelation beyond the reach of the Church.

 

     “Labzin’s religion was thus a nondenominational and antiecclesiastical Christianity. Men’s hearts, he maintained, had been imbued with belief in Christ on the first day of creation; primitive pagan peoples were therefore closer to true Christianity than nations that had been baptized but were blinded by the false values of civilization. The official Church was only an assembly of lower-category Christians, and the Bible a ‘silent mentor who gives symbolic indications to the living teacher residing in the heart’. All dogmas, according to Labzin, were merely human inventions: Jesus had not desired men to think alike, but only to act justly. His words ‘Come unto Me all ye that labor and are heavy laden’ showed that he did not mean to set up any intermediate hierarchy between the believers and God.”[260]

 

     In 1802 A.A. Zherebtsov opened the “United Friends” lodge in Petersburg. Its aim was “to remove between men the distinctions of races, classes, beliefs and views, and to destroy fanaticism and superstition, and annihilate hatred and war, uniting the whole of humanity through the bonds of love and knowledge.”[261] Then there was the society of Count Grabianka, “The People of God”. “The aim of the society was ‘to announce at the command of God the imminent Coming of the Lord Jesus Christ and his glorious reign upon earth’ and to prepare the humble and faithful souls for the approaching Kingdom of God. ‘As in the Rosecrucian lodges,’ writes Sokolskaia, ‘in the lodge of Count Grabianka people indulged, besides theosophy, in alchemy and magic. But while asserting that the brothers of the “Golden Rose Cross” had as their object of study ‘white, Divine magic’, the leaders of the Rosecrucians accused the followers of Count Grabianka of indulging in reading books of black magic and consorting with evil spirits. In sorrow at the lack of firmness of these brothers, who had become enmeshed in a new teaching, the leaders wrote: ‘Those who are known to us are wavering on their path and do not know what to join. And – God have mercy on them! – they are falling into the hands of evil magicians or Illuminati…’”[262]

 

     Finally, in 1810 an Illuminati lodge, “Polar Star”, was opened by the German Lutheran and pantheist mystic Professor I.A. Fessler. Fessler included among its adepts no less a person than M.M. Speransky, the Minister of Finance.

 

     “’Speransky,’ writes Professor Shiman, ‘was a Freemason who accepted the strange thought of using the organization of the lodge for the reform of the Russian clergy, which was dear to his heart. His plan consisted in founding a masonic lodge that would have branch-lodges throughout the Russian State and would accept the most capable clergy as brothers.

 

     “’Speransky openly hated Orthodoxy. With the help of Fessler he wanted to begin a war against the Orthodox Church. The Austrian chargé d’affaires Saint-Julien, wrote in a report to his government on the fall of Speransky that the higher clergy, shocked by the protection he gave to Fessler, whom he had sent for from Germany, and who had the rashness to express Deist, antichristian views, were strongly instrumental in his fall (letter of April 1, 1812). However, our ‘liberators’ were in raptures with Speransky’s activities….’”[263]

 

     This Masonic ferment was not without its effect on the conduct of government. Thus within a few weeks of ascending the throne Alexander formed a neglassny komitet (secret committee) composed of three or four people of liberal views, who with the emperor plotted the transformation of Russia on liberal lines.

 

     “On June 24, 1801,” writes V.F. Ivanov, “the secret committee opened its proceedings. Alexander called it, on the model of the revolution of 1789, ‘the Committee of public safety’, and its opponents from the conservative camp – ‘the Jacobin gang’.

 

     “There began criticism of the existing order and of the whole government system, which was recognised to be ‘ugly’. The firm and definite conclusion was reached that ‘only a constitution can muzzle the despotic government’”.[264]

 

     However, Alexander’s coronation in September, 1801, in Moscow, the heart of Old Russia with its autocratic traditions, pulled him in the opposite direction to the liberal ideas of St. Petersburg. “After being anointed with Holy Oil by the Metropolitan, Alexander swore a solemn oath to preserve the integrity of the Russian lands and the sacred concept of autocracy; and he was then permitted, as one blessed by God, to pass through the Royal Doors into the Sanctuary where the Tsars had, on this one occasion in their lives, the privilege of administering to themselves the Holy Sacrament. But Alexander felt unworthy to exercise the priestly office in this way; and, as [Metropolitan] Platon offered him the chalice, he knelt to receive communion as a member of the laity. Although only the higher clergy and their acolytes witnessed this gesture of humility, it was soon known in the city at large and created a deep impression of the new Tsar’s sense of spiritual discipline.”[265]

 

     St. Petersburg and Moscow, liberal “ecumenism” and Orthodoxy autocracy, the True Church of Orthodoxy and the false “inner church” of Masonry, divided Alexander’s heart between them, making his reign a crossroads in Russian history.

 

Alexander, Napoleon and Speransky

 

     Alexander was finally forced to make his choice for Orthodoxy by the appearance on the frontiers of Russia of that supreme representative of the despotic essence of liberalism – Napoleon.

 

     Tsar Paul had been murdered with the connivance of the British. Knowing this, Alexander “did not trust the British…, and much that Consul Bonaparte was achieving in France appealed to his own political instincts. Provided Napoleon had no territorial ambitions in the Balkans or the eastern Mediterranean, Alexander could see no reason for a clash of interests between France and Russia. The Emperor’s ‘young friends’ on the Secret Committee agreed in general with him rather than with [the Anglophile] Panin, and when Alexander discussed foreign affairs with them during the late summer of 1801, they received the impression that he favoured settling differences with France as a preliminary to a policy of passive isolation. As St. Helens wrote to Hawksbury shortly before Alexander’s departure for Moscow, ‘The members of the Emperor’s Council, with whom he is particularly connected… been… zealous in promoting the intended peace with France, it being their professed System to endeavour to disengage the Emperor from all foreign Concerns… and induce him to direct his principal attention to the affairs of the Interior.’”[266]

 

     However, the influence of Napoleon on Alexander began to wane after the Russian Emperor’s meeting with the Prussian king Frederick William and his consort Queen Louise in June, 1802. The closeness of the two monarchs threatened to undermine the Tsar’s policy of splendid isolation from the affairs of Europe, and alarmed his foreign minister Kochubey, as well as annoying the French. But isolation was no longer a practical policy as Napoleon continued to encroach on the rights of the German principalities, and so Alexander replaced his foreign minister and, in May, 1803, summoned General Arakcheev to strengthen the Russian army in preparation for possible conflicts in the future…

 

     In 1804 the Duc d’Enghien was kidnapped in Baden by French agents, put on trial and executed as a traitor. “Alexander was enraged by the crime. The Duc d’Enghien was a member of the French royal house. By conniving at his kidnapping and execution the First Consul became, in Alexander’s eyes, a regicide. Nor was this the only cause of the Tsar’s indignation. He regarded the abduction of the Duke from Baden as a particular insult to Russia, for Napoleon had been repeatedly reminded that Alexander expected the French authorities to respect the lands of his wife’s family. His response was swift and dramatic. A meeting of the Council of State was convened in mid-April at which it was resolved, with only one dissentient voice, to break off all diplomatic contact with France. The Russian Court went into official mourning and a solemn note of protest was despatched to Paris.

 

     “But the French paid little regard to Russian susceptibilities. Napoleon interpreted Alexander’s complaint as unjustified interference with the domestic affairs and internal security of France. He entrusted the reply to Talleyrand, his Minister of Foreign Affairs, and a bland statement appeared in the official Moniteur: ‘If, when England prepared the assassination of Paul I, the Russian Government had discovered that the organizers of the plot were no more than a league away from the frontier, would it not have seized them at once?’ No allusion could have been better calculated to wound the Tsar than this deliberate reference to the circumstances of his own accession. It was a rhetorical question which he found hard to forgive or forget. A month later news came from Paris that the First Consul had accepted from the French Senate the title of Emperor. Now, to all his other transgressions, Napoleon had added contempt for the dynastic principle. Resolutely the successor of Peter the Great refused to acknowledge the newest of empires.”[267]

 

     Alexander now set about forming a defensive alliance with Austria and Prussia against France (there were extensive negotiations with Britain, too, but no final agreement was reached). The Tsar and his new foreign minister, the Pole Czartoryski, added an interesting ideological element to the alliance. “No attempt would be made to impose discredited regimes from the past on lands liberated from French military rule. The French themselves were to be told that the Coalition was fighting, not against their natural rights, but against a government which was ‘no less a tyranny for France than the rest of Europe’. The new map of the continent must rest on principles of justice: frontiers would be so drawn that they coincided with natural geographical boundaries, provided outlets for industries, and associated in one political unit ‘homogeneous peoples able to agree among themselves’.”[268]

 

     Appealing to peoples over the heads of their rulers, and declaring that states should be made up of homogeneous ethnic units were, of course, innovative steps, derived from the French revolution, which presented considerable dangers for multi-ethnic empires such as the Russian and the Austrian. Similarly new and dangerous was the idea that the nation was defined by blood alone. None of these ideological innovations appealed to the other nations, and the Coalition (including Britain) that was eventually patched up in the summer of 1805 was motivated more by Napoleon’s further advances in Italy than by a common ideology.

 

     However, although the British defeated Napoleon at sea at Trafalgar, it was a different story on land. At Austerlitz the Allies lost between 25,000 and 30,000 men killed, wounded or captured. And this was only the beginning. In 1806 Napoleon routed the Prussians at Jena and Auerstadt, and in 1807, after an indecisive conflict at Eylau, he defeated the Russians at Friedstadt. Almost the whole of Europe up to the borders of the Russian empire was in French hands…

 

     Two religious events of the year 1806 gave a deeper and darker hue to the political and military conflict. In France Napoleon re-established the Jewish Sanhedrin, which then proclaimed him the Messiah. Partly in response to this, the Holy Synod of the Russian Church called Napoleon the antichrist, declaring that he was threatening “to shake the Orthodox Greco-Russian Church, and is trying by a diabolic invasion to draw the Orthodox into temptation and destruction”. It said that during the revolution Napoleon had bowed down to idols, to human creatures and whores. Finally, ‘to the greater disgrace of the Church of Christ he has thought up the idea of restoring the Sanhedrin, declaring himself the Messiah, gathering together the Jews and leading them to the final uprooting of all Christian faith”.[269]

 

     In view of this unprecedented anathema, and the solemn pledges he had made to the King of Prussia, it would have seemed unthinkable for Alexander to enter into alliance with Napoleon at this time. And yet this is precisely what he did at the famous treaty of Tilsit, on the river Niemen, in July, 1807. It came as a terrible shock to many that he should invite Napoleon to the meeting, saying: “Alliance between France and Russia has always been a particular wish of mine and I am convinced that this alone can guarantee the welfare and peace of the world”. Queen Louise of Prussia, who was very close to Alexander, wrote to him: “You have cruelly deceived me”. And it is hard not to agree with her since, with Alexander’s acquiescence, Napoleon took most of the Prussian lands and imposed a heavy indemnity on the Prussians, while Alexander took a part of what had been Prussian territory in Poland, the province of Bialystok. The only concession Alexander was able to wring from the Corsican was that King Frederick should be restored to the heart of his greatly reduced kingdom “from consideration of the wishes of His Majesty the Emperor of All the Russias”.

 

     Alexander Solzhenitsyn has argued that the peace of Tilsit was in Russia’s interests and should have been maintained, since it would have averted the war of 1812 and the huge loss of life that involved. And he points to little-known facts, such as the burning alive in the fire of Moscow of 15,000 Russian soldiers who were recovering from wounds suffered at Borodino in the military hospitals of the city.[270] However, he fails to take into account the long-term destructive power of the ideology of the French revolution, of which Napoleon was the carrier. If Napoleon had not invaded Russia in 1812, and been defeated there, that ideology would have been firmly established throughout Europe up to the borders of Russia, and would have had an intensified influence inside Russia. As it was, the defeat of Napoleon gave the counter-revolution a chance to halt, if not finally stamp out, the virus of revolution.

 

     “As the days went by with no clear news from Tilsit, the cities of the Empire were again filled with alarming rumours, as they had been after Austerlitz: was Holy Russia to be sold to the Antichrist? For, whatever the fashion on the Niemen, in St. Petersburg and Moscow the Church still thundered on Sundays against Bonaparte, that ‘worshipper of idols and whores’. The Holy Synod was unaccustomed to diplomatic revolution…”[271]

 

     Metropolitan Platon of Moscow wrote to the Tsar warning him not to trust Napoleon, whose ultimate aim was to subjugate the whole of Europe.[272] In other letters, Platon compared Napoleon to Goliath and to “the Pharaoh, who will founder will all his hosts, just as the other did in the Red Sea”.[273]

 

     Of course, in view of his crushing military defeats, Alexander was in a weak position at Tilsit. Nevertheless, if he could not defeat his enemy, he did not have to enter into alliance with him or legitimise his conquests, especially since Napoleon did not (at that time) plan to invade Russia. To explain Alexander’s behaviour, which went against the Church, his Allies and most of public opinion at home, it is not sufficient to point to the liberal ideas of his youth, although those undoubtedly played a part. It is necessary to point also to a personal factor, the romantically seductive powers of that truly antichristian figure, Napoleon Bonaparte. As we have seen in the last chapter, Napoleon had seduced a whole generation of young people in Europe and America; so it is hardly surprising that the Tsar should also have come under his spell.

 

     As Tsaritsa Elizabeth perceptively wrote to her mother: “You know, Mamma, this man [Napoleon] seems to me like an irresistible seducer who by temptation or force succeeds in stealing the hearts of his victims. Russia, the most virtuous of them, has defended herself for a long time; but she has ended up no better than the others. And, in the person of her Emperor [Alexander], she has yielded as much to charm as to force. He feels a secret attraction to his enticer which is apparent in all he does. I should indeed like to know what magic it is that he [Napoleon] employs to change people’s opinions so suddenly and so completely…”[274]

 

     In any case, “the peace of Tilsit,” writes Ivanov, ”did not bring pacification. A year after Tilsit a meeting took place at Erfurt between Napoleon and Alexander, to which Alexander brought Speransky. At this last meeting Napoleon made a huge impression and convinced him of the need of reforming Russia on the model of France.

 

     “The historian Professor Shiman in his work, Alexander I, writes:

 

     “’And so he (Alexander) took with him to Erfurt the most capable of his officials, the privy councillor Michael Mikhailovich Speransky, and put him in direct contact with Napoleon, who did not miss the opportunity to discuss with him in detailed conversations various questions of administration. The result of these conversations was a whole series of outstanding projects of reform, of which the most important was the project of a constitution for Russia.’[275]

 

     “Alexander returned to Petersburg enchanted with Napoleon, while his State-Secretary Speransky was enchanted both with Napoleon and with everything French.

 

     “The plan for a transformation of the State was created by Speransky with amazing speed, and in October, 1809 the whole plan was on Alexander’s desk. This plan reflected the dominant ideas of the time, which were close to what is usually called ‘the principles of 1789’.

 

     “1) The source of power is the State, the country.

 

     “2) Only that phenomenon which expresses the will of the people can be considered lawful.

 

     “3) If the government ceases to carry out the conditions on which it was summoned to power, its acts lose legality. The centralised administration of Napoleon’s empire influenced Alexander’s ideas about how he should reform his own administration.

 

     “4) So as to protect the country from arbitrariness, and put a bound to absolute power, it is necessary that it and its organs – the government institutions – should be led in their acts by basic laws, unalterable decrees, which exactly define the desires and needs of the people.

 

     “5) As a conclusion from what has been said: the basic laws must be the work and creation of the nation itself.

 

     “Proceeding from the proposition expressed by Montesquieu that ‘three powers move and rule the state: the legislative power, the executive power and the judicial power’, Speransky constructed the whole of his plan on the principle of the division of powers – the legislative, the executive and the judicial. Another masonic truth was introduced, that the executive power in the hands of the ministers must be subject to the legislative, which was concentrated in the State Duma.

 

     “The plot proceeded, led by Speransky, who was supported by Napoleon.

 

     “After 1809 stubborn rumours circulated in society that Speransky and Count N.P. Rumyantsev were more attached to the interests of France than of Russia.

 

     “Karamzin [the historian] in his notes and conversations tried to convince Alexander to stop the carrying out of Speransky’s reforms, which were useless and would bring only harm to the motherland.

 

     “Joseph de Maistre saw in the person of Speransky a most harmful revolutionary, who was undermining the foundations of all state principles and was striving by all means to discredit the power of the Tsar.

 

     “For two years his Majesty refused to believe these rumours and warnings. Towards the beginning of 1812 the enemies of Speransky in the persons of Arakcheev, Shishkov, Armfeldt and Great Princess Catherine Pavlovna convinced his Majesty of the correctness of the general conviction of Speransky’s treachery.

 

     “The following accusations were brought against Speransky: the incitement of the masses of the people through taxes, the destruction of the finances and unfavourable comments about the government.

 

     “A whole plot to keep Napoleon informed was also uncovered. Speransky had been entrusted with conducting a correspondence with Nesselrod, in which the main French actors were indicated under pseudonyms. But Speransky did not limit himself to giving this information: on his own, without authorisation from above, he demanded that all secret papers and reports from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs should be handed over to him. Several officials were found who without objections carried out his desire….

 

     “Then from many honourable people there came warnings about the traitrous activities of Speransky.

 

     “At the beginning of 1812 the Swedish hereditary prince Bernadotte, who was in opposition to Napoleon, informed Petersburg that ‘the sacred person of the Emperor is in danger’ and that Napoleon was ready with the help of a big bribe to establish his influence in Russia again.

 

     “A letter was intercepted in which Speransky told a friend about the departure of his Majesty with the aim of inspecting the fortifications that had been raised on the western border, and he used the expression ‘our Boban’. ‘Our Boban’ was a humorous nickname inspired by Voltaire’s story, ‘White Bull’.

 

     “Speransky was completely justly accused of belonging to the most harmful sect of Masonry, the Illuminati. Moreover, it was pointed out that Speransky was not only a member of it, but was ‘the regent of the Illuminati’.

 

     “Speransky’s relations with the Martinists and Illuminati were reported by Count Rastopchin, who in his ‘Note on the Martinists’, presented in 1811 to Great Princess Catherine Pavlovna, said that ‘they (the Martinists) were all more or less devoted to Speransky, who, without belonging in his heart to any sect, or perhaps any religion, was using their services to direct affairs and keep them dependent on himself.’

 

     “Finally, in the note of Colonel Polev, found in Alexander I’s study after his death, the names of Speransky, Fessler, Magnitsky, Zlobin and others were mentioned as being members of the Illuminati lodge…

 

     “On March 11, 1812 Sangley was summoned to his Majesty, who informed him that Speransky ‘had the boldness to describe all Napoleon’s military talents and advised him to convene the State Duma and ask it to conduct the war while he absented himself’. ‘Who am I then? Nothing?’, continued his Majesty. ‘From this I see that he is undermining the autocracy, which I am obliged to transfer whole to my heirs.’

 

     “On March 16 Professor Parrot of Derpt university was summoned to the Winter Palace. ‘The Emperor,’ he wrote in a later letter to Emperor Nicholas I, ‘angrily described to me the ingratitude of Speransky, whom I had never seen, expressing himself with feeling that drew tears from him. Having expounded the proof of his treachery that had been presented to him, he said to me: ‘I have decided to shoot him tomorrow, and have invited you here because I wish to know your opinion on this.’

 

     “Unfortunately, his Majesty did not carry out his decision: Speransky had too many friends and protectors. They saved him, but for his betrayal he was exiled to Nizhni Novgorod, and then – in view of the fact that the Nizhni Novgorod nobility were stirred up against him – to Perm…. At a patriotic banquet in the house of the Provincial Governor Prince Gruzinsky in Nizhni Novgorod, the nobles’ patriotism almost cost Speransky his life. ‘Hang him, execute him, burn Speransky on the pyre’ suggested the Nizhni Novgorod nobles.

 

     “Through the efforts of his friends, Speransky was returned from exile and continued his treachery against his kind Tsar. He took part in the organisation of the uprising of the Decembrists, who after the coup appointed him first candidate for the provisional government.”[276]

 

1812

 

     However, it was Napoleon’s invasion rather than any internal factors that swung the scales in favour of the status quo, thereby paradoxically saving Russia from a 1789-style revolution. Napoleon decided on this fatal step after a gradual cooling in relations between the two countries, ending with Alexander’s withdrawal, in December, 1810, from the economically disastrous Continental System that Napoleon had established against England. By May, Tsar Alexander was showing a much firmer, and more realistic, attitude to the political and military situation: “Should the Emperor Napoleon make war on me, it is possible, even probable, that we shall be defeated. But this will not give him peace… We shall enter into no compromise agreements; we have plenty of open spaces in our rear, and we shall preserve a well-organized army… I shall not be the first to draw my sword, but I shall be the last to sheathe it… I should sooner retire to Kamchatka than yield provinces or put my signature to a treaty in my conquered capital which was no more than a truce…”[277]

 

     The invasion also probably saved Russia from a union with Catholicism, which by now had made its Concordat with Napoleon and was acting, very probably, on Napoleon’s orders. For in 1810 Metropolitan Platon of Moscow, as K.A. Papmehl writes, “became the recipient of ecumenical overtures by the French senator Grégoire (formerly Bishop of Blois), presumably on Napoleon’s initiative. In a letter dated in Paris in May of that year, Grégoire referred to the discussions held in 1717, at the Sorbonne, between Peter I and some French bishops, with a view of exploring the prospects of re-unification. Peter apparently passed the matter on to the synod of Russian bishops who, in their turn, indicated that they could not commit themselves on a matter of such importance without consulting the Eastern Patriarchs. Nothing had been heard from the Russian side since then. Grégoire nevertheless assumed that the consultation must have taken place and asked for copies of the Patriarchs’ written opinions. He concluded his letter by assuring Platon that he was hoping and praying for reunification of the Churches…

 

     “Platon passed the letter to the Synod in St. Petersburg. In 1811 [it] replied to Grégoire, with Emperor Alexander’s approval, to the effect that a search of Russian archives failed to reveal any of the relevant documents. The idea of a union, Platon added, was, in any case ‘contrary to the mood of the Russian people’ who were deeply attached to their faith and concerned with its preservation in a pure and unadulterated form.”[278]

 

     Only a few years before, at Tilsit in 1807, the Tsar had said to Napoleon: “In Russia I am both Emperor and Pope – it’s much more convenient.”[279] But this was not true: if Napoleon was effectively both Emperor and Pope in France, this could never be said of the tsars in Russia, damaged though the Orthodox symphony of powers had been by a century of absolutism and anti-Orthodox acculturation. And the restraint on Alexander’s power constituted by what remained of that symphony of powers evidently led him to think again about imitating the West too closely, whether politically or ecclesiastically.

 

     That the symphony of powers was still intact was witnessed at the consecration of the Kazan cathedral in St. Petersburg on September 27, 1811, the tenth anniversary of Alexander’s coronation. “There was an ‘immense crowd’ of worshippes and onlookers. Not for many years had the people of St. Petersburg witnessed so solemn a ceremony symbolizing the inter-dependence of Church and State, for this essential bond of Tsardom was customarily emphasized in Moscow rather than in the newer capital. To some it seemed, both at the time and later, that the act of consecration served Alexander as a moment of re-dedication and renewal, linking the pledges he had given at his crowning in Moscow with the mounting challenge from across the frontier. For the rest of the century, the Kazan Cathedral remained associated in people’s minds with the high drama of its early years, so that it became in time a shrine for the heroes of the Napoleonic wars.”[280]

 

     It was from the Kazan Cathedral that Alexander set out at the start of the campaign, on April 21, 1812. As Tsaritsa Elizabeth wrote to her mother in Baden: “The Emperor left yesterday at two o’clock, to the accompaniment of cheers and blessings from an immense crowd of people who were tightly packed from the Kazan Church to the gate of the city. As these folk had not been hustled into position by the police and as the cheering was not led by planted agents, he was – quite rightly – moved deeply by such signs of affection from our splendid people!… ‘For God and their Sovereign’ – that was the cry! They make no distinction between them in their hearts and scarcely at all in their worship. Woe to him who profanes the one or the other. These old-world attitudes are certainly not found more intensively anywhere than at the extremes of Europe. Forgive me, dear Mamma, for regaling you with commonplaces familiar to everyone who has a true knowledge of Russia, but one is carried away when speaking of something you love; and you know my passionate devotion to this country.”[281]

 

     A century later, at the beginning of a still greater war against a western enemy, another German-born Tsaritsa would express almost exactly similar sentiments on seeing her husband and Tsar go to battle…

 

     And so Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 acquired a significance that the other Napoleonic wars in continental Europe did not have: it became a struggle, not simply between two not-so-different political systems, but between two radically opposed faiths: the faith in the Revolution and the faith in Orthodoxy. 1812 produced an explosion of Russian patriotism and religious feeling. More religious feeling than patriotism, which was not immediately evident in some parts of the population at the beginning of the invasion. For, as K.N. Leontiev writes: “It was ecclesiastical feeling and obedience to the authorities (the Byzantine influence) that saved us in 1812. It is well-known that many of our peasants (not all, of course, but those who were taken unawares by the invasion) found little purely national feeling in themselves in the first minute. They robbed the landowners’ estates, rebelled against the nobility, and took money from the French. The clergy, the nobility and the merchants behaved differently. But immediately they saw that the French were stealing the icons and putting horses in our churches, the people became harder and everything took a different turn…”[282]

 

     God’s evident support for the heroic Russian armies, at the head of which was the “Reigning” icon of the Mother of God[283], reanimated a fervent pride and belief in Holy Russia. Of particular significance was the fact that it had been Moscow, the old capital associated with Orthodoxy and the Muscovite tsars, rather than the new and westernized capital of St. Petersburg, which had borne the brunt of the suffering. For it was not so much the indecisive battle of Borodino, a contest in which, according to Napoleon, “the French showed themselves worthy of victory and the Russians of being invincible”[284], as the burning of Moscow, which destroyed 80% of dwellings in the city, and Alexander’s refusal to surrender even after that, which proved the decisive turning-point, convincing Napoleon that he could not win…

 

     The terrible sufferings of the French on their return march are well-known. There was even cannibalism, - a sure sign of apocalyptic times, - as the soldiers of the Great Army began to put their fellow-soldiers in the stew pots. Out of the vast army that set out for Russia, only 120,000 returned, 35,000 of them French.[285]

 

     However, the victory of the Orthodox was almost prevented by the intrigues of the Masons. Prominent among them was the commander-in-chief of the army Kutuzov, who, according to Sokolskaia, was initiated into Masonry at the “Three Keys” lodge in Regensburg, and was later received into lodges in Frankfurt, Berlin, Petersburg and Moscow, penetrating into the secrets of the higher degrees.[286] The Tsar was against Kutuzov’s appointment, but said: “The public wanted his appointment, I appointed him: as regards myself personally, I wash my hands of him.”

 

     He was soon proved right in his premonition. The Russian position at the battle of Borodino was poorly prepared by Kutuzov, and he himself took no part in it. The previous commander-in-chief, Barclay, took the lead and acted heroically. Then he followed the agreed plan by retreating and evacuating Moscow. But Kutuzov put all the blame for this on Barclay. De Maistre, writing to his master, the King of Sardinia, was horrified: “There are few crimes to compare with openly attributing all the horror and destruction of Moscow to General Barclay, who is not Russian and has nobody to defend him.”[287]

 

     In Moscow, the patriotic Count Rastopchin, well aware of the pro-Napoleonic sentiments of the nobility, had them evacuated, while Kutuzov slept. As the Martinist Runich said: “Rastopchin, acting through fear, threw the nobility, the merchants and the non-gentry intellectuals out of Moscow in order that they should not give in to the enticements and influence of Napoleon’s tactics. He stirred up the hatred of the people by the horrors [of the fire, which was lit on Rastopchin’s orders] that he ascribed to the foreigners, whom he mocked at the same time. He saved Russia from the yoke of Napoleon.”[288]

 

     “The fire of Moscow started the people’s war. Napoleon’s situation deteriorated from day to day. His army was demoralised. The hungry French soldiers wandered round the outskirts of Moscow searching for bread and provisions. Lootings and murders began. Discipline in the army declined sharply. Napoleon was faced with a threatening dilemma: either peace, or destruction.

 

     “Peace negotiations began. On September 23 at Tarutino camp Kutuzov met Napoleon’s truce-envoy Lauriston. Kutuzov willingly accepted this suggestion and decided to keep the meeting a complete secret. He told Lauriston to meet him outside the camp, beyond the line of our advance posts, on the road to Moscow. Everything was to be done in private and the profect for a truce was to be put forward very quickly. This plan for a secret agreement between Napoleon and the masonic commander-in-chief fell through. Some Russian generals and especially the English agent attached to the Russian army, [General] Wilson, protested against the unofficial secret negotiations with Napoleon. On September 23 Wilson made a scene in front of Kutuzov; he came to him as the representative of the general staff and army generals and declared that the army would refuse to obey him. Wilson was supported by the Duke of Wurtemburg, the Emperor’s uncle, his son-in-law the Duke of Oldenburg and Prince Volkonsky, general-adjutant, who had arrived not long before with a report from Petersburg. Kutuzov gave way, and the meeting with Lauriston took place in the camp headquarters.

 

     “Kutuzov’s failure in securing peace did not stop him from giving fraternal help to Napoleon in the future.

 

     “After insistent urgings from those close to him and at the insistence of his Majesty, Kutuzov agreed to attack near Tarutino.

 

     “The battle of Tarutino revealed the open betrayal of the commander-in-chief.

 

     “’When in the end the third and fourth corps came out of the wood and the cavalry of the main army was drawn up for the attack, the French began a general retreat. When the French retreat was already an accomplished fact and the French columns were already beyond Chernishina, Bennigsen moved his armies forward.

 

     “The main forces at the moment of the French retreat had been drawn up for battle. In spite of this, and the persuasions of Ermolov and Miloradovich, Kutuzov decisively refused to move the armies forward, and only a part of the light cavalry was set aside for pursuing the enemy, the rest of the army returned to the Tarutino camp.

 

     “Bennigsen was so enraged by the actions of the field-marshal that after the battle he did not even consider it necessary to display military etiquette in front of him and, on receiving his congratulations on the victory, did not even get off his horse.

 

    “In private conversations he accused Kutuzov not only of not supporting him with the main army for personal reasons, but also of deliberately holding back Osterman’s corps.

 

     “For many this story will seem monstrous; but from the Masonic point of view it was necessary: the Mason Kutuzov was only carrying out his obligations in relation to his brother (Murat), who had been beaten and fallen into misfortune.

 

     “In pursuing the retreating army of Napoleon Kutuzov did not have enough strength or decisiveness to finish once and for all with the disordered French army. During the retreat Kutuzov clearly displayed criminal slowness.

 

     “’The behaviour of the field-marshall drives me mad,’ wrote the English agent General Wilson about this.” For “the Masonic oath was always held to be higher than the military oath.”[289]

 

The Aftermath of Victory

 

     The victory over Napoleon elicited an explosion of religious feeling, not least in the Tsar himself, who said: “The burning of Moscow enlightened my soul, and the judgement of God on the icy fields filled my heart with a warmth of faith such as I had not felt before. Then I came to know God as He is depicted in the Holy Scriptures. I am obliged to the redemption of Europe from destruction for my own redemption”. All the crosses and medallions minted in memory of 1812, he said, were to bear the inscription: “Not to us, not to us, but to Thy name give the glory”.[290]

 

     God was teaching the Russians a most important lesson: that those western, and especially French, influences which had so inundated Russia in the century up to 1812, were unequivocally evil and threatened to destroy all that was good in Russia. As Bishop Theophan the Recluse wrote generations later: “We are attracted by enlightened Europe… Yes, there for the first time the pagan abominations that had been driven out of the world were restored; then they passed and are passing to us, too. Inhaling into ourselves these poisonous fumes, we whirl around like madmen, not remembering who we are. But let us recall 1812: Why did the French come to us? God sent them to exterminate that evil which we had taken over from them. Russia repented at that time, and God had mercy on her.”[291]

 

     Tragically, however, that lesson was only partially and superficially learned. Although the Masonic plans to overthrow both Church and State had been foiled, both Masonry and other unhealthy religious influences continued to flourish. And discontent with the existing order was evident in both the upper and the lower classes.

 

     Thus the question arose of the emancipation of the peasants, who had played such a great part in the victory, voluntarily destroying their own homes and crops in order to deny them to the French. They hoped for more in return than they actually received, especially those who had marched in the armies that marched to Paris, observing, as Zamoyski notes, “that peasants in France and Germany lived in proper houses and ate well, and that even Prussian soldiers were treated in more human fashion than they were themselves”[292].

 

     “There was great bitterness,” writes Hosking, “among peasants who returned from their militia service to find that there was no emancipation. Alexander, in his manifesto of 30 August 1814, thanking and rewarding all his subjects for their heroic deeds, said of the peasants simply that they would ‘receive their reward from God’…. Some nobles tried to persuade the authorities not to allow them back, but to leave them in the regular army as ordinary soldiers. The poet Gavriil Derzhavin was informed by his returnees that they had been ‘temporarily released’ and were now state peasants and not obliged to serve him. Rumours circulated that Alexander had intended to free them all, but had been invited to a special meeting of indignant nobles at night in the Senate, from which he had allegedly been rescued, pleading for his life, by his brother Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich…”[293]

 

     Here we have the theme, familiar throughout later Russian history, of the people laying the blame for their woes, not on the tsar, but on the nobles. Some peasants may have wanted emancipation and a share in the nobles’ wealth. But they wanted it with the Tsar and through the Tsar, not as the expression of some egalitarian and anti-monarchist ideology. Tsarism and Orthodoxy were the great strengths of Russia, which her enemies always underestimated. The French revolution in this, its imperialist, expansionist phase, overthrew many kingdoms and laid the seeds for the overthrow of still more; but it broke against the rock of the Russian people’s faith in their God and their Tsar…

 

     However, if the masses of the people were still Orthodox and loyal to the Tsar, this was becoming more and more difficult to say of the nobility. We have seen the extent to which Masonry penetrated the bureaucracy in the early part of Alexander’s reign. Unfortunately, the triumphant progress of the Russian army into the heart of Masonry, Paris, did not destroy this influence, but only served to strengthen it. For, as Zamoyski writes, “if nobles at home wanted to keep their serfs, the nobles who served as officers in the armies that occupied Paris were exposed to other, liberal influences. They had been brought up speaking French and reading the same literature as educated people in other countries. They could converse effortlessly with German and English allies as well as with French prisoners and civilians. Ostensibly, they were just like any of the Frenchmen, Britons and Germans they met, yet at every step they were made aware of profound differences. The experience left them with a sense of being somehow outside, almost unfit for participation in European civilisation. And that feeling would have dire consequences…”[294]

 

     Not only Masonry and liberalism, but all kinds of pseudo-religious mysticism flooded into Russia from the West. There was, writes N. Elagin, “a veritable inundation of ‘mystical’ and pseudo-Christian ideas… together with the ‘enlightened’ philosophy that had produced the French Revolution. Masonic lodges and other secret societies abounded; books containing the Gnostic and millenarian fantasies of Jacob Boehme, Jung-Stilling, Eckhartshausen and other Western ‘mystics’ were freely translated into Russian and printed for distribution in all the major cities of the realm; ‘ecumenical’ salons spread a vague teaching of an ‘inner Christianity’ to the highest levels of Russian society; the press censorship was under the direction of the powerful Minister of Spiritual Affairs, Count Golitsyn, who patronized every ‘mystical’ current and stifled the voice of traditional Orthodoxy by his dominance of the Holy Synod as Procurator; the Tsar Alexander himself, fresh from his victory over Napoleon and the formation of a vaguely religious ‘Holy Alliance’ of Western powers, favored the new religious currents and consulted with ‘prophetesses’ and other religious enthusiasts; and the bishops and other clergy who saw what was going on were reduced to helpless silence in the face of the prevailing current of the times and the Government’s support of it, which promised exile and disgrace for anyone who opposed it. Many even of those who regarded themselves as sincere Orthodox Christians were swept up in the spiritual ‘enthusiasm’ of the times, and, trusting their religious feelings more than the Church’s authority and tradition, were developing a new spirituality, foreign to Orthodoxy, in the midst of the Church itself. Thus, one lady of high birth, Ekaterina P. Tatarinova, claimed to have received the gift of ‘prophecy’ on the very day she was received into the Orthodox Church (from Protestantism), and subsequently she occupied the position of a ‘charismatic’ leader of religious meetings which included the singing of Masonic and sectarian hymns (while holding hands in a circle), a peculiar kind of dancing and spinning when the ‘Holy Spirit’ would come upon them, and actual ‘prophecy’ – sometimes for hours at a time. The members of such groups fancied that they drew closer to the traditions of Orthodoxy by such meetings, which they regarded as a kind of restoration of the New Testament Church for ‘inward’ believers, the ‘Brotherhood in Christ’, as opposed to the ‘outward’ Christians who were satisfied with the Divine services of the Orthodox Church… The revival of the perennial ‘charismatic’ temptation in the Church, together with a vague ‘revolutionary’ spirit imported from the West, presented a danger not merely to the preservation of true Christianity in Russia, but to the very survival of the whole order of Church and State…”[295]

 

     V.N. Zhmakin writes: “From 1812 there began with us in Russia a time of the domination of extreme mysticism and pietism… The Emperor Alexander became a devotee of many people simultaneously, from whatever quarter they declared their religious enthusiasm… He protected the preachers of western mysticism, the Catholic paters… Among the first of his friends and counsellors was Prince A.N. Golitsyn, who was ober-procurator of the Synod from 1803… He had the right to affirm the Synodal decisions… Prince Golitsyn was the complete master of the Russian Orthodox Church in the reign of Alexander I… Having received no serious religious education, like the majority of aristocrats of that time, he was a complete babe in religious matters and almost an ignoramus in Orthodoxy… Golitsyn, who understood Orthodoxy poorly, took his understanding of it only from its external manifestations… His mystical imagination inclined in favour of secrecy, fancifulness, originality… He became simultaneously the devotee of all the representatives of contemporary mysticism, such as Mrs. Krunder, the society of Quakers, Jung Schtilling, the pastors… etc. Moreover, he became the pitiful plaything of all the contemporary sectarians, all the religious utopians, the representatives of all the religious theories, beginning with the Masons and ending with the … eunuch Selivanov and the half-mad Tatarinova. In truth, Prince Golitsyn at the same time protected the mystics and the pietists, and gave access into Russia to the English missionaries, and presented a broad field of activity to the Jesuits, who, thanks to the protection of the Minister of Religious Affairs, sowed a large part of Russia with their missions… He himself personally took part in the prayer-meetings of the Quakers and waited, together with them, for the overshadowing of the Holy Spirit, he himself took part in the religious gatherings of Tatarinova, which were orgies reminiscent of the Shamans and khysts…. Thanks to Prince Golitsyn, mystical literature received all rights of citizenship in Russia – works shot through with mystical ravings were distributed en masse… By the direct order of Prince Golitsyn all the more significant mystical works and translations were distributed to all the dioceses to the diocesan bishops. In some dioceses two thousand copies of one and the same work were sent to some dioceses… Prince Golitsyn… acted… in the name of the Holy Synod… and in this way contradicted himself;… the Synod as it were in its own name distributed works which actually went right against Orthodoxy…. He strictly persecuted the appearance of such works as were negatively oriented towards mysticism… Many of the simple people, on reading the mystical works that came into their hands, … were confused and perplexed.”[296]

 

     Something of the atmosphere of St. Petersburg at that time can be gathered from the recollections of the future Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), when he went there for service in the newly reformed ecclesiastical schools in 1809. “The Synod greeted him with the advice to read ‘Swedenborg’s Miracles’ and learn French. He was taken to court to view the fireworks and attend a masquerade party in order to meet Prince Golitsyn…, quite literally ‘amidst the noise of a ball’… This was Philaret’s first masquerade ball, and he had never before seen a domino. ‘At the time I was an object of amusement in the Synod,’ Philaret recalled, ‘and I have remained a fool’.”[297]

 

     As Alexander pursued the remnants of Napoleon’s Great Army into Poland in the bitterly cold winter of 1812-13, he was “in a state bordering on religious ecstasy. More and more he turned to the eleventh chapter of the Book of Daniel with the apocalyptic vision of how the all-conquering King of the South is cast down by the King of the North. It seemed to him as if the prophecies, which had sustained him during the dark days of autumn and early winter, were now to be fulfilled: Easter this year would come with a new spiritual significance of hope for all Europe. ‘Placing myself firmly in the hands of God I submit blindly to His will,’ he informed his friend Golitsyn from Radzonow, on the Wrkra. ‘My faith is sincere and warm with passion. Every day it grows firmer and I experience joys I had never know before… It is difficult to express in words the benefits I gain from reading the Scriptures, which previously I knew only superficially… All my glory I dedicate to the advancement of the reign of the Lord Jesus Christ’… At Kalisch (Kalisz) on the border of the Grand-Duchy of Warsaw and Prussia the Tsar concluded a convention with Frederick William: the agreement provided for a close military alliance between Russia and Prussia, stipulating the size of their respective contingents and promising Prussia territory as extensive as in 1806; but the final clauses went beyond the normal language of diplomacy to echo Alexander’s religious inspiration. ‘Let all Germany join us in our mission of liberation,’ the Kalisch Treaty said. ‘The hour has come for obligations to be observed with that religious faith, that sacred inviolability which holds together the power and permanence of nations.’”[298]

 

     Of course, there were difficult battles still to be fought, and alarms to be endured. Not the least of them was Napoleon’s escape from Elba, which he had been unwisely given (as many others had foreseen, Elba was much too close to the mainland) at the insistence of the ever-chivalrous Alexander, after which he was only with great difficulty finally defeated at Waterloo in June, 1815. Nevertheless, the Tsar showed great tenacity of purpose, in contrast to his weakness at Tilsit, in pushing all the way to Paris and the complete overthrow of the antichrist-emperor, and must take the main credit for finally seeing a legitimate Bourbon king placed on the throne of France.

 

     Perhaps the best measure of his victory was the Orthodox Divine Liturgy celebrated on Alexander’s namesday, September 12, on seven altars on the Plain of Vertus, eighty miles east of Paris, in the presence of the Russian army and all the leading political and military leaders of Europe. Neither before nor since in the modern history of Europe has there been such a universal witness, by all the leaders of the Great Powers, to the true King of kings and Lord of lords.

 

     And if this was just a diplomatic concession on the part of the non-Orthodox powers, it was much more than that for Alexander. His truly Orthodox spirit, so puzzling to the other leaders of Europe, was manifested in a letter he wrote that same evening: “This day has been the most beautiful in all my life. My heart was filled with love for my enemies. In tears at the foot of the Cross, I prayed with fervour that France might be saved…”[299]

 

The Holy Alliance

 

     A few days later Alexander presented his fellow sovereigns with a sacred treaty which he urged them to sign and publish. The treaty was designed to bind the rulers of Europe to a union in virtue, requiring them “to take as their sole guide the precepts of the Christian religion”. The Tsar insisted on proclaiming the treaty dedicated “to the Holy and Indivisible Trinity” in Paris because it was the most irreligious of all Europe’s capital cities.[300]

 

     Only the King of Prussia welcomed the idea. The Emperor of Austria was embarrassed; and in private agreed with his chancellor, Metternich, that Alexander was mad. On the British side, the Duke of Wellington confessed that he could hardly keep a straight face. He and Castlereagh mocked it in private.

 

     Why such irreverence when all agreed that they had come together to defend religion and legitimate government against the atheist Jacobinism? First, because it was not religion, but legitimate government, - more precisely, their own positions, - that most of the statesmen were really interested in, little understanding that the foundation of legitimate government is religion. And secondly, because there had been no agreement in Europe about what “the Christian religion” was for nearly 800 years…

 

     Nevertheless, Tsar Alexander was now the most powerful man in Europe, and the others could not afford to reject his project out of hand. So, led by Metternich, they set about discreetly editing the treaty of its more mystical elements until it was signed by the monarchs of Russia, Austria and Prussia (the British and the Turks opted out, as did the Pope of Rome) on September 26. [301]

 

     “Conformably to the word of the Holy Scriptures,” declared the signatories, “the three contracting Monarchs will remain united by the bonds of a true and indissoluble fraternity, and considering each other as fellow countrymen, they will on all occasions, and in all places led each other aid and assistance; and regarding themselves towards their subjects and armies as fathers of families, they will lead them, in the same fraternity with which they are animated to protect religion, peace and justice.”[302] They pledged themselves to stand together as “members of a single Christian nation” – a remarkable idea in view of the fact that of the three members of the Alliance, one, Russia, was Orthodox, another, Austria, was Catholic, and the third, Prussia, was Protestant.

 

     Golitsyn wrote about the Sacred Alliance in positively chiliastic terms: “This act cannot be recognized as anything other than a preparation for that promised kingdom of the Lord which will be upon the earth as in the heavens.”[303] And the future Metropolitan Philaret wrote: “Finally the kingdoms of this world have begun to belong to our Lord and His Christ”.[304]

 

     But if the Russians’ vision was apocalyptic, that of the Germans was backward-looking in accordance with that romantic medievalism that was sweeping the Germanic lands. For, as Bamber Gascoigne writes: “The Middle Ages were the period when Europe had seemed to be a single Christian nation, and the medieval yearnings of the Romanic Movement played a large part in the political dreams of the right. In 1799 Novalis had anticipated the mood in an essay called Christendom or Europe. He advocated returning to a rather vaguely defined medieval structure of society, in which the virtues were ‘respect for antiquity, attachment to spiritual institutions, a love for the monuments of our ancestors, and the old glorious state families, and the joy of obedience.’ Of all these merits, the joy of obedience was undoubtedly the most attractive to the Christian rulers signing the Holy Alliance. The only prince to abstain was the English prince regent, who was advised by Castlereagh that the alliance was ‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’ (the strictly utilitarian Jeremy Bentham had an even more pungent phrase for such matters, ‘nonsense on stilts’). The Christian princes wasted no time in reviving certain ancient institutions which had been abolished under the Enlightenment or by Napoleon. The Index of Prohibited Books and the Inquisition were restored; and the Jesuits, who for two centuries had been a symbol of papal influence throughout Europe, were re-established.”[305]

 

     Even some renowned churchmen seem to have been temporarily influenced by the ecumenist spirit of this project.[306] Fortunately, however, later tsars, while retaining the politics of alliances with monarchical states against the revolution (Nicholas I even helped the Sultan of Turkey against the Pasha of Egypt in 1833), did not attach to it that ecumenist religious significance given to it by Tsar Alexander. A dangerous temptation had been narrowly averted…

 

The Polish Question

 

     One of the most important issues faced by the Great Powers in 1815 was the settlement of Poland. As was to be expected, the Poles welcomed Napoleon after he defeated the Prussians at Jena in 1806, even if his claims to be a liberator were well and truly tarnished by then (Polish soldiers had suffered particularly in helping the French tyrant’s attempts to crush Dominican independence). But Napoleon was the means, they felt, to their own independence.[307] They were doomed to be disappointed, however. In 1807 Napoleon created the Grand Duchy of Warsaw, and by 1812 controlled almost all the lands of the former Republic – but did not restore it to full independence. And then the Russian armies came back… Nevertheless, Polish soldiers faithfully followed Napoleon both to Elba and to St. Helena, and the cult of Napoleon remained alive in Polish hearts for a long time. Thus the poet Mickiewicz signed himself “Adam Napoleon Mickiewicz”[308].

 

     But in fact Tsar Alexander offered the Poles more than Napoleon had ever given them – one of the most liberal constitutions in Europe, affording the Poles more rights than even the Russians![309] As Lebedev writes: “Great was the joy of Emperor Alexander I in connection with the fact that in 1815 he succeeded in creating a Polish Kingdom that was free both from Prussia and from Austria and almost completely – from Russia! For he gave this Kingdom a Constitution! An unparalleled situation was created. While remaining a part of the Russian Empire, Poland was at the same time a state within a state, and distinct from Russia precisely because it had rights and freedoms which did not exist in Russia! But this seemed little to the proud (and therefore the blind) Poles! They were dreaming of recreating, then and there, the [Polish State] in that ‘greatness’ which, as they thought, it had had before the ‘division of Poland. A revolutionary ‘patriotic’ movement began in which even the friend of Alexander I’s youth, A. Chartoryskij, took part. Like other Polish ‘pans’ [nobles], he looked with haughty coldness on the actions of the Emperor in relation to Poland. The Polish gentry did not value them…”[310]

 

     A complicating factor in the Polish question was Freemasonry. The Masonic historian Jasper Ridley writes: “Alexander I’s attitude to Freemasonry in Russia was affected by the position in Poland. The first Freemasons’ lodge in Poland was formed in 1735; but the Freemasons were immediately attacked by the Jesuits and the Roman Catholic Church, which was influential in Poland, and in 1738 King Augustus II issued a decree suppressing them. His successor, King Stanislaus Augustus Poniatovsky, was sympathetic to the Freemasons. He allowed the first Polish Grand Lodge to be formed in 1767, and ten years later he himself became a Freemason.

 

      “The partition of Poland between Catherine the Great, Frederick the Great and Maria Theresa in 1772, was followed by the further partitions of 1793 and 1796, which eliminated Poland as a country. It was a black day for the Polish Freemasons. Only Frederick the Great and his successors in Prussia tolerated them; they were suppressed in Austrian Poland in 1795 and in Russian Poland in 1797. Some of the leaders of the Polish resistance… were Freemasons; but the most famous of all the heroes of Polish independence, Tadeusz Kosciuszko, was not a Freemason, though he was a personal friend of La Fayette.

 

     “When Napoleon defeated the Russians at Eylau and Friedland, and established the Grand Duchy of Warsaw under French protection in 1807, he permitted and encouraged the Freemasons, and in March 1810 the Grand Orient of Poland was established. After the defeat of Napoleon, Alexander I did not ban the Freemasons in that part of Poland which again came under Russia. When he visited Warsaw in November 1815 he was entertained at a banquet by the Polish Freemasons, and was made a member of the Polish Grand Orient. In 1816 General Alexander Rojnezky became Deputy Grand Master of the Polish Grand Orient, and he drafted a new constitution for the Freemasons which brought the organization to a considerable extent under the control of the Russian government. This aroused the resentment of patriotic Poles who did not like the Russians. In 1819 Major Victor Lukacinsky formed a rival masonic organization. It was free from Russian control and only Poles were admitted.

 

     “The development in Poland was probably one of the factors which persuaded Tsar Alexander to change his attitude towards Freemasonry [and the Polish Kingdom]; though another was his general shift towards a reactionary [sic] policy which followed the formation of the Holy Alliance against revolution between Russia, Austria and Prussia. He asked Lieutenant General Egor Alexandrovich Kushelev, who was a senator and himself a prominent Freemason, to report to him on the masonic lodges in Russia.

 

     “Kushelev’s report, in June 1821, stated that although true Freemasons were loyal subjects and their ideals and activities were praiseworthy, masonic lodges could be used as a cover for revolutionary activities, as they had been in the Kingdom of Naples; and the same was happening in Russia, especially in three of the St. Petersburg lodges.

 

     “’This is the state, Most Gracious Sovereign, in which Masonic lodges now exist in Petersburg. Instead of the Spirit of Christian mildness and of true Masonic rules and meekness, the spirit of self-will, turbulence and real anarchy acts through them.’

 

     “Within a month of receiving Kushelev’s report, Alexander I banned the publication of masonic songs and all other masonic documents. On 1 August 1822 he issued a decree suppressing the Freemasons throughout Russia. In November he issued a similar decree banning the Freemasons and all other secret societies in Russian Poland. These decrees were re-enacted by his more reactionary brother, Tsar Nicholas I, when Nicholas succeeded Alexander…”[311]

 

The Jewish Question

 

     If the Polish problem was difficult to solve, the Jewish problem was even more intractable. The two nations had much in common: both were nations without states, distrustful of each other but united in their craving for national autonomy, both were motivated by a fiercely anti-Orthodox faith, and both occupied approximately the same territories in what was now Western Russia, the subjects of that people, the Russians, whom they had both exploited in the not-so-distant past. The future of Europe, and Christian civilization in general, would to a large extent depend on how well Orthodox Russia would succeed in assimilating and neutralising this breeding-ground of the Revolution…

 

     Now for a century or so before the French revolution, all the major countries of Europe, with the partial exception of Britain and her colonies, had been absolutist in their political structure. In each the monarch supported an official religion which was in decline but still powerful, and in each there were large religious minorities that were sometimes tolerated and sometimes persecuted – the Huguenots in France, the Orthodox in Austro-Hungary, the Orthodox and Armenians in Turkey, the Old Believers and Catholics in Russia, the Orthodox and Protestants in Poland, the Jews everywhere…

 

     The universal principles proclaimed by the Enlightenment, together with the idea of the holiness of the Nation proclaimed by the French revolution, led to the emancipation of the Jews, first in France, and then in most of the countries of Europe. The process was slow and accompanied by many reverses and difficulties, but inexorable. The only great power which firmly and consistently resisted this trend was Russia….

 

     It was not that the Russians did not want to emancipate their Jewish population if that had been possible without harm to the Christians. The record of the Russian empire in giving full rights to natives of various subject populations was in fact very good – we only have to look at the large number of Baltic German names among the senior officials of the empire, the large measure of autonomy given to the Finns, and the way in which Tatar khans and Georgian princes were fully assimilated. But the Jews presented certain intractable problems not presented by the other peoples of the empire.

 

     The first was the sheer number of Jews who suddenly found themselves within the boundaries of the Russian empire. Thus Hartley writes: “The empire acquired a further c. 250,000 Jews after the establishment of the Congress Kingdom of Poland in 1815. There was a substantial Jewish population in Bessarabia (11.3 per cent in 1863). In 1854, the Jewish population of the whole empire was estimated as 1,062,132.”[312] These numbers grew rapidly in the second half of the nineteenth century. And by the beginning of the twentieth century, according to Lebedev, about half the number of the Jews in the whole world were to be found in the Russian empire.

 

     Still more important than the sheer numbers of Russian Jews was their social structure and their attitude to Christians in general and Russians in particular. We have seen how important the internal Jewish authority of the kahal was considered by the enlightened Polish Jew Hourwitz. The Tsar’s servants were soon to make this discovery for themselves. Tsar Paul I appointed the poet and state official Gavriil Romanovish Derzhavin to make a special investigation of the Jewish question. After visiting Belorussia twice, writes Platonov, Derzhavin “noted the ominous role of the kahals – the organs of Jewish self-rule on the basis of the bigoted laws of the Talmud, which ‘a well-constructed political body must not tolerate’, as being a state within the state. Derzhavin discovered that the Jews, who considered themselves oppressed, established in the Pale of Settlement a secret Israelite kingdom divided into kahal districts with kahal administrations endowed with despotic power over the Jews which inhumanly exploited the Christians and their property on the basis of the Talmud. …[313]

 

     “Derzhavin also uncovered the concept of ‘herem’ – a curse which the kahal issued against all those who did not submit to the laws of the Talmud. This, according to the just evaluation of the Russian poet, was ‘an impenetrable sacrilegious cover for the most terrible crimes’.

 

     “In his note Derzhavin ‘was the first to delineate a harmonious, integral programme for the resolution of the Jewish question in the spirit of Russian statehood, having in mind the unification of all Russian subjects on common ground’.

 

     “Paul I, after reading the note, agreed with many of its positions and decorated the author. However, the tragic death of the Tsar as the result of an international Masonic conspiracy destroyed the possibility of resolving the Jewish question in a spirit favourable for the Russian people. The new Emperor, Alexander I, being under the influence of a Masonic environment, adopted a liberal position. In 1802 he created a special Committee for the improvement of the Jews, whose soul was the Mason Speransky, who was closely linked with the Jewish world through the well-known tax-farmer Perets, whom he considered his friend and with whom he lived.

 

     “Another member of the committee was G.R. Derzhavin. As general-governor, he prepared a note ‘On the removal of the deficit of bread in Belorussia, the collaring of the avaricious plans of the Jews, on their transformation, and other things’. Derzhavin’s new note, in the opinion of specialists, was ‘in the highest degree a remarkable document, not only as the work of an honourable, penetrating statesman, but also as a faithful exposition of all the essential sides of Jewish life, which hinder the merging of this race with the rest of the population.’

 

     “In the report of the official commission on the Jewish question which worked in the 1870s in the Ministry of the Interior, it was noted that at the beginning of the reign of Alexander I the government ‘stood already on the ground of the detailed study of Jewry and the preparation that had begun had already at that time exposed such sides of the public institutions of this nationality which would hardly be tolerable in any state structure. But however often reforms were undertaken in the higher administrative spheres, every time some magical brake held up the completion of the matter.’ This magical brake stopped Derzhavin’s proposed reform of Jewry, which suggested the annihilation of the kahals in all the provinces populated by Jews, the removal of all kahal collections and the limitation of the influx of Jews to a certain percentage in relation to the Christian population, while the remaining masses were to be given lands in Astrakhan and New Russia provinces, assigning the poorest to re-settlement. Finally, he proposed allowing the Jews who did not want to submit to these restrictions freedom to go abroad. However, these measures were not confirmed by the government.

 

     “Derzhavin’s note and the formation of the committee elicited great fear in the Jewish world. From the published kahal documents of the Minsk Jewish society it becomes clear that the kahals and the ‘leaders of the cities’ gathered in an extraordinary meeting three days later and decided to sent a deputation to St. Petersburg with the aim of petitioning Alexander I to make no innovations in Jewish everyday life. But since this matter ‘required great resources’, a very significant sum was laid upon the whole Jewish population as a tax, refusal from which brought with it ‘excommunication from the people’ (herem). From a private note given to Derzhavin by one Belorussian landowner, it became known that the Jews imposed their herem also on the general procurator, uniting with it a curse through all the kahals ‘as on a persecutor’. Besides, they collected ‘as gifts’ for this matter, the huge sum for that time of a million rubles and sent it to Petersburg, asking that ‘efforts be made to remove him, Derzhavin, from his post, and if that was not possible, at any rate to make an attempt on his life’.”[314]

 

     Not surprisingly, Tsar Alexander’s Statute for the Jews of December 9, 1804 turned out to be fairly liberal – much more liberal than the laws of Frederick Augustus in Napoleon’s Duchy of Warsaw. Its strictest provisions related to a ban on Jews’ participation in the distilling and retailing of spirits.

 

     Also, writes Vital, “there was to be no relaxation of the ancient rule that Jews (negligible exceptions apart[315]) were to be prevented from penetrating into ‘inner Russia’. Provision was made for an eventual, but determined, attack on the rabbinate’s ancient – but in the government’s view presumptuous and unacceptable – practice of adjudicating cases that went beyond the strict limits of the religious (as opposed to the civil and criminal domain), but also on rabbinical independence and authority generally….[316]

 

     “But the Jews themselves could take some comfort in it being expressly stated that there was to be no question of forcible conversion to Christianity; that they were not to be oppressed or harassed in the observance of their faith and in their general social activities; that the private property of the Jews remained inviolable; and that Jews were not to be exploited or enserfed. They were, on the contrary, to enjoy the same, presumably full protection of the law that was accorded other subjects of the realm. They were not to be subject to the legal jurisdiction of the landowners on whose estates they might happen to be resident. And they were encouraged in every way the Committee could imagine – by fiscal and other economic incentives, for example, by the grant of land and loans to develop it, by permission to move to the New Russian Territories in the south – to undergo decisive and (so it was presumed) irreversible change in the two central respects which both Friezel and Derzhavin had indeed, and perfectly reasonably, regarded as vital: education and employment. In this they were to be encouraged very strongly; but they were not to be forced…”[317]

 

     However, the liberal Statute of 1804 was never fully implemented, and was succeeded by stricter measures towards the end of Alexander’s reign and in the reign of his successor, Nicholas I. There were many reasons for this. Among them, of course, was Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, which, if it had been successful, would have united the Western Sephardic Jews with the Eastern Ashkenazi Jews in a single State, free, emancipated, and under their own legally convened Sanhedrin. But not only did Napoleon not succeed: the invasion of Russia was the graveyard of his empire. In 1813, and again in 1815, the Russian armies entered Paris. From now on, the chief target of the Jews’ hatred would be the Russian Empire…

 

     But the main reason for the tightening of Russian policy was “the Jews’ abhorrence of Christianity, the intensely negative light in which non-Jewish society had always been regarded, and the deeply ingrained suspicion and fear in which all forms of non-Jewish authority were commonly held.”[318] If the French delegates who emancipated the French Jews could ignore this fact, the Russian Tsars could not. For, as the prosemitic and anti-Russian author, David Vital writes, “there were differences between Russian and the other European states not only in the political relationship between state and Church, but in respect of the place of religion generally… It was not merely that in principle Russia continued to be held by its Autocrat and his minions to be a Christian state with a particular duty to uphold its own Orthodox Church. It was that, far from the matter of the state’s specifically Christian duty slowly wasting away, as in the west, it continued actively to exercise the minds of Russia’s rulers as one of the central criteria by which questions of public policy were to be judged and decided. The continuous search for an effective definition of the role, quality, and ultimate purposes of the Autocracy itself was an enterprise which, considering the energy and seriousness with which it was pursued, sufficed in itself to distinguish Russia from its contemporaries. The programmes to which the state was committed and all its structures were under obligation to promote varied somewhat over time. But in no instance was there serious deviation from the rule that Russian Orthodoxy was and needed to remain a central and indispensable component of the ruling ethos. Nineteenth-century Russia was… an ideological state in a manner and to a degree that had become so rare as to be virtually unknown in Europe and would not be familiar again for at least a century…”[319]

 

     The Tsars’ gradual tightening of policy in relation to the Jews had little or no effect on the basic problem of religious and social antagonism. As Platonov writes: “The statute of the Jews worked out in 1804, which took practically no account of Derzhavin’s suggestion, continued to develop the isolation of the Jewish communities on Russian soil, that is, it strengthened the kahals together with their fiscal, judicial, police and educational independence. However, the thought of re-settling the Jews out of the western region continued to occupy the government after the issuing of the statute in 1804. A consequence of this was the building in the New Russian area (from 1808) of Jewish colonies in which the government vainly hoped to ‘re-educate’ the Jews, and, having taught them to carry out productive agricultural labour, to change in this way the whole structure of their life. Nevertheless, even in these model colonies the kahal-rabbinic administration retained its former significance and new settlements isolated themselves from the Christian communities; they did not intend to merge with them either in a national or in a cultural sense. The government not only did not resist the isolation of the Jews, but even founded for them the so-called Israelite Christians (that is, Talmudists who had converted to Orthodoxy). A special committee existed from 1817 to 1833.”[320]

 

The Reaction against Masonry

 

     Church-State relations were greatly strained in Alexander’s reign by the Bible Society. “Founded in 1804 in England by Methodists and Masons, the Bible Society extended its wide activity also in Russia. The Society had large financial resources. In 1810 the monetary contributions of the Bible Society attained 150,000 rubles, and at the end of 1823 there were already 300 such societies in Russia. Under the mask of love for one’s neighbour and the spreading of the word of God, the bible societies began to conduct oral propaganda and publish books directed against [the Orthodox Christian] religion and the State order. These books were published under the management of the censor, which was attached to the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and Popular Enlightenment, which was headed by the Emperor Alexander’s close friend, Prince A.N. Golitsyn. The main leaders of the Bible societies were members of the Masonic lodges, who preached the rejection of Orthodoxy, the Church and the rites of the Church. In 1819 there was published Stankevich’s book, ‘A conversation in the coffin of a child’, which was hostile to the institution of the Orthodox Church. Then Yastrebov published a work entitled ‘An appeal to men to follow the inner promptings of the Spirit of Christ’. This work was recognised to be a sermon ‘of seditious elements against the Christian religion’ and the good order of the State. In 1824 there appeared ‘a blasphemous interpretation of the Gospel’ published by the director of the Russian Bible Society. This work openly pursued the aim of stirring up people against the Church and the Throne. Besides the publication of books directed against Orthodoxy, foreign religious propaganda was conducted. Two Catholic priests from Southern Germany, Gosner and Lindl, preached Protestantism, a sect beloved by the Masons. The Methodists and other sectarians sowed their tares and introduced heresies amidst the Orthodox. At the invitation of the Mason Speransky, the very pope of Masonry, Fessler, came and took charge of the work of destroying the Orthodox Church.

 

     “The Orthodox clergy were silent. They could not speak against the evil that was being poured out everywhere. All the powerful men of the world were obedient instruments of Masonry. The Tsar, who was falsely informed about the aims and tasks of the Bible Society by Prince Golitsyn, gave the latter his protection from on high.”[321]

 

     “Golitsyn,” writes Oleg Platonov, “invited to the leadership of the Bible Society only certain hierarchs of the Russian Church that were close to him. He de facto removed the Holy Synod from participation in this matter. At the same time he introduced into it secular and clerical persons of other confessions, as if underlining that ‘the aim of the Society is higher than the interests of one, that is the Russian Church, and that it develops its activities in the interests of the whole of Christianity and the whole of the Christian world’.[322]

 

     “As the investigator of the Bible Society I.A. Chistovich wrote in 1873, ‘this indifferent cosmopolitanism in relation to the Church, however pure its preachers might be in their ideal simplicity of heart, was, however, was an absurdity at that, as at any other time. Orthodoxy is, factually speaking, the existing form of the Christian faith of the Greco-Russian Church, and is completely in accord with the teaching and statutes of the Ancient Universal Church. Therefore Christianity in its correct ecclesiastical form only exists in the Orthodox Church and cannot have over or above it any other idea… But the Bible Society was directed precisely against such an ideal, and they sought it out or presupposed it.’

 

     “In an official document of the Bible Society the ideas of Masonic ecumenism were openly declared. ‘The heavenly union of faith and love,’ it says in a report of the Russian Bible Society in 1818, ‘founded by means of Bible Societies in the great Christian family, reveal the beautiful dawn of the wedding day of Christians and that time when there will be one pastor and one flock, that is, when there will be one Divine Christian religion in all the various formations of Christian confessions.’

 

     “The well-known Russian public figure, the academic A.S. Shishkov wrote on this score: ‘Let us look at the acts of the Bible Societies, let us see what they consist of. It consists in the intention to construct out of the whole human race one general republic or other and one religion – a dreamy and undiscriminating opinion, born in the minds either of deceivers or of the vainly wise… If the Bible Societies are trying only to spread piety, as they say, then why do they not unite with our Church, but deliberately act separate from her and not in agreement with her? If their intention consists in teaching Christian doctrines, does not our Church teach them to us? Can it be that we were not Christians before the appearance of the Bible Societies? And just how do they teach us this? They recruit heterodox teachers and publish books contrary to Christianity!… Is it not strange – even, dare I say it, funny – to see our metropolitans and hierarchs in the Bible Societies sitting, contrary to the apostolic rules, together with Lutherans, Catholics, Calvinists and Quakers – in a word, with all the heterodox? They with their grey hairs, and in their cassocks and klobuks, sit with laymen of all nations, and a man in a frock suit preaches to them the Word of God (of God as they call it, but not in fact)! Where is the decency, where the dignity of the church server? Where is the Church? They gather in homes where there often hang on the walls pictures of pagan gods or lascivious depictions of lovers, and these gatherings of theirs – which are without any Divine services, with the reading of prayers or the Gospel, sitting as it were in the theatre, without the least reverence – are equated with Church services, and a house without an altar, unconsecrated, where on other days they feast and dance, they call the temple of God! Is this not similar to Sodom and Gomorrah?’”[323]

 

     At this critical moment for Russian Orthodoxy, God raised up righteous defenders of the faith, such as Archimandrite, later Bishop Innocent (Smirnov) and then Metropolitan Michael (Desnitsky) and the superior of the Novgorod Yuriev monastery, Archimandrite Photius (Spassky).

 

     Metropolitan Michael protested at Golitsyn’s removal of the censorship of spiritual books from the Holy Synod into the hands of laymen, which meant giving free expression to the pseudo-mystical sects. There were stormy scenes between the prince and the metropolitan even in the Synod.

 

     “The holy hierarch Philaret [at that time archbishop of Yaroslavl], as a Member of the Synod was witness to the heated speeches of Metropolitan Michael in defence of the Church and undoubtedly approved of his actions. In his eyes the first-ranking hierarch was rightly considered to be a pillar of the Orthodox Church, restraining the onslaught of false mysticism. And when this pillar collapsed (he died[324]), and the storms did not die down, Philaret, like many others, was seized by fear for the destiny of the Church. Under the influence of a vision seen by someone concerning Metropolitan Michael, a sorrowful picture of Church life, full of misery and darkness, was revealed. He believed that in such a situation only a person possessing the spirit and power of the Prophet Elijah could work with benefit for the Church. However, the holy hierarch was profoundly convinced that the Church was supported, not by people, but by the Lord. And since he saw that it was impossible to save the Church only by human efforts, without the help of God, he decided that it was better for him to withdraw himself from everything as far as he could. Evidently, Philaret preferred a different method of warfare with various kinds of heterodox preachers and sectarian societies from that employed by Metropolitan Michael. And these methods were: a correct organization of the spiritual schools throughout Russia and the spiritual enlightenment of the Russian people through the distribution of Orthodox spiritual literature…”[325]

 

      However, while Philaret withdrew to concentrate on spiritual education, a man with the spirit and strength of the Prophet Elijah was found. Fr. Photius (Spassky), later superior of Yuriev monastery near Novgorod, began his open defence of Orthodoxy in 1817. “Bureaucratic and military Petersburg were angry with the bold reprover. His first speech was unsuccessful. Photius’ struggle… against the apostates from Orthodoxy, the followers of the so-called inner Church, ended with his expulsion from Petersburg.

 

     “After the expulsion of Photius the Masons celebrated their victory. But the joy of the conquerors turned out to be short-lived. The exile was found to have followers. Photius received special support at a difficult time of his life from the great righteous woman, Countess Anna Alexeevna Orlova-Chesmenskaia, who presented a model of piety. She not only protected him, but chose him as her leader and confessor. The firmness and courage with which Photius fought against the enemies of Orthodoxy attracted the mind and heart of Countess Orlova, a woman of Christian humility and virtue. After the death of her instructor, Countess Orlova explained why it was Photius whom she chose as her spiritual director. ‘He attracted my attention,’ wrote Countess Orlova, ‘by the boldness and fearlessness with which he, being a teacher of the law of God at the cadet corps and a young monk, began to attack the dominant errors in faith. Everybody was against him, beginning with the Court. He did not fear this. I wanted to get to know him and entered into correspondence with him. His letters seemed to me to be some kind of apostolic epistles. After getting to know him better, I became convinced that he personally sought nothing for himself.’”[326]

 

      However, the struggle against Masonry was helped by other events. As we have seen, Kushelev reported to the Tsar on the revolutionary activity in the Polish and Russian lodges. And then there was the Congress of the Sacred Alliance in Verona in 1822. Lebedev writes that at this Congress “Metternich unexpectedly, on the basis of masonic documents that had unexpectedly fallen into his possession, demonstrated that the secret societies of all countried, being in constant communication with each other, constituted one common plot, which was subject only to the secret leaders, and only for form’s sake accepted different programmes in different countries, depending on circumstances and conditions. He was supported by the Prussian minister, Count Haugwitz, who himself had formerly been a Mason. He made a detailed report in which he showed that the ‘enmity’ of various unions of Masonry was only for show, to divert attention. In actual fact Masonry in its depths was one and its aim was the subjection of the world, and in the first place the subjection of the monarchs, so that they become weapons in the hands of the Masons. Haugwitz added that since 1777 personally ruled not only a part of the Prussian lodges, but also Masonry in Poland and Russia! We can imagine how shocked his Majesty Alexander I was as he sat in the hall. He had been born in the same year of 1777 and had entered Masonry in 1803. Everybody was stunned. The Austrian Emperor Frantz and the Russian Emperor Alexander I decided to attack this great evil. In 1822 Masonry was forbidden in Russia by a decree of the Tsar. The lodges were disbanded, the ‘brothers’’ correspondence with abroad was strictly forbidden. At the same time this was the third powerful blow that shook the soul of Alexander I with the collapse of his faith in the nobility of the Masonic ideas and strivings. Strict censorship was introduced, especially in the publication of books of a spiritual nature. Now his Majesty began to pay attention to the rebukes of Masonry and mysticism issuing from Archimandrite Innocent, who had suffered earlier for this, of the metropolitan of the capital Michael, Metropolitan Seraphim who succeeded him, and also of the zealous defender of Orthodoxy Archimandrite Photius (Spassky)… Seraphim and Photius, joining forces, were able to to show Alexander the danger for Orthodoxy of ‘fashionable’ tendencies in though, the harmfulness of the activity of Prince Golitsyn, and return the heart of the Tsar to Holy Orthodoxy. A visit to Valaam monastery, conversations with Vladyka Seraphim, with Elder Alexis of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra made a great impression on Alexander and showed him that what his exalted soul had sought throughout his life was contained in the experience, rules and methods of Orthodox asceticism, which was just then experiencing an unusual ascent, being armed with such books as The Philokalia and others, especially on the doing of the Jesus prayer (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner!’). This was Alexander’s fourth powerful spiritual shock. It had two kinds of consequences. When, in April, 1924, after many fruitless exhortation, Archimandrite Photius publicly (in a private house) pronounced ‘anathema’ on Prince Golitsyn and the latter retired[327], his Majesty accepted his retirement.”[328]

 

     Archimandrite Photius wrote: “the Masonic faith is of Antichrist, and its whole teaching and writings are of the devil”[329], and “in the spring of 1824 [he] wrote two epistles to his Majesty. In one of them he said that ‘in our time many books, and many societies and private people are talking about some kind of new religion, which is supposedly pre-established for the last times. This new religion, which is preached in various forms, sometimes under the form of a new world…, sometimes of a new teaching, sometimes of the coming of Christ in the Spirit, sometimes of the union of the churches, sometimes under the form of some renewal and of Christ’s supposed thousand-year reign, sometimes insinuated under the form of a so-called new religion – is apostasy from the faith of God, the faith of the apostles and the fathers. It is faith in the coming Antichrist, it is propelling the revolution, it is thirsting for blood, it is filled with the spirit of Satan. Its false-prophets and apostles are Jung-Stilling, Eckartshausen, Thion, Bohme, Labzin, Fessler and the Methodists…’

 

     “His Majesty was favourably disposed to the epistle of Archimandrite Photius in spite of the fact that it contained criticism of all his recent friends and of the people who had enjoyed his protection. Almost at the same time there appeared the book of Gosner, about whose harmful line Archimandrite Photius had reported to his Majesty on April 17, 1824.

 

     “On April 20, 1824, Emperor Alexander received Photius, who was ordered: ‘Come by the secret entrance and staircase into his Majesty’s study so that nobody should know about this’. Their conversation lasted for three hours, and on May 7 Photius sent his second epistle with the title: ‘Thoroughly correct the work of God. The plan for the revolution published secretly, or the secret iniquities practised by secret society in Russia and everywhere.’

 

     “On April 29 Photius gave his Majesty another note: ‘To your question how to stop the revolution, we are praying to the Lord God, and look what has been revealed. Only act immediately. The way of destroying the whole plan quietly and successfully is as follows: 1) to abolish the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and remove two others from a well-known person; 2) to abolish the Bible Society under the pretext that there are already many printed Bibles, and they are now not needed; 3) the Synod is, as before, to supervise education, to see if there is anything against the authorities and the faith anywhere; 4) to remove Koshelev, exile Gosner, exile Fessler and exile the Methodists, albeit the leading ones. The Providence of God is now to do nothing more openly.’

 

     “This flaming defence of Orthodoxy [by Photius] together with Metropolitan Seraphim was crowned with success: on May 15, 1824 the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs was abolished.”[330]

 

     The Synod was now freer; it had a new over-procurator in the place of Golitsyn, and was purged of those members that had been linked with him. The Tsar had paid heed to Photius’ appeal. “God conquered the visible Napoleon who invaded Russia,” he said to him. “May He conquer the spiritual Napoleon through you!”

 

     However, not everyone saw only good in the struggle against the Bible Society and the false mystics. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, who had been Archimandrite Photius’ early sponsor, had declined to enter into open warfare against the mystics, partly because of his personal friendship with Golitsyn[331], and partly because he had another approach to mysticism.

 

     “At the same time as the negative actions which Golitsyn had permitted against the Church, the Moscovite archpastor saw in him much that was positive and recognized him to be one of the zealots of the spiritual side of the ecclesiastical organism. One way or the other, with the support of Prince Golitsyn it had been possible to publish many useful ecclesiastical books of a mystical character, but in an Orthodox spirit. Of course, Philaret was Orthodox in his views on mysticism. He clearly understood that in mysticism the most important question is its relation to the Church and the institutions of the Church. Every form of isolation could bring only harm, not good. Philaret recognized the usefulness of mystical teaching in the spirit of Orthodoxy and was far from sympathizing with a superficial approach to the latter. In the actions of the opponents of mysticism he found excesses, while the very method of the struggle against the latter he considered to be open to criticism and of little use. What, for example, did the party of Arakcheev and Photius gain by their victory? Absolutely nothing…. First of all, mystical literature was subjected to terrible attacks, and that which was formerly considered useful was now recognized to be harmful, demonic and heretical. All books of a mystical character were ordered to be removed from the libraries of educational institutions and a veto placed on them. Terrible difficulties were placed in the way of the publication of patristic literature. Publishers were frightened, as it were, to publish, for example, the writings of St. Macarius, they were frightened to appear thereby to be supporters of mysticism. The opponents of the Bible Society did great harm also to the translation of the Holy Scriptures into Russian…”[332]

 

     Philaret had been taking an active part in this translation because he saw in it the best means of diverting the often misdirected religious aspirations of Russian society in the direction of Orthodoxy. “’Let the bread not be taken away from the child’… - Metropolitan Philaret firmly believed in the renovatory power of the Word of God. He uninterruptedly bound his destiny with the work on the Bible, with the translation of the Holy Scriptures. And it is difficulty properly to value his Biblical exploit. For him personally it was bound up with great trials and sorrow.”[333]

 

     For the work of translation was vigorously opposed by Metropolitan Seraphim, Archimandrite Photius and Admiral Shishkov, the new minister of education.

 

     Thus Shishkov “denied the very existence of the Russian language – ‘as if he saw in it a certain person’, he saw in it only baseness and meanness, ‘the simple people’s’ dialect of the single Slavic-Russian language. He saw in [Philaret’s] determination to translate the Word of God an ill-intentioned undertaking, ‘a weapon of revolutionary plots’, ‘how can one dare to change the words which are venerated as having come from the mouth of God?’… And translate it into what? Who would read these translations, would they not pile up everywhere in torn-up copies?… From the translation of the Bible Shishkov turned to the Catechism of Philaret and to his Notes on the Book of Genesis, where the Biblical and New Testament texts were translated in a Russian ‘reworking’. He was particularly disturbed by the fact that the Catechism was printed in a large print-run (18,000!) – he saw in this the clear manifestation of some criminal intention. Archimandrite Photius, on his part,… reproached the ‘unhealthy and harmful’ work of the Biblical translation – ‘the power of the translation was such that it clearly overthrew the dogmas of Church teaching or cast doubt on the truth of the Church’s teaching and traditions’. And Photius directly attacked Philaret, who, in his words, ‘was struggling on behalf of a God-fighting assembly’ and was supposedly ‘influencing the translation of the Bible in order rather to give a new appearance to the Word of God, thereby assisting faithlessness, innovation and all kinds of ecclesiastical temptations’. He directly called Philaret’s Catechism ‘gutter water’. As Philaret was told by his disciple Gregory, who was then rector of the Petersburg Academy and many years later Metropolitan of Novgorod and Petersburg, they were saying about the Bible Society that ‘it was founded in order to introduce a reformation’. They feared the translation of the Old Testament, and in particular the five books of Moses, lest it somehow seduced people to return to the Old Testament ritual law, or fall into Molokanism and Judaism (this thought was Magnitsky’s). They began ‘to say unpleasant things’ about Philaret in Petersburg, and it was suggested that he be removed to the Caucasus as exarch of Georgia… In these years Philaret was in Moscow and took no notice of the Petersburg rumours and ‘Alexandrine politics’. As before, he directly and openly defended the work on the Bible and attempted to show that ‘the very desire to read the Holy Scriptures is already an earnest of moral improvement’. To the question, what was the purpose of this new undertaking in a subject so ancient and not subject to change as Christianity and the Bible, Philaret replied: ‘What is the purpose of this new undertaking? But what is new here? Dogmas? Rules of life? But the Bible Society preaches none of these things, and gives into the hands of those who desire it the book from which the Orthodox dogmas and pure rules of life were always drawn by the true Church in the past and to the present day. A new society? But it introduces no novelty into Christianity, and produces not the slightest change in the Church’… They asked: ‘Why is this undertaking of foreign origin?’ But, replied Philaret, so much with us ‘is not only of foreign origin, but also completely foreign’…

 

     “The supposed zealots succeeded in obtaining the banning of Philaret’s Catechism on the excuse that there were ‘prayers’ in it – the Symbol of faith and the Commandments – in Russian. The Russian translation of the New Testament was not banned, but the translation of the Bible was stopped. And as Metropolitan Philaret of Kiev remembered later ‘with great sorrow and horror’, from fear of conversions to Judaism, ‘they found it necessary to commit to the flames of brick factories several thousand copies of the five books of the Prophet Moses translated into Russian in the St. Petersburg Theological Academy and printed by the Bible Society’. M. Philaret reacted sharply and sorrowfully to these actions, which were carried out bypassing the Holy Synod. ‘I don’t know what it was all about, but I cannot see that it was about anything else than Orthodoxy. I cannot understand by whom and how and why doubt can be cast on a work as pure and approved by all, as sacred as anything on earth. It would be no small matter if the doubt threatened only the one man who was the instrument of this work; but does it not threaten the Hierarchy? Does it not threaten the Church? If the Orthodoxy of a Catechism that was triumphantly approved by the Most Holy Synod is in doubt, then will not the Orthodoxy of the Most Holy Synod itself not be in doubt? Will not allowing this shake the Hierarchy to its foundations, will it not disturb the peace of the Church? Will it not produce a serious temptation for the Church?’ Metropolitan Seraphim calmed Philaret, saying that Orthodoxy was not in question here, that everything came down to the language, but he refused ‘to reply in a satisfactory manner’ ‘why the Russian language must have no place in the Catechism, which was, moreover, short, and intended for small children who had no knowledge whatsoever of the Slavonic language, and for that reason were not able to understand the truths of the faith which were expounded to them in that language’… The ban on the Catechism (1828) was removed only when all the texts had been put into Slavonic and the Russian translation of the Symbol, the Lord’s Prayer and the Commandments had been left out. M. Philaret was deeply shaken by these events. ‘Smoke is eating into their eyes’, he wrote to his vicar, ‘and they are saying: how corrosive is the light of the sun! They can hardly breathe from the smoke and with difficulty decree: how harmful is the water from the source of life! Blessed is he who can not only raise his eyes to the mountains, but run there for the clean air, the living water!… Blessed is he who can sit in his corner and weep for his sins and pray for the Sovereign and the Church, and has no need to take part in public affairs, becoming tainted with the sins of others and multiplying his own sins!’ Above all Philaret was alarmed by the un-thought-through hastiness and interference of secular people, ‘people who have been called neither by God, nor by their superiors’, and who rise up in bold self-opiniated fashion against the appointed teachers.”[334]

 

    The destruction of the Holy Scriptures simply because they were in a Russian translation, and of the official Catechism of the Russian Church simply because it quoted the Scriptures in Russian rather than Slavonic, was a phenomenon which, in another age, would have led to a schism. But Philaret refrained from open protest because he did not want to create a schism. Nor, since Metropolitan Seraphim of St. Petersburg had threatened to retire if Philaret insisted on continuing his translation, did he want a rupture between the two senior sees in the Church.[335] However, with heresy overwhelming so many from the left, and blind prejudice parading as traditionalism from the right, the Russian Church was in a precarious position…

 

The Serbian Revolution

 

     In Greece and the Balkans the ideas of the French revolution found expression in national liberation movements, which succeeded in liberating a large part of the Orthodox lands in Europe from the Turkish yoke. The vital question for these lands as they gradually liberated themselves in the course of the 19th century was: would freedom allow them to re-establish the genuinely Orthodox “symphonic” model of Church-State relations which had prevailed throughout the region before the fall of Constantinople? Unfortunately, the answer in the case of each newly emergent state – Serbia, Greece and Bulgaria – was: no.

 

     The first condition of “symphony” is the existence of a genuinely independent Orthodox Church able to exert a strong moral influence on the powers that be. After the Turkish conquest, the influence of the Serbian Church even increased, and thanks to the collaborative policies of the Serb leaders after Kosovo, the Turks even allowed the re-establishment of the Serbian Patriarchate at Peć in 1557.

 

     As Branimir Anzulovic writes, “it no longer served the Serbian state because that state had ceased to exist; but it served the Ottoman state, and as the only surviving national institution, it became the main carrier of Serbian national identity. Its nonreligious functions were even expanded under the Turkish system of millets – ethnoreligious communities of non-Islamic peoples, which enjoyed a considerable degree of religious and cultural autonomy and were in charge of administrative duties such as the collection of taxes… [One] scholar described the Serbian Orthodox Church, at the time of the Peć patriarchate, as “a sort of a vassal clerocratic state within the framework of the power military-feudal empire”’”.[336]

 

     The Serbian Church was in general loyal to its Turkish masters (the first patriarch of the Peć patriarchate was a close relative of the Grand Vizier Mehmet Pasha Sokollu).[337] However, when, in 1690, King Leopold I of Hungary invited them to cross over to his land, 40,000 Serbs (according to another source, 37,000 families) took up his invitation with the blessing of Patriarch Arsenije III. This led to the foundation of the Serbian metropolitanate of Karlovcy in Slavonia in 1713. Towards the end of the 19th century, there were six dioceses under Karlovcy with about a million faithful.[338] In 1766 the Peć patriarchate was abolished, as was the autocephalous archbishopric of Ochrid in the following year. From that time the role of the Church decreased, without ever ceasing to be important, and non-Orthodox political models and theories began to infiltrate Serbian society, not least the nationalist ideas of the French revolution, which played a significant part in the Serbs’ own revolution in the first half of the 19th century.

 

     The Serbian revolution began as a rebellion against the Dahis, the four top Janissary commanders, who were terrorising both the Serbs and the Muslims in the province and effectively annulling the autonomy that the sultan had given them.

 

     Tim Judah writes: “Local leaders, including Kardjordje, a swine dealer who had fought both in the Austrian Freikorps and in the Turkish-organised Serbian army, began to plot their removal. But the Dahis struck first. In early 1804 they executed up to 150 of the Serbian knezes or local leaders in an operation they called ‘The Cutting Down of the Chiefs’. It was this that provoked the rebellion. At first the Serbs did not claim to be fighting to rid themselves of Ottoman domination but rather claimed to be rebelling in the name of the sultan against the repressive Dahis. Karadjordje was elected as leader of the uprising on 14 February 1804. He soon succeeded in liberating almost all of the pashalik, especially after the sultan ordered forces from Bosnia to intervene to finish off the Dahis.

 

     “At this early stage, the Serbs were joined by at least part of the pashalik’s Muslim population, whom the Serbs called the ‘Good Turks’, and who were also keen to rid themselves of the rapacious Dahis. However, as the Serb aim soon changed to a demand for complete independence, co-operation rapidly turned to confrontation and massacre.

 

     “In the negotiations that followed the defeat of the Dahis, the Serbs demanded the restoration of their autonomy, but the Turks became alarmed. The rebels were making contact with Serbs in other parts of the Ottoman Empire and with semi-independent Montenegro. Karadjordje had also sent a delegation to Russia to appeal for help, and he was talking ‘of throwing off the yoke that the Serb has borne since Kosovo’. Another Ottoman army was sent to crush the rebels, but it was soundly beaten at Ivankovac on 18 August 1805. Meeting in Smederovo in 1805, the insurgents decided not only to repudiate the pashalik’s annual tribute to the sultan but to take the struggle beyond the borders of the province. In reply a jihad or holy war was declared against them.

 

     “At the end of 1806, Russia went to war with the Ottomans, and the Serbs were encouraged to keep fighting. A modest Russian force was sent to fight alongside the Serbs. Within weeks, though, the Russians and the Turks signed the Treaty of Slobozia, in which neither side bothered to mention the Serbs…

 

     “In 1809, fighting between the Serbs and Turks resumed, with some Russian help. Russia soon needed to muster all its strength to counter Napoleon’s campaign of 1812, so a peace treaty was concluded in Bucharest with the Turks. It specified that Serbia would revert to Ottoman rule, with the proviso that there would be a general amnesty for participants in the insurrection.[339] The Serbs rejected this, but their defences collapsed in the ensuing Turkish onslaught. Karadjordje fled, along with thousands of refugees, who sought protection in the Habsburg provinces, Wallachia and Russia. The Turkish vengeance was terrible. Villages were burned and thousand were sent into slavery. On 17 October 1813 alone, 1,800 women and children were sold as slaves in Belgrade. Soon afterwards a halt was called to the reprisals, and many of the refugees began returning. Some of the former insurgent leaders, such as Miloš Obrenović from the Rudnik district (who had not fled), now made their peace with the Turks, who confirmed them in their local positions of power. It was an untenable situation. In 1814, one of Karadjordje’s former commanders started a new rebellion, but it did not catch on. In the wake of the fresh reprisals following its defeat, however, preparations were made for yet another uprising. Led by Obrenović, the rebels had by mid-July 1815 succeeded in freeing a large part of the pashalik.

 

     “Just as before, it was the international situation which helped shape developments. With Napoleon defeated at Waterloo in 1815, the Turks were wary of the Russians in case they intervened again on behalf of the Serbs. So, after much negotiation, a deal was struck with Obrenović. The Belgrade pashalik was to become an autonomous province. Serbian chiefs were granted the right to collect taxes, but the Turks could remain only in the towns and forts of the province.

 

     “Obrenović was born in 1783 into a poor family which had originally come to Serbia from Hercegovina. As a child he tended cattle for his neighbours and later joined his brother, who had his own livestock business. He was a brave commander in the first uprising and after the second he proved himself a shrewd but brutal and murderous politician. He constantly sought increased concessions from the Turks while he gradually undermined their residual power in Serbia. In 1817, influence by the Philike Hetairia, a Greek revolutionary secret society, Karadjordje slipped back into Serbia. Sensing danger for both himself and his plans, Obrenović sent his agents who murdered Karadjordje with an axe. His skinned head was stuffed and sent to the sultan. This act was to spark off a feud between the families which was periodically to convulse Serbian politics until 1903. Then the last Obrenović and his wife were murdered by being thrown out of the palace windows in Belgrade. The hapless King Aleksandar allegedly grabbed the parapet, but he fell to his death after one of the conspirators used his sword to chop off his fingers.

 

     “Miloš Obrenović was as rapacious as any Turk had been in collecting taxes. As his rule became ever more oppressive, there were seven rebellions against him including three major uprisings between 1815 and 1830. In 1830 the sultan nevertheless formally accepted Miloš’s hereditary princeship.”[340] 

 

     It was hardly to be expected that such a ruler would restore the glorious traditions of St. Sabbas and the Nemanja dynasty. And Serbian history from now on was dominated by two sharply contrasting, but equally unOrthodox ideologies: the westernizing, secular tradition deriving from the Enlightenment, and the bloodthirsty, tribal-heroic and nationalist tradition represented by the Montenegrin bishop-prince and poet Petar Petrović Njegoš (d. 1851).

 

     Montenegro united Church and State in the only completely independent Orthodox land in the Balkans. Fortescue writes: “In 1516, Prince George, fearing lest quarrels should weaken his people (it was an elective princedom), made them swear always to elect the bishop as their civil ruler as well. These prince-bishops were called Vladikas… In the 18th century the Vladika Daniel I (1697-1737) succeeded in securing the succession for his own family. As Orthodox bishops have to be celibate, the line passed (by an election whose conclusion was foregone) from uncle to nephew, or from cousin to cousin. At last, in 1852, Danilo, who succeeded his uncle as Vladika, wanted to marry, so he refused to be ordained bishop and turned the prince-bishopric into an ordinary secular princedom. Since then, another person has been elected Metropolitan of Cetinje, according to the normal Orthodox custom.”[341]

 

     In view of the Serbian wars of the 1990s, it is important to note the long-term influence of the Montenegrim Prince-Bishop Njegoš’ famous poem, The Mountain Wreath, which glorifies the mass slaughter of Muslims who refuse to convert to Christianity on a certain Christmas Eve. The principal character, Vladyka Danilo, says:

 

The blasphemers of Christ’s name

We will baptize with water or with blood!

We’ll drive the plague out of the pen!

Let the son of horror ring forth,

A true altar on a blood-stained rock!

 

And in another poem Njegoš writes that “God’s dearest sacrifice is a boiling stream of tyrant’s blood”.[342]

 

     An armed struggle against the infidel for the sake of Christ and His glory could indeed serve as the subject of a worthy and truly Christian glorification. But there is little that is Christian in this bishop’s poem. Even Bishop Nikolai Velimirović, an admirer of Njegoš, had to admit: “Njegoš’s Christology is almost rudimentary. No Christian priest has ever said less about Christ than this metropolitan from Cetinje.”[343]

 

     This bloodthirsty, nationalist and only superficially Christian tradition, which was continued by such figures as the poet Vuk Karadžić, who called the Serbs “the greatest people on the planet” and boosted the nation’s self-esteem “by describing a culture 5,000 years old and claiming that Jesus Christ and His apostles had been Serbs”[344], was to have profound effects on the future of Serbia, and through Serbia, on European history as a whole.

 

The Greek Revolution

 

     In Greece, as in Serbia, the ideas of the French revolution caused great excitement and nationalist bombast. Thus Benjamin of Lesbos wrote: “Nature has set limits to the aspirations of other men, but not to those of the Greeks. The Greeks were not in the past and are not now subject to the laws of nature.”[345]

 

     The dreams of the Greeks were excited by a number of causes. First, there were the political factors: the rebellion of the Muslim warlord Ali Pasha against the Sultan in 1820 and the inexorable gradual southward expansion of the Russian Empire, which drew Greek minds to the prophecies about the liberation of “the City”, Constantinople, by to xanthon genos, “the yellow-haired race” – whom the Greeks identified with the Russians. Secondly, the wealthier merchants chafed at the restrictions on the accumulation of capital in the Ottoman empire, and longed for the more business-friendly kind of regime that their travels acquainted them with in Western Europe. And thirdly, and most importantly, in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth, these merchants subsidised an explosion in the publication of Greek books and in the provision of educational opportunities for young Greeks.

 

     Such an emphasis on education had been made by the holy new Hieromartyr Cosmas of Aitolia (+1779), who built schools in over two hundred towns and villages. But he emphasised education in Orthodoxy in order to escape the snares of western culture.[346] These merchants, however, sent young Greeks to the universities of Western Europe, especially Germany, where they were infected by western ideas. For “here,” writes Clogg, “they came into contact not only with the heady ideas of the Enlightenment, of the French Revolution and of romantic nationalism but they were made aware of the extraordinary hold which the language and civilisation of ancient Greece had over the minds of their educated European contemporaries.[347]

 

     “During the centuries of the Tourkokratia knowledge of the ancient Greek world had all but died out, but, under the stimulus of western classical scholarship, the budding intelligentsia developed an awareness that they were the heirs to an heritage that was universally revered throughout the civilised world. By the eve of the war in independence this progonoplexia (ancestor obsession) and arkhaiolatreia (worship of antiquity), to use the expressive Greek terms, had reached almost obsessive proportions. It was precisely during the first decade of the nineteenth century that nationalists, much to the consternation of the Church authorities, began to baptise their children with the names of (and to call their ships after) the worthies of ancient Greece rather than the Christian saints….”[348]

 

     The Church’s concern was understandable; for the ideas inflaming the minds of young Greeks were far from Orthodox. Especially dangerous was the western revolutionary ideology of freedom – not spiritual freedom, but the freedom of the individual and the nation from all external bonds. The Greeks already had experience of the bitter fruits of revolution; for in 1770 “the ill-fated Orlov expedition to the Peloponessos, launched by Catherine the Great, and the combined Russian-Greek attempt to free the Peloponnesos from the tyranny of the Ottoman Muslims, ended in disaster. In addition to destroying the Greek military forces and many of the Russians, the Albanian Muslim mercenaries, who were called in by the Ottoman Muslims, wreaked havoc on the local population…”[349] But this tragedy did not prevent many Greeks, and even some prominent churchmen, from being influenced by the French revolution of 1789.

 

     The Church’s attitude to the revolution was expressed in a work called Paternal Teaching, which appeared in the revolutionary year of 1789, and which, according to Charles Frazee, "was signed by Anthimus of Jerusalem but was probably the work of the later Patriarch Gregory V. The document is a polemic against revolutionary ideas, calling on the Christians 'to note how brilliantly our Lord, infinite in mercy and all-wise, protects intact the holy and Orthodox Faith of the devout, and preserves all things'. It warns that the devil is constantly at work raising up evil plans; among them is the idea of liberty, which appears to be so good, but is only there to deceive the people. The document points out that [the struggle for] political freedom is contrary to the Scriptural command to obey authority, that it results in the impoverishment of the people, in murder and robbery. The sultan is the protector of Christian life in the Ottoman Empire; to oppose him is to oppose God."[350]

 

     Patriarch Gregory was also a determined opponent of the religious ecumenism that was the other side of the coin of Masonry’s call to revolutionary violence: “Let us neither say nor think that [they who teach erroneous doctrines] also believe in one Lord, have one Baptism, and confess the one Faith. If their opinions are correct, then by necessity our own must be incorrect. But if our own doctrines are upheld and believed and given credence and confessed by all as being good, true, correct, and unadulterated, manifestly then, the so-called sacraments of all heretics are evil, bereft of divine grace, abominable, and loathsome, and the grace of ordination and the priesthood by which these sacraments are performed has vanished and departed from them. And when there is no priesthood, all the rest are dead and bereft of spiritual grace. We say these things, beloved, lest anyone – either man or woman – be misled by the heterodox regarding their apparent sacraments and their so-called Christianity. Rather, let each one stand firmly in the blameless and true Faith of Christ, especially that we may draw to ourselves those who have been led astray and, as though they were own members, unite them to the one Head, Christ, to Whom be glory and dominion unto the ages of ages. Amen.”[351]

 

     However, Patriarch Gregory’s negative attitude towards the political and religious revolution was not shared by another famous hierarch of the time who came from the same village of Dhimitsana in the Peloponnese: Metropolitan Germanus of Old Patras. And so when the Phanariot Greek Alexander Ypsilantis crossed from Russia into Turkish-occupied Romania with a small band of Greeks in 1821, a simultaneous rebellion took place in the Peloponnese under the leadership of Metropolitan Germanus and eight other bishops. Ypsilantis' force was soon crushed, for it was repudiated by both the Russian Tsar and the Romanian peasants.[352] But Germanos' campaign prospered, in spite of the deaths of five of the bishops in prison. And soon the south of Greece and the islands of Hydra, Spetsae and Poros were in Greek hands.

 

     At this point the frightened Turks put pressure on Patriarch Gregory and his Synod to anathematize Ypsilantes and all those who cooperated with him. They obeyed. Some have argued that the patriarch secretly repudiated this anathema and sympathised with the insurgents; which is why the Turks, suspecting him of treachery, hanged him on April 10. “In any case,” writes Fr. Anthony Gavalas, “the anathema was ignored, as were all the other letters unfavourable to the plans of the revolutionaries, as having been issued under duress. There is an opinion that the patriarch knew that the anathema would be so considered and issued it, hoping to placate the Turks on the one hand, and on the other, to gain time for the revolution to gain strength.”[353] However, the patriarch’s righteousness of character precludes the possibility that he could have been plotting against a government to which he had sworn allegiance and for which he prayed in the Divine Liturgy. Moreover, he had always refused to join the philiki hetairia, the secret, masonic-style society to which most of the insurgents (including Ypsilantis and Metropolitan Germanus) belonged.

 

     This society, founded among the Greek diaspora in Odessa in 1814, was created with the aim of liberating the Motherland from the Ottoman empire. Its essentially pagan inspiration is indicated by its initiation rituals, which carried the penalty of death for those who betrayed the secret and commended the initiate “to the protection of the Great Priests of the Eleusinian Mysteries”.[354] By 1821 almost a thousand members had been initiated into the society. Significantly, the patriarch’s body was picked up by a Russian ship and taken to Odessa, mutely pointing to where the organisation that had truly caused his death was centred.

 

     The essentially western ideology of the Greek revolution explains why so many young westerners, among whom the most famous was the poet Byron, to join the Greek freedom-fighters. But they were fighting, not for Orthodox Greece, but for their romantic vision of ancient, pagan Greece. Significantly, there were no volunteers from Orthodox Russia, whose tsars correctly saw in the revolutionary spirit a greater threat to the well-being of the Orthodox peoples than Turkish rule.

 

     Certainly, the Greeks had to pay a heavy price for the political freedom they gained. After the martyrdom of Patriarch Gregory, the Turks ran amok in Constantinople; and there were further pogroms in Smyrna, Adrianople, Crete and especially Chios, which had been occupied by the revolutionaries and where in reprisal tens of thousands were killed or sold into slavery. When the new patriarch, Eugenius, again anathematised the insurgents, twenty-eight bishops and almost a thousand priests in free Greece in turn anathematised the patriarch, calling him a Judas and a wolf in sheep's clothing, and ceasing to commemorate him in the Liturgy.

 

     And what was it all for? When Byron was dying in Greece in 1824, the Duc d’Orléans commented “that he was dying so that one day people would be able to eat sauerkraut at the foot of the Acropolis”. He was not far from the truth; for after Greece was declared independent in 1830, in 1833 Otto I, son of the king of Bavaria, became king. As Zamoyski sardonically comments: “Sauerkraut indeed…”[355]

 

     Inevitably, therefore, as Charles Frazee writes, the new State of Greece, "looked to the west, the west of the American and French Revolutions, rather than to the old idea of an Orthodox community as it had functioned under the Ottomans. The emotions of the times did not let men see it; Orthodoxy and Greek nationality were still identified, but the winds were blowing against the dominant position of the Church in the life of the individual and the nation..."[356]

 

     Thus, forgetting the lessons of the council of Florence four hundred years earlier, the new State and Church entered into negotiations with the Pope for help against the Turks. Metropolitan Germanus was even empowered to speak concerning the possibility of a reunion of the Churches. However, it was the Pope who drew back at this point, pressurized by the other western States which considered the sultan to be a legitimate monarch.

 

     The western powers helped Greece again when, in 1827, an Allied fleet under a British admiral destroyed the Turkish-Egyptian fleet at Navarino. But after the assassination of the president of Greece, Count Kapodistrias, in 1832, the country descended further into poverty and near civil war.

 

     Then, in 1833, the western powers appointed a Catholic prince, Otto of Bavaria, as king of Greece, with three regents until he came of age, the most important being the Protestant George von Maurer. Maurer proceeded to work out a constitution for the country, which proposed autocephaly for the Church under a Synod of bishops, and the subordination of the Synod to the State on the model of the Bavarian and Russian constitutions, to the extent that "no decision of the Synod could be published or carried into execution without the permission of the government having been obtained". In spite of the protests of the patriarch of Constantinople and the tsar of Russia, and the walk-out of the archbishops of Rethymnon and Adrianople, this constitution was ratified by the signatures of thirty-six bishops on July 26, 1833.

 

     In 1844 the Church reiterated her new canonical position: “The Orthodox Church of Greece acknowledges our Lord Jesus Christ as her Head. She is inseparably united in faith with the Church of Constantinople and with every other Christian Church of the same profession, but is autocephalous, exercises her sovereign rights independently of every other Church and is governed by the members of the Holy Synod.” The Ecumenical Patriarch refused to acknowledge the new Synod. And many Greeks were also unhappy.[357]

 

     The Greek Church therefore exchanged the admittedly uncanonical position of the patriarchate of Constantinople under Turkish rule for the even less canonical position of a Synod unauthorized by the patriarch and under the control of a Catholic king and a Protestant constitution! In addition to this, all monasteries with fewer than six monks were dissolved, and heavy taxes imposed on the remaining monasteries. And very little money was given to a Church which had lost six to seven thousand clergy in the war, and whose remaining clergy had an abysmally low standard of education.

 

     In spite of this, Divine grace worked to transform the situation from within, as it had in Russia. Thus in 1839 the Synod forbade marriages between Orthodox and heterodox; and gradually, within the Synod and outside, support for reunion with the patriarchate grew stronger. Then, in 1843, a bloodless coup forced the king to dismiss his Bavarian aides and summon a National Assembly to draw up a constitution in which the indissoluble unity of the Greek Church with Constantinople was declared.

 

     In 1849 the Greek government sent the Patriarch the Order of St. Saviour; but he was still not mollified. However, under Russian pressure, he and his Synod finally, on June 29, 1851, issued a Tomos which recognized the autocephaly of the Greek Church, but with conditions: that the State should not interfere in the affairs of the Church (as if it never interfered in the affairs of the Patriarchate!), that the name of the Patriarch should be commemorated at every Liturgy in Greece, that the Holy Chrism should be sent from Constantinople, and that the Greek Holy Synod should submit all important questions to the Patriarch. Although there were some protests against these conditions, the quarrel now died down…[358]

 

The Kollyvades Movement

 

     During the Greek War of Independence there came to a head a long-running dispute over the canonicity of two liturgical practices: (1) the performing of services commemorating the dead on Sundays, and (2) the practice of receiving Divine Communion no more than two or three times a year.

 

     The so-called “Kollyvades” Fathers[359] – so called after the kollyva, or boiled wheat, which is traditionally given out at memorial services in the Greek Church – rose up against these practices, saying that memorial services for the dead should be held, according to Apostolic Tradition, on Saturdays, not Sundays, and that Communion should be received as often as possible consistent with proper preparation for the sacrament. There was much opposition to the teaching of Kollyvades, and successive patriarchs adopted a compromise position based on the principle of “economy” or condescension. Thus in 1772 Patriarch Theodosius II decreed in a letter: “Those who perform memorial services for the dead of Saturday do well, as they keep the ancient Tradition of the Church, while those who perform them on Sunday do not sin.” Again, in 1819 Patriarch Gregory V decreed that memorial services “be performed without distinction on Sundays and Saturdays, as well as on other days of the week, in order to terminate completely that dispute which arose long ago.” [360]

 

     As for the receiving of Communion, “in 1775, Ecumenical Patriarch Theodosios sought to reconcile the two factions. He wrote to the monks of Athos saying that the early Christians received Holy Communion every Sunday, while those of the subsequent period received it every forty days, after penance; he advised that whoever felt himself prepared should follow the former, whereas if he did not he should follow the latter. But this did not bring an end to the dispute. Like the contention about memorial services, it continued until the early part of the nineteenth century. In 1819, Patriarch Gregory V wrote to the monks of the Holy Mountain that Communion should not be received at certain set times, but whenever one felt oneself read for it, following confession and other necessary preparation.”[361]

 

     Constantine Cavarnos points out that the Kollyvades controversy witnesses to the revival of Greek Orthodox spirituality in the period. And he continues: “There is another very important side to the Kollyvades movement: its revival of Eastern Orthodox mysticism. Together with the Kollyvades’ fervor for a stricter adherence to Sacred Tradition went an endeavour to revive and cultivate this mysticism, known as hesychasm. After the vindication of hesychasm by the Synod of Hagia Sophia in 1351 and the canonization of the great defender of hesychasm, Gregory Palamas, hesychasm gradually fell into relative oblivion. It was revived by the Kollyvades, particularly Macarios and Nicodemos. The Philokalia, a monumental anthology of ascetic-mystical writings by some thirty Greek Fathers which played a role of first rate importance in the revival of hesychasm in Greece, the other Balkan countries and Russia, owed its publication to these two saints….”[362]

 

     The Philokalia was translated into Slavonic by the Russian Athonite monk St. Paisius Velichkovsky, who thereby brought the neo-hesychast movement to Romania and Russia. Here it was destined to bring forth much fruit, notably among the famous Elders of Optina monastery…

 

     Even the opposition aroused by the Kollyvades, especially on Mount Athos, was turned to the good by Divine Providence. “Contrary to all the anticipations of the Anti-Kollyvades, this persecution served to spread the ideas of the Kollyvades throughout Greece. Many of the Kollyvades left Mount Athos and scattered all over Greece, especially the Aegean islands, becoming spiritual awakeners and reformers through their sermons, personal counsels, the establishment of monasteries that developed into luminous centers of spiritual life, and their exemplary Christian character and way of life.”[363]

 

The Decembrist Rebellion

 

     The wave of revolutionary violence reached Russia after the supposed death of Tsar Alexander I on November 19, 1825. During the interregnum, on December 14, a group of army officers attempted to seize power in St. Petersburg. The Decembrist conspirators were divided into a Northern Society based in St. Petersburg and a Southern society based in Tulchin, headquarters of the Second Army in the Ukraine.

 

     “In the ideology of the Northern Society especially,” writes Walicki, “there were certain elements reminiscent of the views of the aristocratic opposition of the reign of Catherine II. Many of the members in this branch of the Decembrist movement were descendants of once powerful and now impoverished boyar families… Nikita Muraviev claimed that the movement was rooted in the traditions of Novgorod and Pskov, of the twelfth-century Boyar Duma, of the constitutional demands presented to Anne by the Moscow nobility in 1730, and of the eighteenth-century aristocratic opposition. The poet Kondraty Ryleev painted an idealized portrait of Prince Andrei Kurbsky (the leader of the boyar revolt against Ivan the Terrible) and even devoted one of his ‘elegies’ to him…In his evidence before the Investigating Commission after the suppression of the revolt, Petr Kakhovsky stated that the movement was primarily a response to the high-handedness of the bureaucracy, the lack of respect for ancient gentry freedom, and the favoritism shown to foreigners. Another Northern Decembrist, the writer and literary critic Aleksandr Bestuzhev… wrote that his aim was ‘monarchy tempered by aristocracy’. These and similar facts explain Pushkin’s view, expressed in the 1830’s, that the Decembrist revolt had been the last episode in the age-old struggle between autocracy and boyars…

 

     “The Decembrists used the term ‘republic’ loosely, without appearing to be fully aware that there were essential differences between, for instance, the Roman republic, the Polish gentry republic, the old Russian city states, and modern bourgeois republics… Muraviev modeled his plan for a political system on the United States… The theorists of the Northern Society made no distinction between criticism of absolutism from the standpoint of the gentry and similar criticism from a bourgeois point of view. Hence they saw no difficulty in reconciling liberal notions taken largely from the works of Bentham, Benjamin Constant and Adam Smith with an idealization of former feudal liberties and a belief in the role of the aristocracy as a ‘curb on despotism’. The theoretical premise here was the ‘juridical world view’ of the Enlightenment, according to which legal and political forms determined the revolution of society.”[364]

 

     The Northern Decembrists were in favour of the emancipation of the serfs. However, they insisted that the land should remain with the gentry, thereby ensuring the continued dependence of the serfs on the gentry. “The conviction that the peasants ought to be overjoyed merely at the abolition of serfdom was shared by many Decembrists. Yakushkin, for instance, could not conceal his exasperation at his peasants’ demand for land when he offered to free them. When they were told that the land would remain the property of the landlord, their answer was: ‘Then things had better stay as they were. We belong to the master, but the land belongs to us.’”[365]

 

     The Northern Decembrists worked out a new interpretation of Russian history conceived “as an antithesis to Karamzin’s theory of the beneficial role of autocracy.  “An innate Russian characteristic, the Decembrists maintained – one that later developments had blunted but not destroyed – was a deep-rooted love of liberty. Autocracy had been unknown in Kievan Russia: the powers of the princes had been strictly circumscribed there and decisions on important affairs of state were taken by the popular assemblies. The Decembrists were especially ardent admirers of the republican city-states of Novgorod and Pskov. This enthusiasm was of practical significance, since they were convinced that the ‘spirit of liberty’ that had once imbued their forbears was still alive; let us but strike the bell, and the people of Novgorod, who have remained unchanged throughout the centuries, will assemble by the bell tower, Ryleev declared. Kakhovsky described the peasant communes with their self-governing mir as ‘tiny republics’, a living survival of Russian liberty. In keeping with this conception, the Decembrists thought of themselves as restoring liberty and bringing back a form of government that had sound historical precedents.”[366]

 

     This reinterpretation of Russian history was false. Russia was imbued from the beginning with the spirit of Orthodox autocracy and patriarchy: the “republics” of Pskov and Novgorod were exceptions to the historical rule. And if Kievan autocracy was less powerful than the Muscovite or Petersburg autocracies, this was not necessarily to its advantage. Russia succumbed to the Mongols because the dividedness of her princes precluded a united defence. And there can be little doubt that she would not have survived into the nineteenth century as an independent Orthodox nation if she had not been an autocracy.

 

     The leader of the Southern Society, Colonel Pavel Pestel, had more radical ideas in his draft for a constitution, Russian Justice, which was based on two assumptions: “that every man has a natural right to exist and thus to a piece of land large enough to allow him to make a basic living; and that only those who create surplus wealth have a right to enjoy it. After the overthrow of tsarism, therefore, Pestel proposed to divide land into two equal sectors: the first would be public property (or, more accurately, the property of the communes); the second would be in private hands. The first would be used to ensure everyone a minimum living, whereas the second would be used to create surplus wealth. Every citizen was entitled to ask his commune for an allotment large enough to support a family; if the commune had more land available, he would even be able to demand several such allotments. The other sector would remain in private hands. Pestel felt that his program ensured every individual a form of social welfare in the shape of a communal land allotment but also left scope for unlimited initiative and the opportunity of making a fortune in the private sector.

 

    “Pestel believed that his program had every chance of success since land ownership in Russia had traditionally been both communal and private. Here he obviously had in mind the Russian village commune; it should be emphasized, however, that Pestel’s commune differed essentially from the feudal obshchina in that it did not restrict its members’ movement or personal freedom and did not impose collective responsibility for individual members’ tax liabilities.”[367]

 

     The Decembrist rebellion was not as important for what it represented in itself as for the halo of martyrdom which its exiles acquired, inspiring Herzen and other sons of the gentry in their much more radical ideas and plans. The Decembrists were romantic dreamers rather than hardened revolutionaries – one of their leaders, the poet Ryleyev, mounted the scaffold with a volume of Byron’s works in his hands.[368] But this did not diminish the evil effect their words and deeds had on the minds of succeeding generations. And the saints of Russia were severe in their condemnation.

 

     “They say,” writes Platonov, “that in 1825, not long before the Decembrist rebellion, a Mason, apparently Pestel, asked St. Seraphim for a blessing. But he shouted angrily at him, as at the greatest criminal and apostate from Christ: ‘Go where you came from,’ – and threw him out.”[369]

 

     579 people arrested and brought to trial. 40 were given the death sentence and the rest – hard labour. In the end only five were executed. The soldiers were flogged.[370] On August 21, 1826 Tsar Nicholas confirmed his predecessor’s ban on the Masonic lodges…

 

     “And so for the first time in Russian history,” writes Lebedev, “a rebellion of the nobility had as its aim not the removal of one sovereign by another, but the annihilation of tsarist power altogether… It became clear that [the Decembrists’] links in ‘society’ were so significant and deep, and the sympathy for them so broad, that one could speak of a betrayal of the Throne and Church – or, at any rate, of the unreliability – of the noble class as a whole.”[371]

 

     V.F. Ivanov writes: “As an eyewitness put it, the rebellion in Petersburg shocked the general mass of the population of Russia profoundly. In his words, ‘the attempt to limit the Tsar’s power and change the form of government seemed to us not only sacrilege, but an historical anomaly; while the people, seeing that the plotters belonged exclusively to the upper class, considered the nobility to be traitors, and this added one more sharp feature to that secret hatred which it nourished towards the landowners. Only the progressives and the intelligentsia of the capital sympathised with the unfortunate madmen’ (Schilder).

 

     “The best people turned away from the affair in disgust and branded the work of the Mason-Decembrists that of Cain. In the words of Karamzin: ‘Look at the stupid story of our mad liberalists! Pray God that not so many real rogues are found among them. The soldiers were only victims of a deception. Sometimes a fine day begins with a storm: may it be thus in the new reign… God saved us from a great disaster on December 14…’”[372]

 

St. Seraphim of Sarov

 

     In 1844 Nicholas Alexandrovich Motovilov, a nobleman of Simbirsk province and a close friend of the greatest saint of the age, Seraphim of Sarov (+1833), made notes of his conversations with the saint, which provide the best spiritual commentary on the age. At the beginning of the twentieth century Sergius Alexandrovich Nilus found these notes and published them as follows:

 

     “… As a demonstration of true zeal for God Batyushka Seraphim cited the holy Prophet Elijah and Gideon, and for hours at a time he talked in an inspired manner about them. Every judgement that he made about them was concluded by its application to life, precisely our own life, and with an indication of how we… can draw soul-saving instructions from their lives. He often spoke to me about the holy King, Prophet and Ancestor of God David, at which point he went into an extraordinary spiritual rapture. How one had to see him during those unearthly minutes! His face, inspired by the grace of the Holy Spirit, shone like the sun, and I – I speak the truth – on looking at him felt in my eyes as if I was looking at the sun. I involuntarily recalled the face of Moses when he had just come down from Sinai. My soul, pacified, entered such a quiet, and was filled with such great joy, that my heart was ready to embrace within itself not only the whole human race, but also the whole creation of God, pouring out in love towards everything that is of God…

 

     “’So, your Godbelovedness, so,’ Batyushka used to say, leaping from joy (those who still remember this holy elder will relate how he would sometimes be seen leaping from joy), ‘”I have chosen David my servant, a man after My own heart, who will do all My will”’…

 

     “In explaining how good it was to serve the Tsar and how much his life should be held dear, he gave as an example Abishai, David’s war-commander.

 

     “’Once,’ said Batyushka Seraphim, ‘to satisfy the thirst of David, he stole in to a spring in view of the enemy camp and got water, and, in spite of a cloud of arrows released at him from the enemy camp, returned to him completely unharmed, bringing the water in his helmet. He had been saved from the cloud of arrows only because of his zeal towards the King. But when David gave an order, Abishai replied: “Only command, O King, and everything will be done in accordance with your will.” But when the King expressed the desire to take part himself in some bloody deed to encourage his warriors, Abishai besought him to preserve his health and, stopping him from participating in the battle, said: “There are many of us, your Majesty, but you are one among us. Even if all of us were killed, as long as you were alive, Israel would be whole and unconquered. But if you are gone, then what will become of Israel?”…’

 

     “Baytushka Fr. Seraphim loved to explain himself at length, praising the zeal and ardour of faithful subjects to the Tsar, and desiring to explain more clearly how these two Christian virtues are pleasing to God, he said:

 

     “’After Orthodoxy, these are our first Russian duty and the chief foundation of true Christian piety.’

 

     “Often from David he changed the subject to our great Emperor [Nicholas I] and for hours at a time talked to me about him and about the Russian kingdom, bewailing those who plotted evil against his August Person. Clearly revealing to me what they wanted to do, he led me into a state of horror; while speaking about the punishment prepared for them from the Lord, and in confirmation of his words, he added:

 

     “’This will happen without fail: the Lord, seeing the impenitent spite of their hearts, will permit their undertakings to come to pass for a short period, but their illness will turn upon their heads, and the unrighteousness of their destructive plots will descend upon them. The Russian land will be reddened with streams of blood, and many noblemen will be killed for his great Majesty and the integrity of his Autocracy: but the Lord will not be wrath to the end, and will not allow the Russian land to be destroyed to the end, because in it alone will Orthodoxy and the remnants of Christian piety be especially preserved.

 

     “Once,” as Motovilov continued in his notes, “I was in great sorrow, thinking what would happened in the future with our Orthodox Church if the evil contemporary to us would be multiplied more and more. And being convinced that our Church was in an extremely pitiful state both from the great amount of carnal debauchery and… from the spiritual impiety of godless opinions sown everywhere by the most recent false teachers, I very much wanted to know what Batyushka Seraphim would tell me about this.

 

     “Discussing the holy Prophet Elijah in detail, he said in reply to my question, among other things, the following:

 

     “’Elijah the Thesbite complained to the Lord about Israel as if it had wholly bowed the knee to Baal, and said in prayer that only he, Elijah, had remained faithful to Lord, but now they were seeking his soul, too, to take it… So what, batyushka, did the Lord reply to this? “I have left seven thousand men in Israel who have not bowed the knee to Baal.” So if in the kingdom of Israel, which had fallen away from the kingdom of Judah that was faithful to God, and had come to a state of complete corruption, there still remained seven thousand men faithful to the Lord, then what shall we say about Russia? I think that at that time there were no more than three million in the kingdom of Israel at that time. And how many do we have in Russia now, batyushka?’

 

     “I replied: ‘About sixty million.’

 

     “And he continued: ‘Twenty times more. Judge for yourself how many more of those faithful to God that brings!… So, batyushka, those whom He foreknew, He also predestined; and those whom He predestined, He also called; and those whom He called, He guards, and those He also glorifies… So what is there for us to be despondent about!… God is with us! He who hopes in the Lord is as Mount Sion, and the Lord is round about His people… The Lord will keep you, the Lord will protect you on your right hand, the Lord will preserve your coming in and your going out now and to the ages; by day the sun will not burn you, nor the moon by night.’

 

     “And when I asked him what this meant, and to what end he was talking to me about it:

 

     “’To the end,’ replied Batyushka Fr. Seraphim, ‘that you should know that in this way the Lord guards His people as the apple of His eye, that is, the Orthodox Christians, who love Him and with all their heart, and all their mind, in word and deed, day and night serve Him. And such are those who completely observe all the commandments, dogmas and traditions of our Eastern Universal Church, and confess the piety handed down by it with their lips, and really, in all the circumstances of life, act according to the holy commandments of our Lord Jesus Christ.’

 

     “In confirmation of the fact that there were still many in the Russian land who remained faithful to our Lord Jesus Christ, who lived in Orthodoxy and piety, batyushka Fr. Seraphim once said to one acquaintance of mine – either Fr. Gury, the former guest-master of Sarov, or Fr. Simeon, the owner of Maslinshensky court, - that once, when he was in the Spirit, he saw the whole land of Russia, and it was filled and as it were covered with the smoke of the prayers of believers praying to the Lord…”[373]

 

     St. Seraphim not only clearly condemned the Decembrists for their attack on the Tsardom: he prophetically saw that this evil would continue to grow and would lead in the end to the Russian revolution of 1917: "More than half a century will pass. Then evildoers will raise their heads high. This will happen without fail: the Lord, seeing the impenitent evil of their hearts, will allow their enterprises for a short time. But their sickness will rebound upon their own heads, and the unrighteousness of their destructive plots will fall upon them. The Russian land will become red with rivers of blood... Before the birth of the Antichrist there will be a great, protracted war and a terrible revolution in Russia passing all bounds of human imagination, for the bloodletting will be most terrible: the rebellions of Ryazan, Pugachev and the French revolution will be nothing in comparison with what will take place in Russia. Many people who are faithful to the fatherland will perish, church property and the monasteries will be robbed; the Lord's churches will be desecrated; good rich people will be robbed and killed, rivers of Russian blood will flow..."[374]

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Part II. LIBERALISM AND AUTOCRACY

(1830-1871)
3. THE WEST: THE DUAL REVOLUTION

 

The King reigns, but does not govern.

Adolphe Thiers, Le National, 4 February, 1830.    

 

     The system worked, throughout Europe, with an extraordinary success and facilitated the growth of wealth on an unprecedented scale. To save and to invest became at once the duty and the delight of a large class. The savings were seldom drawn on, and accumulating at compound interest, made possible the material triumphs which we now all take for granted. The morals, the politics, the literature and the religion of the age joined in a grand conspiracy for the promotion of saving. God and Mammon were reconciled. Peace on earth to men of good means. A rich man could, after all, enter into the Kingdom of Heaven – if only he saved.

John Maynard Keynes, A Tract on Monetary Reform (1923).

 

We intend to dethrone the King of heaven

as well as the monarchs of the earth.

The Paris Commune.

 

     The short period of reaction in France under the absolutist monarchy of Charles X came to an end with the “July Days” revolution of 1830, which introduced a constitutional monarchy headed by another Bourbon, Louis-Philippe, the Duke of Orléans. At almost the same time, in 1832, the British parliament passed the Reform Act, which rationalized and extended the franchise, consolidating the role of the middle class in government. With liberalism triumphant in these two countries (as also, of course, in the United States), the revolution acquired a second wind throughout Europe. Everybody could see that reaction was over and liberalism was here to stay. Its progress might be checked temporarily; it might be appeased for a time with concessions that fell short of the full liberal programme. But even emperors, such as Napoleon III, would have to seek a popular mandate and pay at least nominal deference to constitutional ideals.

 

     And then there was the industrial revolution, which was to transform every State in Western Europe, and from there – the whole world.

 

     The origins of the industrial revolution are to be found in the agrarian revolution of the eighteenth century. Its essential features were the “privatisation” of the common land (in England, the pioneer in both the agrarian and industrial revolutions, through the Enclosure Acts of 1760 to 1830), its more efficient capitalist exploitation by a new breed of capitalist landowners, creating a new surplus in food and market in agricultural produce, and the destruction of the feudal bonds that bound the peasant to the land that he worked and the landowner for whom he worked. This led to the creation of a large number of landless agricultural labourers who, in the absence of work in the countryside, sought it in the new industrial enterprises that were being created in the towns to exploit a series of important technological innovations.

 

     Liberalism’s triumph was aided by an offshoot of the industrial revolution, the revolution in communications. “The most famous demonstration,” writes Norman Stone, “of the value of superior communication was staged on 19 June 1815, when Nathan Rothschild made a record killing on the London stock market, having used a special yacht to bring news of Waterloo many hours in advance of his rivals.”[375]

 

     But yachts were as nothing compared to the new, machine-produced means of communication, such as the electric telegraph (1835). The impact of the explosion in newspaper reading was so great that the Austrian Chancellor Metternich wondered “whether society can exist along with the liberty of the press.”[376] Thus in the revolution of 1848, writes Eric Hobsbawm, “even the most arch-reactionary Prussian junkers discovered… that they required a newspaper capable of influencing ‘public opinion’ – in itself a concept linked with liberalism and incompatible with traditional hierarchy.”[377]

 

     As the poet Robert Southey wrote: “The steam engine and the spinning engines, the mail coach and the free publication of the debates in parliament… Hence follow in natural and necessary consequences increased activity, enterprise, wealth and power; but on the other hand, greediness of gain, looseness of principle, wretchedness, disaffection and political insecurity…”[378]

 

     The world as we know it today is largely the product of this dual revolution – the political revolution in France and the industrial revolution in Britain - that took place in the central decades of the nineteenth century.

 

Art and Revolution: (1) Byronism

 

     But first let us examine that union of revolutionary sentiment and romanticism noted in the first chapter. The Enlightenment had undermined faith and religion, substituting for them reason and science. The Counter-Enlightenment, convinced of the narrowness and superficiality of these, put forward imagination and art instead. The artist was now prophet and priest; and since artistic imagination was the path to all truth, it was the path to political truth also. And political action, too; for the Romantics insisted on the unity of mind and heart, feeling and action. For, as William Blake put it as early as 1793, “Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.”[379]

 

     And so Romantic art became identified with the revolution.[380] We see the tendency for art to become the mouthpiece of the revolution as early as that paragon of classicism – Mozart. In his opera The Marriage of Figaro, which avoided the censorship that had banned Beaumarchais’ play of the same name, a distinct strand of anti-aristocratic rebelliousness is given vigorous expression – although masters and servants are touchingly united in the final chorus. Again, in Don Giovanni, while the Don’s words Viva la liberta! celebrated sexual rather than political revolution (the two invariably go together), the censors, fearing that word liberta!, still demanded that he sing Viva la societa! instead.[381] Finally, The Magic Flute, composed in 1791, celebrated that Masonic society that was the heart of the revolution.

 

     The French revolution was almost unanimously acclaimed by poets and philosophers. Wordsworth exclaimed what bliss it was to be alive at the dawn of the revolution, and Byron and Shelley considered it their duty as poets to join the revolution. Painters such as David chose revolutionaries as their subjects, and invariably portrayed the object of their revolutionary desires, liberty, as a half-naked young woman (the link between political rebellion and sexual lust has always been close).

 

     It was the same with instrumental music. In 1803, Beethoven devoted the first great work of romantic music, the Eroica symphony, to the god of the early revolution, Napoleon, only to scratch out the dedication when he found that his idol had feet of clay. Somewhat later, Berlioz, Liszt and Chopin were all close to the revolutionary movement…

 

     The artist who most clearly represented the link between art and the revolution in the early nineteenth century was Lord Byron. It was not simply that Byron died, as we have seen, in the cause of the Greek revolution: his poetry expressed a cynical, disillusioned, anti-establishment and anti-Christian, and yet still vaguely idealistic mood that swept Europe in the wake of the failure of the first French revolution. Indeed, “Byronism” represented a whole phase in European sensibility.

 

      Dostoyevsky had a highly questionable, but, as always, illuminating point of view on Byronism. “First of all,” he wrote, “one shouldn’t use the word ‘Byronist’ as an invective. Byronism, though a momentary phenomenon, was a great, sacred and necessary one in the life of European mankind and, perhaps, in that of the entire human race. Byronism appeared at a moment of dreadful anguish, disillusionment and almost despair among men. Following the ecstatic transports of the new creed in the new ideals proclaimed at the end of the last century in France, then the most progressive nation of European mankind, the outcome was very different from what had been expected; this so deceived the faith of man that there has never perhaps been a sadder moment in the history of Western Europe. The new idols – raised for one moment only – fell not only as a result of external (political) causes, but because of their intrinsic bankruptcy – which was clearly perceived by the sagacious hearts and the progressive minds. The new outcome was not yet in sight; the new valve was not yet revealed, and everybody was suffocating under the weight of a former world, which drew and narrowed itself down over mankind in a most dreadful manner. The old idols lay shattered.

 

     “It was at this very moment that a great and mighty genius, a passionate poet appeared. In his melodies there sounded mankind’s anguish of those days, its gloomy disillusionment in its mission and in the ideals which had deceived it. It was a novel, then unheard-of muse of vengeance and sorrow, malediction and despair. The spirit of Byronism, as it were, swept mankind as a whole, and everything responded to it. It was precisely as if a valve had been opened: at least, amidst the universal and dull groans – mostly unconscious – this was a mighty outcry in which all the cries and moans of mankind combined and merged in one chord. How could it not have been felt in Russia and particularly by so great, ingenious and leading a mind as that of Pushkin? – In those days also, in Russia no strong mind, no magnanimous heart could have evaded Byronism. And not only because of compassion from afar for Europe and European mankind, but because precisely at that time in Russia, too, there arose a great many unsolved and tormenting questions, a great many old disillusionments…”[382]

 

     While agreeing with Dostoyevsky’s account of the origins of Byronism and its significance, we may doubt whether it was “great, sacred and necessary”; nor was every magnanimous heart in Europe touched by Byron’s demonic genius. For demonic is certainly what it was. His unfettered will defied both the impediment of his deformed foot, which he saw “as the mark of satanic connection”[383], and all the laws of morality, of which the end, for a Christian consciousness, could only be the hell he describes in “The Giaour”:

 

So do the dark in soul expire,

Or live like Scorpion girt with by fire;

So writhes the mind Remorse hath riven,

Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven,

Darkness above, despair beneath,

Around it flame, within it death!

 

Art and Revolution: (2) The July Days

 

     Let us look more closely at the link between Romantic art and the revolution. Artistic imagination in the Romantic sense was much more than the ability to fantasise. Jacques Barzun writes: “Out of the known or knowable, Imagination connects the remote, interprets the familiar, or discovers hidden realities. Being a means of discovery, it must be called ‘Imagination of the real’. Scientific hypotheses perform that same office; they are products of imagination.

 

     “This view of the matter explains why to the Romanticists the arts no longer figured as a refined pleasure of the senses, an ornament of civilized existence, but as one form of the deepest possible reflection on life. Shelley, defending his art, declares poets to be the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. The arts convey truths; they are imagination crystallized; and as they transport the soul they reshape the perceptions and possibly the life of the beholder. To perform this feat requires genius, because it is not a mechanical act. To be sure, all art makes use of conventions, but to obey traditional rules and follow set patterns will not achieve that fusion of idea and form which is properly creation. It was Romanticist discussion that made the word creation regularly apply to works of art…

 

     “Those Romanticist words, recharged with meaning, helped to establish the religion of art. That faith served those who could and those could not partake of the revived creeds. To call the passion for art a religion is not a figure of speech or a way of praise. Since the beginning of the 19C, art has been defined again and again by its devotees as ‘the highest spiritual expression of man’. The dictum leaves no room for anything higher and this highest level is that which, for other human beings, is occupied by religion. To 19C worshippers the arts form a treasury of revelations, a body of scriptures, the makers of this spiritual testament are prophets and seers. And to this day the fortunate among them are treated as demigods…”[384]

 

     The word “creation” was understood by the Romantics in almost a literal sense, as the activity of the Word of God creating something out of nothing. This meant, however, that Romantic art was not only a path to truth: it created its own truth. But since truth is not created by man, but revealed to him by God, this can only mean that Romantic “creationism” was demonic in origin.

 

     Thus, as Sir Isaiah Berlin writes, “whatever the differences between the leading romantic thinkers – the early Schiller and the later Fichte, Schelling and Jacobi, Tieck and the Schlegels when they were young, Chateaubriand and Byron, Coleridge and Carlyle, Kierkegaard, Stirner, Nietzsche, Baudelaire – there runs through their writings a common notion, held with varying degrees of consciousness and depth, that truth is not an objective structure, independent of those who seek it, the hidden treasure waiting to be found, but is itself in all its guises created by the seeker. It is not to be brought into being necessarily by the finite individual: according to some it is created by a greater power, a universal spirit, personal or impersonal, in which the individual is an element, or of which he is an aspect, an emanation, an imperfect reflection. But the common assumption of the romantics runs counter to the philosophia perennis is that the answers to the great questions are not to be discovered so much as to be invented. They are not something found, they are something literally made. In its extreme Idealistic form it is a vision of the entire world. In its more familiar conduct – aesthetics, religious, social, moral, political – a realm seen not as a natural or supernatural order capable of being investigated, described and explained by the appropriate method – rational examination or some more mysterious procedure – but as something that man creates, as he creates works of art; not by imitating, or even obtaining illumination from, pre-existent models or truths, or by applying pre-existent truths that are objective universal, eternal unalterabl; but by an act of creation, the introduction into the world of something literally novel – the unique expression of an individual and therefore unique creative activity, natural or supernatural, human or in part divine, owing nothing to anything outside it (in some versions because nothing can be conceived as being outside it), self-subsistent, self-justified, self-fulfilling. Hence that new emphasis on the subjective and ideal rather than the objective and the real, on the process of creation rather than its effects, on motives rather than consequences; and, as a necessary corollary of this, on the quality of the vision, the state of mind or soul of the acting agent – purity of heart, innocence of intention, sincerity of purpose rather than getting the answer right, that is, accurate correspondence to the ‘given’. Hence the emphasis on activity, movement that cannot be reduced to static segments, the flow that cannot be arrested, frozen, analysed without being thereby fatally distorted; hence the constant protest against the reduction of ‘life’ to dead fragments, of organism to ‘mere’ mechanical or uniform units; and the corresponding tendency towards similes and metaphors drawn from ‘dynamic’ sciences – biology, physiology, introspective psychology – and the worship of music, which, of all the arts, appears to have the least relation to universally observable, uniform natural order. Hence, too, celebration of all forms of defiance directed against the ‘given’ – the impersonal, the ‘brute fact’ in morals or in politics – or against the static and the accepted, and the value placed on minorities and martyrs as such, no matter what the ideal for which they suffer.”[385]

 

     By virtue of this common desire to defy the “given”, the identification of the revolution with romantic art, as Adam Zamoyski notes, was almost complete. “’People and poets are marching together,’ wrote the French critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve in 1830. ‘Art is henceforth on a popular footing, in the arena with the masses.’ There was something in this. Never before or since had poetry been so widely and so urgently read, so taken to heart and so closely studied for hidden meaning. And it was not only in search of aesthetic or emotional uplift that people did so, for the poet had assumed a new role over the past two decades. Art was no longer an amenity but a great truth that had to be revealed to mankind, and the artist was one who had been called to interpret this truth, a kind of seer. In Russia, Pushkin solemnly declared the poet’s status as a prophet uttering the burning words of truth. The American Ralph Waldo Emerson saw poets as ‘liberating gods’ because they had achieved freedom themselves, and could therefore free others. The pianist and composer Franz Liszt wanted to rcapture the ‘political, philosophical and religious power’ that he believed music had in ancient times. William Blake claimed that Jesus and his disciples were all artists, and that he himself was following Jesus through his art. ‘God was, perhaps only the first poet of the universe,’ Théophile Gauthier reflected.[386] By the 1820s artists regularly referred to their craft as a religion, and Victor Hugo represented himself alternately as Zoroaster, Moses and Christ, somewhere between prophet and God.”[387]

 

     Of all the art-forms the one having the most direct revolutionary impact, combining as it did poetry, theatre, visual art and music, was opera. Daniel Auber’s La Muette de Portici, had a revolutionary subject, a tenor playing the part of the revolutionary dressed in open shirt, tricolor pantaloons and a red Phrygian cap and singing a refrain ‘Amour sacré de la Patrie’ which contained a phrase out of the Marseillaise. It brought the house down, becoming, in spite of the censors’ best efforts, a symbol of subversion and a sign pointing to what was to come in the revolutionary year of 1830.[388]

 

     “The first night of Victor Hugo’s play Hernani, on 25 February 1830, set the tone for the new year. The play, which is about an outlaw struggling for love and liberation against fate and the Habsburg establishment, nicely encapsulated all the most fashionable themes. Its form also broke all the artistic conventions, and in the preface Hugo declared that the Romantic style was no more or less than liberalism in the arts. The theatre was the scene of a pitched battle between classicists and Romantics, an artistic dress rehearsal for what was to come in the political sphere.

 

     “The ineptitude of the opposition under the Restoration had given the Bourbons the impression that they were firmly in the saddle. Louis XVIII died peacefully in 1824 and was uneventfully succeeded by his brother, the Comte d’Artois, as Charles X. He began turning back the clock as soon as he ascended the throne, insisting on having himself crowned at Rheims in May 1825 with the full ceremonial of tradition. Meaning to strengthen the throne’s position further, Charles X strove to undermine the principles of the Charte that had been the foundation of the Restoration. An economic depression in the years 1826-7 provoked unrest in various parts, and in November 1827 there was a rising in Paris. But the feelings that led to it were diffuse and vague. Among the young men on the barricades was Auguste Blanqui, who confessed to not knowing exactly what he was fighting for, even though this was to be the beginning of a long life dedicated to revolt. The rising was quickly quashed, but the emotions that underlay it were not so easily dealt with.

 

     “These had no leader to coalesce around, aside from the largely symbolic figure of Lafayette. He had been associated with every conspiracy since 1815, but did not lead any of them. Although he took pride in his revolutionary credentials and could not resist young enthusiasts, he had grown more practical with age and was now keener on constitutional reform. He nevertheless remained the most respected figure in French public life. His American trip of 1824 had enhanced his standing, and his agitation for the Greek cause had given him an opportunity to fly the flag of liberty. He was recognized as representing all that was finest in French political culture.

 

     “Frustrated by the Chamber of Deputies, Charles X decided to dissolve it and call an election in March 1830. This yielded an increased opposition. The king set his mind on a show of strength and on 26 July announced a set of emergency ordonnances, abrogating press freedom, dissolving the newly-elected Chamber and limiting the franchise for the next election. The following day barricades began to go up and people started looting gunsmiths’ shops. The situation was serious but not critical, as the protesters had no leaders, no plan, and no particular idea of what they wanted. Nor were they representatives of the population at large. The former Napoleonic marshal Marmont was in command of the 10,000 troops in the capital, and he should have been able to prevent the rising from gaining ground, but he received conflicting orders. The king intended to ride the stron but then changed his mind, by which time it was too late. After two days of confused fighting, Marmont’s troops began to go over to the other side. By 29 July most of Paris was controlled by the insurgents, and the municipal committee in the Hôtel de Ville was behaving like a provisional government. Charles X fled abroad, as he had done on 16 July 1789.

 

     “The rising, unplanned and undirected, was motivated by a spectrum of grievances and desires, but frustration of one sort or another was probably the dominant motor during its three-day duration, which came to be called ‘Les Trois Glorieuses’. Some of the insurgents wer poor and hungry, but poverty and hunger were noticeably absent from the slogans and banners. The most commonly heard shout was ‘Vive la liberté!’, but its meaning depended very much on who was doing the shouting. There were those who wanted constitutional change, but most would have been hard put to it to define their demands. The cry of ‘Smash the Romantics!’ was more in evidence than any calls for bread or better working conditions.

 

     “The Romantics were out in force. Alexandre Dumas manned a barricade with the painter Paul Huet, a former Carbonaro. Franz Liszt was caught up in the excitement and roamed the streets encouraging the insurgents and meditating a Revolutionary Symphony. Stendhal stayed at home during the three days, engrossed in Le Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, that bible of the cult of Napoleon. Dumas, who was helping to build a barricade on the Place de l’Odéon on the second day of the revolt, witnessed a scene that fully justified Stendhal’s studies. As he and his companions toiled away, tearing up paving-stones and heaving furniture on to the barricade, the owner of a nearby riding-school rode up on a white horse, in a tightly buttoned coat and a black tricorn hat, and came to a halt, with one hand held behind his back. The resemblance to Napoleon was so striking that the whole crowd began to shout: ‘Vive l’Empereur!’ An old woman fell to her knees, made the sign of the cross, and cried out: ‘Oh! Jesus! that I should have been allowed to see him before I die!…’

 

     “In the moral confusion, it was symbols and shibboleths that carried the day. Foremost among these was the Marseillaise. It was on the lips of the first confused crowds as they began to build their barricades, and the sound electrified the capital. When the tenor Nourrit sang it on the stage of the Opéra, a religious silence fell, and some went down on their knees. By popular demand, Nourrit would mount the stage in full National Guard uniform every evening for the next three months to sin the sacred hymn, holding a tricolor flag. For the composer Hector Berlioz, the hymn provided one of the great musical experiences of his life. He had been writing an orchestral cantata for the competition of the Institut de France when the revolution began. All through 28 July he worked feverishly at the score in the Palais Mazarin, while bullets and cannon-balls thudded against the walls and pattered over the roof. The following day, having finished the piece, he got hold of a pistol and joined ‘the holly rabble’ on the streets. At one point he came across a group of young men singing rousing battle-songs. A crowd gathered, and when Berlioz and the singers wanted to leave, they were pursued by thousands of frantic admirers. They were finally cornered in a cul-de-sac, and had no option but to continue singing. They ascended to a first-floor room and opened the windows so that they could be seen and heard by the crowd. They intoned the Marseillaise. ‘Almost at once the seething mass at our feet grew quiet and a holy stillness fell upon them,’ recalls Berlioz. When it came to the chorus of ‘Aux armes, citoyens!’ the multitude of men, women and children, ‘hot from the barricades, their pulses still throbbing with the excitement of the recent struggle’, gave voice, and Berlioz sank to the floor, overcome with emotion.

 

     “The other defining symbol of Les Trois Glorieuses was the tricolor, also banned in 1814. Dumas was crossing a bridge on 28 July when he suddenly saw it flying over Notre Dame. ‘I leaned over the parapet, my arms outstretched, my eyes fixed and bathed in tears.’ And it was the tricolor that was to decide the outcome of the revolution. The instincts driving the insurgents on to the barricades, and those that made the royal troops waver and then go over to the other side, were emotional and spiritual rather than political. Those July days were not born of any deep sense of injustice and they wer not about bringing in a new social order. They were a rejection of the Bourbon restoration and an attempt to regain the spirit of 1789. They were a reaffirmation of the primacy of the nation, which had been ignored and insulted by the Bourbons.

 

     “On 29 July, when the fighting was pretty well over, Lafayette set out for the Hôtel de Ville, cheered by the population. He was the one man everyone could fall in behind. But he was not the man who could wield power. No one understood this better than the only member of the French royal family still in Paris, the Duc d’Orléans. Louis Philippe d’Orléans had been crafting his image carefully, gradually manoeuvring himself into the position of being both the acceptable face of royalty and the representative of the spirit of 1792. He cultivated artists and heaped patronage and flattery on popular writers, who served him well. In 1824 he sponsored a great exhibition of contemporary French painting at the Palais-Royal, which, incidentally, featured two great canvases by Vernet depicting him at Valmy and Jemappes.

 

     “The duke kept out of sight during the July Days, using Béranger and Ary Scheffer to put forward his name and sound out opinion on his behalf. He had the support of many constitutional liberals, and of what might be described as the business interest. As soon as it became apparent that the cause of Charles X was dead, people opposed to a republic began to look to Orléans as the lesser of two evils. It was only than that he sidled into the limelight. On 20 July a delegation from the moderates to the Chamber of Deputies invited Orléans to become ‘Lieutenant of the Kingdom’ and the following day he went to the Hôtel de Ville, where Lafayetter was doing his best to contain the more radical elements.

 

     “As Orléans stood on the balcony of the Hôtel de Ville with Lafayetter, facing a sullen crowd, he had the brilliant idea of seizing a huge tricolor flag and brandishing it while he embraced the general. Its folds framed the figures of Lafayette and the duke, brushing their faces, and the crowd erupted into a frenzy of enthusiastic applause. Orléans was the hero of the hour, and a couple of days later he had been acclaimed Louis Philippe, King of the French. It was his reward for intelligent observation. He knew the power of the tricolor and its importance for ordinary Frenchmen. When an officer serving with the French forces in Algeria gave his soldiers the news of Les Trois Glorieuses, explaining that the hated Bourbons had fallen, and that their new king was a constitutional monarch who had fought at Valmy, they were unmoved. ‘It was only when they learned that the tricolor had replaced the white standard that these good men gave vent to their joy,’ he writes.

 

     “Joy was the prevalent emotion in France at the end of July 1830. ‘As soon as the heat of combat had died down,’ noted the legitimist Comtess de Boigne on 29 July, ‘it became a city of brothers.’ The poor were still poor, the hungry still hungry, but they had been given back their dreams…

 

     “This joy at the new dawn was not confined to France. Just as in 1789, a shudder of excitement ran through the Western world. ‘It roused my utmost enthusiasm, and gave me, as it were, a new existence,’ wrote John Stuart Mill, then twenty-four, who hastened to Paris, where he gazed rapt on Lafayette and other heroes of the July days. Heinrich Heine, though older, reacted with lyricism to ‘the thick packet of newspapers with the warm, glowing-hot news’. ‘Each item was a sunbeam, wrapped in printed paper, and together they enkindled my soul with a wild glow… Lafayette, the tricolor, the Marseillaise – it intoxicates me. Bold, ardent hopes spring up, like trees with gold fruit and branches that shoot up wildly till their leaves touch the clouds.’

 

     “And there was the same quasi-religious reverence surrounding what had happened. A Belgian radical who was in Germany at the end of July recorded a scene in a Karlsruhe inn. ‘We saw a group of Baden officers, sitting together at the table d’hôte, rise up suddenly in a respectful silence when one of them, opening a letter sent to him from Strasbourg let a tricolor cockade drop out of the envelope. In an attempt to stop the spread of the infection, several German governments prohibited performances of operas such as La Muette de Portici and Guilleaume Tell. They knew what they were doing: a performance of one of them was responsible for launching an insurrection that created a nation where people had least expected it – in Belgium…”[389]

 

     Inspired though they were by the poets, the revolutions of 1830 soon settled down into prosaic mediocrity. The difference between the revolutions of 1789 and 1830 consisted in the latter’s concentration on broadening electoral suffrage and in its more openly commercial flavour, in keeping with the new spirit of commercial enterprise. “Master of everything,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville of France in the 1840s, “as no aristocracy had ever been or perhaps will never be, the middle class, which one has to call the governing class, having entrenched itself in power and soon afterwards in its self-interest, seemed like a private industry. Each of its members scarcely gave a thought to public affairs except to make them function to profit his own private business, and had no difficulty in forgetting the lower orders in his little cocoon of affluence. Posterity… will possibly never realize how far the government of the day had in the end taken on the appearance of an industrial company, where all operations are carried out with a view to the benefit the shareholders can draw from them.”[390]

 

The Polish Question

 

     Encouraged by the Tsar’s non-intervention in the French and Belgian revolutions, the Poles rose against Tsarist authority in November, 1830. But this time the Tsar did act. As he wrote to his brother, who ruled the Polish Kingdom: “It is our duty to think of our security. When I say ours, I mean the tranquillity of Europe.”[391] And so the rebellion was crushed. Europe was saved again – and was again uncomprehending and ungrateful.

 

     Although it failed, the Polish rebellion gave further support to the idea of a close, symbiotic link between the revolution and art, as well as bringing to birth perhaps the most idiosyncratic, powerful and long-lasting variety of the cult of the nation. The 55,000 Polish troops and 6,000 civilians who made a great exodus to the West and Paris kept this cult alive, not in Polish hearts only, but throughout Europe. Only the Russians were not seduced by its masochistic charm.

 

     Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes: “The revolutions of 1830 in France and Belgium gave an impulse to the Masonic movement in Poland. It had two basic tendencies – an extreme republican one (headed by the historian Lelevel) and a more moderate aristocratic one (headed by A. Chartoysky). At the end of 1830 there began a rebellion in Warsaw. Great Prince Constantine Pavlovich with a detachment of Russian soldiers was forced to abandon Poland. In 1831 there came there the armies of General Dibich, which had no significant success, in particular by reason of a very strong outbreak of cholear, from which both Dibich and Great Prince Constantine died. Meanwhile the revolutionaries in Warsaw created first a ‘Provisional government’ with a ‘dictator’ at its head, and then convened the Sejm. The rebels demanded first the complete independence of Poland with the addition to it of Lithuania and western Rus’, and then declared the ‘deposition’ of the Romanov dynasty from the throne of the Kingdom of Poland. Count Paskevich of Erevan was sent to Poland. He took Warsaw by storm and completely destroyed the Masonic revolutionary armies, forcing their remnants abroad [where they played a significant role in the revolutionary movement in Western Europe]. Poland was divided into provinces and completely included into the composition of the Russian Empire. The language of business was declared to be Russian. Russian landowners received land in Poland. A Deputy was now placed at the head of the Kingdom of Poland. He became Paskevich with the new title of Prince of Warsaw. In connection with all this it became clear that the Polish magnates and landowners who had kept their land-holdings in Belorussia and Ukraine had already for some time been persecuting the Orthodox Russians and Little Russians and also the uniates, and had been occupied in polonizing education in general the whole cultural life in these lands. Tsar Nicholas I was forced to take severe measures to restore Russian enlightenment and education in the West Russian and Ukrainian land. In particular, a Russian university was opened in Kiev. The part of the Belorussian and Ukrainian population headed by Bishop Joseph Semashko which had been in a forcible unia with the Catholic Church since the end of the 16th century desired reunion with Orthodoxy. Nicholas I decided to satisfy this desire and in 1839 all the uniates (besides the inhabitants of Kholm diocese) were united to ‘to the ancestral Orthodox All-Russian Church’, as they put it. This was a great feast of Orthodoxy! Masses of uniates were united voluntarily, without any compulsion. All this showed that Russia had subdued and humbled Poland not because she wished to lord it over her, and resist her independence, but only because Poland wanted to lord it (both politically and spiritually) over the ages-old Russian population, depriving it of its own life and ‘ancestral’ faith! With such a Poland as she was then striving to be, there was nothing to be done but completely subdue her and force her to respect the rights of other peoples! But to the Polish Catholics Russia provided, as usual, every opportunity of living in accordance with their faith and customs.”[392]

 

     Unfortunately, the Poles and the West did not see it like that. The composer Frederick Chopin wrote: “The suburbs [of Warsaw] are destroyed, burned… Moscow rules the world! O God, do You exist? You’re there and You don’t avenge it. How many more Russian crimes do You want – or – are You a Russian too!!?”[393]

 

     Another artist who gave expression to the new Polish faith was the poet Mickiewicz. “Poland will arise,” he wrote, “and free nations of Europe from bondage. Ibi patria, ubi male; wherever in Europe liberty is suppressed and is fought for, there is the battle for your country.”[394] Adam Zamoyski writes that Mickiewicz turned “the spiritual fantasies of a handful of soldiers and intellectuals into the articles of faith that built a modern nation.

 

     “Mickiewicz had established his reputation as Poland’s foremost lyric poet in the 1820s, and enhanced his political credentials by his exile in Russia, where he met several prominent Decembrists and grew close to Pushkin [who, however, did not sympathize with his views on Poland]. In 1829 Mickiewicz received permission to go to Germany to take the waters. He met Mendelssohn and Hegel in Berlin, Metternich in Marienbad, and August Schlegel in Bonn, and attended Goethe’s eightieth birthday party in Weimar. Goethe kissed him on the forehead, gave him the quill with which he had worked on Faust, and commissioned a portrait of him for his collection. Mickiewicz then went to Italy where, apart from a de rigueur trip to Switzerland (Chillon and Altdorf, with Byron and Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell in his hand), he spent the next year-and-half. It was in Rome that news of the November Rising [in Warsaw] reached him. He set off for Poland, but his attempts to cross the border were foiled by Cossack patrols, and he was obliged to watch the debacle from Dresden.

 

     “In this tranquil Saxon city he was gripped by inspiration and wrote frantically in fits lasting up to three days, without pausing to eat or sleep. The fruit was the third part of a long poetic drama entitled Forefathers’ Eve, which can only be described as a national passion play. Mickiewicz had also seen the significance of the holy night [of November 29, 1830], and he likened all monarchs, and Nicholas in particular, to Herod – their sense of guilty foreboding led them to massacre the youth of nations. The drama describes the transformation through suffering of the young poet and lover, Konrad, into a warrior-poet. He is a parable for Poland as a whole, but he is also something more. ‘My soul has now entered the motherland, and with my body I have taken her soul: I and the motherland are one,’ he declares after having endured torture. ‘My name is Million, because I love and suffer for millions… I feel the sufferings of the whole nation as a mother feels the pain of the fruit within her womb.’

 

     “In Paris in 1832 Mickiewicz published a short work entitled Books of the Polish Nation and of the Pilgrimage of Poland. It was quickly translated into several languages and caused a sensation. It is a bizarre work, couched in biblical prose, giving a moral account of Polish history. After an Edenic period, lovingly described, comes the eighteenth century, a time when ‘nations were spoiled, so much so that among them there was left only one man, both citizen and soldier’ – a reference to Lafayetter. The ‘Satanic Trinity’ of Catherine of Russia, Frederick of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria decided to murder Poland, because Poland was Liberty. They crucified the innocent nation while degenerate France played the role of Pilate.[395] But that was not to be the end of it. ‘For the Polish nation did not die; its body lies in the tomb, while its soul has left the earth, that is public life, and visited the abyss, that is the private life of peoples suffering slavery at home and in exile, in order to witness their suffering. And on the third day the soul will re-enter the body, and the nation will rise from the dead and will liberate all the peoples of Europe from slavery.’[396] In a paraphrase of the Christian Creed, Liberty will then ascend the throne in the capital of the world, and judge the nations, ushering in the age of peace.

 

     “So the Polish nation was now in Limbo, and all it had to do in order to bring about its own resurrection and that of all grieving peoples was to cleanse and redeem itself through a process of expiation which Mickiewicz saw as its ‘pilgrimage’. This was to be a kind of forty days in the wilderness. The pilgrims must fast and pray on the anniversaries of the battles of Wawer and Grochow, reciting litanies to the 30,000 dead of the Confederation of Bar and the 20,000 martyrs of Praga; they must observe their ancient customs and wear national dress. One is reminded of Rousseau’s admonitions in his Considérations sur le Gouvernement de Pologne.

 

     “Rousseau would have been proud of this generation. As one freedom fighter writes in his memoirs: ‘Only he loves Poland with his heart and his soul, only he is a true son of his Motherland who has cast aside all lures and desires, all bad habits, prejudice and passions, and been reborn in the pure faith, he who, having recognized the reasons for our defeats and failures through his own judgement and conviction, brings his whole love, his whole – not just partial, but whole – conviction, his courage and his endurance, and lays them on the altar of the purely national future. He had taken part in the November Rising and a conspiratorial fiasco in 1833, for which he was rewarded with fifteen years in the Spielberg and Küfstein prisons. Yet decades later he still believed that the November Rising had ‘called Poland to a new life’ and brought her ‘salvation’ closer by a hundred years. Such feelings were shared by tens of thousands, given expression by countless poets and artists, and understood by all the literate classes.

 

     “Most of Mickiewicz’s countrymen read his works and wept over them. They identified with them and learned them by heart. They did not follow the precepts laid down in them, nor did they really believe in this gospel in any literal sense. These works were a let-out, an excuse even, rather than a guiding rule. But they did provide an underlying ethical explanation of a state of affairs that was otherwise intolerable to the defeated patriots. It was an explanation that made moral sense and was accepted at the subconscious level. It was a spiritual and psychological lifeline that kept them from sinking into a Slough of Despond. It made misfortune not only bearable, but desirable.

 

     “And it was by no means an expression of uniquely Polish sensibility. The cast of mind that underlay it was common to most of Europe…”[397]

 

     When Alexander II became Tsar and was crowned King of Poland, he granted a general amnesty to Polish prisoners in Russia, and about 9000 exiles returned to their homes from Siberia between 1857 and 1860. However, they brought back with them the virus of nationalism. Thus on the day after the Tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Constantine, was made viceroy of Poland, he was shot in the shoulder.

 

     Nor did a programme of “re-Polonization” – more liberal state administration and local government, regulations governing the use of the Polish language, and Polish educational institutions – appease the nationalists. Even when all the other nations of Europe had settled down after the abortive revolutions of 1848, the Poles rose again.

 

     “In January 1863,” writes John van de Kiste, “they slaughtered Russian soldiers asleep in their Warsaw barracks, and national resistance turned to general uprising. This spread through the kingdom into the nine formerly Polish provinces known as Russia’s Western region, where powerful landlords and Catholic clergy were ready to give vent to their hatred of Russian domination. For a while it looked as if England, France and Austria might join in on the side of Warsaw after giving their tacit blessing to the rebels, but Russia put down the unrest at no little cost to the Poles…. While the Poles butchered scores of Russian peasants including women and children, the Russians erected gibbets in the streets where rebels and civilians were hanged in their hundreds, with thousands more sent to Siberia. The insurrection was finally quelled in May 1864, when the more conservative Count Theodore Berg was sent to replace Constantine as viceroy.”[398]

 

The Source of Political Authority

 

     The French revolution was essentially liberal in character; the Polish revolution – nationalist. Both directions were latent in the original revolutionary project, in the logic of the struggle for “freedom”. Which direction triumphed depended largely on the circumstances in which the struggle for freedom took place – that of oppressed individuals or classes within a sovereign nation or oppressed nations within a multi-ethnic empire. As yet the potential conflicts between the two – the fact that the liberation of the nation might mean putting off the liberation of the individual for the time being, and vice-versa – were only dimly perceived.

 

     Still less clearly perceived was the fact that the revolution could not be used to make limited reforms, and then stopped in its tracks before it became “dangerous”. The path that the first French revolution took after 1792 should have made that obvious. But many conservative liberals who took part in the revolution of 1830 deluded themselves into thinking that the further development of the revolutionary idea and passions could now be arrested. They thought they could sow the wind without reaping the whirlwind, as if the genie could be let out of the bottle to do some necessary “cleaning”, and then put back again before the cleaning breeze became a hurricane. They failed to see that the revolution was not a rational human desire for limited, reasonable reform but an irrational, elemental, satanic force whose ultimate aim, whether those who purported to lead and manipulate it understood this or not, was simply total destruction.

 

     One of the most typical of these conservative liberals was François Guizot, Prime Minister of France in the 1840s. In 1820, when Louis XVIII’s Charter conceded legal equality, religious toleration and the necessity for parliamentary consent to new laws on taxation, he declared: “I consider the revolution of 1789 to be over. All its interests and legitimate wishes are guaranteed by the Charter…. What France needs now is to do away with the revolutionary spirit which still torments her.”[399] Guizot wanted to believe that the “freedom” aimed at by the revolutionaries of 1789 and 1830 was quite different from the “freedom” aimed at by the revolutionaries of 1793, and therefore that the revolution could conveniently stop in 1830, when the middle classes were put back in the saddle after the period of reaction under Charles X, and not go on to anything really radical and unpleasant. But is there really such a radical opposition between the “freedom from” of the liberals and the “freedom to” of the sans-culottes? How can one and not the other be called “the spirit of insurrection”[400] when both attained their ends by means of bloody insurrection against the established order?

 

      But Guizot’s real ideal was not the French revolution, but the “Glorious” English one of 1688, a relatively bloodless affair which put the men of property firmly in power. Guizot thought that “moderate” revolutions such as 1688 and 1789 could somehow avert “radical” ones such as 1793. That is why he supported the overthrow of Charles X in 1830, hoping that Louis Philippe could play the role of William of Orange to Charles X’s James II: “We did not choose the king but negotiated with a prince [Orléans] we found next to the throne and who alone could by mounting it guarantee our public law and save us from revolutions… Our minds were guided by the English Revolution of 1688, by the fine and free government it founded, and the wonderful prosperity it brought to the British nation.”[401] And since the English Revolution had put the middle classes into power (although only after the Reform Act of 1832 did they really begin to acquire power at the ballot box), he wanted the same for France. “I want,” he said, “to secure the political preponderance of the middle classes in France, the final and complete organization of the great victory that the middle classes have won over privilege and absolute power from 1789 to 1830.”[402]

 

     But Louis Philippe, though more liberal than his predecessor, was not liberal enough for the Zeitgeist. As one who was both of royal blood and had been a Jacobin himself, he sought to establish a “golden mean” between absolutism and Jacobinism.[403] But such a “golden mean” was attained only by the English in the nineteenth century for any long period of time; and his reign was cut off by a more radical revolution, that of 1848, which was succeeded by the still more radical revolution of the Paris Commune in 1870. For why should the spirit of liberty favour only the men of property and not also the proletariat, the Third Estate and not also the Fourth Estate? Guizot and Louis Philippe are clear examples of the inconsistency and ultimate ineffectiveness of those who oppose revolution, not root and branch, but only in its more obviously unpleasant and radical manifestations.

 

     The vanity of the liberal hope of “limited revolution” was demonstrated by Hieromonk Seraphim (Rose): “In the Christian order, “politics… was founded upon absolute truth… The principal providential form government took in union with Christian Truth was the Orthodox Christian Empire, wherein sovereignty was vested in a Monarch, and authority proceeded from him downwards through a hierarchical social structure… On the other hand… a politics that rejects Christian Truth must acknowledge ‘the people’ as sovereign and understand authority as proceeding from below upwards, in a formally ‘egalitarian’ society. It is clear that one is the perfect inversion of the other; for they are opposed in their conceptions both of the source and of the end of government. Orthodox Christian Monarchy is government divinely established, and directed, ultimately, to the other world, government with the teaching of Christian Truth and the salvation of souls as its profoundest purpose; Nihilist rule  - whose most fitting name… is Anarchy – is government established by men, and directed solely to this world, government which has no higher aim than earthly happiness.

 

     “The Liberal view of government, as one might suspect, is an attempt at compromise between these two irreconcilable ideas. In the 19th century this compromise took the form of ‘constitutional monarchies’, an attempt – again – to wed an old form to a new content; today the chief representatives of the Liberal idea are the ‘republics’ and ‘democracies’ of Western Europe and America, most of which preserve a rather precarious balance between the forces of authority and Revolution, while professing to believe in both.

 

     “It is of course impossible to believe in both with equal sincerity and fervor, and in fact no one has ever done so. Constitutional monarchs like Louis Philippe thought to do so by professing to rule ‘by the Grace of God and the will of the people’ – a formula whose two terms annul each other, a fact as evident to the Anarchist [Bakunin] as to the Monarchist.

 

     “Now a government is secure insofar as it has God for its foundation and His Will for its guide; but this, surely, is not a description of Liberal government. It is, in the Liberal view, the people who rule, and not God; God Himself is a ‘constitutional monarch’ Whose authority has been totally delegated to the people, and Whose function is entirely ceremonial. The Liberal believes in God with the same rhetorical fervor with which he believes in Heaven. The government erected upon such a faith is very little different, in principle, from a government erected upon total disbelief; and whatever its present residue of stability, it is clearly pointed in the direction of Anarchy.

 

     “A government must rule by the Grace of God or by the will of the people, it must believe in authority or in the Revolution; on these issues compromise is possible only in semblance, and only for a time. The Revolution, like the disbelief which has always accompanied it, cannot be stopped halfway; it is a force that, once awakened, will not rest until it ends in a totalitarian Kingdom of this world.  The history of the last two centuries has proved nothing if not this. To appease the Revolution and offer it concessions, as Liberals have always done, thereby showing that they have no truth with which to oppose it, is perhaps to postpone, but not to prevent, the attainment of its end. And to oppose the radical Revolution with a Revolution of one’s own, whether it be ‘conservative’, ‘non-violent’, or ‘spiritual’, is not merely to reveal ignorance of the full scope and nature of the Revolution of our time, but to concede as well the first principle of the Revolution: that the old truth is no longer true, and a new truth must take its place.”[404]

 

Liberalism and Free Trade

 

     “Liberalism,” writes Norman Davies, “developed along two parallel tracks, the political and the economic. Political liberalism focused on the essential concept of government by consent. It took its name from the liberales of Spain, who drew up their Constitution of 1812 in opposition to the arbitrary powers of the Spanish monarchy; but it had its roots much further back, in the political theories of the Enlightenment and beyond. Indeed, for much of its early history it was indistinguishable from the growth of limited government. Its first lasting success may be seen in the American Revolution, though it drew heavily on the experiences of British parliamentarianism and on the first, constitutional phase of the Revolution in France. In its most thoroughgoing form it embraced republicanism, though most liberals welcomed a popular, limited, and fair-minded monarch as a factor encouraging stability. Its advocates stressed above all the rule of law, individual liberty, constitutional procedures, religious toleration and the universal rights of man. They opposed the inbuilt prerogatives, wherever they survived, of Crown, Church, or aristocracy. Nineteenth-century liberals also gave great weight to property, which they saw as the principal source of responsible judgement and solid citizenship. As a result, whilst taking the lead in clipping the wings of absolutism and in laying the foundations of modern democracy, they were not prepared to envisage radical schemes for universal suffrage or for egalitarianism.

 

     “Economic liberalism focused on the concept of free trade, and on the associated doctrine of laissez-faire, which opposed the habit of governments to regular economic life through protectionist tariffs. It stressed the right of men of property to engage in commercial and industrial activities without undue restraint. Its energies were directed on the one hand to dismantling the economic barriers which had proliferated both within and between countries and on the other to battling against all forms of collectivist organization, from the ancient guild to the new trade unions.”[405]

 

     Liberalism was an individualist creed in that its aim, in line with the main stream of intellectual development since the Renaissance, was the maximum development and happiness of individual men. It was concerned to protect individual freedoms from the encroachment of all collectives, including the State. However, trends towards individualism have always gone hand in hand historically with trends in the opposite, collectivist direction; and the horrors caused by liberal individualism elicited the growth of socialist collectivism...

 

     Economic liberalism was based on egoism in theory and practice. Thus in Adam Smith’s Inquiry into the Nature and Cause of the Wealth of Nations (1776) we read: “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love… [The individual] is in this as in any other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention… I have neve known much good done by those who affected to trade for the public good. It is an affectation, indeed, not very common among merchants, and very few words need to be employed in dissuading them from it.”[406]

 

     It is a paradoxical theory, to say the least: that the public interest is best served by everyone pursuing his self-interest as freely as possible! Nor did the theory find much immediate confirmation in practice, at least before the second half of the nineteenth century. Certainly, there were some who got rich quick – mainly those with initial capital and entrepreneurial skills. But for the great majority of Englishmen economic liberalism meant the horror and squalor of William Blake’s “satanic mills”. If “freedom” in liberal theory means “freedom from”, it certainly did not mean freedom from poverty, disease or death for the workers crowded together in filthy slums in Manchester, where there could be very little “freedom to” do anything at all except work oneself to the bone. It is hardly surprising that not only the poor, but also many of the better-off who pitied them, came to see look upon these liberal “freedoms” with jaundiced eyes… Later, of course, largely under the pressure of humanitarian ideas and the labour movement, capitalism did begin to restrain itself, thereby disproving Marx’s prophecy of its imminent collapse. But the rise of collectivism was not checked by these concessions, but was rather strengthened, as we see throughout Europe as the nineteenth century progresses.

 

     Free trade, the main principle of economic liberalism, was a very important concept, first in England, and then in other countries that followed the English way.

 

     “True,” writes J.M. Roberts, “it is almost impossible to find economic theorists and publicists of the early industrial period who advocated absolute non-interference with the economy. Yet there was a broad, sustaining current which favoured the view that much good would result if the market economy was left to operate without the help or hindrance of politicians and civil servants. One force working this way was the teaching often summed up in a phrase made famous by a group of Frenchmen: laissez-faire. Broadly speaking, economists after Adam Smith had said with growing consensus that the production of wealth would be accelerated, and therefore the general well-being would increase, if the use of economic resources followed the ‘natural’ demands of the market. Another reinforcing trend was individualism, embodied in both the assumption that individuals knew their own business best and the increasing organization of society around the rights and interests of the individual.

 

     “These were the sources of the long-enduring association between industrialism and liberalism; they were deplored by conservatives who regretted a hierarchical, agricultural order of mutual obligations and duties, settled ideas, and religious values. Yet liberals who welcomed the new age were by no means taking their stand on a simply negative and selfish base. The creed of ‘Manchester’, as it was called because of the symbolic importance of that city in English industrial and commercial development, was for its leaders much more than a matter of mere self-enrichment. A great political battle which for years preoccupied Englishmen in the early nineteenth century made this clear. Its focus was a campaign for the repeal of what were called the ‘Corn Laws’, a tariff system originally imposed to provide protection for the British farmer from imports of cheaper foreign grain. The ‘repealers’, whose ideological and political leader was a none-too-successful businessman, Richard Cobden, argued that much was at stake. To begin with, retention of the duties on grain demonstrated the grip upon the legislative machinery of the agricultural interest, the traditional ruling class, who ought not to be allowed a monopoly of power. Opposed to it were the dynamic forces of the future which sought to liberate the national economy from such distortions in the interest of particular groups. Back came the reply of the anti-repealers: the manufacturers were themselves a particular interest who only wanted cheap food imports in order to be able to pay lower wages; if they wanted to help the poor, what about some regulation of the conditions under which they employed women and children in factories? There, the inhumanity of the production process showed a callous disregard for the obligations of privilege which would never have been tolerated in rural England. To this, the repealers responded that cheap food would mean cheaper goods for export. And in this, for someone like Cobden, much more than profit was involved. A worldwide expansion of Free Trade untrammelled by the interference of mercantilist governments would lead to international progress both material and spiritual, he thought; trade brought peoples together, exchanged and multiplied the blessings of civilization and increased the power in each country of its progressive forces. On one occasion he committed himself to the view that Free Trade was the expression of the Divine Will (though even this did not go as far as the British consul at Canton who had proclaimed that ‘Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ’)…

 

     “Only in England was the issue fought out so explicitly and to so clear-cut a conclusion. In other countries, paradoxically, the protectionists soon turned out to have the best of it. Only in the middle of the century, a period of expansion and prosperity, especially for the British economy, did Free Trade ideals get much support outside the United Kingdom, whose prosperity was regarded by believers as evidence of the correctness of their views and even mollified their opponents; Free Trade became a British political dogma, untouchable until well into the twentieth century. The prestige of British economic leadership helped to give it a brief popularity elsewhere, too. The prosperity of the era in fact owed as much to other influences as to this ideological triumph, but the belief added to the optimism of economic liberals. Their creed was the culmination of the progressive view of Man’s potential as an individual, whose roots lay in Enlightenment ideas.”[407]

 

     The difference between the old patriarchal attitude towards social and economic relations and the new attitude promulgated by the economic liberals is seen in the contrast between Lord Ashley and Richard Cobden: “Lord Ashley, the Christian Tory philanthropist who did so much to campaign for the improvement of working conditions for the poor, hated the competitive atmosphere of factories. Visiting his ancestral seat, St. Giles in the county of Dorset, he noted in his diary on 29 June 1841, ‘What a picture contrasted with a factory district, a people known and cared for, a people born and trained on the estate, exhibiting towards its hereditary possessors both deference and sympathy, affectionate respect and a species of allegiance demanding protection and repaying it in duty.’ To the Northern factory-owners such patronizing attitudes led only to stultification. There was no movement, no struggle, in Ashley’s view of society. Cobden, the Corn Law reformer par excellence, hated Ashley’s attempts to set limits to an employer’s powers – the length of hours he could make factory hands work, or the limiting of the age of his employees. ‘Mine is that masculine species of charity which would lead me to inculcate in the minds of the labouring classes the love of independence, the privilege of self respect, the disdain of being patronised or petted, the desire to accumulate and the ambition to rise.’”[408]

 

     Cobden’s “masculine species of charity” was imitated by other industrial employers and landlords, who felt much less bound by custom and morality to protect their employees than had the feudal landlords of previous ages. Trevelyan writes: “Throughout the ‘forties nothing was done to control the slum landlords and jerrybuilders, who, according to the prevalent laissez-faire philosophy, were engaged from motives of self-interest in forwarding the general happiness. These pioneers of ‘progress’ saved space by crowding families into single rooms or thrusting them underground into cellars, and saved money by the use of cheap and insufficient building materials, and by providing no drains – or, worse still, by providing drains that oozed into the water supply. In London, Lord Shaftesbury discovered a room with a family in each of its four corners, and a room with a cesspool immediately below its boarded floor. We may even regard it as fortunate that cholera ensured, first in the years of the Reform Bill and then in 1848, because the sensational character of this novel visitation scared society into the tardy beginnings of sanitary self-defence.”[409]

 

     What legislation there was in this period of what Sir Karl Popper aptly called “unrestrained capitalism” only exacerbated the plight of the poor. This was particularly true of the Poor Law Act of 1834, which prescribed the building of workhouses that were designed to be as unattractive as possible. Thus the Reverend H.H. Milman wrote to Edwin Chadwick: “The workhouses should be a place of hardship, of coarse fare, of degradation and humility; it should be administered with strictness – with severity; it should be as repulsive as is consistent with humanity.”[410]

 

     The Poor Law, as John Gray writes, “set the level of subsistence lower than the lowest wage set by the market. It stigmatised the recipient by attaching the harshest and most demeaning conditions to relief. It weakened the institution of the family. It established a laissez-faire regime in which individuals were solely responsible for their own welfare, rather than sharing that responsibility with their communities.

 

      “Eric Hobsbawm captures the background, character and effects of the welfare reforms of the 1830s when he writes: ‘The traditional view, which still survived in a distorted way in all classes of rural society and in the internal relations of working-class groups, was that a man had a right to earn a living, and, if unable to do so, a right to be kept alive by the community. The view of middle-class liberal economists was that men should take such jobs as the market offered, wherever and at whatever rate it offered, and the rational man would, by individual or voluntary collective saving and insurance make provision for accident, illness and old age. The residuum of paupers could not, admittedly, be left actually to starve, but they ought not to be given more than the absolute minimum – provided it was less than the lowest wages offered in the market, and in the most discouraging conditions. The Poor Law was not so much intended to help the unfortunate as to stigmatize the self-confessed failures of society… There have been few more inhuman statutes than the Poor Law Act of 1834, which made all relief ‘less eligible’ than the lowest wage outside, confined it to the jail-like work-house, forcibly separating husbands, wives and children in order to punish the poor for their destitution.’

 

     “This system applied to at least 10 per cent of the English population in the mid-Victorian period. It remained in force until the outbreak of the First World War.

 

     “The central thrust of the Poor Law reforms was to transfer responsibility for protection against insecurity and misfortune from communities to individuals and to compel people to accept work at whatever rate the market set. The same principle has informed many of the welfare reforms that have underpinned the re-engineering of the free market in the late twentieth century…

 

     “No less important than Poor Law reform in the mid-nineteenth century was legislation designed to remove obstacles to the determination of wages by the market. David Ricardo stated the orthodox view of the classical economists when he wrote, ‘Wages should be left to fair and free competition of the market, and should never be controlled by the interference of the legislature.’

 

     “It was by appeal to such canonical statements of laissez-faire that the Statute of Apprentices (enacted after the Black Death in the fourteenth century) was repealed and all other controls on wages ended in the period leading up to the 1830s. Even the Factory Acts of 1833, 1844 and 1847 avoided any head-on collision with laissez-faire orthodoxies. ‘The principle that there should be no interference in the freedom of contract between master and man was honoured to the extent that no direct legislative interference was made in the relationship between employers and adult males… it was still possible to argue for a further half-century, though with diminishing plausibility, that the principle of non-interference remained inviolate.’

 

     “The removal of agricultural protection and the establishment of free trade, the reform of the poor laws with the aim of constraining the poor to take work, and the removal of any remaining controls on wages were the three decisive steps in the construction of the free market in mid-nineteenth century Britain. These key measures created out of the market economy of the 1830s the unregulated free market of mid-Victorian times that is the model for all subsequent neo-liberal policies.”[411]

 

     The industrial bourgeoisie who formed the core of the new “middle class” were, as Eric Hobsbawm writes,  “self-made men, or at least men of modest origins who owed little to birth, family or formal higher education. (Like Mr. Bounderly in Dickens’ Hard Times, they were not reluctant to advertise the fact.) They were rich and getting richer by the year. They were above all imbued with the ferocious and dynamic self-confidence of those whose own careers prove to them that divine providence, science and history have combined to present the earth to them on a platter.

 

     ”’Political economy’, translated into a few simple dogmatic propositions by self-made journalist-publishers who hymned the virtues of capitalism… gave them intellectual certainty. Protestant dissent of the hard Independent, Utilitarian, Baptist and Quaker rather than the emotional Methodist type gave them spiritual certainty and a contempt for useless aristocrats. Neither fear, anger, nor even pity moved the employer who told his workers:

 

     “’The God of Nature has established a just and equitable law which man has no right to disturb; when he ventures to do so it is always certain that he, sooner or later, meets with corresponding punishment… Thus when masters audaciously combine that by an union of power they may more effectually oppress their servants; by such an act, they insult the majesty of Heaven, and bring down the curse of God upon themselves, while on the other hand, when servants unite to extort from their employers that share of the profit which of right belongs to the master, they equally violate the laws of equity.’

 

     “There was an order in the universe, but it was no longer the order of the past. There was only one God, whose name was steam and spoke in the voice of Malthus, McCulloch, and anyone who employed machinery…

 

     “A pietistic Protestantism, rigid, self-righteous, unintellectual, obsessed with puritan morality to the point where hypocrisy was its automatic companion, dominated this desolate epoch. ‘Virtue’, as G.M. Young said, ‘advanced on a broad invincible front’; and it trod the unvirtuous, the weak, the sinful (i.e. those who neither made money nor controlled their emotional or financial expenditures) into the mud where they so plainly belonged, deserving at best only of their betters’ charity. There was some capitalist economic sense in this. Small entrepreneurs had to plough back much of their profits into the business if they were to become big entrepreneurs. The masses of new proletarians had to be broken into the industrial rhythm of labour by the most draconian labour discipline, or left to rot if they would not accept it. And yet even today the heart contracts at the sight of the landscape constructed by that generation.

 

     “‘You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there – as the members of eighteen religious persuasions had done – they made it a pious warehouse of red brick, with sometimes (but this only in highly ornamented examples) a bell in a bird-cage on the top of it… All the public inscriptions in the town were pained alike, in severe characters of black and white. The jail might have been the infirmary, the town-hall might have been either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the contrary in the graces of their construction. Fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact, everywhere in the immaterial… Everything was fact between the lying-in hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the dearest, was not and never should be, world without end, Amen.’

 

     “This gaunt devotion to bourgeois utilitarianism, which the evangelicals and puritans shared with the agnostic eighteenth-century ‘philosophic radicals’ who put it into logical words for them, produced its own functional beauty in railway lines, bridges and warehouses, and its romantic horror in the smoke-drenched endless grey-black or reddish files of small houses overlooked by the fortresses of the mills. Outside it the new bourgeoisie lived (if it had accumulated enough money to move), dispensing command, moral education and assistance to missionary endeavour among the black heathen abroad. Its men personified the money which proved their right to rule the world; its women, deprived by their husbands’ money even of the satisfaction of actually doing household work, personified the virtue of their class: stupid (‘be good, sweet maid, and let who will be clever’), uneducated, impractical, theoretically unisexual, propertyless and protected. They were the only luxury which the age of thrift and self-help allowed itself.

 

     “The British manufacturing bourgeoisie was the most extreme example of its class, but all over the continent there were smaller groups of the same kind: Catholic in the textile districts of the French North or Catalonia, Calvinist in Alsace, Lutheran pietist in the Rhineland, Jewish all over central and eastern Europe. They were rarely quite as hard as in Britain, for they were rarely quite as divorced from the older traditions of urban life and paternalism. Leon Faucher was painfully struck, in spite of his doctrinaire liberalism, by the sight of Manchester in the 1840s, as which continental observer was not? But they shared with the English the confidence which came from steady enrichment…”[412]

 

     Even the Anglican Church, which hardly penetrated into the new industrial slums, seemed to be on the side of the exploiters. “A typical representative of this kind of Christianity was the High Church priest J. Townsend, author of A Dissertation on the Poor Laws, by a Wellwisher of Mankind, an extremely crude apologist for exploitation whom Marx exposed. ‘Hunger,’ Townsend begins his eulogy, ‘is not only a peaceable, silent, unremitted pressure but, as the most natural motive of industry and labour, it calls forth the most powerful exertions.’ In Townsend’s ‘Christian’ world order, everything depends (as Marx observes) upon making hunger permanent among the working class; and Townsend believes that this is indeed the divine purpose of the principle of the growth of population; for he goes on: ‘It seems to be a law of nature that the poor should be to a certain degree improvident, so that there may always be some to fulfil the most servile, the most sordid, the most ignoble offices in the community. The stock of human happiness is thereby much increased, whilst the more delicate… are left at liberty without interruption to pursue those callings which are suited to their various dispositions.’ And the ‘delicate priestly sychophant’, as Marx called him for this remark, adds that the Poor Law, by helping the hungry, ‘tends to destroy the harmony and beauty, the symmetry and order, of that system which God and nature have established in the world.’”[413]

 

     With the official Church effectively on the side of the exploiters, it was left to “Christian socialists”, individual preachers and philanthropists, and, above all, novelists to elicit the milk of human kindness from the hard breasts of the rich. The realistic novel in the hands of great writers such as Dickens and Balzac acquired an importance it had not had in earlier ages, teaching morality without moralising. Thus Mrs. Elisabeth Gaskell’s North and South not only brought home to readers in the rural south the sufferings of the industrial north: it also showed how the philosophy of Free Trade tended to drive out even the Christian practice of almsgiving. For the novel describes how the industrialist Thornton, though not a cruel man at heart, is against helping the starving families of his striking workers on the grounds that helping them would help prolong the strike, which, if successful, would force him out of business, which would mean unemployment and starvation for those same workers. But in the end he is led by the woman he loves to see how a thriving business and kindness to the workers can be combined.

 

The Irish Famine

 

     The doctrine of economic liberalism, or Free Trade, gained its decisive victory in 1846, when the Tory Prime Minister, Lord Peel, made a dramatic volte-face and voted for the repeal of the Corn Laws, thereby creating civil war in his party and condemning it to the political wilderness for a generation. But before he left office, the terrible fruits of the doctrine he had just espoused were making themselves felt in one of the greatest tragedies of modern history: the Irish famine. Thus it was not only the workers and peasants of England who suffered from Free Trade: it devastated also the earliest colony of the British Empire.

 

     True, the immediate cause of the famine was not Free Trade, but a blight of the potato crop on which the eight million Irish depended for their survival. However, it was the callousness of the English governing class – whose callousness was in no small part caused by the political and economic doctrines it espoused – that made the eventual death-toll (1.1 million between 1845 and 1850) as large as it was. As Niall Ferguson writes: “It may have been phytophthora infestans that ruined the potatoes; but it was the dogmatic laissez-faire policies of Ireland’s British rulers that turned harvest failure into outright famine.”[414]

 

     John Mitchel put the same point as follows in his The Last Conquest of Ireland (Perhaps) 1860: “The Almighty indeed sent the potato blight, but the English created the Famine.”

 

     “These words,” writes A.N. Wilson, “very understandably became the unshakeable conviction of the Irish, particularly those forced into exile by hunder. The tendency of modern historians is not so much to single out individuals for blame, such as Charles Edward Trevelyan, permanent head of the Treasury, as to point to the whole attitude of mind of the governing class and the, by modern standards, gross inequalities which were taken for granted. Almost any member of the governing class would have shared some of Trevelyan’s attitudes.

 

     “But there is more to John Mitchel’s famous statement (one could almost call it a declaration of war) than mere rhetoric. Deeply ingrained with the immediate horrors of the famine was the overall structure of Irish agrarian society, which placed Irish land and wealth in the hands of English (or in effect English) aristocrats. It was the belief of a Liberal laissez-faire economist such as Lord John Russell that the hunger of Irish peasants was not the responsibility of government but of landowners. No more callous example of a political doctrine being pursued to the death – quite literally – exists in the annals of British history. But Lord John Russell’s government, when considering the Irish problem, were not envisaging some faraway island in which they had no personal concern. A quarter of the peers in the House of Lords had Irish interests…”[415]

 

     Another factor contributing to English callousness was “No Popery”. “There were plenty who saw [the famine] as ‘a special “mercy”, calling sinners both to evangelical truth and the Dismantling of all artifical obstacles to divinely-inspired spiritual and economic order’, as one pamphlet put it.”[416]

 

     In spite of such attitudes, there were English men and women who felt their consciences and contributed to the relief of the famine – Queen Victoria and Baron Rothschild among them. “Yet these overtures from the English side,” continues Wilson, “were undoubtedly made against a tide of prejudice and bitterness. The hordes of Irish poor crowding into English slums did not evoke pity – rather, fear and contempt. The Whiggish Liberal Manchester Guardian blamed the famine quite largely on the feckless Irish attitudes to agriculture, family, life in general. Small English farmers, said this self-righteous newspaper, don’t divide farms into four which are only sufficient to feed one family. (The economic necessities which forced the Irish to do this were conveniently overlooked by the Manchester Guardian: indeed economic weakness, in the Darwinian jungle, is the equivalent of sin.) Why weren’t the English starving? Because ‘they bring up their children in habits of frugality, which qualify them for earning their own living, and then send them forth into the world to look for employment’.

 

     “We are decades away from any organized Irish Republican Movement. Nevertheless, in the midst of the famine unrest, we find innumerable ripe examples of British double standards where violence is in question. An Englishman protecting his grossly selfish way of life with a huge apparatus of police and military, prepared to gun down the starving, is maintaining law and order. An Irishman retaliating is a terrorist. John Bright, the Liberal Free Trader, hero of the campaign against the Corn Laws, blamed Irish idleness for their hunger – ‘I believe it would be found on inquiry, that the population of Ireland, as compared with that of England, do not work more than two days a week.’ The marked increase in homicides during the years 1846 and 1847 filled these English liberals with terror. There were 68 reported homicides in Ireland in 1846, 96 in 1847, 126 shootings in the latter year compared with 55 the year before. Rather than putting these in the contexts of hundreds of thousands of deaths annually by starvation, the textile manufacturer from Rochdale blames all the violence of these starving Celts on their innate idleness. ‘Wherever a people are not industrious and not employed, there is the greatest danger of crime and outrage. Ireland is idle, and therefore she starves; Ireland starves, and therefore she rebels.’

 

     “Both halves of this sentence are factually wrong. Ireland most astonishingly did not rebel in, or immediately after, the famine years; and we have said enough to show that though there was poverty, extreme poverty, before 1845, many Irish families survived heroically on potatoes alone. The economic structure of a society in which they could afford a quarter or a half an acre of land on which to grow a spud while the Duke of Devonshire owned Lismore, Bolton (and half Yorkshire), Chatsworth (and ditto Derbyshire), the whole of Eastbourne and a huge palace in London was not of the Irish peasant’s making.

 

     “By 1848/9 the attitude of Lord John Russell’s government had become Malthusian, not to say Darwinian, in the extreme. As always happens when famine takes hold, it was followed by disease. Cholera swept through Belfast and Co. Mayo in 1848, spreading to other districts. In the workhouses, crowded to capacity, dysentery, fevers and ophthalmia were endemic – 13,812 case of ophthalmia in 1849 rose to 27,200 in 1850. Clarendon and Trevelyan now used the euphemism of ‘natural causes’ to describe death by starvation. The gentle Platonist-Hegelian philosopher Benjamin Jowett once said, ‘I have always felt a certain horror of political economists, since I heard one of them say that he feared the famine of 1848 in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.’ As so often Sydney Smith was right: ‘The moment the very name of Ireland is mentioned, the English seem to bid adieu to common feeling, common prudence and common sense, and to act with the barbarity of tyrants and the fatuity of idiots.’”[417]

 

The British Empire

 

     The tragedy of the Irish famine, and the callousness of the English ruling class’s response to it, brings us to the question: how could a country whose ideology was liberalism, and which had fought, and would continue to fight, under the banner of freedom from tyranny for all peoples, then set about creating the largest empire the world had ever seen, enslaving hundreds of millions of peoples to itself?

 

     Of course, there are many very different kinds and qualities of empire. The principal argument of this series of books is that one kind in particular – the Orthodox Christian Empire, based on the symphony of powers between the Orthodox Autocrat and the Orthodox Church – is in fact the best form of government yet devised for the attainment of the supreme end of man: the salvation of his immortal soul. The British Empire was not of this type, although it also claimed to be bringing the salvation of Christ to heathen peoples.

 

     But could it be argued that the British Empire, as the first exemplar of what Ferguson calls “the liberal Empire”, did more good than evil? Ferguson summarises his case for the British Empire as follows: “For much (though certainly, as we shall see, not all) of its history, the British Empire acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt government on roughly a quarter of the world. The Empire also did a good deal to encourage those things in countries which were outside its formal imperial domain but under its economic influence through the ‘imperialism of free trade’. Prima facie, there therefore seems a plausible case that empire enhanced global welfare – in other words, was a Good Thing.

 

     “Many charges can of course be leveled against the British Empire; they will not be dropped in what follows. I do not claim, as John Stuart Mill did, that British rule in India was ‘not only the purest in intention but one of the most beneficent in act ever known to mankind’; nor, as Lord Curzon did, that ‘the British Empire is under Providence the greatest instrument for good that the world has seen’; nor, as General Smuts claimed, that it was ‘the widest system of organized human freedom which has ever existed in human history’. The Empire was never so altruistic. In the eighteenth century the British were indeed as zealous in the acquisition and exploitation of slaves as they were subsequently zealous in trying to stamp slavery out; and for much longer they practiced forms of racial discrimination and segregation that we today consider abhorrent. When imperial authority was challenged – in India in 1857, in Jamaica in 1831 or 1865, in South Africa in 1899 – the British response was brutal. When famine struck (in Ireland in the 1840s, in India in the 1870s) their response was negligent, in some measure positively culpable. Even when they took a scholarly interest in oriental cultures, perhaps they did subtly denigrate them in the process.

 

     “Yet the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world. To characterize all this as ‘gentlemanly capitalism’ risks underselling the scale – and modernity – of the achievement in the sphere of economics; just as criticism of the ‘ornamental’ (meaning hierarchical) character of British rule overseas tends to overlook the signal virtues of what were remarkable non-venal administrations.”[418]

 

     Of course, this begs the question whether “the free movement of goods, capital and labour” is such an indubitable good. In England for generations it was an indubitable evil, in that it plunged the vast majority of the population – the rural as well as the urban poor – into terrible, soul-destroying poverty, while increasing the pride, cruelty and hypocrisy of the governing class to a proverbial degree (“Victorian hypocrisy” is still a byword). Nor does the fact that liberal England gradually, very gradually corrected these ills – significantly, by abandoning the strict theory of Free Trade and the non-interference of government through the enactment of various social reforms and the beginning of the Welfare State – alter this judgement, unless we are to believe, with the Jesuits, that “the end justifies the means”, and that the cruelty of Victorian England is justified by the relatively more just and humane England of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

 

     If “the free movement of goods, capital and labour” was such a disaster for the British themselves as weighed on the scale of that utilitarian principle of Jeremy Bentham, “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”, it is difficult to see how it could have been a boon for anyone else. Thus the destruction of the indigenous Indian textile industry by competition with the factories of Northern England doomed millions of Indian peasants to even greater poverty. And if the British administration was indeed less venal than the Mughal one that it replaced, this was a relatively small benefit to place in the scale against the five million dead in the Bengal famine of 1873-74 and the famines that periodically recurred thereafter. Of course, if it is argued that such suffering was justified in that it was a necessary stage “on the path to modernity” and the modern, democratic India, then we are back with the Jesuit principle again and the idea that the sufferings of one generation, undertaken unwillingly and imposed for less than altruistic motives, can compensate for the relatively greater prosperity of another, much later one.

 

     Ferguson continues: “Even if we allow for the possibility that trade, capital flows and migration could have been ‘naturally occurring’ in the past 300 years, there remain the flows of culture and institutions. And here the fingerprints of empire seem more readily discernible and less easy to expunge.

 

     “When the British governed a country – even when they only influenced its government by flexing their military and financial muscles – there were certain distinctive features of their own society that they tended to disseminate. A list of the most important of these would run:

 

  1. The English language
  2. English forms of land tenure
  3. Scottish and English banking
  4. The Common Law
  5. Protestantism
  6. Team Sports
  7. The limited or ‘night watchman’ state
  8. Representative assemblies
  9. The idea of liberty

 

     “The last of these is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the Empire, the thing that sets it apart from its continental rivals. I do not mean to claim that all British imperialists were liberals: some were very far from it. But what is striking about the history of the Empire is that whenever the British were behaving despotically, there was almost always a liberal critique of that behaviour from within British society. Indeed, so powerful and consistent was this tendency to judge Britain’s imperial conduct by the yardstick of liberty that it gave the British Empire something of a self-liquidating character. Once a colonized society had sufficiently adopted the other institutions the British brought with them, it became very hard for the British to prohibit that political liberty to which they attached so much significance for themselves.”[419]

 

     This is a fair point, but a highly paradoxical one. For it presupposes that the “liberal Empire” of Britain could only introduce the benefits of liberalism by illiberal means, by coercion, and that these benefits were perceived not immediately, but only after several generations had passed, when the formerly uncivilised tribes had matured to the extent of being capable of parliamentary self-government. Moreover, as history was to show, even when a colony had attained a certain maturity, the Empire was rarely willing to hand over self-government voluntarily, as its liberal principles implied that it should.

 

     This was because, as Ferguson admits, the spreading of liberalism was not the real motivation for the creation of the Empire, but rather commercial gain from the import of sugar, spices, cotton, etc., and the export of manufactures, financial services, etc. When that commercial gain was threatened for one reason or another, the British response was to send in the gunboats or the redcoats, and annex the territory in question. And so “the rise of the British Empire, it might be said, had less to do with the Protestant work ethic, or English individualism than with the British sweet tooth.”[420]

 

     And when the end of the Empire came, after the Second World War, it came not so much as result of the British at length deciding that the natives were now mature enough to govern themselves, nor even because the natives’ demand for self-government acquired an unstoppable momentum, but simply because the Empire was now broke and could no longer afford its colonies…[421]

 

De Tocqueville on America

 

     Although liberal democracy was the accepted panacea among all Anglo-Saxon intellectuals except those on the extreme right and left, the system had its critics, even among democrats, and one of the best of them was Alexis de Tocqueville, whose Democracy in America was published in 1835.

 

     An important fault of American democracy was what de Tocqueville called “the tyranny of the majority”, whose power, he considered, threatened to become not only predominant (which was only to be expected in a democracy), but irresistible.

 

     “The moral authority of the majority is partly based on the notion that there is more enlightenment and wisdom in a numerous assembly than in a single man, and the number of the legislators is more important than how they are chosen. It is the theory of equality applied to brains. This doctrine attacks the last asylum of human pride; for that reason the minority is reluctant in admitting it and takes a long time to get used to it…

 

     “The idea that the majority has a right based on enlightenment to govern society was brought to the United States by its first inhabitants; and this idea, which would of itself be enough to create a free nation, has by now passed into mores and affects even the smallest habits of life…”[422]

 

     One effect, paradoxically, of this extreme freedom was an extreme intolerance of the dissident opinion. “I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America. The majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.”[423]

 

     This contributed to a general “dumbing down” of culture generally, although this cultivated Frenchman admitted it also prevented complete brutalization. “Few pleasures are either very refined or very coarse, and highly polished manners are as uncommon as great brutality of tastes. Neither men of great learning nor extremely ignorant communities are to be met with; genius becomes more rare, information more diffused. There is less perfection, but more abundance in all the productions of the arts.”[424]

 

     This state of affairs was facilitated by the fact that there was no native American aristocracy, and few minority interests (except those of the Indians and Negroes) which were directly and permanently antagonistic to the interests of the majority. “Hence the majority in the United States has immense actual power and a power of opinion which is almost as great. When once its mind is made up on any question, there are, so to say, no obstacles which can retard, much less halt, its progress and give it time to hear the wails of those it crushes as it passes.

 

     “The consequences of this state of affairs are fate-laden and dangerous for the future…”[425]

 

     One of the consequences was legislative instability, “an ill inherent in democratic government because it is the nature of democracies to bring new men to power…. Thus American laws have a shorter duration than those of any other country in the world today. Almost all American constitutions have been amended within the last thirty years, and so there is no American state which has not modified the basis of its laws within that period…

 

     “As the majority is the only power whom it is important to please, all its projects are taken up with great ardour; but as soon as its attention is turned elsewhere, all these efforts cease; whereas in free European states, where the administrative authority has an independent existence and an assured position, the legislator’s wishes continue to be executed even when he is occupied by other matters.”[426]

 

     But, continues de Tocqueville, “I regard it as an impious and detestable maxim that in matters of government the majority of a people has the right to do everything, and nevertheless I place the origin of all powers in the will of the majority. Am I in contradiction with myself?

 

     “There is one law which has been made, or at least adopted, not by the majority of this or that people, but by the majority of all men. That law is justice.

 

     “Justice therefore forms the boundary to each people’s right.

 

     “A nation is like a jury entrusted to represent universal society and to apply the justice which is its law. Should the jury representing society have greater power than that very society whose laws it applies?

 

     “Consequently, when I refuse to obey an unjust law, I be no means deny the majority’s right to give orders; I only appeal from the sovereignty of the people to the sovereignty of the human race.”[427]

 

     In a believing age, instead of “the sovereignty of the human race”, the phrase would have been: “the sovereignty of God” or “the authority of the Church as the representative of God”. But after this obeisance to the atheist and democratic temper of his age, de Tocqueville does in fact invoke the sovereignty of God. For the essential fact is that the majority – even the majority of the human race – can be wrong, and that only God is infallible. “Omnipotence in itself seems a bad and dangerous thing. I think that its exercise is beyond man’s strength, whoever he be, and that only God can be omnipotent without danger because His wisdom and justice are always equal to His power. So there is no power on earth in itself so worthy of respect or vested with such a sacred right that I would wish to let it act without control and dominate without obstacles. So when I see the right and capacity to do all given to any authority whatsoever, whether it be called people or king, democracy or aristocracy, and whether the scene of action is a monarchy or a republic, I say: the germ of tyranny is there, and I will go look for other laws under which to live.

 

     “My greatest complaint against democratic government as organised in the United States is not, as many Europeans make out, its weakness, but rather its irresistible strength. What I find most repulsive in America is not the extreme freedom reigning there, but the shortage of guarantees against tyranny.

 

     “When a man or a party suffers an injustice in the United States, to whom can he turn? To public opinion? That is what forms the majority. To the legislative body? It represents the majority and obeys it blindly. To the executive power? It is appointed by the majority and serves as its passive instrument. To the police? They are nothing but the majority under arms. A jury? The jury is the majority vested with the right to pronounce judgement; even the judges in certain states are elected by the majority. So, however, iniquitous or unreasonable the measure which hurts you, you must submit.

 

     “But suppose you were to have a legislative body so composed that it represented the majority without being necessarily the slave of its passions, an executive power having a strength of its own, and a judicial power independent of the other two authorities; then you would still have a democratic government, but there would be hardly any remaining risk of tyranny.”[428]

 

     The democratic government de Tocqueville had in mind here as preventing the tyranny of the majority was probably that of England, with its rule by “the king in parliament”, its respect for custom and strong aristocratic element. And it is to a closer consideration of English political liberalism that we now turn.

 

Mill on Liberty

 

     Foreigners were impressed by England’s political system because it appeared able to combine freedom with stability, individualism with solidarity, power with prosperity (for the few), gradual extension of rights with traditional deference to title and rank, science and progress with morality and religion. And yet, as we have seen, the objective reasons for a revolution from below were, if anything, stronger in England than elsewhere; the poverty of the majority was worse; the contempt in which they were held by the rich minority greater. So why was England able to avoid the continual upheavals that we see in contemporary France and on the continent?

 

     One reason was undoubtedly that the rich minority were able to use the improved methods of communication, especially the railways, to concentrate the power of a greatly increased police force against troublemakers more quickly than on the continent. A second was the unprecedentedly large emigration to America and the White Dominions (in the case of Australia, of course, this “emigration” was compulsory), which served a safety-valve for the desperately poor. A third was that the rapidly increasing lower middle classes, though poor, already had more than their chains to lose, and so tended to support the existing system. They needed the patronage of the rich, and looked down on the proletarians below them, whose desperation they feared. The rich took this into account, and so were able to proceed more slowly than they might otherwise have done in the work of helping the poor.

 

     But they did introduce just enough reforms to maintain stability. As Barzun writes: “This knack of judging when and how things must change without upsetting the apple cart was painfully acquired by the English over the centuries. They were long reputed the ungovernable people. But fatigue caught up at last and a well-rooted anti-intellectualism helped to keep changes unsystematic and under wraps. Forms, titles, décor remain while different actions occur beneath them; visual stability maintains confidence. It was the knack of rising above principle, the reward of shrewd inconsistency.”[429]

 

     This “knack” paid dividends (literally and metaphorically). The 1850s saw England at her peak from an external point of view. Her navies ruled the seas; her trade and industry was far greater than any other country’s (though America and Germany were catching up fast). And while liberalism failed on the continent after 1848 as monarchy revived and the proletariat raged, in England it remained remarkably stable. It was to give a theoretical underpinning to this English variety of liberalism, that John Stuart Mill wrote his famous On Liberty, which remains to this day the most elegant and influential defence of English liberalism.

 

     Mill admired de Tocqueville, and was a passionate opponent of “the tyranny of the majority”. To protect society against this tyranny he proposed a single “very simple” principle which would place a limit on the ability of the state to interfere in the life of the individual: “The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means to be used by physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion. That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection. That the only purpse for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant. He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right. These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise. To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else. The only part of the conduct of anyone or which it is amenable to society is that which concerns others. In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute. Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.”[430]

 

     Mill asserted that this “Liberty Principle” or “Harm Principle” applied only to people in “the maturity of their faculties”, not to children or to “those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage.”[431] For “Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved through free and equal discussion”.[432]

 

     This qualification provided a neat justification for the spread of the British Empire among the pagan nations; and in general, in spite of the fact that Mill was concerned above all to protect the liberty of the individual against the tyranny of the majority and popular morality, his theory fitted in remarkably well with the prejudices of the majority in the England of his time. Thus the English prided themselves on their freedom of speech, and their giving refuge to political exiles of every kind, from Louis XVIII and Louis Napoleon to Herzen and Bakunin, Kossuth and Marx.[433] No tyranny of the majority here!

 

     Mill provided a passionate defence of the widest possible possible freedom of thought and speech. “First,” he argued, ‘the opinion which it is attempted to suppress by authority may possibly be true. Those who desire to suppress it, of course, deny its truth; but they are not infallible. They have no authority to decide the question for all mankind and exclude every other person from the means of judging. To refuse a hearing to an opinion because they are sure that it is false is to assume that their certainty is the same thing as absolute certainty. All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”[434]

 

     No: there is a difference between certainty and the assumption of infallibility. A man may consider himself to be a wretched sinner and prone to all kinds of errors, and yet be completely certain of some things. All true religious belief is of this kind – and much false religious belief also. Faith, according to the definition of the Apostle, is certainty in the existence of invisible realities (Hebrews 11.1); it is incompatible with the least doubt. But even if one is not completely certain about something, one may be sufficiently sure to act to censor what one considers a false opinion. Thus a government may not be completely certain that a certain drug has no serious side effects. But it may still act to ban it, and ban any propaganda in its favour, in the belief that the risks are sufficiently great to warrant such action. Now Mill may be able to accommodate this example with his “Harm Principle”, but not on the grounds that to exclude a certain opinion on the grounds that it is likely to be false amounts to a belief in one’s infallibility.

 

     Mill anticipates this objection: “Men and governments must act to the best of their ability. There is no such thing as absolute certainty, but there is assurance sufficient for the purposes of human life. We may, and must assume our opinions to be true for the guidance of our own conduct; and it is assuming no more when we forbid bad men to pervert society by the propagation of opinions which we regard as false and pernicious.”[435]

 

     But Mill will have none of this; it is only by allowing our opinion to be contested by those who think otherwise, he argues, that we come to know whether it is really deserving of confidence, and hence whether the opposite opinion should be censored. “The most intolerant of churches, the Roman Catholic Church, even at the canonization of a saint admits, and listens patiently to, a ‘devil’s advocate’. The holiest of men, it appears, cannot be admitted to posthumous honours until all that the devil could say against him is known and weighed.”[436]

 

     In practice, this means that no opinion should ever be censored; “the lists have to be kept open” in case someone appears who will expose the flaw in the accepted “truth”. And this applies even if the dissenting opinion goes against one’s most treasured and vital convictions concerning God or morality. For “however positive anyone’s persuasion may be, not only of the falsity but of the pernicious consequences – not only of the pernicious consequences, but (to adopt expressions which I altogether condemn) the immorality and impiety of an opinion – yet if, in pursuance of that private judgement, though backed by the public judgement of his country or his contemporaries, he prevents the opinion from being heard in its defence, he assumes infallibility. And so far from the assumption being less objectionable or less dangerous because the opinion is called immoral or impious, this is the case of all others in which it is most fatal. These are exactly the occasions on which the men of one generation commit those dreadful mistakes which excite the astonishment and horror of posterity.”[437] And then Mill cites the examples of Socrates and Jesus Christ, who, though the most admirable of men, became the victims of the censoriousness of their generation.

 

     Mill’s most powerful argument in favour of complete liberty of speech – an argument expressed before him in More’s Utopia and Milton’s Areopagitica - is that it is only in an atmosphere of complete intellectual freedom that truth can be truly understood and become well rooted. “Truth gains more even by the errors of one who, with due study and preparation, thinks for himself than by the true opinions of those who only hold them because they do not suffer themselves to think. Not that it is solely, or chiefly, to form great thinkers that freedom of thinking is required. On the contrary, it is as much and even more indispensable to enable average human beings to attain the mental stature which they are capable of. There have been, and may again be, great individual thinkers in a general atmosphere of mental slavery. But there never has been, nor ever will be, in that atmosphere an intellectually active people.”[438] And he cites the Reformation in Europe, the late eighteenth-century in France and the early nineteenth-century in Germany as admirable periods of intellectual freedom. “In each, an old mental despotism had been thrown off, and no new one had yet taken its place. The impulse given at these three periods has made Europe what it now is. Every single improvement which has taken place either in the human mind or in institutions may be traced distinctly to one or other of them.”[439]

 

     However, the citing of these three periods exposes the false assumptions of Mill’s argument. The Reformation was indeed an intellectually exciting period, when many of the abuses and falsehoods of the medieval period were exposed. But did it lead to a greater understanding of positive truth? By no means. Similarly, the late eighteenth century was the period in which the foundations of Church and State were so effectively undermined as to lead to the bloodiest and most mendacious revolution in history to that date, a revolution which most English liberals abhorred. As to the early nineteenth century in Germany, its most dominant thinker was Hegel, who, as we shall see, constructed probably the most inflatedly pompous and contradictory – indeed, strictly nonsensical - of all philosophical systems, which is considered, with some justice, to be an ancestor of both communism and fascism.

 

     Moreover, in the one-and-a-half centuries since Mill’s time, although the Anglo-Saxon world has attained a still greater degree of freedom of thought and speech than prevailed in those three epochs, it has been at the expense of the almost complete decay of traditional Christian belief and morality, that belief which Mill and the present author agree – albeit, probably, with different degrees of conviction - in considering to be the truth.

 

     Evidently, freedom does not necessarily lead to truth. Nor did the Truth incarnate ever claim that it would, declaring rather the reverse relationship, namely, that “ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free” (John 8.32). And part of the truth consists in the sober recognition that men’s minds are fallen, and for much of the time do not even want the truth, so that if given complete freedom to say what they like, the result will be the falling away of society from truth into the abyss of destruction. As Timothy Snyder writes, interpreting the lessons of George Orwell’s 1984 for today’s mass democracies: “The core texts of liberal toleration, such as Milton’s Areopagitica and Mill’s On Liberty, take for granted that individuals will wish to know the truth. They contend that in the absence of censorship, truth will eventually emerge and be recognised as such. But even in democracies this may not always be true.”[440]

 

     Mill’s arguments in favour of complete freedom of expression rest on the assumption, as he freely admitted, that the men who are given this freedom are not children or barbarians. And yet the corruption of mind and heart we associate with the word “barbarian” is present in every single man; this is what we mean by the term “original sin”. And if men were not very often children in mind, the Apostle Paul would not have been forced to say: “Brethren, be not children in your thinking; be babes in evil, but in thinking be mature” (I Corinthians 14.20).

 

     James Fitzjames Stephen, in his Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (1873) pointed to further important flaws in Mill’s argument. Liberty was like fire, he said; it could be used for good and ill; to assume otherwise was naïve and dangerous. It was by no means certain that full freedom from interference by others would lead to greater searching for truth; it could just as easily lead to idleness and lack of interest in social affairs. Moreover, writes Gertrude Himmelfarth, “what disturbed him about Mill’s doctrine was the possibility that its adoption would leave society impotent in those situations where there was a genuine need for social action. Implicit too was the possibility that the withdrawal of social sanctions against any particular belief or act would be interpreted as a sanctioning of that belief or act, a licence to do that which society could not prohibit.”[441]

 

     Stephen’s line of argument has been developed in our time by Lord Devlin in his essay entitled The Enforcement of Morals (1968). “The occasion for Devlin’s essay,” writes Himmelfarth, “was the Report of the Wolfenden Commission recommending the legalization of homosexuality between consenting adults. Against the Commission’s claim that private morality and immorality were ‘not the law’s business’, Devlin argued that ‘the suppression of vice is as much the law’s business as the suppression of subversive activities; it is not more possible to define a sphere of private morality than it is to define private subversive activity.”[442]

 

     As we know, the Wolfenden Commission’s recommendation with regard to homosexuality was accepted by the English parliament, which demonstrates the power – the highly destructive power – that the application of Mill’s Principle has acquired in our times, a power that Mill himself would probably have deplored. Indeed, a completely consistent application of the Principle would probably lead to the sweeping away of prohibitions against such activities as euthanasia, incest and prostitution on the grounds that these are within the sphere of private morality or immorality and so of no concern to the State. But then, asks Devlin, “if prostitution is… not the law’s business, what concern has the law with the ponce or the brotherl-keeper…? The Report recommends that the laws which make these activities criminal offences should be maintained… and brings them… under the heading of exploitation…. But in general a ponce exploits a prostitute no more than an impresario exploits an actress.”[443]

 

     Mill justifies the prohibition of certain acts, such as public decency, on the grounds that they “are a violation of good manners, … coming thus within the category of offences against others”. And yet, as Jonathan Wolff points out, it is difficult to see how such a prohibition can be justified on the basis of the Harm Principle alone. For “what harm does ‘public indecency’ do? After all, Mill insists that mere offence is no harm. Here Mill, without being explicit, seems to allow customary morality to override his adherence to the Liberty Principle. Few, perhaps, would criticize his choice of policy. But it is hard to see how he can render this consistent with his other views: indeed, he appears to make no serious attempt to do so.

 

     “Once we begin to consider examples of this kind we begin to understand that following Mill’s ‘once simple principle’ would lead to a society of a kind never seen before, and, perhaps, one which we would never wish to see…”[444]

 

     And so, while English liberalism of the Mills variety carefully sought to protect society both from absolutist tyranny of the continental variety, and from the American-style tyranny of the majority, it ended up delivering society into a series of tyrannies of the minorities, which is best exemplified by the European Human Rights Act that is devastating Christian faith and morality in the contemporary Britain. This should not surprise us; for liberalism is in essence a pagan doctrine, owing its origin more to fifth-century Athens than to any period of Christian history. Mills extolled the Liberty or Harm Principle not simply because it supposedly guaranteed freedom from tyranny and the triumph of truth, but because it fostered that ideal of the human being, vigorous, independent, unafraid of being different, even eccentric, which he found in Classical Greece. Indeed, he openly rejected the ascetic, Calvinist (that is to say, the Anglican) ideal in favour of the pagan Greek: “There is a different type of human excellence from the Calvinistic: a conception of humanity as having its nature bestowed on it for other purposes than merely to be abnegated. ‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial’. There is a Greek ideal of self-development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-government blends with, but does not supersede. It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either; nor would a Pericles, if we had one in these days, be without anything good which belonged to John Knox.”[445]

 

Victorian Religion

 

     Since the English were so devoted to material gain, so callous towards the poor both of their own and other races (while priding themselves on their abolition of the slave trade), and so devoted to a purely pagan understanding of liberty, one might have expected that there would be no room for religion in their life. And yet the paradox is that the English were extremely religious. Neither the German “God is dead” movement, nor the atheistic anarchism of Blanqui or Bakunin, nor (somewhat later) the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels found much response in English hearts. And if some surprising blasphemies did escape the lips of senior public servants – such as the British consul in Canton’s remark: “Jesus Christ is Free Trade, and Free Trade is Jesus Christ”[446] – this was not common. True, Free Trade was probably the real faith of the English governing classes; but officially England was a “most Christian” nation, and Anglicanism the only religion a man aspiring to high office could confess.

 

     “Doubts there were aplenty”, writes A.N. Wilson, about various questions. “But we who live in a fragmented society have become like an individual addicted to psychoanalysis, struggle with our uncertainties, pick at our virtues and vices as if they were scabs. The Victorian capacity not to do this, to live, very often, with double standards, is what makes so many of them – individually and collectively – seem to be humbugs and hypocrites.”[447]

 

     One of the questions that troubled the Victorians was the question of the relationship between religion and science, doubts that would become more acute after the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859 (see below). Another was the impact of industrialisation on the spiritual life in a more general sense. Thus Thomas Carlyle wrote: “Now the Genius of Mechanism smothers [man] worse than any Nightmare did. In Earth and Heaven he can see nothing but Mechanism; he has fear for nothing else, hope in nothing else… To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to gring me limb from limb.”[448]

 

     But whatever their doubts, and however great the apparent inconsistencies between their beliefs and actions, the Victorians were prepared to go to great pains to export their religion to other lands, as the efforts of Livingstone in Africa and Lord Redstock in Russia demonstrate. As late as 1904 the German satirical magazine Simplicissimus pointed to this religiosity of the British Empire by comparison with the other empires “with a cartoon contrasting the different colonial powers. In the German colony even the giraffes and crocodiles are taught to goose-step. In the French, relations between the races are intimate to the point of indecency. In the Congo the natives are simply roasted over an open fire and eaten by King Leopold. But British colonies are conspicuously more complex than the rest. There, the native is force-fed whisky by a businessman, squeezed in a press for every last penny by a soldier and compelled to listen to a sermon by a missionary…”[449]

 

     The Russian theologian Alexis Khomiakov was amazed at how silent the streets of London were on a Sunday, as everyone went to church. And he wrote: “Germany has in reality no religion at all but the idolatry of science; France has no serious longings for truth, and little sincerity; England with its modest science and its serious love of religious truth might [seem] to give some hopes…”[450]

 

     Of course, England did not have the true faith, which is only in the East, in the Orthodox Church. And yet the Oxford movement excited Khomiakov with hopes of a genuine rapprochement between Anglicans and Orthodox (see next chapter). In the midst of her “Babylonian” materialism, as exemplified above all by the 1851 Great Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London, England seemed to have “higher thoughts”: “England, in my opinion, has never been more worthy of admiration than this year. The Babylonian enterprise of the Exhibition and its Crystal Palace, which shows London to be the true and recognised capital of Universal Industry, would have been sufficient to engross the attention and intellectual powers of any other country; but England stands evidently above its own commercial wonders. Deeper interests agitate her, higher thoughts direct her mental energy…”[451]

    

     In the end, as the Oxford movement petered out (Khomiakov’s friend, William Palmer, joined Catholicism, not Orthodoxy), and England joined with “insincere” France and infidel Turkey in the Crimean War against Holy Russia, Khomiakov’s admiration turned to disillusion and anger. In his last years he may well have felt closer in his estimate of England to that of a famous compatriot of his, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, who was appalled by his visit to London in 1862. “On the streets he saw people wearing beautiful clothes in expensive carriages, side by side with others in filth and rags. The Thames was poisoned, the air polluted; the city seemed marked by joyless drinking and wife abuse. The writer was particularly horrified by child prostitution:

 

     “’Here in the Haymarket, I saw mothers who brought along their young daughters and taught them their occupation. And these twelve-year-old girls took you by the hand and asked to be accompanied. One evening, in the swarm of people I saw a little girl dressed in rags, dirty, barefoot, emaciated and battered. Through her rags I could see that her body was covered with bloody stripes. She wandered senseless in the crowd… perhaps she was hungry. No one paid her any attention. But what struck me most was her sad expression and the hopelessness of her misery. It was rather unreal and terribly painful to look at the despair and cursed existence of this small creature.’

 

     “When he visited the London World’s Fair with ‘civilization’s shining triumphs’, Dostoyevsky again found himself possessed by feelings of fear and dejection. Appalled, he recoiled from the hubris that had created the Crystal Palace’s ‘colossal decorations’. Here was something taken to its absolute limit, he maintained, here man’s prideful spirit had erected a temple to an idol of technology:

 

     “’This is a Biblical illustration, this speaks of Babylon, in this a prophet of the Apocalypse is come to life. You feel that it would take unbelievable spiritual strength not to succumb to this impression, not to bow before this consummate fact, not to acknowledge this reality as our ideal and mistake Baal for God.’”[452]

 

     Dostoyevsky agreed with Khomiakov that the English were sincerely religious. But he saw through their religiosity, and had no hesitation in calling it “atheism”, because he saw in it ultimately the worship of man wrapped in the trappings of the worship of God. It was Auguste Comte who had introduced the idea of a “Religion of Humanity”, and English thinkers such as Mill were impressed by it, seeing in it no contradiction with their own Anglicanism. Dostoyevsky noted this, and much later, in 1876, he wrote: “In their overwhelming majority, the English are extremely religious people; they are thirsting for faith and are continually seeking it. However, instead of religion – notwithstanding the state ‘Anglican’ religion – they are divided into hundreds of sects…. Here, for instance, is what an observer who keeps a keen eye on these things in Europe, told me about the character of certain altogether atheistic doctrines and sects in England: ‘You enter into a church: the service is magnificent, the vestments are expensive; censers; solemnity; silence; reverence among those praying. The Bible is read; everybody comes forth and kisses the Holy Book with tears in his eyes, and with affection. And what do you think this is? This is the church of atheists. Why, then, do they kiss the Bible, reverently listening to the reading from it and shedding tears over it? – This is because, having rejected God, they began to worship ‘Humanity’. Now they believe in Humanity; they deify and adore it. And what, over long centuries, has been more sacred to mankind than this Holy Book? – Now they worship it because of its love of mankind and for the love of it on the part of mankind; it has benefited mankind during so many centuries – just like the sun, it has illuminated it; it has poured out on mankind its force, its life. And “even though its sense is now lost”, yet loving and adoring mankind, they deem it impossible to be ungrateful and to forget the favours bestowed by it upon humanity…’

 

     “In this there is much that is touching and also much enthusiasm. Here there is actual deification of humankind and a passionate urge to reveal their love. Still, what a thirst for prayer, for worship; what a craving for God and faith among these atheists, and how much despair and sorrow; what a funeral procession in lieu of a live, serene life, with its gushing spring of youth, force and hope! But whether it is a funeral or a new and coming force – to many people this is a question.”[453]

 

     Dostoyevsky then quotes from his novel, A Raw Youth, from the “dream of a Russian of our times – the Forties – a former landowner, a progressive, a passionate and noble dreamer, side by side with our Great Russian breadth of life in practice. This landowner also has no faith and he, too, adores humanity ‘as it befits a Russian progressive individual.’ He reveals his dream about future mankind when there will vanish from it every conception of God, which, in his judgement, will inevitably happen on earth.

 

     “’I picture to myself, my dear,’ he began, with a pensive smile, ‘that the battle is over and that the strife has calmed down. After maledictions, lumps of mud and whistles, lull has descended and men have found themselves alone, as they wished it; the former great idea has abandoned them; the great wellspring of energy, that has thus far nourished them, has begun to recede as a lofty, receding Sun, but this, as it were, was mankind’s last day. And suddenly men grasped that they had been left all alone, and forthwith they were seized with a feeling of great orphanhood. My dear boy, never was I able to picture people as having grown ungrateful and stupid. Orphaned men would at once begin to draw themselves together closer and with more affection; they would grasp each other’s hands, realizing that now they alone constituted everything to one another. The grand idea of immortality would also vanish, and it would become necessary to replace it, and all the immense over-abundance of love for Him who, indeed, had been Immortality, would in every man be focussed on nature, on the universe, on men, on every particle of matter. They would start loving the earth and life irresistibly, in the measure of the gradual realization of their transiency and fluency, and theirs would now be a different love – not like the one in days gone by. They would discern and discover in nature such phenomena and mysteries as had never heretofore been suspected, since they would behold nature with new eyes, with the look of a lover gazing upon his inamorata. They would be waking up and hastening to embrace one another, hastening to love, comprehending that days are short and that this is all that is left to them…’

 

     “Isn’t there here, in this fantasy, something akin to that actually existent ‘Atheists’ Church’?”[454]

 

The Collectivist Reaction: (1) English Self-Help

 

     The result of worsening economic conditions for the great majority in the 1840s, writes Hobsbawm, “was social revolution in the form of spontaneous risings of the urban and industrial poor”, which “made the revolution of 1848 on the continent, the vast Chartist movement in Britain. Nor was discontent confined to the labouring poor. Small and inadaptable businessmen, petty-bourgeois, special sections of the economy, were also the victims of the Industrial Revolution and of its ramifications. Simple-minded labourers reacted to the new system by smashing the machines which they thought responsible for their troubles; but a surprisingly large body of local businessmen and farmers sympathized profoundly with these Luddite activities of their labourers, because they too saw themselves as victims of a diabolical minority of selfish innovators. The exploitation of labour which kept its incomes at subsistence level, thus enabling the rich to accumulate the profits which financed industrialization (and their own ample comforts), antagonized the proletarian. However, another aspect of this diversion of national income from the poor to the rich, from consumption to investment, also antagonized the small entrepreneur. The great financiers, the tight community of home and foreign ‘fund-holders’ who received what all paid in taxes… - something like 8 per cent of the entire national income – were perhaps even more unpopular among small businessmen, farmers and the like than among labourers, for these knew enough about money and credit to feel a personal rage at their disadvantage. It was all very well for the rich, who could raise all the credit they needed, to clamp rigid deflation and monetary orthodoxy on the economy after the Napoleonic Wars; it was the little man who suffered, and who, in all countries and at all times in the nineteenth century demanded easy credit and financial unorthodoxy. Labour and the disgruntled petty-bourgeois on the verge of toppling over into the unpropertied abyss, therefore shared common discontents. These in turn united them in the mass movements of ‘radicalism’, ‘democracy’ or ‘republicanism’ of which the British Radicals, the French Republicans and the American Jacksonian Democrats were the most formidable between 1815 and 1848.”[455]

 

     Although violent collectivist reaction to the excesses of liberal individualism seemed inevitable, there were still some who believed in the path of peaceful reform and the importance of individuals. Foremost among these was the Welsh manufacturer Robert Owen.

 

     “His creed,” writes Sir Isaiah Berlin, “was summarised in the sentence inscribed at the head of his journal, The New Moral World: ‘Any general character, from the best to the worst, from the most ignorant to the most enlightened, may be given to any community, even the world at large, by the application of proper means, which means are to a great extent at the command and under the control of those who have influence in the affairs of men.’ He had triumphantly demonstrated the truth of his theory by establishing model conditions in his own cotton mills in New Lanark, limiting working hours, and creating provision for health and a savings fund. By this means he increased the productivity of his factory and raised immediately the standard of living of his workers, and, what was even more impressive to the outside world, trebled his own fortune. New Lanark became a centre of pilgrimage for kings and statesmen, and, as the first successful experiment in peaceful co-operation between labour and capital, had a considerable influence on the history both of socialism and of the working class. His later attempts at practical reform were less successful. Owen, who died in deep old age in the middle of the nineteenth century, was the last survivor of the classical period of rationalism, and, his faith unshaken by repeated failures, believed until the end of his life in the omnipotence of education and the perfectibility of man.”[456]

 

     However, Owen’s later schemes failed, and kind-hearted entrepreneurs remained few and far between. Therefore only state action could solve the problem, thought John Stuart Mill – a writer more renowned, as we have seen, for his development of the theory of liberalism. But it was while revising “his Principles of Political Economy,” writes Barzun, “that Mill broke with the liberal school by asserting that the distribution of the national product could be redirected at will and that it should be so ordered for the general welfare. That final phrase, perpetually redefined, was a forecast…. It was [its] underlying idea – essential socialism – that ultimately triumphed, taking the twin form of Communism and the Welfare State, either under the dictatorship of a party and its leader or under the rule of a democratic parliament and democracy.”[457]

 

     However, the English solutions of self-help and education (Owen) and state redistribution of wealth (Mill) were rejected by the more radical thinkers on the continent. Thus Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England (1844) was the first major exposé of the terrible plight of the proletariat. Marx built on his data to argue that the workers would not better their lot through helping themselves, and still less through receiving help from governments or employers, but only through the inevitable March of History from feudalism to capitalism to socialism.

 

The Collectivist Reaction: (2) French Socialism

 

     Another kind of reaction to the horrors of industrial society came from the French thinker, the Comte de Saint-Simon.

 

     Talmon writes: “Saint-Simon’s earliest pamphlet, A Letter from a Citizen of Geneva, contains the bizarre scheme of a Council of Newton. The finest savants of Europe were to assemble in a mausoleum erected in honour of the great scientist, and deliberate on the problems of society. The author thereby gave picturesque expression to his view that in the French Revolution popular sovereignty had proved itself as fumbling, erratic and wrong as the divine right of kings, and that the tenets of rationalism about the rights of man, liberty and equality, had shown themselves just as irrelevant to man’s problems as theological doctrine. Not being rooted in any certainty comparable to that of science, old and new political ideas alike became only a pretext for the will of one set of men to dominate all others – which was all, in fact, that politics had ever been.

 

     “What had made men yield to such palpable error for so long and then caused Saint-Simon to see through them at precisely that moment? Unlike eighteenth-century philosophers – such as his masters Turgot and Condorcet – Saint-Simon does not invoke the march of progress, the victory of enlightenment, or the sudden resolve of men. He points to the importance assumed by scientific advance, technological development and problems of industrial production, all based upon scientific precision, verifiable facts and quantitative measurements which left no room for human arbitrariness.

 

     “In the past, mythological and theological modes of thought, medieval notions of chivalry, metaphysical preoccupations and so on were the accompaniment – or, as Saint-Simon more often seems to suggest, the matrix – of the economic conditions and the social-political order of the day. In brief, frames of mind, modes of production and social political systems hang together, and develop together, and the stages of such overall development cannot be skipped. The industrial system which the nineteenth century was ushering in had its beginnings in the Middle Ages. Within the womb of a civilization dominated by priests and warriors, shaped by values and expectations not of this world, geared for war and inspired by theatrical sentiments of chivalry, there began a mighty collective effort to fashion things, instruments and values designed to enhance men’s lives here and now: industrial production, economic exchange and scientific endeavour. The communes had at first no thought of subverting the feudal-theological order, within which they made their earliest steps – firstly because they were as yet too weak for such a revolt, and secondly because they did not value the external accoutrements of power. They believed only in positive tangible goods and solid achievements in the social-economic and scientific domain.

 

     “This was the cause of a divorce between content and form. While in external appearance warriors and priests still held the reins of authority, real power was increasingly concentrated in the hands of the productive classes. These classes, whose position, indeed whose very existence, lacked acknowledged legitimacy in the official scheme of things, developed a special ethos. Knowing the ruling classes to be incompetent to deal with matters of decisive importance to them, the bourgeoisie resored to a theory of laissez-faire which condemned all government interference and glorified individual initiative and the interplay of economic interests. In order to clothe this class interest in theoretical garb, bourgeois spokesmen evolved the doctrine of the natural rights of man and the theory of checks and balances and division of power. These designed to curb the power-drives of the feudal forces, and indeed succeeded in undermining the self-assurance of the aristocratic order.

 

     “In Saint-Simon’s view, the French Revolution signified not so much the triumph of rationalist-democratic ideas as the total victory of the productive classes and the final swamping of feudal-theological values by positive forces. But this fundamental fact was distorted and obscured by those metaphysicians and lawyers who, having played an important part in helping the industrial classes to win, mistook their secondary role for a mission to impose their ideas and their rule upon society. Instead of stepping aside and letting the imperatives of industrial endeavour shape new institutions, they set out to impose their conjectural ideas upon society, side-tracking the real issues and befogging them with rhetoric and sophistry. In effect their intention was not to abolish the old system which divided society into rulers and ruled, but to continue it, only substituting themselves for the feudal lords; in other words, to rule by force. For where the relationship between rulers and ruled is not grounded in the nature of things as is that, for example, between doctor and patient, teacher and pupil – that is, on division of functions – the only reality is the rule of man over man based on force. This form of relationship dated from the days when man was considered to need protection by superiors because he was weak, lowly and ignorant, or had to be kept from mischief because he was riotous and savage. It was no longer justified since the Revolution had proved that man had come of age. It was time for government, in other words the state, to make room for an administration of things, and conscious, sustained planning of the national economy. The need to keep law and order, allegedly always so pressing and relentless, would be reduced to a minimum when social relations were derived from objective necessities. The whole problem was thus reduced to the discovery of the ‘force of things’, the requirements of the mechanism of production. Once these had become the measure of all things, there would be no room for the distinction between rulers in the traditional political sense. The nexus of all human relationships would be the bodn between expert knowledge and experience on the one hand, and discipleship, fulfilment of necessary tasks, on the other. The whole question of liberty and equality would then assume a quite different significance.

 

     “In fact men would no longer experience the old acute craving for liberty and equality. A scientific apportioning of functions would ensure perfect cohesion of the totality, and the high degree of integration would draw the maximum potential fomr every participant in the collective effort. Smooth, well-adjusted participation heightens energy and stills any sense of discomfort or malaise. There is no yearning for freedom and no wish to break away in an orchestra, a choir, a rowing boat. Where parts do not fit and abilities go to waste, there is a sense of frustration and consequently oppression, and man longs to get away. The question of equality would not arise once inequality was the outcome of a necessary and therefore just division of tasks. There is no inequality where there is no domination for the sake of domination.

 

     “Such a perfect integration remained to be discovered. Pursuing his quest, Saint-Simon stumbled upon socialism, and then found himself driven to religion. Waste, frustration, deprivation, oppression were the denial of both cohesion of the whole and the self-expression of the individual. Those scourges were epitomized in the existence of the poorest and most numerous class – the workers. And so what started with Saint-Simon as a quest for positive certainty and efficiency gradually assumed the character of a crusade on behalf of the disinherited, the underprivileged and frustrated. The integrated industrial productive effort began to appear as conditioned upon the abolition of poverty, and dialectically the abolition of poverty now seemed the real goal of a fully integrated collective endeavour.

 

     “But was the removal of friction and waste enough to ensure the smooth working of the whole? And would rational understanding suffice to ensure wholehearted participation in the collective effort? Saint-Simon was led to face at a very early stage of socialism the question of incentives. He felt that mechanical, clever contrivances, intellectual comprehension and enlightened self-interest were in themselves insufficient as incentives and motives. And so the positivist, despising mythical, theological and metaphysical modes of thought, by degrees evolved into a mystical Romantic. He became acutely aware of the need for incentives stronger, more impelling and compelling than reason and utility. In a sense he had already come to grips with the problem in the famous distinction between organic and critical epochs in history, a distinction which was destined to become to important in the theory of his disciple, Auguste Comte.

 

     “These two types of epoch alternate in history. There is a time of harmony and concord, like the pre-Socratic age in Greece and the Christian Middle Ages, and there are times of disharmony and discord, like post-Socratic Greece and the modern age, which began with the Reformation, evolved into rationalism, and came to a climax in the French Revolution. The organic ages are period of a strong and general faith, when the basic assumptions comprise a harmonious pattern and are unquestioningly taken for granted. There are no dichotomies of any kind, and classes live in harmony. In the critical ages there is no longer any consensus about basic assumptions; beliefs clash, traditions are undermined, there is no accepted image of the world. Society is torn by class war and selfishness is rampant.

 

     “The crying need of the new industrial age was for a new religion. There must be a central principle to ensure integration of all the particular truths and a single impulse for all the diverse spiritual endeavours. The sense of unity of life must be restored, and every person must be filled with such an intense propelling and life-giving sense of belonging to that unity, that he would be drawn to the centre by the chains of love, and stimulated by a joyous irresistible urge to exert himself on behalf of all.

 

     “Saint-Simon called this new religion of his ‘Nouveau Christianisme’. It was to be a real fulfillment of the original promise of Christianity, and was to restore that unity of life which traditional Christianity – decayed and distorted – had done its best to deny and destroy. The concept of original sin had led to a pernicious separation of mankind into a hierarchy of the perfect and the mass of simple believers. This carried with it the distinction between theory and practice, the perfect bliss above and the vale of tears below; the result was compromise and reconciliation with – in effect, approval of – evil here and now.” [458]

 

     Saint-Simon reduced Christianity to the application of Christ’s words: “Love thy neighbour”. “Applied to modern society,” writes Edmund Wilson, this principle “compels us to recognize that the majority of our neighbours are destitute and wretched. The emphasis has now been shifted from the master mind at the top of the hierarchy to the ‘unpropertied man’ at the bottom; but the hierarchy still stands as it was, since Saint-Simon’s whole message is still his own peculiar version of the principle of noblesse oblige. The propertied classes must be made to understand that an improvement in the condition of the poor will mean an improvement in their condition, too; the savants must be shown that their interests are identical with those of the masses. Why not go straight to the people? he makes the interlocutor ask in his dialogue. Because we must try to prevent them from resorting to violence against their governments; we must try to persuade the other classes first.

 

     “And he ends – the last words he ever wrote – with an apostrophe to the Holy Alliance, the combination of Russia, Prussia and Austria which had been established upon the suppression of Napoleon. It was right, says Saint-Simon, to get rid of Napoleon, but what have they themselves but the sword? They have increased taxes, protected the rich; their church and their courts, and their very attempts at progress, depend on nothing but force; they keep two million men under arms.

 

     “’Princess!’ he concludes, ‘hear the voice of God, which speaks to you through my mouth: Become good Christians again, throw off the belief that the hired armies, the nobility, the heretical clergy, the corrupt judges, constitute your principal supporters; unite in the name of Christianity and learn to accomplish the duties which Christianity imposes on the powerful; remember that Christianity command them to devote their energies to bettering as rapidly as possible the lot of the very poor!’”[459]

 

     Saint-Simon is an important transitional figure, a link between the Masonic visionaries of the French revolution and the “scientific” vision of the Marxists. The importance he attached to economic factors and means of production formed one of the most important strands in Marxism – although Marx himself dismissed him as a “Utopian socialist”. That he could still think in terms of a “New Christianity” shows his attachment to the religious modes of thought of earlier ages, although, of course, his Christianity is a very distorted form of the faith (he actually took Freemasonry as his ideal).

 

     Marx would purge the religious element and make the economic element the foundation of his theory, while restoring the idea of Original Sin in a very secularized form. As for the incentives which Saint-Simon thought so necessary and which he thought to supply with his “New Christianity”, Marx found those through his adoption of the idea of a scientifically established progress to a secular Paradise, whose joyous inevitability he borrowed from the dialectical historicism of one of the most corrupting thinkers in the history of thought – Hegel.

 

     One of Saint-Simon’s disciples was Auguste Comte (1798-1857). “Comte,” writes Norman Stone, “held that all knowledge passed through three successive stages of development, where it is systematized according to (respectively) theological, metaphysical, and ‘positive’ or scientific principles. The theological and metaphysical states had to be discarded in order to arrive at the state of true knowledge, which is science. Comte placed the sciences in a kind of hierarchy with a new “science of society”, or sociology, at the summit. The social scientists’ task was “to know in order to foresee, and to foresee in order to know”.[460] 

 

     Another Utopian Socialist figure was Charles Fourier. He believed in the old chiliastic dream of Paradise on earth, in which men would live to be 144 years old.[461] He had other dreams, too: “he believed that the world would last precisely 80,000 years and that by the end of that time every soul would have traveled 810 times between the earth and certain other planets which he regarded as certainly inhabited, and would have experienced a succession of existences to the precise number of 1626![462]

 

     “His starting point,” according to Talmon, “was very much that of Rousseau. Man, he believed, had come out of the hands of nature a good and noble being. The institutions of civilization had brought about his undoing. Greed and avarice were the root of all evil. They had created the existing dichotomies between private morality and commercial and political codes of behaviour, between things preached and ways practiced. Morose, ascetical teachings about the evil character of the natural urges were motivated by the avarice and ambition of the greed and strong, who wished to instill into their victims a sense of sin, and with it humility and readiness to bear privations, perform the dirtiest jobs, and receive the whip. The attempt to stifle natural impulses had the effect of turning the energy contained in them into channels of perversion and aggressiveness.

 

     “Such impulses were inflamed by the spectacle of avarice rampant and all-pervasive, in spite of the official ascetic teachings. Fourier may have moralized, may have dreamed of the waters of the oceans turning into lemonade and of lions changed into modern aeroplanes and carrying men over vast distance; but his homilies and dreams are buttressed by a very acute analysis and critique of commercial, if not quite capitalist, civilization. He also analysed history into a succession of social economic stages, and sketched a historical dialectic from which Marx and Engels could – and it seems did – learn something.

 

     “Here, however, we are concerned with Fourier’s contribution to the problem of organization and freedom. In his view, the state and its laws were instruments of exploitation, and any large centralized state was bound to develop into an engine of tyranny. Fourier therefore held that the state ought to be replaced by a network of small direct democracies. Each should enjoy full autonomy and be at once a wholly integrated economic unit and a closely-knit political community. In these ‘phalanstères’ all would be co-partners, everybody would know all the other members (Fourier laid down a maximum of 1800), and decisions would be reached by common consent. By these means men would never be subjected to some anonymous, abstract power above and outside them.

 

     “Fourier also tackled the problem of reconciling integration with self-expression. He argued that it was absured to expect to eliminate the love of property, desire to excel, penchant for intrigue or craving for change, let alone sex and gluttony. Such an attempt was sure to engender frustration and anti-social phenomena. And there was no escape from the fact that people had different characteristics and urges of different intensity. Happily, benevolent nature had taken care of that by creating different sorts of characteristics and passions, like symphonic compositions in which the most discordant elements are united into a meaningful totality. The task was therefore reduced to the art of composing the right groups of characteristics – perfectly integrated partnerships based on the adjustment of human diversities. It followed that the other task was to manipulate the human passions so cleverly that they would become levers of co-operative effort and increased production instead of impediments to collaboration. (This implies an ardent faith in education and environmental influence comparable to Robert Owen’s. [463]) To take first the love of property: it would not be abolished or made equal. There would be a secured minimum of private property, but beyond that it would depend on investment, contribution, type of work, degree of fatige and boredom, and so on, with progressively decreasing dividends. Persons of diverse characteristics joined into one group would stimulate each other, and competition between groups would be strongly encouraged. The paramount aim was to turn labour into a pleasure instead of a curse. In order to obviate the danger of boredom, spells of work would be short and changes in the type of labour frequent. Gangs of children would be set the task of doing the dirty jobs in a spirit of joyous emulation. Finally, industry would be combined with an Arcadian type of agriculture.

 

     “This is Fourier’s solution to the dilemmas which have plagued our common sense for so long: who will do the disagreeable jobs in a perfectly harmonious society, and what will be the relationship between superiors and inferiors in it?”[464]

 

     Another important influence on Marx was the French socialist, Proudhon, who uttered the famous words: “What is property? Property is theft.” Marx disagreed with the latter statement insofar as it presupposed real rights in property. Nevertheless, he admitted the importance of Proudhon’s analysis of private property relations. “The two forces,” writes Berlin, “which Proudhon conceived as fatal to social justice and the brotherhood of man were the tendency towards the accumulation of capital, which led to the continual increase of inequalities of wealth, and the tendency directly connected with it, which openly united political authority with economic control, and so was designed to secure a growth of a despotic plutocracy under the guise of free liberal institutions. The state became, according to him, an instrument designed to dispossess the majority for the benefit of a small minority, a legalised form of robbery…”[465]

 

     Before leaving the French thinkers, we should briefly take note of the great historian Michelet. In the first half of his book, The People, written shortly before the 1848 revolution, he analysed industrial society in a way that anticipated Marx, but broader in scope and more balanced in its vision. “Taking the classes one by one, the author shows how all are tied into the social-economic web – each, exploiting or being exploited, and usually both extortionist and victim, generating by the very activities which are necessary to win its survival irreconcilable antagonisms with its neighbors, yet unable by climbing higher in the scale to escape the general degradation. The peasant, eternally in debt to the professional moneylender or the lawyer and in continual fear of being dispossessed, envies the industrial worker. The factory worker, virtually imprisoned and broken in will by submission to his machines, demoralizing himself still further by dissipation during the few moments of freedom he is allowed, enview the worker at a trade. But the apprentice to a trade belongs to his master, is servant as well as workman, and he is troubled by bourgeois aspirations. Among the bourgeoisie, on the other hand, the manufacturer, borrowing from the capitalist and always in danger of being wrecked on the shoal of overproduction, drives his employees as if the devil were driving him. He gets to hate them as the only uncertain element that impairs the perfect functioning of the mechanism; the workers take it out in hating the foreman. The merchant, under pressure of his customers, who are eager to get something for nothing, brings pressure on the manufacturer to supply him with shoddy goods; he leads perhaps the most miserable existence of all, compelled to be servile to his customers, hated by and hating his competitors, making nothing, organizing nothing. The civil servant, underpaid and struggling to keep up his respectability, always being shifted from place to place, has not merely to be polite like the tradesman, but to make sure that his political and religious views do not displease the administration. And, finally, the bourgeoisie of the leisure class have tied up their interests with the capitalists, the least public-spirited members of the nation, and they live in continual terror of communism. They have now wholly lost touch with the people. They have shut themselves up in their class; and inside their doors, locked so tightly, there is nothing but emptiness and chill….

 

     “’Man has come to form his soul according to his material situation. What an amazing thing! Now there is a poor man’s soul, a rich man’s soul, a tradesman’s soul… Man seems to be only an accessory to his position.’”[466]

 

The Collectivist Reaction: (3) German Historicism

 

     Even a sketchy study of the sources of Marx’s thought must say something about the sources of his atheism and historicism.

 

     Not that Marx appears to have been in no need of teachers in respect of atheism, being not only atheist, but also anti-theist from the beginning. There is some evidence that in his youth he turned against God and became a Satanist because God did not give him the girl he loved. And he said: “I shall build my throne high overhead”, which is a more or less direct quotation of Satan’s words in Isaiah 14.13.[467] In his doctor’s thesis he wrote: “Philosophy makes no secret of the fact: her creed is the creed of Prometheus – ‘In a word, I detest all the gods.’ This is her device against all deities of heaven or earth who do not recognize as the highest divinity the human self-consciousness itself.”[468] In later life he was known as “Old Nick”, and his little son used to call him “devil”.[469] “In spite of all Marx’s enthusiasm for the ‘human’,” writes his admirer Edmund Wilson, “he is either inhumanly dark and dead or almost superhumanly brilliant”[470] – a truly demonic combination!

 

     Marx’s atheism received a theoretical impetus from Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1841), which in a sense substituted anthropology for theology, defining God as a projection of man’s ideal for himself: “The divine essence is nothing else than the essence of man; or, better, it is the essence of man when freed from the limitations of the individual, that is to say, actual corporeal man, objectified and venerated as an independent Being distinct from man himself.”[471]

 

     Marx praised Feuerbach, according to Isaiah Berlin, “for showing that in religion men delude themselves by inventing an imaginary world to redress the balance of misery in real life – it is a form of escape, a golden dream, or, in a phrase made celebrated by Marx, the opium of the people; the criticism of religion must therefore be anthropological in character, and take the form of exposing and analysing its secular origins. But Feuerbach is accused of leaving the major task untouched: he sees that religion is an anodyne unconsciously generated by the unhappy to soften the pain caused by the contradictions of the material world, but then fails to see that these contradictions must, in that case, be removed: otherwise they will continue to breed comforting and fatal delusions: the revolution which alone can do so must occur not in the superstructure – the world of thought – but in its material substratum, the real world of men and things. Philosophy has hitherto treated ideas and beliefs as possessing an intrinsic validity of their own; this has never been true; the real content of a belief is the action in which it is expressed. The real convictions and principles of a man or a society are expressed in their acts, not their words. Belief and act are one; if acts do not themselves express avowed beliefs, the beliefs are lies – ‘ideologies’, conscious or not, to cover the opposite of what they profess. Theory and practice are, or should be, one and the same. ‘Philosophers have previously offered various interpretations of the world. Our business is to change it.’”[472]

 

     This is an atheist variation on the Catholic-Protestant debate about faith and works – with Marx coming down firmly on the Catholic side. Similarly, in the old Greek philosophical debate about which is more real: time or eternity, Marx came down on the side of time. In this he was a child of his time; for by contrast with the Age of Reason, which had sought to elucidate truths that were valid for all cultures and all times, for the Age of Revolution truth was ineluctably historical. And this did not mean simply that the truth about a person or nation can be understood only by studying him or it in its historical context. It meant that truth itself changes with time, is moulded by time.

 

     Thus God for the romantics of the Age of Revolution was a dynamic, evolving being indistinguishable from nature and history, always overcoming contradictions and rising to ever higher unities. It followed that the notion of a perfectly revealed religion, a final, unalterable truth, was anathema to them. “Christians must not be ‘vain and foolish’, Friedrich Schleiermacher warned, for their religion is not the only ‘revealed religion’. All religions are revealed from God. Christianity is the center around which all others gather. The disunity of religions is an evil and ‘only in the totality of all such possible forms can there be given the true religion,’ Schleiermacher added.”[473]

 

     This Romantic scheme of history and the evolution of religion was developed by Friedrich Schelling, who, as Fr. Michael Azkoul writes, “discoursed on the three ages of history – the age of the Father, the age of the Son, and the age of the Holy Spirit which correspond to the events of creation, redemption and consummation. Schelling believed that Christianity was now passing through ‘the second age’ which Christ ‘incarnated’ almost two millennia ago.

 

     “In the vocabulary of the Romantics, Christ brought ‘the Idea of Christianity’ with Him. An ‘Idea’ is the invisible, unchangeable, and eternal aspect of each thing. (Plato was probably the first to teach ‘Idealism’.) Phenomena are visible, changeable, and temporary. Put another way, the Idea of Christianity (‘one Church’) is what the historical institution will become when it finishes growing, or, as Schelling would say, when God becomes fully God. One may compare its Idea to wheat and historical Christianity (the Idea) to what Protestantism, Roman Catholicism and Eastern Christianity will become. When the multiplicity of churches grows into the ecumenical Church, then, the Idea of Christianity, of ‘one church’, will have been actualised in space and time. It will be actualised in the coming of ‘the third age’, ‘the age of the Spirit’, ‘the age of consummation’.”[474]

 

     But it was a third Friedrich, Friedrich Hegel, who really initiated Marx – and the whole of Europe – into the doctrine of historicism. Even before he composed his famous philosophy of history, he had already shown an extreme readiness always to keep “in step with the times”. Thus in 1806 he had hailed Napoleon’s victory at Jena as “the end of history” and the most perfect revelation of the “World Spirit”, and the revolution that Napoleon embodied - as the manifestation of the perfect form of statehood. But the fall of Napoleon and the restoration of the Prussian monarchy forced him to change his mind and magnify Prussian monarchism as a still more perfect historical revelation of the World Spirit. At the same time, he called for representative institutions in 1821, and in 1831 wrote in praise of the pending Reform Bill in England.[475] So he could be said to have dabbled in most of the fashions of the political thought of his time.

 

     Such “flexibility”, while desirable for those wishing to keep up with the Zeitgeist, nevertheless required some justifying if it was to pass muster among intellectuals – and Hegel was a university professor. Hence the origin of his philosophy of history. This theory is important not only for an understanding of future movements, especially Marxism and Fascism, which borrowed much from Hegel, but also in that it constitutes a kind of synthesis of the two major movements of western thought that we have just examined: rationalism, with its political child, liberal democracy, and romanticism, with its offspring, the more collectivist and authoritarian forms of political life.

 

     Hume had demonstrated the irrationality of rationalism, of “pure” empiricism, but without proposing a way out of the dilemma it posed for believers in God, the immortal soul, morality and spirituality in general. Kant had demonstrated that the application of reason presupposes a spirit transcending the empirical world, but could not explain how this free realm of spirit related to the causally determined world of matter. Hegel expanded the realm of spirit to engulf everything, making it into a kind of pantheistic god called the Absolute Idea or the World Spirit. To this Spirit, which is the All and can only be understood, like an organism, from the point of view of the All, he gave all the attributes that romanticism had rescued from the maw of devouring rationalism: emotion, mystery, dynamism, history, even nationalism. Thus to the bright empiricist-rationalist thesis, and its dark romantic-idealist antithesis, Hegel supplied a cloudy, metaphysical, empiricist-rationalist and romantic-idealist synthesis.[476]

 

     Hegel made rebelliousness and revolution respectable, as being, not optional modes of thought and action, but inherent in the deepest nature of things. Rebelliousness was an aspect of “alienation”, and revolution – of the self-realisation of the World Spirit. For “Hegel’s dialectic,” writes Scruton, “implies that all knowledge, all activity and all emotions exist in a state of tension, and are driven by this tension to enact a primeval drama. Each concept, desire and feeling exists first in a primitive, immediate and unified form – without self-knowledge, and inherently unstable, but nevertheless at home with itself. Its final ‘realisation’ is achieved only in a condition of ‘unity restored’, a homecoming to the primordial point of rest, but in a condition of achieved self-knowledge and fulfilled intention. In order to reach this final point, each aspect of spirit must pass through a long trajectory of separation, sundered from its home, and struggling to affirm itself in a world that it does not control. This state of alienation – the vale of tears – is the realm of becoming, in which consciousness is separated from its object and also from itself. There are as many varieties of alienation as there are forms of spiritual life; but in each form the fundamental drama is the same: spirit can know itself only if it ‘posits’ an object of knowledge – only if it invests its world with the idea of the other. In doing this it becomes other to itself, and lives through conflict and disharmony, until finally uniting with the other – as we unite with the object of science when fully understanding it; with the self when overcoming guilt and religious estrangement; with other people when joined in a lawful body politic.”[477]

 

     Lionel Trilling writes: “The historical process that Hegel undertakes to expound is the self-realization of Spirit through the changing relation of the individual to the external power of society in two of its aspects, the political power of the state and the power of wealth. In an initial stage of the process that is being described the individual consciousness renders what Hegel calls ‘obedient service’ to the external power and feels for it an ‘inner reverence’. Its service is not only obedient but also silent and unreasoned, taken for granted; Hegel calls this ‘the heroism of dumb service’. This entire and inarticulate accord of the individual consciousness with the external power of society is said to have the attribute of ‘nobility’.

 

     “But the harmonious relation of the individual consciousness to the state power and to wealth is not destined to endure. It is the nature of Spirit, Hegel tells us, to seek ‘existence on its own account’ – that is, to free itself from limiting conditions, to press towards autonomy. In rendering ‘obedient service’ to and in feeling ‘inner reverence’ for anything except itself it consents to the denial of its own nature. If it is to fulfil its natural destiny of self-realization, it must bring an end to its accord with the external power of society. And in terminating this ‘noble’ relation the individual consciousness moves towards a relation with external power which Hegel calls ‘base’.

 

     “The change is not immediate. Between the noble relation of the individual consciousness to state power and to wealth and the developing base relation there stands what Hegel speaks of as a ‘mediating term’. In this transitional stage the ‘heroism of dumb service’ modifies itself to become a heroism which is not dumb but articulate, what Hegel calls the ‘heroism of flattery’. The individual, that is to say, becomes conscious of his relation to the external power of society; he becomes conscious of having made the choice the maintain the relationship and of the prudential reasons which induced him to make it – the ‘flattery’ is, in effect, the rationale of his choice which the individual formulates in terms of the virtues of the external power, presumably a personal monarch. We might suppose that Hegel had in mind the relation of the court aristocracy to Louis XIV. Consciousness and choice, it is clear, imply a commitment to, rather than identification with, the external power of society.

 

     “From this modification of the ‘noble’ relation to the external power the individual proceeds to the ‘baseness’ of being actually antagonistic to the external power. What was once served and reverenced now comes to be regarded with resentment and bitterness. Hegel’s description of the new attitude is explicit: ‘ It [that is, the individual consciousness] looks upon the authoritative power of the state as a chain, as something suppressing its separate autonomous existence, and hence hates the ruler, obeys only with secret malice and stands ever ready to burst out in rebellion.’ And the relation of the individual self to wealth is even baser, if only because of the ambivalence which marks it – the self loves wealth but at the same time despises it; through wealth the self ‘attains to the enjoyment of its own independent existence’, but it find wealth discordant with the nature of Spirit, for it is of the nature of Spirit to be permanent, whereas enjoyment is evanescent.

 

     “The process thus described makes an unhappy state of affairs but not, as Hegel judges it, by any means a deplorable one. He intends us to understand that the movement from ‘nobility’ to ‘baseness’ is not a devolution but a development. So far from deploring ‘baseness’, Hegel celebrates it. And he further confounds our understanding by saying that ‘baseness’ leads to and therefore is ‘nobility’. What is the purpose of this high-handed inversion of common meanings?

 

     “An answer might begin with the observation that the words ‘noble’ and ‘base’, although they have been assimilated to moral judgement, did not originally express concepts of moral law, of a prescriptive and prohibitory code which is taken to be of general, commanding, and even supernal authority and in which a chief criterion of a person’s rightdoing and wrongdoing is the effect of his conduct upon other persons. The words were applied, rather, to the ideal of personal existence of a ruling class at a certain time – its ethos, in that sense of the word which conveys the idea not of abstractly right conduct but of a characteristic manner of style of approved conduct. What is in accord with this ethos is noble; what falls short of it or derogates from it is base. The noble self is not shaped by its beneficent intentions towards others; its intention is wholly towards itself, and such moral virtue as may be attributed to it follows incidentally from its expressing the privilege and function of its social status in mien and deportment. We might observe that the traits once thought appropriate to the military life are definitive in the formation of the noble self. It stands before the world boldly defined, its purposes clearly conceived and openly avowed. In its consciousness there is no division, it is at one with itself. The base self similarly expresses a social condition, in the first instance by its characteristic mien and deportment, as these are presumed or required to be, and ultimately by the way in which it carries out those of its purposes that are self-serving beyond the limits deemed appropriate to its social status. These purposes can be realized only by covert means and are therefore shameful. Between the intentions of the base self and its avowals there is no congruence. But the base self, exactly because it is not under the control of the noble ethos, has won at least a degree of autonomy and has thereby fulfilled the nature of Spirit. In refusing its obedient service to the state power and to wealth it has lost its wholeness; its selfhood is ‘disintegrated’; the self is ‘alienated’ from itself. But because it has detached itself from imposed conditions, Hegel says that it has made a step in progress. He puts it that the existence of the self ‘on its own account’ is, strictly speaking, the loss of itself’. The statement can also be made the other way round: ‘Alienation of self is really self-preservation’.”[478]

 

     Hegel’s historicism, writes Golo Mann, is “a fantastic, almost mad, almost successful [!] attempt to give an answer to every question every asked, and to assign to every answer ever given to every question a historical place within his own great, final answer – an attempt to create being dialectically from thought, to reconcile idea and reality and to overcome the cleavage between self and non-self. It was this cleavage – the existence of the self in an alien world – that Hegel made his starting-point. What he found was the identity of everything with everything, of God with the world, of logic with reality, of motion with rest, of necessity with freedom. The world spirit is everywhere, in nature, in man, in the history of man. The spirit, alienated from itself in nature, comes into its own in man. This process takes place on the one hand in the true history of peoples and states, and on the other in art, religion and philosophy. All these spheres correspond to each other; what is accomplished in each individual sector belongs to the whole and fits into it or nothing will be accomplished. ‘As far as the individual is concerned each person cannot in any even help being the child of his time. So too philosophy is the expression of its time in ideas.’ ‘He who expresses and accomplishes what his time wills is the great man of his time.’ Every present is always a single whole, just as the history of mankind is its general lines a whole. It finds expression in peoples, states and civilizations, of which the west European or, as Hegel calls it, the Germanic is the highest so far attained. Will there be higher ones? On this point the philosopher is silent. [479] One can only understand the past, and the present to the extent that it is the final product of all pasts which are preserved in it. The future cannot be explored or understood; it does not exist for the spirit. No other historical thinker was so little concerned with the future as Hegel. What he hinted at, or what followed from his doctrine, was that the future would be something entirely different from the past. For philosophy comes late, at the end of an epoch. It does not come to change or improve, but merely to understand and to express; it constructs in the realm of the spirit what has already been constructed in the realm of reality. ‘When philosophy paints its picture in grey on grey, it means that a form of life has grown old, and by painting it grey on grey it cannot be restored to its youth, but is only recognised…’ This applies to all true philosophies, and is most valid for the philosophy of all philosophies, namely the Hegelian, which brings to an end the epoch of all epochs: the age of Protestantism, enlightenment and revolution. What was still to come? Hegel shrugged his shoulders sadly at this question. His philosophy gave no answer, and given its nature could not venture to attempt one. ‘The spirit is in its full essence in the present…’ But this philosophy of fulfilment, this song of praise of Man-God contains an element of pessimism: after 1815 nothing further is to be expected.

 

     “Though Hegel’s philosophy as a whole contains rest, fulfilment and finality, it is full of unrest and struggle, both in the realm of the spirit and of reality. The spirit is never content with what has been achieved, it always seeks new conflicts, it must struggle to find and express itself anew. States and peoples are never at rest, they come into conflict and one of them must give way. The world spirit advances by catastrophes, and its path is marked by forms that are used up, emptied, and jettisoned. Quiet is only apparent quiet, lull before a new storm; as mere rest it is of no interest to the historian. ‘Epochs of happiness are empty pages in the history of the world.’ History does not exist for the happiness, the idyllic contentment of the individual. The goal is set high: the reconciliation of all contradictions, absolute justice, complete knowledge, the incarnation of reason on earth, the presence of God. The road to it is one of exertion and ever new confusion. But what has happened is the only thing that could have happened and how it happened was right. Terrible things occurred; the rise of the Roman Empire was terrible and terrible was its fall. But everything had a purpose and was as it should be. Julius Caesar was murdered after he had done what the age wanted from him; the Roman Empire collapsed after it had completed its historical mission. Otherwise how could it have fallen? It is useless to lament the abysses of history, the crimes of power, the sufferings of good men. The world spirit is right in the end, its will will be obeyed, its purpose fulfilled; what does it care about the happiness or unhappiness of individuals?[480] ‘The real is rational and the rational is the real.’ When something ceases to be rational, when the spirit has already moved on, it will wither away and die. The individual may not understand his fate because he is liable to over-estimate himself and believes that history revolves around his person at the centre. The philosopher who perceives the kernel in the multi-coloured rind of what occurs will provide the insight too.

 

     “Power, and war, which creates and enhances power, cannot be omitted from all this. Man only realizes himself in the state and the state exists only where there is power to defend and attack. Might gives right. It is unlikely, it is in fact impossible, that the state without right on its side will win. What sort of right? Not a universally valid, pale right invented by stoicist philosophers, but historical right, the superiority of the historical mission. Thus right was on the side of the Spaniards against the Peruvians, in spite of all their cruelty and deceit; right was on Napoleon’s side against the antiquated German Empire. Later, on the other hand, right was on the side of allied Europe against Napoleon only because, the professor concluded after much puzzling over this problem in his study, the arrogant Emperor, himself now outdated, gave the Allies the right to conquer him, and only because he put himself in the wrong could he be conquered. Success, the outcome, provide the justification; in power there lies truth…”[481]

 

Hegel’s Political Philosophy

 

     Hegel’s philosophy is manifestly false, even, as Popper has demonstrated, nonsensical. Nevertheless, in view of his historical importance, especially in his influence on the (no less false) theories of the modern totalitarians, it will be worth reviewing his political philosophy in a little more detail.

 

     “In the historical development of Spirit,” writes Bertrand Russell, expounding Hegel, “there have been three main phases: The Orientals, the Greeks and Romans, and the Germans. ‘The history of the world is the discipline of the uncontrolled natural will, bringing it into obedience to a universal principle and conferring subjective freedom. The East knew, and to the present day knows, only that One is free; the Greek and Roman world, that some are free; the German world knows that All are free.’ One might have supposed that democracy would be the appropriate form of government where all are free, but not so. Democracy and aristocracy alike belong to the stage where some are free, despotism to that where one is free, and monarchy to that in which all are free. This is connected with the very odd sense in which Hegel uses the word ‘freedom’. For him (and so far we may agree) there is no freedom without law; but he tends to convert this, and to argue that wherever there is law there is freedom. Thus ‘freedom’, for him, means little more than the right to obey the law.

 

     “As might be expected, he assigns the highest role to the Germans in the terrestrial development of Spirit. ‘The German spirit is the spirit of the new world. Its aim is the realization of absolute Truth as the unlimited self-determination of freedom – that freedom which has its own absolute form itself as its purport.’[482]

 

     “This is a very superfine brand of freedom. It does not mean that you will be able to keep out of a concentration camp. It does not imply democracy, or a free press, or any of the usual Liberal watchwords, which Hegel rejects with contempt. When Spirit gives laws to itself, it does so freely. To our mundane vision, it may seem that the Spirit that gives laws is embodied in the monarch, and the Spirit to which laws are given is embodied in his subjects. But from the point of view of the Absolute the distinction between monarch and subjects, like all other distinctions, is illusory, and when the monarch imprisons a liberal-minded subject, that is still Spirit freely determining itself. Hegel praises Rousseau for distinguishing between the general will and the will of all. One gathers that the monarch embodies the general will, whereas a parliamentary majority only embodies the will of all…

 

     “So much is Germany glorified that one might expect to find it the final embodiment of the Absolute Idea, beyond which no further development would be possible. But this is not Hegel’s view. On the contrary, he says that America is the land of the future, ‘where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the world’s history shall reveal itself – perhaps [he adds characteristically[ in a contest between North and South America.’ He seems to think that everything important takes the form of war. If it were suggested to him that the contribution of America to world history might be the development of a society without extreme poverty, he would not be interested. On the contrary, he says that, as yet, there is no real State in America, because a real State requires a division of classes into rich and poor.

 

     “Nations, in Hegel, play the part that classes play in Marx. The principle of historical development, he says, is national genius. In every age, there is some one nation which is charged with the mission of carrying the world through the stage of the dialectic that it has reached. In our age, of course, this nation is Germany. [483] But in addition to nations, we must also take account of world-historical individuals; these are men in whose aims are embodied the dialectical transitions that are due to take place in their time. These men are heroes, and may justifiably contravene ordinary moral rules…

 

     “Hegel’s emphasis on nations, together with his peculiar conception of ‘freedom’, explains his glorification of the State – a very important aspect of his political philosophy….

 

     “We are told in The Philosophy of History that ‘the State is the actually existing realized moral life’, and that all the spiritual reality possessed by a human being he possesses only through the State. ‘For his spiritual reality consists in this, that his own essence – Reason – is objectively present to him, that it possesses objective immediate existence for him… For truth is the unity of the universal and subjective Will, and the universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth.’[484]

 

     “… If the State existed only for the interests of individuals (as Liberals contend), an individual might or might not be a member of the State. It has, however, a quite different relation to the individual: since it is objective Spirit, the individual only has objectivity, truth, and morality in so far as he is a member of the State, whose true content and purpose is union as such. It is admitted that there may be bad States, but these merely exist, and have no true reality, whereas a rational State is infinite in itself.

 

     “It will be seen that Hegel claims for the State much the same position as St. Augustine and his Catholic successors claimed for the Church. There are, however, two respects in which the Catholic claim is more reasonable than Hegel’s. In the first place, the Church is not a chance geographical association, but a body united by a common creed, believed by its members to be of supreme importance; it is thus by its very essence the embodiment of what Hegel calls the ‘Idea’. In the second place, there is only one Catholic Church, whereas there are many States. When each State, in relation to its subjects, is made an absolute as Hegel makes it, there is difficulty in finding any philosophical principle by which to regulate the relations between different States. In fact, at this point Hegel abandons his philosophical talk, falling back on the state of nature and Hobbes’s war of all against all.

 

     “The habit of speaking of ‘the State’, as if there were only one, is misleading so long as there is no world State. Duty being, for Hegel, solely a relation of the individual to his State, no principle is left by which to moralize the relations between States. This Hegel recognizes. In external relations, he says, the State is an individual, and each State is independent as against the others. ‘Since in this independence the being-for-self of real spirit has its existence, it is the first freedom and highest honour of a people.’ He goes on to argue against any sort of League of Nations by which the independence of separate States might be limited. The duty of a citizen is entirely confined (so far as the external relations of his State are concerned) to upholding the substantial individuality and independence and sovereignty of his own State. It follows that war is not wholly an evil, or something that we should seek to abolish. The purpose of the State is not merely to uphold the life and property of the citizens, and this fact provides the moral justification of war, which is not to be regarded as an absolute evil or as accidental, or as having its cause in something that ought not to be.

 

     “Hegel does not mean only that, in some situations, a nation cannot rightly avoid going to war. He means much more than this. He is opposed to the creation of institutions – such as a world government – which would prevent such situations from arising, because he thinks it a good thing that there should be wars from time to time. War, he says, is the condition in which we take seriously the vanity of temporal goods and things. (This view is to be contrasted with the opposite theory, that all wars have economic causes.) War has a positive moral value: ‘War has the higher significance that through it the moral health of peoples is preserved in their indifference towards the stabilizing of finite determinations.’ Peace is ossification; the Holy Alliance, and Kant’s League for Peace, are mistaken, because a family of states needs an enemy. Conflicts of States can only be decided by war; States being towards each other in a state of nature, their relations are not legal or moral. Their rights have their reality in their particular wills, and the interest of each State is its own highest law. There is no contrast of morals and politics, because States are not subject to ordinary moral laws.

 

     “Such is Hegel’s doctrine of the State – a doctrine which, if accepted, justifies every internal tyranny and every external aggression that can possibly be imagined…”[485]

 

     However, as Copleston points out, “it is essential to remember that Hegel is speaking throughout of the concept of the State, its ideal essence. He has no intention of suggesting that historical States are immune from criticism.”[486]

 

     Having made that qualification, it remains truth that the similarities between Hegel and the modern totalitarians, especially the Fascists, are clear: “(a) Nationalism, in the form of the historicist idea that the state is the incarnation of the Spirit (or now, of the Blood) of the state-creating nation (or race); one chosen nation (now, the chosen race) is destined for world domination. (b) The state as the natural enemy of all other states must assert its existence in war. (c) The state is exempt from any kind of moral obligation; history, that is, historical success, is the sole judge; collective utility is the sole principle of personal conduct; propagandist lying and distortion of the truth is permissible. (d) The ‘ethical’ idea of war (total and collectivist), particularly of young nations against older ones; war, fate and fame as most desirable goods. (e) The creative rôle of the Great Man, the world-historical personality, the man of deep knowledge and great passion (now, the principle of leadership). (f) The ideal of the heroic life (‘live dangerously’) and of the ‘heroic man’ as opposed to the petty bourgeois and his life of shallow mediocrity.”[487]

 

     Barzun has sought to lessen Hegel’s guilt somewhat: “Hegel did express himself in favor of a strong state. What intelligent German who remembered 200 years of helplessness would want a weak one?”[488] True; and yet the desire for a strong state, which is compatible with many creeds and philosophies, need not be translated into the worship of the State as the Divine Idea on earth, which is in effect Hegel’s idea. As he put it: “the State is the basis and centre of all the concrete elements in the life of a people: of Art, Law, Morals, Religion, and Science…”[489] This is idolatry, and the purest atheism…

 

     So from Hildebrand to Hegel we have come full circle: from the absolute dominion of the Church in all spheres to the absolute dominion of the State in all spheres. Hegel’s theories found their incarnation in the State-worshipping creeds of Communism and Fascism, the most evil in history. Such is the fall of western civilisation, its thesis and antithesis, which has not yet found – or, more exactly, has not recovered (since it used to have it in the pre-schism, Orthodox period) - its synthesis in the Orthodox symphony of powers…

 

Marx’s Historical Materialism

 

     By the mid-1840s, writes Wilson, Marx and Engels “had taken stock of their predecessors and, with their own sharp and realistic minds, they had lopped off the sentimentality and fantasy which had surrounded the practical perceptions of the utopians. From Saint-Simon they accepted as valid his [supposed] discovery that modern politics was simply the science of regulating production; from Fourier, his arraignment of the bourgeois, his consciousness of the ironic contrast between ‘the frenzy of speculation, the spirit of all-devouring commercialism’, which were rampant under the reign of the bourgeoisie and ‘the brilliant promises of the Enlightenment’ which had preceded them; from Owen, the realization that the factory system must be the root of the social revolution. But they saw that the mistake of the utopian socialists had been to imagine that socialism was to be imposed upon society from above by disinterested members of the upper classes. The bourgeoisie as a whole, they believed, could not be induced to go against its own interests. The educator, as Marx was to write in his Theses on Feuerbach, must, after all, first have been educated: he is not really confronting disciples with a doctrine that has been supplied him by God; he is merely directing a movement of which he is himself a member and which energizes him and gives him his purpose. Marx and Engels combined the aims of the utopians with Hegel’s process of organic development”[490], substituting Hegel’s idea of the historical role of nations with that of the role of class.

 

     “The history of all hitherto existing society is a history of class struggle”, wrote Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto. Marx claimed that this was his only original contribution to what later came to be called Marxism. Be that as it may (Plato, as Sir Karl Popper points out, had said something similar), it was certainly one of the two fundamental axioms of his theory.

 

      The other was his teaching on the economic foundation of all human civilization. Everything is determined, according to Marx, by man’s struggle for economic survival, which in turn depends on his relationship to the economic conditions of production. The juridical, political, religious, aesthetic and philosophical aspects of man’s existence are all simply “ideological forms of appearance” of the only true reality, his economic position in society – that is, his class membership. As he put it in his famous epigram: “It is not the consciousness of man that determines his existence – rather, it is his social existence that determines his consciousness.”[491]

 

     For “I was led,” he wrote, “to the conclusion that legal relations, as well as forms of state, could neither be understood by themselves, nor explained by the so-called general progress of the human mind, but that they are rooted in the material conditions of life which Hegel calls… civil society. The anatomy of civil society is to be sought in political economy.”

 

     “The single operative cause,” writes Berlin, “which makes one people different from another, one set of institutions and beliefs opposed to another is, so Marx now came to believe, the economic environment in which it is set, the relationship of the ruling class of possessors to those whom they exploit, arising from the specific quality of the tension which persists between them. The fundamental springs of action in the life of men, he believed, all the more powerful for not being recognised by them, are their relationships to the alignment of classes in the economic struggle: the factor, knowledge of which would enable anyone to predict successfully men’s basic line of behaviour, is their actual social position – whether they are outside or inside the ruling class, whether their welfare depends on its success or failure, whether they are placed in a position to which the preservation of the existing order is or is not essential. Once this is known, men’s particular personal motives and emotions become comparatively irrelevant to the investigation: they may be egoistic or altruistic, generous or mean, clever or stupid, ambitious or modest. Their natural qualities will be harnessed by their circumstances to operate in a given direction, whatever their natural tendency. Indeed, it is misleading to speak of a ‘natural tendency’ or an unalterable ‘human nature’. Tendencies may be classified either in accordance with the subjective feeling which they engender (and this is, for purposes of scientific prediction, unimportant), or in accordance with their actual aims, which are socially conditioned. Men behave before they start to reflect on the reasons for, or the justification of, their behaviour; the majority of the members of a community will act in a similar fashion, whatever the subjective motives for which they will appear to themselves to be acting as they do. This is obscured by the fact that in the attempt to convince themselves that their acts are determined by reasons or by moral or religious beliefs, men have tended to construct elaborate rationalisations of their behaviour. Nor are these rationalisations wholly powerless to affect action, for, growing into great institutions like moral codes or religious organisations, they often linger on long after the social pressures, to explain away which they arose, have disappeared. Thus these great organised illusions themselves become part of the objective social situation, part of the external world which modifies the behaviour of individuals, functioning in the same way as the invariant factors, climate, soil, physical organism, function in their interplay with social institutions.

 

     “Marx’s immediate successors tended to minimise Hegel’s influence upon him; but his vision of the world crumbles and yields only isolated insights if, in the effort to represent him as he conceived himself, as the rigorous, severely factual social scientist, the great unifying, necessary pattern in terms of which he thought, is left out or whittled down.

 

     “Like Hegel, Marx treats history as phenomenology. In Hegel the Phenomenology of the human Spirit is an attempt to show… an objective order in the development of human consciousness and in the succession of civilisations that are its concrete embodiment. Influenced by a notion prominent in the Renaissance, but reaching back to an earlier mystical cosmogony, Hegel looked upon the development of mankind as being similar to that of an individual human being. Just as in the case of a man a particular capacity, or outlook, or way of dealing with reality cannot come into being until and unless other capacities have first become developed – that is, indeed, the essence of the notion of growth or education in the case of individuals – so races, nations, churches, cultures, succeed each other in a fixed order, determined by the growth of the collective faculties of mankind expressed in arts, sciences, civilisation as a whole. Pascal had perhaps meant something of this kind when he spoke of humanity as a single, centuries old, being, growing from generation to generation. For Hegel all change is due to the movement of the dialectic, which works by a constant logical criticism, that is, by struggle against, and final self-destruction of, ways of thought and constructions of reason and feeling which, in their day, had embodied the highest point reached by the ceaseless growth (which for Hegel is the logical self-realisation) of the human spirit; but which, embodied in rules or institutions, and erroneously taken as final and absolute by a given society or outlook, thereby become obstacles to progress, dying survivals of a logically ‘transcended’ stage, which by their very one-sidedness breed logical antimonies and contradictions by which they are exposed and destroyed. Marx translated this vision of history as a battlefield of incarnate ideas into social terms, of the struggle between classes. For him alienation (for that is what Hegel, following Rousseau and Luther and an earlier Christian tradition, called the perpetual self-divorce of men from unity with nature, with each other, with God, which the struggle of thesis against antithesis entailed) is intrinsic to the social process, indeed it is the heart of history itself. Alienation occurs when the results of men’s acts contradict their true purposes, when their official values, or the parts they play, misrepresent their real motives and needs and goals. This is the case, for example, when something that men have made to respond to human needs – say, a system of laws, or the rules of musical composition – acquires an independent status of its own, and is seen by men, not as something created by them to satisfy a common social want (which may have disappeared long ago), but as an objective law or institution, possessing eternal, impersonal authority in its own right, like the unalterable laws of Nature as conceived by scientists and ordinary men, like God and His Commandments for a believer. For Marx the capitalist system is precisely this kind of entity, a vast instrument brought into being by intelligible material demands – a progressive improvement and broadening of life in its own day, that generates its own intellectual, moral, religious beliefs, values and forms of life. Whether those who hold them know it or not, such beliefs and values merely uphold the power of the class whose interests the capitalist system embodies; nevertheless, they come to be viewed by all sections of society as being objectively and eternally valid for all mankind. Thus, for example, industry and the capitalist mode of exchange are not timelessly valid institutions, but were generated by the mounting resistance by peasants and artisans to dependence on the blind forces of nature. They had had their moment; and the values these institutions generated will change or vanish with them.”[492]

 

     Marx differed from Hegel also in his vision of the final outcome of the historical process. Whereas for Hegel the self-realization of the Divine Idea culminated in the Prussian State, for Marx it culminated in the victory of the last and largest class, the proletariat, in the creation of a classless, and therefore conflictless society – and there was nothing Divine about it. One thing was certain: the dominance of the present ruling class, the bourgeoise, could not last.

 

     For Marx and Engels understood the characteristic of the industrial, bourgeois age that distinguished it from all previous ages – its dynamism. Whereas previous ages aimed to preserve the social structure in order to preserve their place in it, the bourgeois were in effect constantly changing it, knowing that technological advance was constantly making present relationships obsolete and unprofitable. Not only did it overthrow the old, patriarchal and feudal society that came before it: it was constantly working to overthrow itself.

 

     “The bourgeoisie,” they wrote, “cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their trace of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into the air.”[493]

 

     But this constant change, although promoted by the bourgeoisie in order to keep it in business, at the same time built up the numbers and resources of the proletariat. “Not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons – the modern working class – the proletarians. In proportion as the bourgeoisie, i.e. capital, is developed, in the same proportion is the proletariat, the modern working class, developed.”[494]

 

     Was Marx’s theory true? Neither of its fundamental axioms were true, and so the whole theory collapsed. If man’s thought is determined by his economic status, then there is no reason for applying the categories of truth and falsehood to it – which applies to Marx’s thinking as much as to anybody else’s. As for the idea that class conflict is the sole determinant of world history, there are countless counter-examples that disprove it. Popper cites the conflict between popes and emperors, both of the same class, in the Middle Ages.[495]

 

1848 and the Spectre of Communism

 

     As we have seen, Marx declared in his Theses on Feuerbach: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world. Our business is to change it.” His chance to do that came in 1848, which began with the publication of his most famous work, The Communist Manifesto, and continued with a European-wide revolution.

 

     The 1848 revolution, writes Hobsbawm, “coincided with a social catastrophe: the great depression which swept across the continent from the middle 1840s. Harvests – and especially the potato crop – failed. Entire populations such as those of Ireland, and to a lesser extent Silesia and Flanders, starved. Food-prices rose. Industrial depression multiplied unemployment, and the masses of the labouring poor were deprived of their modest income at the very moment when their cost of living rocketed. The situation varied from one country to another and within each, and – fortunately for the existing regimes – the most miserable populations, such as the Irish and the Flemish, or some of the provincial factory workers were also politically among the most immature: the cotton operatives of the Nord department of France, for instance, took out their desperation on the equally desperate Belgian immigrant who flooded into Northern France, rather than on the government or even the employers. Moreover, in the most industrialized economy, the sharpest edge of discontent had already been taken away by the great industrial and railway-building boom of the middle 1840s. 1846-8 were bad years, but not so bad as 1841-2, and what was more, they were merely a sharp dip in what was now visibly an ascending slope of economic prosperity. But, taking Western and Central Europe as a whole, the catastrophe of 1846-8 was universal and the mood of the masses, always pretty close to subsistence level, tense and impassioned.

 

     “A European economic cataclysm thus coincided with the visible corrosion of the old regimes. A peasant uprising in Galicia in 1846; the election of a ‘liberal’ Pope in the same year; a civil war between radicals and Catholics in Switzerland in later 1847, won by the radicals; one of the perennial Sicilian autonomist insurrections in Palermo in early 1848: they were not merely straws in the wind, they were the first squalls of the gale. Everyone knew it. Rarely has revolution been more universally predicted, though not necessarily for the right countries or the right dates. An entire continent waited, ready by now to pass the news of revolution almost instantly from city to city by means of the electric telegraph. In 1831 Victor Hugo had written that he already heard ‘the dull sound of revolution, still deep down in the earth, pushing out under every kingdom in Europe its subterranean galleries from the central shaft of the mine which is Paris’. In 1847 the sound was loud and close. In 1848 the explosion burst.”[496]

 

     “Citizen-King” Louis Philippe tried to create an impossible compromise between the principles of monarchy and revolution, but was unable to contain these tensions and abdicated, fleeing to England in February, 1848. However, the Provisional Government of the Second Republic, which included a worker in its ranks, the mechanic Albert Martin, did not last long: the elections to the Constituent Assembly, now on the basis of universal male suffrage, returned a massive monarchist majority. Many of the liberal bourgeoisie, fearing social revolution, voted for the right[497], as did the poor, but property-owning peasantry. As the new government arrested revolutionary leaders, clawed back some of the concessions of February and abolished national workshops, the urban poor rose in rebellion against the republic they had helped to create. This rebellion was put down with much bloodshed. France now had an ideal liberal constitution, with Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Napoleon, as elected President. However, in 1851 he staged a coup d’état, and proclaimed the Second Empire.

 

     The pattern of events was remarkably similar to that of the First French Revolution and the First Empire under the Napoleon the First: as Alfonse Karr wrote, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.[498] However, two things radically distinguished 1848 from 1789. The first was that the monarchical principle was now much weaker. Thus in January, 1848 De Tocqueville, declared: “The old monarchy [of Louis XVI]…. was stronger than you, because of its [hereditary] origin; it had better support than you from ancient practices, old customs, ancient beliefs; it was stronger than you, and yet it fell into the dust… Can you not feel – how shall I put it? – the wind of revolution in the air?”[499] The second was that the spirit of revolution now had a more radical and powerful intellectual support in the form of the theory that took its name from its founder – Karl Marx, whose Communist Manifesto, written with Friedrich Engels, was published in the year of the revolution.

 

     However, this support was still too weak, too little-known and too extreme for the majority even of the leftists. And there were several other factors that contributed to the collapse of the revolution almost as quickly as it spread across Europe. One was the continued support of the armies for the dynastic principle. Another was the distrust of the peasants, still by far the majority part of the population in most countries, for the urban intellectuals. A third was the conflicts created by nationalist movements, which theoretically should have chimed in with the liberals’ aims, but in practice often undermined them.

 

     The most important of these nationalist movements were those for the unification of Italy and Germany. Italy was still little more than “a geographical expression”, in Metternich’s phrase. And when the Italian revolutionaries rebelled, as the Tuscan radical, Giuseppe Montanelli, said, “there was no unity of direction; therefore there was no national government. We fought as Piedmontese, as Tuscans, as Neapolitans, as Romans, not as Italians.”

 

     When the Austrians counter-attacked against revolutionary Milan and Venice, many of their soldiers were poor Italians who distrusted the urban revolutionaries; and the Bourbon King of the Two Sicilies Ferdinand II found allies amongst the Neapolitan poor.[500] Mazzini’s slogan, Italia farà da sé (Italy will do it alone), had failed. His romantic associate Giuseppe Garibaldi (1807-82), who had fought both in Rome and Venice, fled to South America.[501]

 

     German unification was a little further advanced; in 1834 Prussia and the other German states except the Austrian empire had formed a Zollverein, or customs union, to promote trade (an early model for the European Economic Union); and in March, 1848 an all-German preparatory parliament (Vorparlament) convened in Frankfurt. But there were arguments over what kind of constitution a united Germany should have, and whether it should be a “little Germany” without Austria, or a “great Germany” with it. In either case, the problem of what to do with non-German national minorities remained. The Frankfurt parliament ignored the demands of the Prussian Poles for national self-determination; and the Czechs, among other national minorities, “saw the [Austro-Hungarian] Empire as a less unattractive solution than absorption by some expansionist nationalism such as the Germans’ or the Magyars’. ‘If Austria did not already exist,’ Professor Palacky, the Czech spokesman, is supposed to have said, ‘it would be necessary to invent it.’”[502]

 

     Of all the European revolutions, the Hungarian came the nearest to success in 1848. But it, too, came to grief on the rock of nationalism – and the Russian army. Hobsbawm writes: “Unlike Italy, Hungary was already a more or less unified political entity (‘the lands of the crown of St. Stephen’), with an effective constitution, a not negligible degree of autonomy, and indeed most of the elements of a sovereign state except independence. Its weakness was that the Magyar aristocracy which governed this vast and overwhelmingly agrarian area ruled not only over the Magyar peasantry of the great plain, but over a population of which perhaps 60 per cent consisted of Croats, Serbs, Slovaks, Rumanians and Ukrainians, not to mention a substantial German minority. Thse peasant peoples were not unsympathetic to a revolution which freed the serfs, but were antagonised by the refusal of even most of the Budapest radicals to make any concession to their national difference from the Magyars, as their political spokesmen were antagonised by a ferocious policy of Magyarisation and the incorporation of hitherto in som ways autonomous border regions into a centralised and unitary Magyar state. The court at Vienna, following the habitual imperialist maxim ‘divide and rule’, offered them support. It was to be a Croat army, under Baron Jellacic, a friend of Gay, the pioneer of a Yugoslav nationalism, which led the assault on revolutionary Vienna and revolutionary Hungary.”[503]

 

     The final coup de grâce was administered by the 300,000 Russian troops sent by Tsar Nicholas I. Thus did Russia deserve her reputation as ‘The Gendarme of Europe”, the last support of the traditional order that had been re-established in 1815 and just hung on in 1848. And the only important socio-political change brought about by the revolution was the freeing of the serfs of Central Europe…

 

     What role did Freemasonry play in this revolution? L.A. Tikhomirov writes: “Revolutionary agitation between the years 1830 and 1848 was carried out mainly by the Carbonari and various ‘Young Germanies’, ‘Young Italies’, etc. In the Masonic world before 1848 something powerful, similar to 1789, was being planned, and preparations for the revolution went ahead strongly in all countries. In 1847 a big Masonic convention was convened in Strasbourg from deputies elected at several small conventions convened earlier… At the convention it was decided to ‘masonize’ the Swiss cantons and then produce a revolutionary explosion at the same time throughout Europe. As we know, movement did in fact follow, with a difference of several months, in a whole series of countries: Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Milan, Parma, Venice, etc. Reformist ‘banquets’ laying the beginning of the revolution in Paris were organized by the directors of the Masonic lodges…

 

     “… When Louis Philippe fled and a republic was proclaimed, the Masonic lodge loudly expressed its joy. On March 10, 1848 the Supreme Council of the Scottish Rite welcomed the Provisional government. On March 24 a delegation of the Grand Orient also welcomed the Provisional government and was received by two ministers, Crémieux and Garnier-Pagès… who came out in their Masonic regalia.”[504]

 

     However, the Masons seemed to have undergone some change of heart in the middle of the revolution, and determined, whether out of fear or for some other reason, not to allow it to proceed to its logical conclusion. For during the bloody “June days”, they switched sides, supporting the government General Cavaignac against the workers in the streets. Thus “on June 27, the day after the revolutionaries had been defeated, the Grand Orient issued a statement supporting Cavaignac.”[505]

 

     Perhaps it was the spectre of communism that stopped the Masons from going all the way in 1848. Perhaps The Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels, published just before the revolution, had set them thinking. In any case, the consequences were profound. “Hencefore,” writes Hobsbawm, “there was to be no general social revolution of the kind envisaged before 1848 in the ‘advanced’ countries of the world. The centre of gravity of such social revolutionary movements, and therefore of twentieth-century socialist and communist regimes, was to be in the marginal and backward regions… The sudden, vast and apparently boundless expansion of the world capitalist economy provided political alternatives in the ‘advanced’ countries. The (British) industrial revolution had swallowed the (French) political revolution.”[506]

 

     The “political alternatives” came down to a systematic liberalisation of the western European regimes in the following decades that blunted the hunger of the more moderate revolutionaries, persuading them to think of working with rather than against the system to attain their aims. “In 1848-9 moderate liberals therefore made two important discoveries in western Europe: that revolution was dangerous and that some of their substantial demands (especially in economic matters) could be met without it. The bourgeoisie ceased to be a revolutionary force.”[507]

 

     M.S. Anderson writes: “The governments which reasserted themselves after the revolutions were much stronger than their pre-revolutionary predecessors. To some extent this was merely a matter of physical factors. The new railways were making it easier than ever before to move soldiers quickly to crush rebellion before it could offer a serious threat. They also made it possible to transport food rapidly to areas of dearth and thus stave off the famine which alone could produce mass disorder. The new telegraph was allowing a central government to be informed almost instantaneously of events in the most distant parts of its territory, and thus to control these events and still more the day-to-day activity of its own officials. More fundamentally, however, the new regimes of the 1850s embodied attitudes different from those of the age of Metternich, and reflected a changing intellectual climate. Positivism and materialism were now helping to give to the actions of governments a cutting edge of ruthlessness, as well as an energy which they had generally lacked before 1848. In France Louis Napoleon had dreams, and capacities for good and evil, which were quite beyond the scope of Louis-Philippe, as well as an apparatus of political control much more efficient than any possessed by his predecessor. In the Habsburg Empire, Bach and Kübeck, the dominant ministers of the 1850s, were men of a very different stamp from Metternich. In Prussia, now beginning a period of spectacular economic growth, the medievalist dreams of Frederick William IV had lost all significance before he himself collapsed into insanity in 1858. Tempered by the fires of successfully resisted revolution, fortified by new technical aids and helped by a favourable economic climate, the governments of Europe were entering a new era…”[508]

 

     Of course, this positivist and materialist stamp to the post-1848 governments guaranteed a further decay in the foundations of Christian society and therefore a bringing closer of the triumph of the revolution. But that was not how the disillusioned revolutionaries themselves – that is, those who had not changed sides, who had not been bought, who refused to work from within the system – saw it. All believed that a proletarian revolution was not on the cards for at least another generation. The fact that the country with the largest proletariat, Britain, had not even been ruffled by revolutionary fervour, showed the immaturity of the class.

 

     So Marx set about developing a theory according to which a society had to go through all the stages of bourgeois development before the proletariat could rise up and take power. That meant that the revolution, according to him, would not come first in peasant societies such as Russia, but in highly industrialised ones, such as Germany. He did not see any role in that revolution for the peasantry, who had proved so frustratingly conservative in 1848, nor for the smaller nations who, like the Croats in 1848, had fought on the side of counter-revolution.[509] Nor did he believe that the workers’ lot could be improved by pressing for reforms and trade-union agitation – although it did improve in the later nineteenth-century precisely through such means. Altogether, therefore, the failure of the 1848 revolution and of his own prophecies left Marx a lonely figure…

 

The World as Will: Schopenhauer

 

     If the human faculty most admired by the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had been reason, and by the early nineteenth-century Romanic movement – imagination, then the entrepreneurial culture of later nineteenth-century Europe especially admired the will. These men were primarily doers, not thinkers, and espoused such creeds as utilitarianism, which emphasised what was useful and pleasurable in a purely practical sense. In abstract philosophy this tendency was reflected above all in the work of the admirer of Kant and fierce critic of Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer.

 

     While retaining German idealism’s characteristic starting-point in psychology (or meta-psychology), and its post-Hegelian emphasis on history and becoming, Schopenhauer changed its direction by arguing that the essence of reality, the “thing-in-itself”, was not Idea or Mind or Reason, but Will.[510]

 

     Not that he denied the sphere of thought: his main work is entitled The World as Will and Idea. Nevertheless, he ascribed the primacy to will over knowledge, desire over thought; for Schopenhauer, knowledge and thought were at all times the servants of will and desire. In this way he provided the philosophical justification, as it were, of that critical transition in German life from the dreamy, brilliant but somewhat ineffective Romantic period to the intensely active and successful period that began after the 1848 revolution and continued after 1871 into the German Empire.

 

     Copleston asks: “How does Schopenhauer arrive at the conviction that the thing-in-itself is Will? To find the key to reality I must look within myself. For in inner consciousness or inwardly directed perception lies ‘the single narrow door to the truth’. Through this inner consciousness I am aware that the bodily action which is said to follow or result from volition is not something different from volition but one and the same. That is to say, the bodily action is simply the objectified will: it is the will become idea or presentation. Indeed, the whole body is nothing but objectified will, will as a presentation to consciousness. According to Schopenhauer anyone can understand this if he enters into himself. And once he has this fundamental intuition, he has the key to reality. He has only to extend his discovery to the world at large.

 

     “This Schopenhauer proceeds to do. He sees the manifestation of the one individual Will in the impulse by which the magnet turns to the north pole, in the phenomena of attraction and repulsion, in gravitation, in animal instinct, in human desire and so on. Wherever he looks, whether in the inorganic or in the organic sphere, he discovers empirical confirmation of his thesis that phenomena constitute the appearance of the one metaphysical Will.

 

     “The natural question to ask is this. If the thing-in-itself is manifested in such diverse phenomena as the universal forces of Nature, such as gravity, and human volition, why call it ‘Will’? Would not ‘Force’ or ‘Energy’ be a more appropriate term, especially as the so-called Will, when considered in itself, is said to be ‘without knowledge and merely a blind incessant impulse’, ‘an endless striving’? For the term ‘Will’, which implies rationality, seems to be hardly suitable for describing a blind impulse or striving.

 

     “Schopenhauer, however, defends his linguistic usage by maintaining that we ought to take our descriptive term from what is best known to us. We are immediately conscious of our own volition. And it is more appropriate to describe the less well known in terms of the better known than the other way round.

 

     “Besides being described as blind impulse, endless striving, eternal becoming and so on, the metaphysical Will is characterized as the Will to live. Indeed, to say ‘the Will’ and to say ‘the Will to live’ are for Schopenhauer one and the same thing. As, therefore, empirical reality is the objectification or appearance of the metaphysical Will, it necessarily manifests the Will to live. And Schopenhauer has not difficulty in multiplying examples of this manifestation. We have only to look at Nature’s concern for the maintenance of the species. Birds, for instance, build nests for the young which they do not yet know. Insects deposit their eggs where the larva may find nourishment. The whole series of phenomena of animal instinct manifests the omnipresence of the Will to live. If we look at the untiring activity of bees and ants and ask what it all leads to, what is attained by it, we can only answer ‘the satisfaction of hunger and the sexual instinct’, the means, in other words, of maintaining the species in life. And if we look at man with his industry and trade, with his inventions and technology, we must admit that all this striving serves in the first instance only to sustain and to bring a certain amount of additional comfort to ephemeral individuals in their brief span of existence, and through them to contribute to the maintenance of the species…

 

     “Now, if the Will is an endless striving, a blind urge or impulse which knows no cessation, it cannot find satisfaction or reach a state of tranquillity. It is always striving and never attaining. And this essential feature of the metaphysical Will is reflected in its self-objectification, above all in human life. Man seeks satisfaction, happiness, but he cannot attain it. What we call happiness or enjoyment is simply a temporary cessation of desire. And desire, as the expression of a need or want, is a form of pain. Happiness, therefore, is ‘the deliverance from a pain, from a want’; it is ‘really and essentially always only negative and never positive’. It soon turns to boredom, and the striving after satisfaction reasserts itself. It is boredom which makes beings who love one another so little as men do seek one another’s company. And great intellectual powers simply increase the capacity for suffering and deepen the individual’s isolation.

 

     “Each individual thing, as an objectification of the one Will to live, strives to assert its own existence at the expense of other things. Hence the world is the field of conflict, a conflict which manifests the nature of the Will as at variance with itself, as a tortured Will. And Schopenhauer finds illustrations of this conflict even in the inorganic sphere. But it is naturally to the organic and human spheres that he chiefly turns for empirical confirmation of his thesis. He dwells, for example, on the ways in which animals of one species prey on those of another. And when he comes to man, he really lets himself go. ‘The chief source of the most serious evils which afflict man is man himself: homo homini lupus. Whoever keeps this last fact clearly in view sees the world as a hell which surpasses that of Dante through the fact that one man must be the devil of another.’ War and cruelty are, of course, grist for Schopenhauer’s mill. And the man who showed no sympathy with the Revolution of 1848 speaks in the sharpest terms of industrial exploitation, slavery and such like social abuses.

 

     “We may not that it is the egoism, rapacity and hardness and cruelty of men which are for Schopenhauer the real justification of the State. So far from being a divine manifestation, the State is simply the creation of enlightened egoism which tries to make the world a little more tolerable than it would otherwise be.”[511]

 

     The philosopher understands that there is nothing other than this constant striving and suffering, and therefore no other path for him except the decision to renounce the Will to live, which is the cause of all the suffering. This is not accomplished through suicide, as one might expect, for suicide is in fact an attempt to escape certain evils, and therefore the expression of a concealed will to live. Only two things relieve the bleakness of this nihilist vision to any degree: art and asceticism.

 

     In the contemplation of art – especially music, which exhibits the inner nature of the Will, the thing-in-itself – desire is temporarily stilled. For “it is possible for me to regard the beautiful object neither as itself an object of desire nor as a stimulant to desire but simply and solely for its aesthetic significance.”[512]

 

     However, “aesthetic contemplation affords no more than a temporary or transient escape from the slavery of the Will. But Schophenhauer offers a lasting release through renunciation of the Will to live. Indeed, moral progress must take this form if morality is possible at all. For the Will to live, manifesting itself in egoism, self-assertion, hatred and conflict, is for Schopenhauer the source of evil. ‘There really resides in the heart of each of us a wild beast which only waits the opportunity to rage and rave in order to injure others, and which, if they do not prevent it, would like to destroy them.’ This wild beast, this radical evil, is the direct expression of the Will to live. Hence morality, if it is possible, must involve denial of the Will. And as man is an objectification of the Will, denial will mean self-denial, asceticism and mortification.”[513]

 

     “We must banish the dark impression of that nothingness which we discern behind all virtue and holiness as their final goal, and which we fear as children fear the dark; we must not even evade it like the Indians, through myths and meaningless words, such as reabsorption in Brahma or the Nirvana of the Buddhists. Rather do we freely acknowledge that what remains after the entire abolition of will is for all those who are still full of will certainly nothing; but, conversely, to those in whom the will has turned and has denied itself, this our world, which is so real, with all its suns and milky ways – is nothing.”[514]

 

     With the surrender of the Will, “all those phenomena are also abolished; that constant strain and effort without end and without rest at all the grades of objectivity in which and through which the world consists; the multifarious forms succeeding each other in gradation; the whole manifestation of the will; and, finally, also the universal forms of this manifestation, time and space, and also its last fundamental form, subject and object; all are abolished. No will: no idea, no world. Before us there is certainly only nothingness.”[515]

 

     So, contrary to the Christian vision, there is no positive end to the self-denial that Schopenhauer recommends. Nor could there be. For there is nothing other than the Will to live, which is neither God nor any positive ideal, but pure egoism “objectified” in various forms and ending in death. The most a man can hope for as a result of his self-denial is to “penetrate the veil of Maya [illusion] to the extent of seeing that all individuals are really one. For they are all phenomena of the one undivided Will. We then have the ethical level of sympathy. We have goodness or virtue which is characterized by a disinterested love of others. True goodness is not, as Kant thought, a matter of obeying the categorical imperative for the sake of duty alone. True goodness is love, agape or caritas in distinction from eros, which is self-directed. And love is sympathy. ‘All true and pure love is sympathy (Mitleid), and all love which is not sympathy is selfishness (Selbstsucht). Eros is selfishness; agape is sympathy.”[516]

 

     However, the existence of a “true and pure love” attainable by philosophy and self-denial seems to be inconsistent with the premises of Schopenhauer’s system (and personal life). For how can there be a selfless love when all that exists is the selfish Will to live? Indeed, for Schopenhauer “existence, life, is itself a crime: it is our original sin. And it is inevitably expiated by suffering and death.”[517] Since for Schopenhauer there is no paradisal innocence, but only original sin, there can be no escape from sin, and no return to paradise, but only the vain and self-contradictory attempt of existence to deny itself, of being not to be…

 

     Schopenhauer’s vision represents a significant new turn in European philosophy. On the one hand, it reflects the highly practical spirit (will rather than mind) and thrusting energy of the early industrial age. On the other hand, it reflects the underlying scepticism of that age, and looks forward to the nihilism of Nietzsche, and of Stavrogin in Dostoyevsky’s The Possessed. Gone is the optimism of the Enlightenment, and its belief in reason and the perfectibility of man. In its place we find Byronic despair in philosophical form, the despair of the man who has cut himself off from the last vestiges of Christian faith, who believes neither in God nor in anything else except his baser instincts, and is preparing to escape from his suffering by plunging into what he insists will be a sea of nothingness, but which he fears will be something very different and much more terrifying…

 

Nature and Society as Will: Darwin

 

     “What Galileo and Newton were to the seventeenth century,” writes Russell, “Darwin was to the nineteenth. Darwin’s theory had two parts. On he one hand, there was the doctrine of evolution, which maintained that the different forms of life had developed gradually from a common ancestry. This doctrine, which is now generally accepted, was not new. It had been maintained by Lamarck and by Darwin’s grandfather Erasmus, not to mention Anaximander. Darwin supplied an immense mass of evidence for the doctrine, and in the second part of his theory believed himself to have discovered the cause of evolution. He thus gave to the doctrine a popularity and a scientific force which it had not previously possessed, but he by no means originated it.

 

     “The second part of Darwin’s theory was the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. All animals and plants multiply faster than nature can provide for them; therefore in each generation many perish before the age for reproducing themselves. What determines which will survive? To some extent, no doubt, sheer luck, but there is another cause of more importance. Animals and plants are, as a rule, not exactly like their parents, but differ slightly by excess or defect in every measurable characteristic. In a given environment, members of the same species compete for survival, and those best adapted to the environment have the best chance. Therefore among chance variations those that are favourable will preponderate among adults in each generation. Thus from age to age deer run more swiftly, cats stalk their prey more silently, and giraffes’ necks become longer. Given enough time, this mechanism, so Darwin contended, could account for the whole long development from the protozoa to homo sapiens.”[518]

 

     “Given enough time…” Time – enormous amounts of it – was indeed a critical ingredient in Darwin’s theory; some critics would say that it took the place of a satisfactory causal mechanism. But such a theory chimed in with the historicist temper of the times.

 

     It also chimed in with the idea, as Barzun writes, “that everything is alive and in motion – a dynamic universe, as modern jargon has it.”[519] Liberals believed in progress, socialists believed in revolution, everyone with the exception of a few diehards like the Pope believed that things had to change, and that change was for the better. Above all, evolution appealed to man’s pride, in the belief that man was destined for greater and greater things. “You know,” says Lady Constance in Disraeli’s novel Tancred (1847), “all is development – the principle is perpetually going on. First, there was nothing; then – I forget the next – I think there were shells; then fishes; then we came – let me see – did we come next? Never mind, we came at last and the next change will be something very superior to us, something with wings…”[520]

 

     It will be noted that this was written twelve years before Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859), which shows that the “scientific” theory filled an emotional need already expressed by poets and novelists. Evidently not feeling this need himself, Disraeli said that as between the idea that man was an ape or an angel, he was “on the side of the angels”[521]; but he forgot that, as Lady Constance had opined in his novel, evolution was for many a way of attaining angelic status (“something with wings”) in the very long run. For those who did not believe in the deification of man through Christ, evolution provided another, secular form of deification.

 

     This elicited the not unfounded derision of the conservatives. Gobineau said that man was “not descended from the apes, but rapidly getting there”.[522] The Russian religious philosopher Vladimir Soloviev opined: “Man is descended from a monkey. Consequently we shall love one another.” But it was the Prophet-King David who put it best: “Man, being in honour, did not understand; he is compared to the mindless cattle, and is become like unto them” (Psalm 48.21).

 

     Darwin, a former student of theology, may have waited many years before publishing his theory because, as David Quammen writes, he was anxious “about announcing a theory that seemed to challenge conventional religious beliefs – in particular, the Christian beliefs of his wife, Emma. Darwin himself quietly renounced Christianity during his middle age, and later described himself as an agnostic. He continued to believe in a distant, impersonal deity of some sort, a greater entity that had set the universe and its laws into motion, but not in a personal God who had chosen humanity as a specially favored species. Darwin avoided flaunting his lack of religious faith, at least partly in deference to Emma. And she prayed for his soul…”[523]

 

     The model provided by biological evolution was soon applied to the whole universe and everything in it, so that physical evolution was joined onto biological evolution and human and cultural evolution in one seamless fabric. It achieved what 18th-century Deism had not felt strong enough to do – dethrone God from His last refuge in “enlightened” minds as First Cause and Creator. For “in the beginning” now was not “the Word” (i.e. Divine Reason, Meaning and Order) but mindless chaos, and “all things were made” not by God, but by blind mutation and “natural selection” (i.e. death and destruction). These were the two hands of original Chaos, the father of all things – a conception as old as the pre-Socratic philosophers Anixamander and Heraclitus and as retrogressive as the pre-Christian religions of Egypt and Babylon. And they looked forward, not to some golden age of an ever-perfecting and evolving species, but to the chaos and destruction of the twentieth century.

 

     C.S. Lewis wrote of this conception: “By universal evolutionism I mean the belief that the very formula of universal process is from imperfect to perfect, from small beginnings to great endings, from the rudimentary to the elaborate, the belief which makes people find it natural to think that morality springs from savage taboos, adult sentiment from infantile sexual maladjustments, thought from instinct, mind from matter, organic from inorganic, cosmos from chaos. This is perhaps the deepest habit of mind in the contemporary world. It seems to me immensely implausible, because it makes the general course of nature so very unlike those parts of nature we can observe. You remember the old puzzle as to whether the owl came from the egg or the egg from the owl. The modern acquiescence in universal evolutionism is a kind of optical illusion, produced by attending exclusively to the owl’s emergence from the egg. We are taught from childhood to notice how the perfect oak grows from the acorn and to forget that the acorn itself was dropped by a perfect oak. We are reminded constantly that the adult human being was an embryo, never that the life of the embryo came from two adult human beings. We love to notice that the express engine of today is the descendant of the ‘Rocket’; we do not equally remember that the ‘Rocket’ springs not from some even more rudimentary engine, but from something much more perfect and complicated than itself – namely, a man of genius. The obviousness or naturalness which most people seem to find in the idea of emergent evolution thus seems to be a pure hallucination…”[524]

 

     Darwin’s evolutionary biology fits Schopenhauer’s metaphysical philosophy as if they were made for each other. For both the blind, selfish Will to live is everything; for both there is neither intelligent design nor selfless love, but only the struggle to survive at all costs. And if Schopenhauer’s striving for nothingness is Buddhist in inspiration, Darwin’s idea of the evolution of one species into another recalls the Hindu idea of reincarnation…

 

     Schopenhauer in metaphysics, Darwin in science, and Marx in political theory formed a kind of unholy trinity one in essence, whose essence was Will.[525] Marx liked Darwinism because it appeared to justify the idea of class struggle as the fundamental mechanism of human evolution. For, as Fr. Timothy Alferov writes: “The idea of class struggle logically flows from ‘the law of the struggle for existence’. It is precisely by this law that Marxism explains the emergence of classes and their struggle, whence logically proceeds the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Instead of racist pre-eminence class pre-eminence is preached.” [526]

 

     However, Darwinism was also eminently congenial to Marxism because of its blind historicism and its implicit atheism. As Wurmbrand notes: “After Marx had read The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, he wrote a letter to Lassalle in which he exults that God – in the natural sciences at least – had been given ‘the death blow’”.[527] “Karl Marx,” writes Hieromonk Damascene, “was a devout Darwinist, who in Das Kapital called Darwin’s theory ‘epoch making’. He believed his reductionist, materialistic theories of the evolution of social organization to be deducible from Darwin’s discoveries, and thus proposed to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. The funeral oration over Marx’s body, delivered by Engels, stressed the evolutionary basis of communism: ‘Just as Darwin discovered the law of evolution in organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of evolution in human history.’”[528]

 

     As well as completely undermining the Christian understanding of origins, evolutionism formed the basis of a completely anti-Christian system of morality. As St. Barsanuphius of Optina wrote: “The English philosopher Darwin created an entire system according to which life is a struggle for existence, a struggle for the strong against the weak, where those that are conquered are doomed to destruction… This is already the beginning of a bestial philosophy, and those who come to believe in it wouldn’t think twice about killing a man, assaulting a woman, or robbing their closest friend – and they would do all this calmly, with a full recognition of their right to commit their crimes.”[529]

 

The American Civil War

 

     The American Civil War was not unexpected. As early as 1787 Alexander Hamilton “had made a prediction: The newly created federal government would either ‘triumph altogether over the state governments and reduce them to an entire subordination,’ he surmised, or ‘in the course of a few years… the contests about the boundaries of power between the particular governments and the general government… will produce a dissolution of the Union.’”[530]

 

     “Each side,” writes J.M. Roberts, “accused the other of revolutionary designs and behaviour. It is very difficult not to agree with both of them. The heart of the Northern position, as Lincoln saw, was that democracy should prevail, a claim assuredly of potentially limitless revolutionary implication. In the end, what the North achieved was indeed a social revolution in the South. On the other side, what the South was asserting in 1861 (and three more states joined the Confederacy after the first shots were fired) was that it had the same right to organize its life as had, say, revolutionary Poles or Italians in Europe.”[531]

 

     In 1924 the Scottish writer John Buchan wrote that for the South “the vital thing, the thing with which all its affections and sentiments were intertwined, was the State. The North, on the other hand, had for its main conception the larger civic organism, the Nation.”[532] And yet what was “the Nation”? The 1848 revolution in Europe had shown how difficult it was to define a nation, and how people of the same nation theoretically speaking (that is, according to theories of language or blood) nevertheless preferred to remain citizens of States ruled by other nations rather than go to war for the sake of reuniting the nation in a single, ethnically homogeneous state.

 

     In any case, had not the United States come into existence in the first place by rebelling against its own nation, the British? For states can create nations, just as nations – states. As Norman Stone writes, in the nineteenth century nationalism “came in two opposing variants. One of them, state or civil nationalism, was sponsored by the ruling establishments of existing states. The other, popular or ethnic nationalism, was driven by the demands of communities living within those states and against the policy of those governments…. There are as may theories on the essence of nations as there are theorists. But the essential qualities would seem to be spiritual in nature. ‘The nation is a soul,’ wrote Renan, ‘a spiritual principle. [It] consists of two things. One is the common legacy of rich memories from the past. The other is the present consensus, the will to live together…’”[533] According to this criterion, the Southerners, who already belonged to different states from the Northerners, could also count themselves to belong to a different nation. They had a common legacy of rich memories from the past. And they had the will together – but separately from the Northerners, if the latter pressed them too far on issues such as slavery. To put it simply: since they felt themselves to be a different nation, they were a different nation. And so, if the revolution of 1776 had been justified in the name of the liberty of the new nation called America, although it had previously been one nation with Britain, then that of the Southerners in 1861 was no less justified – not least because, as they argued, the Constitution of the United States specifically permitted the secession of individual States.[534] As they sang:

 

Rebels before

Our fathers of yore,

Rebel’s the righteous name

Washington bore.

Why, then, ours be the same.[535]

 

     The other main justification for the war was the existence of slavery in the South. “In 1862 [Lincoln] could still say in a public letter that ‘if I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do itl and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone, I would also do that.’”[536]

 

     However, the proclamation of the emancipation of slavery on New Year’s Day 1863 changed the nature of the war into one of liberation.

 

     However, asks Eric Hobsbawm: “Was it [the South] a slave society at all, given that Negroes were always in a minority even in the Deep South (apart from a few patches), and considering that the majority of slaves worked not on the classical large plantation but in small numbers on white farms or as domestics? It can hardly be denied that slavery was the central institution of Southern society, or that it was the major cause of friction and rupture between the Northern and Southern states. The real question is why it should have led to secession and civil war, rather than to some sort of formula of coexistence. After all, though no doubt most people in the North detested slavery, militant abolitionism alone was never strong enough to determine the Union’s policty. And Northern capitalism, whatever the private views of businessmen, might well have found it as possible and convenient to come to terms with and exploit a slave South as international business has with the ‘apartheid’ of South Africa.

 

     “Of course slave societies, including that of the South, were doomed. None of them survived the period from 1848 to 1890 – not even Cuba and Brazil… They were already isolated both physically, by the abolition of the African slave-trade, which was pretty effective by the 1850s, and, as it were, morally, by the overwhelming consensus of bourgeois liberalism which regarded them as contrary to history’s march, morally undesirable and economically inefficient. It is difficult to envisage the survival of the South as a slave society into the twentieth century, any more than the survival of serfdom in eastern Europe, even if (like some schools of historians) we consider both economically viable as systems of production. But what brought the South the point of crisis in the 1850s was a more specific problem: the difficulty of coexisting with a dynamic northern capitalism and a flood of migration into the West.

 

     “In purely economic terms, the North was not much worried about the South, an agrarian region hardly involved in industrialisation. Time, population, resources and production were on its side. The main stumbling-blocks were political. The South, a virtual semi-colony of the British to whom it supplied the bulk of their raw cotton, found free trade advantageous, whereas the Northern industry had long been firmly and militantly committed to protective tariffs, which it was unable to impose sufficiently for its desires because of the political leverage of the Southern states (who represented, it must be recalled, almost half the total number of states in 1850). Northern industry was certainly more worried about a nation half-free trading and half-protectionist than about one half-slave and half-free. What was equally to the point, the South did its best to offset the advantages of the North by cutting it off from its hinterland, attempting to establish a trading and communications area facing south and based on the Mississippi river system rather than facing east to the Atlantic, and so far as possible pre-empting the expansion to the West. This was natural enough since its poor whites had long explored and opened the West.

 

     “But the very economic superiority of the North meant that the South had to insist with increasing stubbornness on its political force – to stake its claims in the most formal terms (e.g. by insisting on the official acceptance of slavery in new western territories), to stress the autonomy of states (‘states’ rights’) against the national government, to exercise its veto over national policies, to discourage northern economic developments, etc. In effect it had to be an obstacle to the North while pursuing its expansionist policy in the West. Its only assets were political. For (given that it could not or would not beat the North at its own game of capitalist development) the currents of history ran dead against it. Every improvement in transport strengthened the links of the West with the Atlantic. Basically the railroad system ran from east to west with hardly any long lines from north to south. Moreover, the men who peopled the West, whether they came from North or South, were not slave-owners but poor, white and free, attracted by free soil or gold or adventure. The formal extension of slavery to new territories and states was therefore crucial to the South, and the increasingly embittered conflicts of the two sides during the 1850s turned mainly on this question. At the same time slavery was irrelevant to the West, and indeed western expansion might actually weaken the slave system. It provided no such reinforcement as that which Southern leaders hoped for when envisaging the annexation of Cuba and the creation of a Southern-Caribbean plantation empire. In brief, the North was in a position to unify the continent and the South was not. Aggressive in posture, its real recourse was to abandon the struggle and secede from the Union, and this is what it did when the election of Abraham Lincoln from Illinois in 1860 demonstrated that it had lost the ‘Middle West’.

 

     “For four years civil war raged. In terms of casualties and destruction it was by far the greatest war in which any ‘developed’ country was involved in our period, though relatively it pales beside the more or less contemporary Paraguayan War in South America, and absolutely beside the Taiping Wars in China. The Northern states, though notably inferior in military performance, eventually won because of their vast preponderance of manpower, productive capacity and technology. After all, they contained over 70 per cent of the total population of the United States, over 80 per cent of the men of military age, and over 90 per cent of its industrial production. Their triumph was also that of American capitalism and of the modern United States. But, though slavery was abolished, it was not the triumph of the Negro, slave or free. After a few years of ‘Reconstruction’ (i.e. forced democratisation) the South reverted to the control of conservative white Southerners, i.e. racists. Northern occupying troops were finally withdrawn in 1877. In one sense it achieved its object: the Northern Republicans (who retained the presidency for most of the time from 1860 to 1932) could not break into the solidly Democratic South, which therefore retained substantial autonomy. The South, in turn, through its block vote, could exercise some national influence, since its support was essential for the success of the other great party, the Democrats. In fact, it remained agrarian, poor, backward and resentful; the whites resented the never-forgotten defeat, the blacks the disfranchisement and ruthless subordination reimposed by the whites.”[537]

 

     In any case, was slavery in the South as bad as it was made out to be? Robert Owen did not think so: “Bad and unwise as American slavery is and must continue to be, the white slavery in the manufactories of England was at this unrestricted period far worse than the house slaves which I afterwards saw in the West Indies and in the United States, and in many respects, especially as regards health, food and clothing, the latter were much better provided for than were those oppressed and degraded children and work-people in the home manufactories of Great Britain.”[538]

 

     J.M. Roberts writes: “In a sense there had been no colour problem while slavery existed. Servile status was the barrier separating the overwhelming majority of blacks (there had always been a few free among them) from whites, and it was upheld by legal sanction. Emancipation swept away the framework of legal inferiority and replaced this with a framework, or myth, of democratic equality when very few Americans were ready to give this social reality. Millions of blacks in the South were suddenly free. They were also for the most part uneducated, largely untrained except for field labout, and virtually without leadership of their own race. For a little while in the Southern states they leant for support on the occupying armies of the Union; when this prop was removed blacks disappeared from legislatures and public offices of the Southern states to which they had briefly aspired. In some areas they disappeared from the polling-booths, too. Legal disabilities were replaced by a social and physical coercion which was sometimes harsher than the old regime of slavery. The slave at least had the value to his master of being an investment of capital; he was protected like other property and was usually ensured a minimum of security and maintenance. Competition in a free labour market at a moment when the economy of large areas of the South was in ruins, with impoverished whites struggling for subsistence, was disastrous for the black. By the end of the century he had been driven by a poor white population bitterly resentful of defeat and emancipation into social subordination and economic deprivation. From this was to stem emigration to the North in the twentieth century and racial problems in our own day.”[539]

 

     That the Northerners’ zeal to destroy the patriarchal, agrarian, slave-owning society of the South may have been misguided is indicated by the lives of some of the South’s best representatives. For example, General Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was the South’s best general and, in the opinion of Lord Roberts, commander-in-chief of the British armies early in the twentieth century, “one of the greatest natural military geniuses the world ever saw”. As James I. Robertson Jr. writes, he was deeply religious man, who deeply loved his two wives. “He owned two slaves, both of whom had asked him to purchase them after the deaths of their masters. Anna Morrison [his second wife] brought three slaves to the marriage. Jackson viewed human bondage with typical simplicity. God had established slavery for reasons man could not and should not challenge. A good Christian had the twin responsibilities of treating slaves with paternal affection and of introducing them to the promises of God as found in holy scriptures. To that end, Jackson taught a Sunday afternoon Bible class for all slaves and freedmen in Lexington.

 

     “Jackson and the VMI [Virginia Military Institute] corps of cadets served as gallows guard in December 1859, when the abolitionist John Brown was executed for treason and murder having seized the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry. As war clouds thickened in the months thereafter, Jackson remained calm. The dissolution of the Union, he told a minister, ‘can come only by God’s permission, and will only be permitted if for His people’s good.’

 

     “Civil war exploded in mid-April 1861, and Jackson promptly offered his sword to his native state. Virginia’s close ties with the South, and its opposition to the federal government using troops to coerce a state, were the leading issues behind Virginia’s secession. The state regarded as unacceptable the idea of federal troops marching through Virginia to wage war on other states. The nation was still so young that the rights of states remains strongly ingrained in political thinking. Jackson had been a strong believer in the union until Virginia left it. When this happened Jackson felt the same as thousands of his neighbours: Virginia, the Old Dominion, had been in existence for 180 years before a ‘United States’ was established. The roots of families like the Lees and Jacksons ran deep within Virginia’s soil. In 1861 an American’s birthright and heritage was his state, not a federation which, during the last fifteen of its seventy-four years, had been in turmoil over the slavery question…”[540]

 

     In retrospect, it is difficult to believe that the United States could have evolved in any other way than as a unitary state, and easy to believe, given the Union’s contribution to twentieth-century history, that the world as a whole would not have benefited from the permanent secession of the South. And yet the cost was horrific: 600,000 Americans died on both sides, more than all those who died in the two world wars of the twentieth century (520,000). The war opened up divisions not only between North and South, but also between people in the North, where many thousands refused to join the Northern armies and draconian measures were applied to fill the draft. Brutalities were committed on both sides, but more on the side of the “liberators”. The “liberated” slaves were “free” to enjoy unemployment, continued poverty and the continued oppression of the whites. Of course, by comparison with most States, the United States remained a land with a large measure of religious and political freedom. But the claim of Southern writers that the intentions of the Founders were overthrown remains powerful. The power of the state over the individual was vastly increased for all, in both North and South. It is little wonder that Marx and Engels welcomed the war…

 

     And what about the teaching of Christ, in Whose name the war was conducted? In this connection the words of Archbishop Averky of Jordanville are relevant: “The epistle [of the holy Apostle Paul] to Philemon vividly witness to the fact that the Church of Christ, in liberating man from sin, does not at the same time produce a forcible rupture in the established inter-relationships of people, and does not encroach on the civil and state order, waiting patiently for an improvement in the social order, under the influence of Christian ideas. Not only from this epistle, but also from others…, it is evident that the Church, while unable, of course, to sympathize with slavery, at the same time did not abolish it, and even told slaves to obey their masters. Therefore here the conversion of Onesimus to Christianity, which made him free from sin and a son of the Kingdom of God, did not, however, liberate him, as a slave, from the authority of his master. Onesimus had to return to [his master] Philemon, in spite of the fact that the Apostle loved him as a son, and needed his services, since he was in prison in Rome. The Apostle’s respect for civil rights tells also in the fact that he could order Philemon to forgive Onesimus [for fleeing from him], but, recognizing Philemon’s right as master, begs him to forgive his guilty and penitent slave. The words of the Apostle: ‘Without your agreement I want to do nothing’ clearly indicate that Christianity really leads mankind to personal perfection and the improvement of the social legal order on the basis of fraternity, equality and freedom, but not by way of violent actions and revolutions, but by the way of peaceful persuasion and moral influence.”[541]

 

Emperor Napoleon III

 

     One of the reasons for the failure of the 1848 revolution was that the Masons, most of whom were wealthy, drew back from taking the revolution to its logical extreme. This is understandable. However, it is still surprising, and worthy of investigation, why they should have blessed (eventually) the formation of a dictatorship in France under Louis Napoleon.

 

     Ridley writes: “On 10 December 1848 the election was held for the new President of the Republic. The Freemasons’ journal, Le Franc-Maçon, called on its readers to vote for Lamartine [though he was not a Mason], because he believed in ‘the sacred words, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’; but Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (who would soon become the Emperor Napoleon III) was elected by a very large majority; he defeated Cavaignac, Ledru-Rollin, the Socialist François Raspail, and Lamartine, receiving 75 per cent of the votes cast, and coming top of the poll in all except four of the eighty-five departments of France. He was the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, and in his youth had been involved in the revolutionary movement in Italy in 1831. It has been suggested that he joined the Carbonari and the Freemasons in Italy, but this cannot be proved. He afterwards tried twice to make a revolution against Louis Philippe, and on the second occasion was sentenced to life imprisonment in the fortress at Ham near St Quentin in north-eastern France; but he made a sensational escape, took refuge in England, and returned to Paris to his electoral triumph in 1848.

 

     “Although he had been suspected at one time of being a Communist, as soon as he was elected President of the Republic he relied on the support of the Right wing and the Catholic Church. Young Radicals who flaunted red cravats, and shouted ‘Long live the Social Republic!’ were sentenced to several years’ imprisonment. From time to time a Freemasons’ lodge was raided by the police, and warnings were sent by local officials to the government that ‘members of the anarchist party’ were planning to gain control of the Masonic lodges in Paris and the provinces.

 

     “The Grand Orient thought it would be wise to revise their constitution. In 1839, when they were living happily under Louis Philippe, they had stated that ‘Masonry is a universal philanthropic association’ and that one of their objectives was ‘the examination and discussion of all social and economic questions which concern the happiness of humanity’. In August 1848, after the June Days and the legislation suppressing secret political societies, they changed this article in their constitution by deleting the words ‘social and economic’; and a year later, on 10 August 1849, Grand Orient stated that all Freemasons must believe in God and in the immortality of the soul.”[542]

 

     When, in addition to this, Napoleon sent his troops to crush the Roman republic under Mazzini, it must have seemed that the Masons would now, at last, turn against him. And indeed, when he established his dictatorship on December 2, 1861, “there was an attempt at resistance in Paris next day, led by the deputy Baudin, a Freemason.”[543] However, Baudin was shot on the barricade; and when Napoleon held a plebiscite on whether he should continue as President of the Republic for ten years, the Grand Orient called on all Freemasons to vote for him.

 

     Some light is cast on this mystery by Tikhomirov: “According to the very weighty of Deschampes [the historian of Freemasonry], the empire of Louis Napoleon was considered desirable. This became known to Deschampes through Michelet, who played an important role in revolutionary circles, but was a personal friend of Deschampes.

 

     “Soon after the coup of 1851 (more precisely: on February 7, 1852), Michelet wrote to Deschampes: ‘By this time a great convention of the heads of the European societies had taken place in Paris, where they discussed France. Only three members (whose leader was Mazzini) demanded a democratic republic. A huge majority thought that a dictatorship would better serve the work of the revolution – and the empire was decreed ‘sur les promesses formelles’ (on the basis of the formal promises) of Louis Napoleon to give all the forces of France to the services of Masonry.[544] All the people of the revolution applied themselves to the success of the state coup. Narvaets, who was in obedience to Palmerston [British Prime Minister in 1855-1858 and from 1859], even loaned Louis Napoleon 500,000 francs not long before December 2.’

 

     “If Napoleon III really gave ‘formal promises’, then this could refer only to the unification of Italy, and consequently, to the fate of the Pope’s secular dominion. Deschampes has no evidence concerning Louis Napoleon’s membership of Masonry, otherwise than in the form of Carbonarism. He had long belonged to the Carbonari in its Italian form, and as such was obliged to work for the unification of Italy. For breaking this oath he was pursued by attempts on his life, until, after Orsini’s attempt, he renewed his promise and began to fulfil it, risking that the Pope would lose his dominions. But in general Masonry protected Napoleon III. At any rate Palmerston, who had, as they affirm, been the highest leader of European Masonry (the Orient of Orients), supported Napoleon with all his strength, and, perhaps, would not have allowed his fall, if he had not died five years before the Franco-Prussian War.”[545]

 

     So here we see why Napoleon was able to retain the support of the Masons, while supporting their mortal enemy, the Catholic Church: he had a very powerful friend, Lord Palmerston, the British Prime Minister, a former supreme head of Masonry…

 

     And it was Britain under Palmerston, France under Napoleon, the Pope and the Sultan, who worked together to humble the real enemy of Masonry, Russia, in the Crimean War of 1854-1856…

 

Il Risorgimento and the Pope

 

     But then, as we have seen, frightened by attempts on his life, Napoleon III began to fulfil his promises to the Masons and turned against the Pope. In particular, he began to support Count Cavour, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia-Pidemont, which would form the core of the movement for the expulsion of the Austrians from Italy, the political unification of the peninsula and the stripping from the Pope of his secular dominions.

 

     Norman Davies writes: “After the fine performance of Sardinian troops in the Crimea, Napoleon III asked quaintly, ‘What can I do for Italy?’ and a Franco-Sardinian Pact was duly signed. France undertook to support Sardinia in the north against Austria, whilst continuing to defend the Papal states in the centre. Three wars later the game was complete. In 1859-60 the victories at Magenta and Solferino assured the success of the Franco-Sardinian attack on Austrian Italy; whilst the sensational private expedition of Garibaldi’s ‘Thousand’ redshirts assured the fall of Sicily and Naples. Plebiscites in Parma, Modena and Tuscany all voted for Italy; France took Savoy and Nice; Austria still held Venetia; and with French help the Pope still ruled in Rome. But in May 1861 an all-Italian parliament proclaimed Victor Emmanuel II (r. 1849-78) King of Italy. In 1866, with Austria at war with Prussia, Italy contrived the cession of Venetia.”[546]

 

     Christopher Duggan continues the story: “Just as Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866 had brought Italy the Veneto, so France’s defeat by Prussia in 1870 led to the capture of Rome. Throughout much of the 1860s the Holy City had been defended by a garrison of French soldiers. When this was withdrawn in the summer of 1870 to fight Prussia, and Napoleon III was defeated and forced to abdicate, there was little to stop the Italian government seizing the historic capital. On 20 September, less than three weeks after the Battle of Sedan, Italian troops blew a hole in Leonine walls at Porta Pia and marched into the city. Pius IX was left with the small enclave of the Vatican. A law was passed in May 1871 that guaranteed the safety of the pope, provided him with an annual grant, and gave him the full dignities and privileges of a sovereign; but Pius IX rejected it out of hand. The rift between the liberal state and the Church was now broader and deeper than ever.”[547]

 

     As the political power of the Pope crumbled, he sought to compensate for it by asserting his spiritual power more shrilly than ever. The process had begun earlier, in 1854, when Pius IX, with the support of five hundred Italian, Spanish and Portuguese bishops, had proclaimed the doctrine of the immaculate conception of the Virgin while in exile in Gaeta. His personal secretary, Monsignor Talbot, had said at that time: “You see, the most important thing is not the new dogma but the way it is proclaimed.” In other words, the important thing was that the Pope was asserting his power, showing that he was infallible.

    

     Then in 1870, at the First Vatican Council, the Pope declared his own infallibility on matters of faith and morals when speaking ex cathedra, “i.e. when serving as a pastor and teacher of all Christians”, and the Council declared: "The Pope is a divine man and human god... The Pope is the light of faith and reflection of truth."

 

     Of course, even in the period of the Ecumenical Councils, the Popes were far from infallible. Pope Liberius signed an Arian creed in 354; Pope Zosimas inclined to Pelagianism; Pope Vigilius rejected the Fifth Ecumenical Council before declaring that he had been the tool of satan towards the overthrow of the Church before the Lord enlightened him; Pope Honorius was condemned by the Sixth Ecumenical Council.

 

     At the Vatican Council itself Bishop Joseph Strossmayer and many other bishops, especially Dupanloup and Gonolli, opposed the new dogma of papal infallibility…

 

     “Before 1870,” writes Peter de Rosa, “this [dogma] was far from being universally accepted. The French Church, for example, was renowned for its opposition. The Fourth of the Gallican Articles of 1682, signed by the great Bishop Bossuet, said: ‘The pope has the principal share in questions of faith… nevertheless his judgement is not irreformable without the consent of the church.’ The decrees of the Council of Constance were still in force in France in the seventeenth century and, in spite of Rome, many still held them up to 1870.

 

     “The English-speaking world, too, was far from unanimous in accepting papal infallibility. In 1822, Bishop Barnes, the English Vicar Apostolic, said: ‘Bellarmine and other divines, chiefly Italian, have believed the pope infallible when proposing ex cathedra an article of faith. But in England and Ireland I do not believe any Catholic maintains the infallibility of the pope.’ Later still, Cardinal Wiseman, who in 1850 headed the restored hierarchy of England and Wales, said: ‘The Catholic church holds a dogma often proclaimed that, in defining matters of faith, she (that is, the church, not the pope) is infallible.’ He went on: ‘All agree that infallibility resides in the unanimous suffrage of the church.’ John Henry Newman, a convert and the greatest theologian of the nineteenth century, said two years before Vatican I: ‘I hold the pope’s infallibility, but as a theological opinion; that is, not as a certainty but as a probability.’ 

 

     “In the United States, prior to Vatican I, there was in print the Reverend Stephen Keenan’s very popular Controversial Catechism. It bore the Imprimatur of Archbishop Hughes of New York. Here is one extract. ‘Question: Must not Catholics believe the pope himself to be infallible? Answer: This is a Protestant invention, it is no article of the Catholic faith; no decision of his can bind on pain of heresy, unless it be received and enforced by the teaching body, that is, the bishops of the church.’ It was somewhat embarrassing when, in 1870, a ‘Protestant invention’ became defined Catholic faith. The next edition of the Catechism withdrew this question and answer without a word of explanation.

 

     “Pius IX, by getting mostly Italian and other Latin bishops to support him in 1854, was already canonizing ‘the Italian doctrine’ of papal infallibility.

 

     “The manner of proclaiming the immaculate conception was unique. It did not come from a General Council; it was the pontiff’s alone. Ten years later, the Jesuit theologian, Clemens Schrader, was to call the definition ‘an act peculiar to the pontificate of Pius IX, and one to which no former pontificate can show any parallel’…

 

     “Absolute power had fashioned an absolute ‘truth’; and other Christians found one more sky-high barrier between themselves and the Roman church.”[548]

 

     Thierry said: “I, an exhausted rationalist, feel the need for an infallible authority; my tortured spirit needs rest.”[549] This shows that papal infallibility, far from being a challenge in the face of European rationalism, was in fact its furthest logical development. The pope’s proclamation of his own infallibility represented the high-water mark of European rationalism and individualism, that disastrous departure from Catholic (in the non-Romanist sense) truth that began with the Dictatus Papae of Pius’ predecessor, Gregory VII, in 1075.

 

     European individualism since Gregory VII had branched out into three distinct types: liberal individualism, which decrees the maximum rights for every individual person; nationalist individualism, which decree the maximum rights for one specific nation; and papist individualism which decrees the maximum rights – and knowledge – for one specific person, the Pope. Papist individualism had tended to recede into the background as first liberal individualism, and then nationalist individualism caught the imagination and swept up the energies of the European and American continents. But now, having already anathematised the main propositions of liberalism in his Syllabus of Errors of 1864[550], and having stubbornly resisted the triumph of nationalism in his native Italy[551], he reiterated with extra force and fanaticism his own variant of the fundamental European heresy – the original variant, and the maddest of them all. For is it not madness in the strict sense of the word to regard oneself as the sole depository and arbiter of absolute truth?!

 

     For, as Archimandrite Justin (Popovich) writes: “Through the dogma of infallibility the pope usurped for himself, that is for man, the entire jurisdiction and all the prerogatives which belong only to the Lord God-man. He effectively proclaimed himself as the Church, the papal church, and he has become in her the be-all and end-all, the self-proclaimed ruler of everything. In this way the dogma of the infallibility of the pope has been elevated to the central dogma (svedogmat) of the papacy. And the pope cannot deny this in any way as long as he remains pope of a humanistic papacy. In the history of the human race there have been three principal falls: that of Adam, that of Judas, and that of the pope.”[552]

 

The Paris Commune

 

     In the 1860s Napoleon III had introduced several liberal measures in response to a gradual growth in the opposition to his rule, as was clearly revealed in the 1869 elections. However, his position was greatly strengthened by the results of a plebiscite held on May 8, 1870 seeking the electorate’s verdict on the liberal reforms introduced since 1860. “The results,” writes Roger Price, “were an overwhelming success for the regime: 7,350,000 voters registered their approval, 1,538,000 voted ‘no’, and a further 1,900,000 abstained. To one senior official it represented ‘a new baptism of the Napoleonic dynasty’. It had escaped from the threat of political isolation. The liberal empire offered greater political liberty but also order and renewed prosperity. It had considerable appeal. The centres of opposition remained the cities, with 59 per cent of the votes in Paris negative and this rising to over 70 per cent in the predominantly workers arrondissements of the north-east. In comparison with the 1869 elections, however, opposition appeared to be waning. Republicans were bitterly disappointed. Even Gambetta felt bound to admit that ‘the empire is stronger than ever’. The only viable prospect seemed to be a long campaign to persuade the middle classes and peasants that the republic did not mean revolution…”[553]

 

     Nor did the empire face any great dangers abroad. Indeed, “that June, the newly appointed British Foreign Secretary Lord Granville gazed out with satisfaction on the world scene and claimed – with reason – that he could not discern ‘a cloud in the sky’. In all his experience he had never known ‘so great a lull in foreign affairs’. In Paris, Emperor Napoleon III’s Prime Minister, Emile Ollivier, echoed Granville by declaring that ‘at no period has the maintenance of peace seemed better assured’.”[554]

 

     But at that point the Scripture was fulfilled (not for the first or last time in human history): “When they shall say, Peace and safety, then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape” (I Thessalonians 5.3). The national vanity of the French[555], combined with the still-smouldering fires of the revolution, combined to destroy the empire.

 

     “The Prussian triumph over Austria in 1866 had altered the European balance of power, and ever since, French public opinion had believed in the likelihood of a war by means of which France could re-assert its authority. When war came in 1870 it was however due to a series of errors by a government operating under pressure from conservative opinion. The hysterical response of the right-wing press to the news of a Hohenzollern candidature for the Spanish throne was a major factor in creating an atmosphere favourable to war. Although both the emperor and Ollivier might have been willing to accept a simple withdrawal of this candidature, conservative deputies demanded guarantees which Bismark [the Prussian Chancellor], in the infamous Ems telegram, refused in insulting terms. To have accepted this would have meant another humiliating foreign policy reversal and risked parliamentary disapproval which could have thrown into doubt the bases of the recently revised constitution and particularly the emperor’s personal power. In this situation Napoleon, although aware that the military preparations were seriously defective, succumbed to pressure from the empress, from the foreign minister the Duc de Gramont, and from the more authoritarian Bonapartists and hoped that victory would further consolidate the regime.

 

     “The initial public response was indeed overwhelmingly positive. With the exception of a very small minority of revolutionary militants even republicans felt bound to rally to the national cause. Huge crowds singing patriotic songs gathered in the streets to see the troops off. The first defeats brought panic. The emperor’s response to the developing military crisis was to replace the Ollivier government with one made up of authoritatian Bonapartists under General Cousin-Montauban. This could not alter the fact that the army was better prepared in terms of organisation, training and material for dealing with internal security problems than waging a major European war…

 

     “News of the defeat at Sedan and the capitulation of the emperor and one major army was received in Paris on the evening of 2 September and became public knowledge the following day. This failure utterly discredited the regime. The small group of twenty-seven republican deputies were supported by large crowds in demanding its replacement. On 4 September these invaded the Palais Bourbon and drove out the imperial Corps legislative. In such an uncertain political situation the troops and police responsible for the assembly’s security were unwilling to use force against the crowds. Inspired as much by the desire to prevent a take-over by revolutionaries as by the need to replace the imperial administration a group of moderate Parisian deputies proclaimed the republic and established a Provisional Government of National Defence presided over by the military governor of Paris, General Trochu, to continue the war. In the provinces the news of defeat and revolution usually came as a great surprise but there appeared to be no immediate alternative to acceptance of the Parisian initiative. The Empire in its various manifestations had attracted widespread support. Liberalisation, together with its clear commitment to law and order had seemed likely to reinforce this. Military defeat however represented governmental failure on a scale sufficient to destroy its legitimacy.”[556]

 

     Mark Almond writes: “The Third Republic, proclaimed on 4 September, tried to rally the defence of France, looking back to the example of the First Republic, eighty years earlier: ‘The Republic was victorious over the invasion of 1793. The Republic is declared.’ But the dearth of trained soldiers and equipment made resistance to the Germans very difficult, and by 19 September the German army had surrounded and laid siege to Paris.

 

     “The siege was the essential ingredient in the radicalisation of the city’s population. The famine and other burdens reduced many of the recently prosperous to penury, even prostitution…

 

     “Some 350,000 men formed a National Guard to defend the city’ most of them depended on their soldier’s pay for their livelihood because the economy had collapsed during the siege. Attempts to break out of the city failed on 27 October 1870 and 19 January 1871, and provoked demonstrations at the Hôtel de Ville. Already the suspicion was spreading that politicians outside Paris were less devoted to resistance than the people of the capital…

 

     “Despite the efforts of the Parisians to hold out against the besieging army, the French government felt it was futile to continue the war and signed an armistice with Germany on 28 January 1871. This treaty brought an end to the siege but imposed humiliating terms on France, including the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine and a crippling war indemnity of 5 million francs.

 

     “France went to the polls on 8 February to vote for a new government that would (in accordance with the armistice) take responsibility for accepting or rejecting Germany’s terms for peace. The results revealed how different Paris was from the rest of France. Paris elected a group of radicals to the Assembly, while monarchists dominated the elections elsewhere. The monarchist majority wanted peace with the Germans, whatever the humiliation.

 

     “To achieve this peace, the Prime Minister, Thiers, had to disarm the National Guard in Paris. He ordered the Guard to hand over its artillery to the regular army on 18 March 1871. But he had already antagonised the Guard by cutting its pay, which hit the poor much as the abolition of national workships had done in 1848.  The poor had also been hit when the new National Assembly boted to end the wartime moratoriumn on debts and rents. Thus the people of Montmartre, especially the women, rallied to stop their cannons being hauled away. Bloody clashes occurred between the army and the people. The mayor of Montmartre, Georges Clemenceau, was shocked by the violence of the outburst: ‘The mob which filled the courtyard burst into the street in the grip of some kind of frenzy. Amongst them were chasseurs, soldiers of the line, National Guards, women and children. All were shrieking like wild beasts without realizing what they were doing. I observed then that pathological phenomenon which might be called blood lust. A breath of madness seemed to have passed over this mob…’

 

     “Several hours of fighting and rioting followed, at the end of which the government troops appeared to be no nearer to capturing the guns of Montmartre. Thiers decided to withdraw his forces and remove the Government from the capital city to Versailles. The rebels in Paris, meanwhile, voted to revive the Commune (on the model of 1792) in defiance of the government.

 

     “Only four members of the Commune represented the recently founded Marxist Workingman’s International. Twenty-five out of the Commune’s ninety members worked with their hands, but mainly as skilled artisans. They were outnumbered by professionals, such as journalists, radical doctors and teachers. But two-thirds or more of the Commune’s members would have described themselves as the heirs of the Jacobins of 1793. Karl Marx himself did not at first recognise the Communards as the proletarian revolutionaries of his future Communist society, but his sympathy with their struggle against the French bourgeoisie encouraged the romanticization of the Communard as a premature Communist revolutionary…

 

     “Nationalism and popular local government rather than social revolution were the rallying cries of the Commune, but the flight from Paris of Thiers’ government and most of the wealthy members of society created a new social situation. In the absence of many of the bourgeois elite, Paris fell into the hands of members of the lower orders, who had little experience of administration. Marx noted that the Communards lacked effective leadership. ‘They should at once have marched on Versailles,’ he wrote, before Thiers had time to complete amassing his army. But the Communards’ revolutionary hostility to rank meant that their forces lacked an effective commander-in-chief who might have seized the moment. Spontaneity without strategy was bound to fail.

 

     “From March 1871, two rival authorities existed in France, the national government at Versailles and the Commune in Paris, each with its own armed force and each jockeying for political power. Half-hearted negotiations between the two authorities did take place, but when these broke down Thiers decided to attempt once more to retake the capital. He brought up an army of provincial Frenchmen, suspicious and resentful of what they saw as arrogant Parisians trying to dictate politics to France as so often before. Naturally the Germans looked favourably on any blood-letting among the French that would weaken them further.

 

     “On 2 April, government troops seized Courbevoie, a suburb of Paris, and began a new siege of Paris. For several weeks Government troops bombarded the fortresses protecting the capital, taking them one by one, and by 21 May the army was able to force its way into Paris through an undefended point to the south-west of the city. Over the next seven days, known as the ‘bloody week’, the army methodically reconquered the capital from west to east. Each quartier defended itself, giving the army the opportunity to pick off district after district. In the course of the struggle, the Communards set fire to ancient buildings like the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville. They also shot their hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris, Georges Darboy. Given the anti-clerical tradition of revolution in France he might have seemed an ideal reactionary scapegoat, but Darboy himself was disliked by French conservatives: he had voted against Papal Infallibility at the Vatican Council two years earlier and was something of a liberal. The Communards ensured that Paris would not have another liberal archbishop for almost a century…

 

     “As many as 20,000 Communards – including women and children – were killed as the army fought its way forward through the streets of Paris, while another 40,000 insurgents were taken prisoner. About half of these were released soon enough, but 10,000 were transported to the colonies, including the remote New Caledonia in the South Pacific.”[557]

 

     Far more people died in the fall of the Commune than in the Terror of 1793 in Paris. It represented, if not the fall of the revolution as such, at any rate the end of the French revolution that had begun in 1789. After 1871 the revolutionary struggle would acquire new forms and pass to other nations…

 

     The following words of the poet and diplomat Fyodor Tiutchev, while a reflection on the events of 1848, could still more appropriately a commentary on the events of 1871: “The revolution is an illness devouring the West… The revolution is the purest product, the last word and the highest expressionof that which we have been accustomed to call, already for three centuries now, the civilization of the West. It is contemporary thought, in all its integrity, from the time of its break with the Church. The thought is as follows: man, in the final analysis, depends only on himself both in the government of his reason and in the government of his will. Every authority comes from man; everything that proclaims itself to be higher than man is either an illusion or deception. In a word, it is the apotheosis of the human I in the most literal meaning of the word… We are quite possibly present at the bankruptcy of the whole civilization… The revolution is not simply an opponent clothed in flesh and blood. It is more than a Principle. It is Spirit, reason, in order to gain victory over it, we must know how to drive it out…

 

     “As regards France, which cannot continue to exist without renouncing at every step that which has become for the last 60 years its living principle, the Revolution, this country is by the logic of things and in a most fatal manner doomed to powerlessness. It is a society doomed from a feeling of self-preservation to use only one of its arms, and that only in order to shackle the other… The revolution is the logical consequence and final end of contemporary civilization, which antichristian rationalism has won from the Roman church. The revolution has in fact become convinced of its complete inability to act as a unifying principle, and has to the same degree become convinced, on the contrary, that it possesses a disintegrating power. On the other hand, the elements of the old society which have been preserved in Europe are still sufficiently alive that, in case of necessity, they can throw everything that has been done by the Revolution back to its point of origin. But they have also been so penetrated by the revolutionary principle, so distorted by it, that they are almost incapable of creating anything that could be accepted by European society as a lawful authority. That is the dilemma which rears its head with all its exceptional importance at the present time… The European West is only half of a great organic whole, but the difficulties undergone by it, difficulties that are from an external point of view insoluble, will acquire their resolution only in its other half,” that is, in the Russian Empire.

 

     “In Europe recently we have become too accustomed to reduce our evaluation of the actions, or, more accurately, the half-formed intentions of French politics to the phrase which has turned into a proverb: ‘France herself knows what she wants.’ This may be true; but in order to be completely just, we should add: ‘France cannot know what she wants.’ After all, in order to be in a condition to know this, one has first of all to have a single will; but France has already for the last sixty years been condemned to have two wills. We are not talking about that discord, that difference of opinions, whether political or otherwise, that is inherent in a great country in which society is given over, through force of circumstances, to the dominion of parties: we are talking about a fact of incomparably great importance – about that constant, essential and eternally irreconcilable hatred which for the last sixty years has constituted, so to speak, the very essence of the people’s conscience in France. The very soul of France is divided. Although the revolution, since it gained control of this country, has succeeded in changing it, distorting it and turning it upside-down, it has not succeeded, and never will succeed, in assimilating it to itself completely. Whatever it did, in the spiritual life of France there are deposits and principles which will always offer opposition to it – at any rate, until France exists in the world; such are the Catholic church with its beliefs and teaching, Christian marriage and the family, and even property. On the other hand, it is also possible to foresee that the revolution, having entered not only into the blood, but also into the soul of this society, will never voluntarily agree to let go of its prey, and since know of not a single incantatory formula in the history of the world that would be applicable to a whole people, we must think that such an unending inner struggle of a constant and, so to speak, organic bifurcation may become permanent as the natural condition of the new French society. Already for sixty years there has been a combination whereby the state, revolutionary in principle, has dragged a merely rebellious society behind it in tow, while the government, the authorities, who are necessarily related to both, not being able to reconcile them, has by force of circumstances been condemned to a false and pitiful situation, surrounded by dangers and struck by powerlessness…”[558]

 

    

 

 

 


4. THE EAST: THE GENDARME OF EUROPE

 

The root elements of our Russian life have been characterised long ago, and they are so powerfully and completely expressed by the familiar words: Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality. That is what we must preserve! When these principles become weaker or fail, the Russian people will cease to be Russian. It will then lose its sacred three-coloured flag.

Bishop Theophan the Recluse.[559]

 

The hegemony of the Church I do not understand in the form of an inquisition or of persecution for faith; it consists in the State’s setting itself the task (1) of becoming imbued with the spirit of the Church, and (2) of seeing in its own existence only a means for the best establishment of the Church of God on earth.

Ivan Kireevsky.

 

Beneficent Europe has taught us external arts and sciences,

But it takes away our inner goodness and shakes our Orthodox Faith.

It draws money to itself.

St. Macarius of Optina.

 

Introduction: Instinct and Consciousness

 

     Under the shock of the Decembrist rebellion, and of the resumption of the revolution’s march in Europe, it was necessary for Russia clearly to formulate the foundations of her national life, and her religio-moral-political differences from Europe. And the process now began, in informal discussion circles in St. Petersburg and in elegant aristocratic salons in Moscow.

 

     “It is completely natural,” writes L.A. Tikhomorov, “that the clarification of our political principle lagged behind the clarification of the principles of nationality and the faith. As long as our moral-religious ideal was wrapped in a kind of fog or was even, in our opinion, unsound, the monarchy could be represented to consciousness only as absolutism, that is, as a completely unlimited power. Monarchy… is limited by the content of its ideal: if the ideal is unclear, then the power is already in fact unlimited and becomes absolutist.

 

     “And so the development of the monarchical principle, its self-consciousness, in this period could not fail to decline. It was preserved amongst us in accordance with the former voice of instinct, but it was not explained by reason. Therefore of all the aspects of scientific creativity, the state-legal remained throughout the new period the least developed among us, as well as being the most imitative, the most imbued by a simple copying of European ideas, and for that reason – in conformity with the state thought of Europe – assumed a constitutional character.

 

     “The legitimists in Europe in their time were the channels of the monarchical idea. Our juridical thought was the channel of the anti-monarchical, democratic idea.

 

     “When the question of limiting the autocracy or even of external external manifestations of the power of the Monarch in international relations was raised, voices were found among us which pointed to some close bond between the Tsar and Russia, a bond that was a limitation for the Monarch. By this absolutism was denied, as was the teaching that the sovereign can order everything ‘as he likes’. The political thought of Russian State law was as it were raised to the level of consciousness.

 

     “Thus at the moment when Emperor Alexander I, who had been brought up on republican ideas and considered the republic higher than the monarchy, was thinking about limiting his own autocratic power, he heard an eloquent protest from Karamzin.

 

     “’If Alexander,’ wrote Karamzin, ‘inspired by a magnanimous hatred for the abuses of autocracy, had taken a pen to prescribe for himself new laws besides those of God and conscience, then the true Russian citizen would have been so bold as to stop his hand and say: Your Majesty, you are transgressing the bounds of your power. Taught by long-term disasters, Russia entrusted the autocracy to your forebear before the holy altar and demanded that he rule her supremely and undividedly. This covenant is the foundation of your power: we have no other. You can do everything, but you cannot lawfully limit your power.’

 

     “In his note, ‘The Opinion of a Russian Citizen’, given to the sovereign in 1819 with reference to plans for the restoration of Poland, Karamzin tried to prove again that the sovereign had no right to do this:

 

     “’You think,’ writes Karamzin, ‘to restore the ancient kingdom of Poland, but is this restoration in accordance with the law of the State good of Russia? Is it in accordance with Your sacred duties, with Your love for Russia and justice itself?… Do the sovereigns not swear to preserve the integrity of their domains? These lands (that is, Belorussia, Lithuania, Volhynia and Podolia) were already Russia when Metropolitan Plato entrusted to you the crown of Monomakh, Peter and Catherine… Will they say that they unlawfully divided Poland? But You would be acting still more unlawfully if You thought to wipe out its injustice by dividing Russia herself. We took Poland by the sword: that is our right, to which all States are obliged for their existence, for all have been constituted from conquests. Catherine is responsible before God, and before history, for her act, but it is already done, and for You it is already holy: for You Poland is a lawful Russian dominion. There are no old deeds of purchase in politics: otherwise we would be bound to re-establish the Kazan and Astrakhan kingdoms, the Novgorod republic, the great Princedom of Ryazan, etc. Moreover, even according to the old deeds of purchase Belorussia, Volhynia and Podolia, together with Galicia, were once the indigenous heritage of Russia…

 

     “’Until now,’ he continues, ‘our rule was: not a step to an enemy, not a step to a friend. Napoleon was able to conquer Russia, but You, although You are an Autocrat, were not able to cede to him a single Russian hut for free. That is our character and our State character… Your Majesty, I would vouch my life to You that an inevitable consequence of the wholesale restoration of Poland would be the loss, not only of our beautiful provinces, but also of our love for the Tsar; we would cool in soul in our feeling for the Fatherland, seeing it become the plaything of self-willed caprice…’

 

     “In these interesting reasonings we catch the voice of feeling which Karamzin had in his heart and wanted to stir up in the heart of the Sovereign. But from the point of view of principle this is all very unclear and even questionable: Karamzin even refers to some pact between the tsar and the people when the dynasty was elected, although, of course, if that was the whole issue then the pact agreed upon by the parties could always be reviewed and changed. In his reasonings on Poland Karamzin bases everything on the obligation to preserve tradition… This, of course, is easily refuted. Nevertheless a certain truth can be felt here, the rejection of absolute power and an indication of the bond between the Tsar and the nation, a bond which serves as the source of the Tsar’s obligations.

 

     “Instinctual feelings surfaced in Russia sufficiently constantly, but there was very little consciousness, very little theory of Tsarist power and the mutual relatins of Tsar and people.

 

     “This consciousness became the more necessary in that bureaucratic practice inexorably brought to us the idea of absolutism, while the European influence, affirming that Tsarist power was nothing other than absolutism, rejected it. In the 19th century Russian thought was sharply divided into ‘westernizers’ and ‘Slavophiles’, and the whole of the westernising part conducted propaganda against autocracy…

 

     “Throughout the 19th century the whole current of educated westernising thought, which created the so-called ‘intelligentsia’, conducted propaganda against autocracy – in Russia as far as censorship allowed it, and with complete openness in its press abroad. The national part of educated society could not help trying to defend its historical Russian institution of monarchy. The schism in the educated part of Russia between the ‘westernizers’ (under various names) and the national part of the educated class grew still wider after 1861. Moreover, in the ‘westernizing’ tendency there developed a terrible rejection of everything that was typically Russian, while its ideas gained great strength in all the middle educated classes and encompassed the whole people. This struggle, which embraced every aspect of life, was concentrated especially strongly on the autocracy, as a principle and as an institution.

 

     “In this long historical period the monarchical idea was nevertheless clarified to a certain degree. The words of our great artists – Pushkin, Gogol, A. Majkov and others – sound as excellent expressions of the monarchical consciousness. [560] But all these were expressions of feeling, manifestations of instinct, which was so strong in the Russian personality generally that quite often it unexpectedly appears even in the most extreme deniers, as, for example, Bakunin.

 

     “But in the sense of consciousness, the monarchical idea was clarified mainly by means of public debates, in quarrels with opponents, no by a strictly scientific method. Scientific works, which remained basically imitative, in general gave almost nothing to clarify autocracy and most often served only to mix it up hopelessly with absolutism.

 

     “In general, when our statist scholars passed onto the soil of explaining autocracy, then in the best case they repeated the judgements of the publicists. If the monarchical idea of power was in any way clarified amongst us, then it was not in science, not in the study or auditorium of the professor and academic, but on the pages of newspapers and journals, in the verbal disputes of the representatives of the parties and tendencies. Russian political thought, insofar as it had any success in the national spirit, was indebted in everything not to statist science, which instilled European ideas and concept – but to the publicists.

 

     “Among its representatives especially much was done by the Slavophiles in general and by I.S. Aksakov in particular, and particularly by M.N. Katkov who stood behind them….”[561]

 

Tsar Nicholas I

 

     However, before discussing these debates between the westernizers and Slavophiles in more detail, it is necessary to examine the work of the Tsar who dominated the period, to the rage of the westernizers and even of some of the Slavophiles, but to the undoubted benefit of the Church and State of Russia.

 

     Tsar Nicholas had never been swayed by liberal ideas. Having gained something of the flavour of democratic life in France during the reign of his father, he said to Golenischev-Kutuzov: “If, to our misfortune, this evil genius transferred all these clubs and meetings, which create more noise than substance, to us, then I would beseech God to repeat the miracle of the confusion of the tongues or, even better, deprive those who use their tongues in this way of the gift of speech.”[562] A man of strict life and strict opinions, who was venerated by Saints Seraphim of Sarov and Theophilus of the Kiev Caves, his rule was made still stricter by the fact that he came to the throne in the midst of the Decembrist rebellion.

 

      Some have portrayed the Tsar as having been unreasonably strict and censorious. However, he wanted to abolish serfdom, and took important preparatory measures towards that great act carried out by his son. Moreover, he had the ability to convert, and not simply crush, his opponents. Thus it was after a long, sincere conversation with Pushkin that he was able to say: “Gentlemen, I present to you a new Pushkin!” “And it was truly thus,” writes Lebedev. “Not out of fear before the authorities, not hypocritically, but sincerely and truly, Pushkin, the friend of the ‘Decembrists’, the worldly skiver, in life as in poetry, after 1826 renounced his free-thinking and Masonry and created his best and greatest works!”[563]

 

     “Having rejected a rotten support, the nobility,” writes Lebedev, Tsar Nicholas “made his supports the Orthodox Church, the system of state institutions (in which the class of bureaucrats, of officials acquired great significance) and the Russian people which he loved! Having grasped this main direction of the Tsar’s politics, Count S. Uvarov, the minister of enlightenment expressed it [on March 21, 1833] in the remarkable formula: Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood….”[564]

 

     But the formula alone was not enough. It had to be explained and clarified and defended: Orthodoxy against Catholicism and Protestantism, Autocracy against Absolutism and Liberal Democracy, Nationhood against Socialist Internationalism and Phyletistic Nationalism. Moreover, the priorities had to be understood: first Orthodoxy, then Autocracy, and then Nationhood. For the supreme value was Orthodoxy, whose first line of defence was the Autocracy, which in turn was defended by national feeling. Any attempt to invert this order – as, for example, to make Orthodoxy merely a support for Autocracy, or both as supports of Nationhood, would be equivalent to idolatry and lead to the downfall of Russia.

 

     Some, such as D.S. Khomiakov, thought that an inversion of this order, placing Autocracy as the supreme value, did indeed take place.[565] However, this is not the view of Protopriest Lev Lebedev, who writes: “Beginning already with Paul I, the rapprochement of imperial power with the Church continued under Nicholas I, being raised to a qualitatively higher level. The All-Russian Autocrat from now on did not oppose himself to the Church and did not even consider himself ‘self-sufficient’ or ‘independent’ of her. On the contrary, he saw himself as a faithful son of the Orthodox Church, completely sharing the faith of his people and bound in all his politics to be guided by the commandments of God, proceeding precisely from the Orthodox world-view (and not from the demands of a certain non-existent ‘religion of nature’, as under Catherine II). This was a good, grace-filled radical change. It made itself immediately felt also in the relations of the two powers – the tsar’s and the Church’s. From now on the over-procurators of the Synod were people who enjoyed the respect and trust of the Russian hierarchs and considered themselves faithful children of the Church. Such were Admiral Shishkov and Count Protasov. There was not always unanimity between them and the members of the Synod. Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), for example, more than once ‘warred’ with Protasov. But these were quarrels about separate matters, where both sides were governed by the single desire to benefit Holy Orthodoxy (even if they understood this differently).”[566]

 

     This beneficial change in Church-State relations was reflected in the extremely important, successful and (western cavillers notwithstanding) voluntary reunion of the uniates in the western territories with the Orthodox Church. Favourable conditions for this change had been created by the fall of Poland in 1815, the expulsion of the Jesuits from Russia in 1820 and the suppression of the Polish rebellion in 1830-1831. Then, in 1835, a secret committee on the uniate question was formed in St. Petersburg consisting of the uniate bishop Joseph Semashko, the real soul of the movement, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow, the over-procurator of the Holy Synod and the minister of the interior. By 1839 1,600,000 had converted to Orthodoxy.[567]

 

     In spite of these positive changes, it must be admitted that there was no formal change in the Tsar’s relationship to the Church, which continued to fall short of the symphonic ideal. In 1832 he published a new collection of the Fundamental Laws of the Empire[568], which included the article: “The Emperor as the Christian sovereign is the supreme defender and preserver of the dogmas of the dominant faith and the supervisor of right faith and every good order in the Holy Church”. In the administration of the Church, intoned articles 42 and 43, “the autocratic power acts by means of the Holy Governing Synod, which was founded by it.”

 

     And yet when there were clashes between the Tsar and the hierarchs on matters of conscience, the Tsar showed himself ready to give way, which gives strength to Lebedev’s claim that a qualitatively higher level of Church-State relations had been attained. Thus once Metropolitan Philaret refused to bless a triumphal monument because it had some pagan hieroglyphs and unseemly figures representing pagan gods on it. The Emperor, showing a good grasp of church history, said: “I understand, but tell him [Philaret] that I am not Peter the Great and he is not St. Metrophanes.” Nevertheless, he allowed Philaret not to take part in the ceremony.[569] According to another account, on hearing of Philaret’s disinclination to serve, the Emperor said: “Prepare the horses; I’m leaving today”, so that the ceremony took place without either Tsar or metropolitan.[570] Afterwards, on returning to the Trinity Lavra, Philaret said to his spiritual father, Archimandrite Anthony: “Did I act well? I annoyed the Tsar. I don’t have the merits of the hierarch Metrophanes.” “Don’t take them upon yourself,” replied Fr. Anthony, “but remember that you are a Christian bishop, a pastor of the Church of Christ, to whom only one thing is terrible: to depart from the will of Jesus Christ.” Then the hierarch revealed that the previous night St. Sergius had entered his locked room, come up to his bed, and said: “Don’t be disturbed, it will all pass…”[571]

 

     Again, in 1835 the Emperor wanted his son and heir, the Tsarevich Alexander Nikolaevich, to become a member of the Holy Synod. But Metropolitan Philaret, together with the other hierarchs, was against the idea, and on meeting the tsarevich once, asked him when he had received clerical ordination. This forced the tsarevich to refrain from attending sessions of the Holy Synod.[572]

 

     When the Englishman William Palmer criticised the dominance of the State over the Church in Russia, Alexis Khomiakov replied: “That the Church is not quite independent of the state, I allow; but let us consider candidly and impartially how far that dependence affects, and whether it does indeed affect, the character of the Church. The question is so important, that is has been debated during this very year [1852] by serious men in Russia, and has been brought, I hope, to a satisfactory conclusion. A society may be dependent in fact and free in principle, or vice-versa. The first case is a mere historical accident; the second is the destruction of freedom, and has no other issue by rebellion and anarchy. The first is the weakness of man; the second the depravity of law. The first is certainly the case in Russia, but the principles are by no means deteriorated. Whether freedom of opinion in civil and political questions is, or is not, too much restrained, is no business of ours as member of the Church (though I, for my part, know that I am almost reduced to complete silence); but the state never interferes directly in the censorship of works written about religious questions. In this respect, I will confess again that the censorship is, in my opinion, most oppressive; but that does not depend upon the state, and is simply the fault of the over-cautious and timid prudence of the higher clergy. I am very far from approving of it, and I know that very useful thoughts and books are lost in the world, or at least to the present generation.

 

     “But this error, which my reason condemns, has nothing to do with ecclesiastical liberty; and though very good tracts and explanations of the Word of God are oftentimes suppressed on the false supposition of their perusal being dangerous to unenlightened minds, I think that those who suppress the Word of God itself should be the last to condemn the excessive prudence of our ecclesiastical censors. Such a condemnation coming from the Latins would be absurdity itself. But is the action of the Church quite free in Russia? Certainly not; but this depends wholly on the weakness of her higher representatives, and upon their desire to get the protection of the state, not for themselves, generally speaking, but for the Church. There is certainly a moral error in that want of reliance upon God Himself; but it is an accidental error of persons, and not of the Church, and has nothing to do with our religious convictions. It would be a difference case, if there was the smallest instance of a dogmatic error, or something near to it, admitted or suffered without protestation out of weakness; but I defy anybody to find anything like that…”[573]

 

Bishop Ignatius of the Caucasus: The Struggle against Westernism

 

     Khomiakov’s point is well taken. And yet the danger posed by the personal weakness of some of the Church hierarchs, and their over-reliance on the power of the State, was perhaps greater than he realised. The danger was the greater in that the educated classes were gradually losing the savour of True Christianity, which meant that in order for the Church to defend her position and increase her influence, she would have to struggle, not only against a State that interfered too much in her internal affairs, but also against the secularist views of the majority of the leading laymen in both Church and State.

 

     One of the ways in which this secularism was manifested was in tolerance for Christian heresies to the extent of placing them on a par with Orthodoxy. Thus in the 1850s the great elder, St. Ambrose of Optina wrote: “Was any benefit gained by religious tolerance in Russia in relation to foreign nations: the French and others, not to speak of the Jew, who, as a people rejected by God, is despised by all, and nowhere has any significance? Religious tolerance of the indicated nations could have no influence on the simple people, because the way of life of our simple people is completely different from the condition and situation of these nations: but in the circle of Russian educated people this religious tolerance had a great influence on morality and on their domestic way of life. Now many educated people bear only the name of Orthodox, but in actual fact completely adhere to the morals and customs of foreign lands and foreign beliefs. Without any torment of conscience they violate the regulations of the Orthodox Church concerning fasts and gather together at balls and dances on the eves of great Feasts of the Lord, when Orthodox Christians should be in church in prayerful vigil. This would be excusable if such gatherings took place on the eves of ordinary days, but not on the eves of Feasts, and especially great Feasts. Are not such acts and deeds clearly inspired by our enemy, the destroyer of souls, contrary to the commandment of the Lord which says: carry out your ordinary affairs for six days, but the seventh (festal) day must be devoted to God in pious service? How have Orthodox Christians come to such acts hated by God? It is not for no other reason than indiscriminate communion with believers of other faiths…”

 

     The danger of what we would not call ecumenist indifferentism was especially noted by Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov (+1867), who wrote: “You say, ‘heretics are Christians just the same.’ Where did you take that from? Perhaps someone or other calling himself a Christian while knowing nothing of Christ, may in his extreme ignorance decide to acknowledge himself as the same kind of Christian as heretics, and fail to distinguish the holy Christian faith from those offspring of the curse, blasphemous heresies. Quite otherwise, however, do true Christians reason about this. A whole multitude of saints has received a martyr’s crown, has preferred the most cruel and prolonged tortures, prison, exile, rather than agree to take part with heretics in their blasphemous teaching.

 

     “The Ecumenical Church has always recognised heresy as a mortal sin; she has always recognised that the man infected with the terrible malady of heresy is spiritually dead, a stranger to grace and salvation, in communion with the devil and the devil’s damnation. Heresy is a sin of the mind; it is more a diabolic than a human sin. It is the devil’s offspring, his invention; it is an impiety that is near idol-worship. Every heresy contains in itself blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, whether against the dogma or the action of the Holy Spirit…”[574]

 

     Bishop Ignatius was pessimistic about the future of Russia: “We are helpless to arrest this apostasy. Impotent hands will have no power against it and nothing more will be required than the attempt to withhold it. The spirit of the age will reveal the apostasy. Study it, if you wish to avoid it, if you wish to escape this age and the temptation of its spirits. One can suppose, too, that the institution of the Church which has been tottering for so long will fall terribly and suddenly. Indeed, no one is able to stop or prevent it. The present means to sustain the institutional Church are borrowed from the elements of the world, things inimical to the Church, and the consequence will be only to accelerate its fall. Nevertheless, the Lord protects the elect and their limited number will be filled.”

 

     Bishop Ignatius’ attacks on ecumenism and the influence of the western heresies on Russian society and Church life marked the beginning of the return of Russian theology to the patristic traditions of the Ecumenical Church. He was highly valued by the best of his contemporaries, such as Elder Anthony (Bochkov) of Optina, who called him the finest writers and teacher on monasticism of his age, unrivalled in his knowledge of the Holy Fathers, “a living library of the Father@. He was also “the teacher of weeping, the new Jeremiah”.[575]

 

Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow: Church and State

 

     One of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow’s great achievements was a harmonious and deeply-thought-out exposition of the nature of the State in Orthodox thinking. He thought that “it was necessary for there to be a close union between the ruler and the people – a union, moreover, that was based exclusively on righteousness. The external expression of the prosperity of a state was the complete submission of the people to the government. The government in a state had to enjoy the rights of complete inviolability on the part of the subjects. And if it was deprived of these rights, the state could not be firm, it was threatened with danger insofar as two opposing forces would appear: self-will on the part of the subjects and predominance on the part of the government. ‘If the government is not firm,’ taught Philaret, ‘then the state also is not firm. Such a state is like a city built on a volcanic mountain: what does its firmness signify when beneath it is concealed a force which can turn it into ruins at any minute? Subjects who do not recognize the sacred inviolability of the rulers are incited by hope of self-will to attain self-will; an authority which is not convinced of its inviolability is incited by worries about its security to attain predominance; in such a situation the state wavers between the extremes of self-will and predominance, between the horrors of anarchy and repression, and cannot affirm in itself obedient freedom, which is the focus and soul of social life.’

 

     “The holy hierarch understood the rebellion [of the Decembrists] as being a rebellion against the State, against itself. ‘Subjects can themselves understand,’ said Philaret, ‘that in destroying the authorities they are destroying the constitution of society and consequently they are themselves destroying themselves.’”[576]

 

     Philaret, writes V. Shokhin, “did not doubt that monarchical rule is ‘power from God’ (Romans 13.1) in its significance for Russian history and statehood, and more than once in his sermons expressed the most submissively loyal feelings with regard to all the representatives of the Royal Family. But he was one of the very few archpastors who had the courage to resist the tendency – very characteristic of Russian conditions – to reduce Orthodoxy to ‘glorification of the tsar’. Thus, contrary to many hierarchs, who from feelings of servility warmly accepted Nicholas I’s attempt to introduce the heir among the members of the Synod, he justly saw in this a manifestation of caesaropapism…, and in the application of attributes of the Heavenly King to the earthly king – a most dangerous deformation of religious consciousness…, and in such phenomena as the passing of a cross procession around statues of the emperor – a direct return to paganism.”[577]

 

     Metropolitan Philaret, as Fr. Georges Florovsky writes, “distinctly and firmly reminded people of the Church’s independence and freedom, reminded them of the limits of the state. And in this he sharply and irreconcilably parted with his epoch, with the whole of the State’s self-definition in the new, Petersburgian Russia. Philaret was very reserved and quiet when speaking. By his intense and courageous silence he with difficulty concealed and subdued his anxiety about what was happening. Through the vanity and confusion of events he saw and made out the threatening signs of the righteous wrath of God that was bound to come. Evil days, days of judgement were coming – ‘it seems that we are already living in the suburbs of Babylon, if not in Babylon itself,’ he feared… ‘My soul is sorrowful,’ admitted Metropolitan Philaret once. ‘It seems to me that the judgement which begins at the house of God is being more and more revealed… How thickly does the smoke come from the coldness of the abyss and how high does it mount’… And only in repentance did he see an exit, in universal repentance ‘for many things, especially in recent years’.

 

     “Philaret had his own theory of the State, of the sacred kingdom. And in it there was not, and could not be, any place for the principles of state supremacy. It is precisely because the powers that be are from God, and the sovereigns rule by the mercy of God, that the Kingdom has a completely subject and auxiliary character. ‘The State as State is not subject to the Church’, and therefore the servants of the Church already in the apostolic canons are strictly forbidden ‘to take part in the administration of the people’. Not from outside, but from within must the Christian State be bound by the law of God and the ecclesiastical order. In the mind of Metropolitan Philaret, the State is a moral union, ‘a union of free moral beings’ and a union founded on mutual service and love – ‘a certain part of the general dominion of the Almighty, outwardly separate, but by an invisible power yoked into the unity of the whole’… And the foundation of power lies in the principle of service. In the Christian State Philaret saw the Anointed of God, and before this banner of God’s good will he with good grace inclined his head. ‘The Sovereign receives the whole of his lawfulness from the Church’s anointing’, that is, in the Church and through the Church. Here the Kingdom inclines its head before the Priesthood and takes upon itself the vow of service to the Church, and its right to take part in ecclesiastical affairs. He possesses this not by virtue of his autocracy and authority, but precisely by virtue of his obedience and vow. And this right does not extend or pass to the organs of state administration, and between the Sovereign and the Church there cannot and must not be any dividing wall or mediation. The Sovereign is anointed, but not the State. The Sovereign enters into the Church, but the State as such remains outside the Church. And for that reason it has no rights and privileges in the Church. In her inner constitution the Church is completely independent, and has no need of the help or defence of the secular authorities – ‘the altar does not fear to fall even without this protection’. For the Church is ruled by Christ Himself, Who distributes and realizes ‘his own episcopacy of souls’ through the apostolic hierarchy, which ‘is not similar to any form of secular rule’.

 

     “The Church has her own inviolable code of laws, her own strength and privileges, which exceed all earthly measures. ‘In His word Jesus Christ did not outline for her a detailed and uniform statute, so that His Kingdom should not seem to be of this world’… The Church has her own special form of action – in prayer, in the service of the sacraments, in exhortation and in pastoral care. And for real influence on public life, for her real enchurchment, according to Metropolitan Philaret’s thought, the interference of the hierarchy in secular affairs is quite unnecessary – ‘it is necessary not so much that a bishop should sit in the governmental assembly of grandees, as that the grandees and men of nobles birth should more frequently and ardently surround the altar of the Lord together with the bishop’… Metropolitan Philaret always with great definiteness drew a firm line between the state and ecclesiastical orders. Of course, he did not demand and did not desire the separation of the State from the Church, its departure from the Church into the arbitrariness of secular vanity. But at the same time he always sharply underlined the complete heterogeneity and particularity of the State and the Church. The Church cannot be in the State, and the State cannot be in the Church – ‘unity and harmony’ must be realized between them in the unity of the creative realization of God’s commandments.

 

     “It is not difficult to understand how distant and foreign this way of thinking was for the State functionaries of the Nicolaitan spirit and time, and how demanding and childish it seemed to them. Philaret did not believe in the power of rebukes and reprimands. He did not attach great significance to the external forms of life – ‘it is not some kind of transformation that is needed, but a choice of men and supervision’, he used to say. And above all what was necessary was an inner creative uplift, a gathering and renewal of spiritual forces. What was needed was an intensification of creative activity, a strengthening and intensification of ecclesiastical and pastoral freedom. As a counterweight to the onslaught of the State, Metropolitan Philaret thought about the reestablishment of the living unity of the local episcopate, which would be realized in constant consultative communion of fellow pastors and bishops, and strengthened at times by small congresses and councils, until a general local Council would become inwardly possible and achievable.[578] Metropolitan Philaret always emphasized that ‘we live in the Church militant’… And with sadness he recognized that ‘the quantity of sins and carelessnesses which have mounted up in the course of more than one century almost exceeds the strength and means of correction’… Philaret was not a man of struggle, and was weighed down ‘by remaining in the chatter and cares of the city and works of men’. He lived in expectation ‘of that eternally secure city, from which it will not be necessary to flee into any desert’, He wanted to withdraw, to run away, and beyond the storm of affairs to pray for the mercy and longsuffering of God, for ‘defence from on high’.”[579]

 

     The State, wrote Philaret, is “a union of free moral beings, united amongst themselves with the sacrifice of part of their freedom for the preservation and confirmation by the common forces of the law of morality, which constitutes the necessity of their existence. The civil laws are nothing other than interpretations of this law in application to particular cases and guards placed against its violation.”[580]

 

     Philaret emphasised the rootedness of the State in the family, with the State deriving its essential properties and structure from the family: “The family is older than the State. Man, husband, wife, father, son, mother, daughter and the obligations and virtues inherent in these names existed before the family grew into the nation and the State was formed. That is why family life in relation to State life can be figuratively depicted as the root of the tree. In order that the tree should bear leaves and flowers and fruit, it is necessary that the root should be strong and bring pure juice to the tree. In order that State life should develop strongly and correctly, flourish with education, and bring forth the fruit of public prosperity, it is necessary that family life should be strong with the blessed love of the spouses, the sacred authority of the parents, and the reverence and obedience of the children, and that as a consequence of this, from the pure elements of family there should arise similarly pure principles of State life, so that with veneration for one’s father veneration for the tsar should be born and grow, and that the love of children for their mother should be a preparation of love for the fatherland, and the simplehearted obedience of domestics should prepare and direct the way to self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness in obedience to the laws and sacred authority of the autocrat…”[581]

 

     The idea that the State grows out of the family, and must therefore retain the same bonds of love and filial submission that exist in the family, was imbibed by the bearers of the monarchical idea. Thus Tsar Alexander III of Russia told his son, the future Tsar-Martyr Nicholas: “Strengthen the family, because it is the basis of every State”.[582] And the link between family feeling and feeling for the monarchical State is illustrated by the feelings of Prince Sergius Trubetskoy during his childhood under the same Tsar Alexander: “Father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers were for us in childhood not only sources and centres of love and unquestioned authority; they were enveloped in our eyes by a kind of aura which the modern generation does not know… Our fathers and grandfathers were in our children’s eyes both patriarchs and family monarchs, while our mothers and grandmothers were family tsaritsas.”[583]

 

     If the foundation of the State is the family, and each family is both a miniature State and a miniature monarchy, it follows that the most natural form of Statehood is Monarchy – more specifically, a Monarchy that is in union with, as owing its origin to, the Heavenly Monarch, God. Despotic monarchies identify themselves, rather than unite themselves, with the Deity, so they cannot be said to correspond to the Divine order of things. In ancient times, the only monarchy that was in accordance with the order and the command of God was the Israelite autocracy.

 

     As Metropolitan Philaret demonstrates, this superiority of the Israelite Autocracy makes of it a model for all nations in all times: “It is in the family that we must seek the beginnings and first model of authority and submission, which are later opened out in the large family which is the State. The father is… the first master… but since the authority of the father was not created by the father himself and was not given to him by the son, but came into being with man from Him Who created man, it is revealed that the deepest source and the highest principle of the first power, and consequently of every later power among men, is in God – the Creator of man. From Him ‘every family in heaven and on earth is named’ (Ephesians 3.15). Later, when sons of sons became a people and peoples, and from the family there grew the State, which was too vast for the natural authority of a father, God gave this authority a new artificial image and a new name in the person of the King, and thus by His wisdom kings rule (Proverbs 8.15). In the times of ignorance, when people had forgotten their Creator… God, together with His other mysteries, also presented the mystery of the origin of the powers that be before the eyes of the world, even in a sensory image, in the form of the Hebrew people whom He had chosen for Himself; that is: in the Patriarch Abraham He miraculously renewed the ability to be a father and gradually produced from him a tribe, a people and a kingdom; He Himself guided the patriarchs of this tribe; He Himself raised judges and leaders for this people; He Himself ruled over this kingdom (I Kings 8.7). Finally, He Himself enthroned kings over them, continuing to work miraculous signs over the kings, too. The Highest rules over the kingdom of men and gives it to whom He wills. ‘The Kingdom is the Lord’s and He Himself is sovereign of the nations’ (Psalm 21.29). ‘The power of the earth is in the hand of the Lord, and in due time He will set over it one that is profitable’ (Sirach 10.4).”

 

     “A non-Russian would perhaps ask me now: why do I look on that which was established by God for one people (the Hebrews) and promised to one King (David) as on a general law for Kings and peoples? I would have no difficulty in replying: because the law proceeding from the goodness and wisdom of God is without doubt the perfect law; and why not suggest the perfect law for all? Or are you thinking of inventing a law which would be more perfect than the law proceeding from the goodness and wisdom of God?”

 

     “Let us not go into the sphere of the speculations and controversies in which certain people – who trust in their own wisdom more than others – work on the invention… of better, as they suppose, principles for the transfiguration of human societies… But so far they have not in any place or time created such a quiet and peaceful life… They can shake ancient States, but they cannot create anything firm… They languish under the fatherly and reasonable authority of the King and introduce the blind and cruel power of the mob and the interminable disputes of those who seek power. They deceive people in affirming that they will lead them to liberty; in actual fact they are drawing them from lawful freedom to self-will, so as later to subject them to oppression with full right. Rather than their self-made theorising they should study the royal truth from the history of the peoples and kingdoms… which was written, not out of human passion, but by the holy prophets of God, that is – from the history of the people of God which was from of old chosen and ruled by God. This history shows that the best and most useful for human societies is done not by people, but by a person, not by many, but by one. Thus: What government gave the Hebrew people statehood and the law? One man – Moses. What government dealt with the conquest of the promised land and the distribution of the tribes of the Hebrew people on it? One man – Joshua the son of Nun. During the time of the Judges one man saved the whole people from enemies and evils. But since the power was not uninterrupted, but was cut off with the death of each judge, with each cutting off of one-man rule the people descended into chaos, piety diminished, and idol-worship and immorality spread; then there followed woes and enslavement to other peoples. And in explanation of these disorders and woes in the people the sacred chronicler says that ‘in those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was pleasing in his own eyes’ (Judges 21.25). Again there appeared one man, Samuel, who was fully empowered by the strength of prayer and the prophetic gift; and the people was protected from enemies, the disorders ceased, and piety triumphed. Then, to establish uninterrupted one-man rule, God established a King in His people. And such kings as David, Josaphat, Hezekiah and Josiah present images of how successfully an autocratic Majesty can and must serve for the glorification of the Heavenly King in the earthly kingdom of men, and together with that – for the strengthening and preservation of true prosperity in his people… And during the times of the new grace the All-seeing Providence of God deigned to call the one man Constantine, and in Russia the one man Vladimir, who in apostolic manner enlightened their pagan kingdoms with the light of the faith of Christ an thereby established unshakeable foundations for their might. Blessed is that people and State in which, in a single, universal, all-moving focus there stands, as the sun in the universe, a King, who freely limits his unlimited autocracy by the will of the Heavenly King, and by the wisdom that comes from God.”[584]

 

     In 1851, Metropolitan Philaret preached as follows: “As heaven is indisputably better than the earth, and the heavenly than the earthly, it is similarly indisputable that the best on earth must be recognised to be that which was built on it in the image of the heavenly, as was said to the God-seer Moses: ‘Look thou that thou make them after their pattern, which was showed thee in the mount’ (Exodus 25.40). In accordance with this, God established a king on earth in the image of His single rule in the heavens; He arranged for an autocratic king on earth in the image of His almighty power; and He placed an hereditary king on earth in the image of His imperishable Kingdom, which lasts from ages to ages.

 

     “Oh if only all the kings of the earth paid sufficient attention to their heavenly dignity and to the traits of the image of the heavenly impressed upon them, and faithfully united the righteousness and goodness demanded of them, the heavenly unsleeping watchfulness, purity of thought and holiness of intention that is in God’s image! Oh if only all the peoples sufficiently understood the heavenly dignity of the king and the construction of the heavenly kingdom in the image of the heavenly, and constantly signed themselves with the traits of that same image – by reverence and love for the king, by humble obedience to his laws and commands, by mutual agreement and unanimity, and removed from themselves everything of which there is no image in the heavens – arrogance, disputes, self-will, greediness and every evil thought, intention and act! Everything would be blessed in accordance with the heavenly image if it were well constructed in accordance with the heavenly image. All earthly kingdoms would be worthy of being the ante-chamber of the Heavenly Kingdom.

 

     “Russia! You participate in this good more than many kingdoms and peoples. ‘Hold on to that which thou hast, that no man take thy crown’ (Rev. 3.11). Keep and continue to adorn your radiant crown, ceaselessly struggling to fulfil more perfectly the crown-giving commandments: ‘Fear God, honour the king’ (I Peter 2.17).

 

     “Turning from the well-known to that which has perhaps been less examined and understood in the apostle’s word, I direct our attention to that which the apostle, while teaching the fear of God, reverence for the king and obedience to the authorities, at the same time teaches about freedom: ‘Submit’, he says, ‘to every ordinance of man for the Lord’s sake; whether to the king, as being supreme, or to governors as being sent through him… as free’. Submit as free men. Submit, and remain free…

 

     “But how are we more correctly to understand and define freedom? Philosophy teaches that freedom is the capacity without restrictions rationally to choose and do that which is best, and that it is by nature the heritage of every man. What, it would seem, could be more desirable? But this teaching has its light on the summit of the contemplation of human nature, human nature as it should be, while in descending to our experience and actions as they are in reality, it encounters darkness and obstacles.

 

     “In the multiplicity of the race of men, are there many who have such an open and educated mind as faithfully to see and distinguish that which is best? And do those who see the best always have enough strength decisively to choose it and bring it to the level of action? Have we not heard complaints from the best of men: ‘For to will is present in me, but how to perform that which is good I find not’ (Romans 7.18)? What are we to say about the freedom of people who, although not in slavery to anybody, are nevertheless subject to sensuality, overcome by passion, possessed by evil habits? Is the avaricious man free? Is he not bound in golden chains? Is the indulger of his flesh free? Is he not bound, if not by cruel bonds, then by soft nets? Is the proud and vainglorious man free? Is he not chained, not by his hands, and not by his legs, but by his head and heart, is he not chained to his own idol?

 

     “Thus does not experience and consciousness, at least of some people in some cases, speak of that of which the Divine Scriptures speak generally: ‘He who does sin is the servant of sin’ (John 8. 34)?

 

     “Observation of people and human societies shows that people who to a greater degree allow themselves to fall into this inner, moral slavery – slavery to sin, the passions and vices – are more often than others zealots for external freedom – freedom broadened as far as possible in human society before the law and the authorities. But will broadening external freedom help them to freedom from inner slavery? There is no reason to think that. With greater probability we must fear the opposite. He in whom sensuality, passion and vice has already acquired dominance, when the barriers put by the law and the authorities to his vicious actions have been removed, will of course give himself over to the satisfaction of his passions and lusts with even less restraint than before, and will use his external freedom only in order that he may immerse himself more deeply in inner slavery. Unhappy freedom which, as the Apostle explained, ‘they have as a cover for their envy’! Let us bless the law and the authorities which, in decreeing and ordering and defending, as necessity requires, the limits placed upon freedom of action, hinder as far they can the abuse of natural freedom and the spread of moral slavery, that is, slavery to sin, the passions and the vices.

 

     “I said: as far as they can, because we can not only not expect from the law and the earthly authorities a complete cutting off of the abuse of freedom and the raising of those immersed in the slavery of sin to the true and perfect freedom: even the law of the Heavenly Lawgiver is not sufficient for that. The law warns about sin, rebukes the sinner and condemns him, but does not communicate to the slave of sin the power to break the bonds of this slavery, and does not provide the means of blotting out the iniquities that have been committed, which lie on the conscience like a fiery seal of sinful slavery. And in this consists ‘the weakness of the law’ (Romans 8.3), to which the Apostle witnesses without a moment’s hesitation.

 

     “Here the question again presents itself: what is true freedom, and who can give it, and – especially – return it to the person who has lost it through sin? True freedom is the active capacity of the man who has not been enslaved to sin and who is not weighed down by a condemning conscience, to choose the best in the light of the truth of God and to realize it with the help of the power of God’s grace.

 

     “Giving back this freedom to the slave of sin is possible only for Him Who gave it to sinless man at his creation. The Creator of freedom Himself declared this: ‘If the Son will set you free, then you will truly be free’ (John 8.36). ‘If you remain in My words, you will truly be My disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free’ (John 31.32). Jesus Christ, the Son of God, having suffered and died for us in the nature He received from us, by His ‘Blood has cleansed our conscience from dead works’ (Hebrews 9.14), and, having torn apart the bonds of death by His resurrection, has torn apart also the bonds of sin and death that bind us, and, after His ascension to heaven, has sent down the Spirit of truth, giving us through faith the light of His truth to see what is best, and His grace-filled power to do it.

 

     “This is freedom, which is restrained neither by heaven, nor by the earth, nor by hell, which has as its limit the will of God, and this not to its own diminution, because it also strives to fulfil the will of God, which has no need to shake the lawful decrees of men because it is able to see in these the truth that ‘the Kingdom is the Lord’s and He Himself is sovereign of the nations’ (Psalm 21.28), which in an unconstrained way venerates lawful human authority and its commands that are not contrary to God, insofar as it radiantly sees the truth that ‘there is no power that is not of God, the powers that be are ordained of God’ (Romans 13.1). And so this is freedom, which is in complete accord with obedience to the law and lawful authority, because it itself wishes for that which obedience demands.

 

     “I would have much to say about the freedom that is Christian and inner, and not external, which is moral and spiritual, and not carnal, which always does good and is never rebellious, which can live in a hut just as comfortably as in a noble’s house or a royal palace, which a subject, without ceasing to be a subject, can enjoy as much as a master, which is inviolable in bonds and prison, as we can see in the Christian martyrs. But it is already bring our sermon to an end.

 

     “Love Christian freedom – freedom from sin, from passion, from vice, the freedom of willing obedience to the law and the authorities, and do good for the sake of the Lord, in accordance with your faith in and love for Him. And let nobody be seduced by the people from whom the Apostolic word warns us, who ‘promise freedom, being themselves the slaves of corruption’ (II Peter 2.19). Amen.”[585]

 

Russia and Europe: (1) Chaadaev vs. Pushkin

 

     The most important influence on young intellectuals in Russia in the 1820s was the philosophy of Hegel. Many went to Germany and listened to the lectures of Hegel himself, and of other important German philosophers such as Schelling. It was above all Hegel’s historicism, and his concept of “the historical nation”, that stimulated Russian thinkers to take a more historical and dialectical approach to the study of their own land and its present situation.[586] Also important was the influence of Herder, and his concept of the unique essence of every nation.

 

     “What was the relationship between the old, pre-Petrine Russia and the new, post-Petrine Russia?” they asked. “Could these antithetical Russias be reconciled in a new synthesis of the future?” “Is it necessary decisively to choose the one and reject the other?”

 

     More particularly, it was Hegel’s failure “to find room for the Slavs”, as G. Vernadsky put it, in his historical schema that provoked and intrigued the Russian intellectuals. He wrote: “[The Slavs] did indeed found kingdoms and sustain vigorous conflicts with the various nations that came across their path. Sometimes, as an advance guard – an intermediate nationality – they took part in the struggle between Christian Europe and unchristian Asia. The Poles even liberated beleagured Vienna from the Turks; and Slavs have to some extent been drawn within the sphere of Occidental Reason. Yet this entire body of peoples remains excluded from our consideration because hitherto it has not appeared as an independent element in the series of phases that reason has assumed in the world.”[587]

 

     Was Russia no more than “an intermediate nationality”?, asked the Russian intellectuals. Had History really passed the Slavs by? Were they just a footnote to “the sphere of Occidental Reason”? Or did they have something original to contribute? In the next stage of the historical dialectic perhaps? After all, if Hegel thought that the Romano-French period of history had been overtaken by the German, why should not the German in its turn be overtaken by the Slav?[588]

 

     Other elements in Hegelianism that proved attractive to Russian thinkers were the concept of alienation (for they themselves felt alienated from their country and both its leadership and the common people) and the concept of reconciliation with reality (for they were Russian after all, and wanted, if at all possible, to be reconciled with that reality). Less attractive to them were its determinism; and characteristic of almost all these thinkers was their emphasis on the importance of the individual and individual freedom. Those who inherited the determinism of Hegelianism later took the more radical road of atheism and Marxism.

 

     These questions and preoccupations led to the emergence of two schools of thought on the nature and destiny of Russia: the westerners, who basically thought that the westernizing path chosen by Peter had been correct, and the Slavophiles, who believed in Orthodoxy, in the pre-Petrine symphony of powers, and in a special, distinct path chosen by God for Russia. Almost the whole of the public intellectual life of Russia until the revolution could be described as increasingly complex variations on these two viewpoints and the various intermediate positions: Chaadaev and Pushkin, Belinsky and Gogol, Herzen and Khomiakov, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, Soloviev and Pobedonostev, Lenin and Tikhomorov. The result was paradoxical: an increasing westernization of the noble educated classes, who had suffered most from Peter’s revolution, and an increasing “Slavophilisation” of the tsars themselves, culminating in the most Orthodox and Slavophile of all the tsars, Nicholas II.

 

     The great debate began in 1836 with the publication, by the nobleman Peter Yakovlevich Chaadaev, a convert to Catholicism, of the first of his Philosophical Letters. There were eight of these, the first of which was dated 1829 and the last - 1831. N.O. Lossky writes: “The letters are ostensibly addressed to a lady who is supposed to have asked Chaadaev’s advice on the ordering of her spiritual life. In the first letter Chaadaev advises the lady to observe the ordinances of the Church as a spiritual exercise in obedience. Strict observance of church customs and regulations may only be dispensed with, he says[589], when ‘beliefs of a higher order have been attained, raising our spirit to the source of all certainty;’ such beliefs must not be in contradiction to the ‘beliefs of the people’. Chaadaev recommends a well-regulated life as favorable to spiritual development and praises Western Europe where ‘the ideas of duty, justice, law, order’ are part of the people’s flesh and blood and are, as he puts it, not the psychology, but the physiology of the West. He evidently has in mind the disciplinary influence of the Roman Catholic Church. As to Russia, Chaadaev is extremely critical of it. Russia, in his opinion, is neither the West nor the East. ‘Lonely in the world, we have given nothing to the world, have taught it nothing; we have not contributed one idea to the mass of human ideas.’ ‘If we had not spread ourselves from [the] Behring Straits to [the] Oder, we would never have been noticed.’ We do not, as it were, form part of the human organism and exist ‘solely in order to give humanity some important lesson’.”[590] According to Chaadaev, “not a single useful thought has sprouted in our country’s barren soil; not a single great truth has emerged from our ambit…. Something in our blood repulses all true progress. In the end we have lived and now live solely to serve as some inscrutable great lesson for the distant generations that will grasp it; today, whatever anyone may say, we are a void in the intellectual firmament.”[591]

 

     Though writing from a westerning, anti-Russian viewpoint, Sir Isaiah Berlin sums up the matter well: “Chaadaev’s attack, with its deification of Western traditions, ideas and civilisation, was the key to later Russian ‘social thought’. Its importance was enormous. It set the tone, it struck the dominant notes which were echoed by every major Russia writer up to and beyond the Revolution. Everything is there: the proclamation that the Russian past is blank or filled with chaos, that the only true culture is the Roman West, and that the Great Schism robbed Russia of her birthright and left her barbarous, an abortion of the creative process, a caution to other peoples, a Caliban among nations. Here, too, is the extraordinary tendency toward self-preoccupation which characterises Russian writing even more than that of the Germans, from whom this tendency mainly stems. Other writers, in England, France, even Germany, write about life, love, nature and human relations at large; Russian writing, even when it is most deeply in debt to Goethe or Schiller or Dickens or Stendhal, is about Russia, the Russian past, the Russian present, Russian prospects, the Russian character, Russian vices and Russian virtues. All the ‘accursed questions’ (as Heine was perhaps the first to call them) turn in Russian into notorious proklyatye voprosy – questions about the destinies (sud’by) of Russia: Where do we come from? Whither are we bound? Why are we who we are? Should we teach the West or learn from it? Is our ‘broad’ Slav nature higher in the spiritual scale than that of the ‘Europeans’ – a source of salvation for all mankind – or merely a form of infantilism and barbarism destined to be superseded or destroyed? The problem of the ‘superfluous man’ is here already; it is not an accident that Chaadev was an intimate friend of the creator of Eugene Onegin [Pushkin]. No less characteristic of this mental condition is Chaadaev’s contrary speculation that was also destined to have a career in subsequent writing, in which he wondered whether the Russians, who have arrived so late at the feast of the nations and are still young, barbarous and untried, do not thereby derive advantages, perhaps overwhelming ones, over older or more civilised societies. Fresh and strong, the Russians might profit by the inventions and discoveries of the others without having to go through the torments that have attended their mentors’ struggles for life and civilisation. Might there not be a vast positive gain in being late in the field? Herzen and Chernyshevsky, Marxists and anti-Marxists, were to repeat this with mounting optimism. But the most central and far-reaching question was still that posed by Chaadaev. He asked: Who are we and what should be our path? Have we unique treasures (as the Slavophils maintained) preserved for us by our Church – the only true Christian one – which Catholics and Protestants have each in their own way lost or destroyed? Is that which the West despises as coarse and primitive in fact a source of life – the only pure source in the decaying post-Christian world? Or, on the contrary, is the West at least partially right: if we are ever to say our own word and play our part and show the world what kind of people we are, must we not learn from the Westerners, acquire their skills, study in their schools, emulate their arts and sciences, and perhaps the darker sides of their lives also? The lines of battle in the century that followed remained where Chaadaev drew them: the weapons were ideas which, whatever their origins, in Russian became matters of the deepest concern – often of life and death – as they never we in England or France or, to such a degree, in Romantic Germany. Kireevsky, Khomiakov and Aksakov gave one answer, Belinsky and Dobrolyubov another, Kavelin yet a third.”[592]

 

     This letter, in the words of Count Ficquelmont, “fell like a bomb amidst Russian vanity and those principles of religious and political pre-eminence to which the capital is much inclined”, while Herzen later remarked that it “shook the whole of intellectual Russia”.

 

     The tsar was furious. Klementy Rosset, an officer of the General Staff, wrote to the famous poet Alexander Pushkin: “The Emperor has read Chaadaev’s article and found it absurd and extravagant, saying that he was sure ‘that Moscow did not share the insane opinions of the Author’, and has instructed the governor-general Prince Golitsyn to inquire daily as to the health of Chaadaev’s wits and to put him under governmental surveillance…”[593]

 

     This letter, together with the other Philosophical Letters, elicited from Pushkin the first, and one of the best statements of the opposing, Slavophile position.

 

     Pushkin had known Chaadaev for a long time. In 1818, when his views were more radical (and blasphemously atheist) than they came to be at the end of his life, he had dedicated to Chaadaev the following lines:

 

Comrade, believe: joy’s star will leap

Upon our sight, a radiant token;

Russia will rise from her long sleep;

And where autocracy lies, broken,

Our names shall yet be graven deep.[594]

 

But even here anti-autocratic sentiments are combined with a belief in Russia. So although Pushkin admitted to the Tsar that he would have participated in the Decembrist rebellion if he had not been in exile, he was never a typical westernizer. This fact, combined with his deep reading in Russian history, the stabilising experience of marriage and, as we have seen, an enlightening interview with the Tsar himself, led Pushkin to a kind of conversion to Russia and to a belief in her significance as a phenomenon independent of Europe.

 

     The sincerity of his conversion was demonstrated during the Polish rebellion in 1830. Although “enlightened” Europe condemned the Tsar for crushing the rebellion, on August 2, 1830, just three weeks before the taking of Warsaw by Russian troops, Pushkin wrote “To the Slanderers of Russia”. From that time, as the friend of the poet’s brother, Michael Juzefovich, wrote, “his world-view changed, completely and unalterably. He was already a deeply believing person: [he now became] a citizen who had changed his mind, having understood the demands of Russian life and renounced utopian illusions.”[595]

 

     However, Chaadaev had not undergone this conversion, and was still not convinced that Russia’s past was anything more than “a blank sheet of paper”, “an unhappy country with neither past, present nor future”.

 

     Valery Lepakhin and Andrei Zavarzin have summarised the debate between Chaadaev and Pushkin as follows: “Russia and Europe. This problem especially occupied the minds of Russians at the beginning of the 19th century. Chaadaev considered the schism (the division of the Churches [in 1054]) as a tragedy for Russia, which separated it from Christianity (of course, from Catholicism, and not from Christianity, but at that time these terms were synonymous for Chaadaev), from ‘the world idea’, form ‘real progress’, from ‘the wonderworking principle’, from ‘the enlightened, civilised peoples’. In principle Pushkin agreed with Chaadaev, but specified that ‘the schism disunited us from backward Europe’: first, it separated ‘us’, that is, not only Russia, but in general the whole of the eastern branch of Christianity, and secondly, it separated simply from ‘backward Europe’, and not from ‘enlightened and civilised people’, as Chaadaev claimed. In reading the Russian chronicles, sermons and lives of saints, it is impossible not to notice the fact that they are full of gratitude to God for the fact the Russ’ accepted baptism from Orthodox Constantinople, and not from Catholic Rome.[596] This fact is never viewed as a tragedy in Russian literature and history, rather the opposite: beginning with the description of the holy Prince Vladimir’s choice of faith, this event became the subject of poetry and chant. And not out of hostility to Catholicism, and from faith in Divine Providence, which judged that it should be so and which the consciousness of believers perceived with gratitude, for Providence cannot err. But Chaadaev, who speaks so much about Christianity, sees in this fact ‘the will of fate’ in a pagan manner.

 

     “Pushkin agreed with his friend of many years that ‘we did not take part in any of the great events which shook her (Europe)’. But it does not occur to Chaadaev to ask the simple question: why should Rus’ have taken part. Or, for example, would not this ‘participation’ have been for the worse, both for Europe and for Rus’? Pushkin gives a simple, but principled reply at this point: Russia has ‘her own special calling’, which Pushkin in another place calls ‘lofty’: ‘It was Russia and her vast expanses that were swallowed up by the Mongol invasion. The Tartars did not dar to cross our western frontiers and leave us in their rear. They departed for their deserts, and Christian civilisation was saved… By our martyrdom the energetic development of Catholic Europe was delivered from all kinds of hindrances’. From Pushkin’s reply it follows that indirectly at any rate Russia did take part in the life of Western Europe, and, in accordance with its historical significance, this participation was weighty and fraught with consequences for the West. It was not a direct participation insofar as Russia had a different calling. The complete opposition of Pushkin’s and Chaadaev’s views on the problem is characteristic. For the latter the Tartar-Mongol yoke was a ‘cruel and humiliating foreign domination’. For Pushkin this epoch was sanctified by the lofty word ‘martyrdom’, which Russia received not only for herself, but also for her western brothers, for Christian civilization generally. In his reply Pushkin links the special calling of Russia with her reception of Orthodoxy, and see in it not ‘the will of fate’, but Russia’s preparation of herself for this martyrdom.

 

     “Chaadaev’s attitude to Byzantium also elicited objections from Pushkin. Chaadaev called Byzantium ‘corrupt’, he affirmed that it was at that time (the 10th century – the reception of Christianity by Rus’) ‘an object of profound disdain’ for the West European peoples. Now it is difficult even to say what there is more of in this passage from Chaadaev: simple ignorance of the history of Byzantium and Europe and complete absorption in his speculative historiosophical conception, or the conscious prejudice of a westerniser. The beginning of the 10th century in Byzantium was marked by the activity of Leo VI, ‘the Wise’, the middle – by the reign of Constantine VII Porphyrogennitus, and the end – by the victories of Basil II the Bulgar-slayer. It was precisely this period that saw the development of political theories and the science of jurisprudence, theoretical military thought and knowledge of the natural sciences. New schools were opened, and a good education was highly prized both in the world and in the Church. Significant works were produced in the sphere of philosophy, literature and the fine arts, and theology produced such a light as Simeon the New Theologian, the third (after the holy Evangelist John the Theologian and St. Gregory the Theologian) to be given the title ‘theologian’ by the Orthodox Church. … This period is considered by scientists to be the epoch of the flourishing of Byzantine aesthetic consciousness, of architecture and music. If one compares the 10th century in Byzantium and in Europe, the comparison will not be in favour of the latter. Moreover, Chaadaev himself speaks of the ‘barbarism’ of the peoples that despised Byzantium.

 

     “’You say,’ writes Pushkin, ‘that the source from which we drew up Christianity was impure, that Byzantium was worthy of disdain and was disdained’, but, even if it was so, one should bear in mind that ‘from the Greeks we took the Gospel and the traditions, and not the spirit of childish triviality and disputes about words. The morals of Byzantium never were the morals of Kiev. For Chaadaev it was important ‘from where’, but for Pushkin ‘how’ and ‘what’ they took it. After all, ‘was not Jesus Christ Himself born as a Jew and was not Jerusalem a proverb among the nations?’ Pushkin did not want to enter into polemics on the subject of Byzantium insofar as that would have dragged out his letter. Moreover, the problem was a special one not directly connected with the polemic surrounding the history of Russia. For him it was evident that Russia, as a young and healthy organism, had filtered through her Byzantine heritage, assimilated the natural and cast out that which was foreign and harmful. Above mention was made of the fact that in the chronicles praise was often offered to God for the reception of Christianity by Rus’ from Byzantium. But no less often do we find critical remarks about the Greek metropolitans, and of the Greeks and Byzantium in general. Therefore Pushkin placed the emphasis on the critical assimilation of the Byzantine heritage. For him, Rus’ received from Byzantium first of all ‘the light of Christianity’….

 

     “Both Chaadaev and Pushkin highly esteemed the role of Christianity in world history. In his review of The History of the Russian People by N. Polevoj, the latter wrote: ‘The greatest spiritual and political turning-point [in the history of] of our planet is Christianity. In this sacred element the world disappeared and renewed itself. Ancient history is the history of Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome. Modern history is the history of Christianity.’ Chaadaev would also have signed up to these words, but immediately after this common affirmation differences would have arisen. For Chaadaev true Christianity rules, shapes and ‘lords over everything’ only in Catholic Europe – ‘there Christianity accomplished everything’. Chaadaev even considers the history of Catholic Europe to be ’sacred, like the history of the ancient chosen people’.

 

     “He recognises the right of the Russians, as, for example, of the Abyssinians, to call themselves Christians, but in the Christianity of the former and the latter that ‘order of things’, which ‘constitutes the final calling of the human race’ was not realised at all. ‘Don’t you think,’ says Chaadaev to his correspondent, ‘that these stupid departures from Divine and human truths (read: Orthodoxy) drag heaven down to earth?’ And so there exist Catholic Europe, the incarnation of Christianity, and Russia, Abyssinia and certain other historical countries which have stagnated in ‘stupid departures from Divine and human truths’. Chaadaev refuses these countries the right to their own path, even the right to have a future.

 

     “In one of his reviews Pushkin indirectly replies to Chaadaev: ‘Understand,’ he writes, ‘that Russia never had anything in common with the rest of Europe; her history demands other thoughts, other formulae, different from the thoughts and formulae extracted by Guizot from the history of the Christian West’. For Pushkin it is absolutely obvious that any schema of historical development will remain a private, speculative schema and will never have a universal character. Any conception is built on the basis of some definite historical material, and to transfer it, out of confidence in its universality, to other epochs or countries would be a mistake. After all, as often as ot that which does not fit into a once-worked-out schema is cut off and declared to have no significane and not worthy of study or analysis. But Pushkin makes his own generalisations, proceeding from history, from concrete facts. S. Frank wrote: ‘The greatest Russian poet was also completely original and, we can boldly say, the greatest Russian political thinker of the 19th century’. This was also noticed by the poet’s contemporaries. Vyzamesky wrote: ‘In Pushkin there was a true understanding of history… The properties of his mind were: clarity, incisiveness, sobriety… He would not paint pictures according to a common standard and size of already-prepared frames, as is often done by the most recent historians in order more conveniently to fit into them the events and people about to be portrayed’. But it was precisely this that was the defect of Chaadaev’s method. Moreover, the non-correspondence of schema and historical reality (frame and picture) was sometimes so blatant with him that he had completely to reject the historical and religious path of Russia for the sake of preserving his schema of world development.

 

      “Pushkin also did not agree with Chaadaev concerning the unity of Christianity, which for Chaadaev ‘wholly consisted in the idea of the merging of all the moral forces of the world’ for the establishment of ‘a social system or Church which would have to introduce the kingdom of truth among people’.[597] To this Pushkin objected already in his letter of 1831: ‘You see the unity of Christianity in Catholicism, that is, in the Pope. Does it not consist in the idea of Christ, which we find also in Protestantism?’ Pushkin notes the Catholicentrism of Chaadaev, and reminds him of the Protestant part of the Western Christian world. But the main point is that Pushkin turns out to be better-prepared theologically than Chaadaev. The Church is the Body of Christ, and Christ Himself is Her Head, according to the teaching of the Apostle Paul (Ephesians 1.23, 4.16; Colossians 1.18, etc.). Here Pushkin in a certain sense anticipates the problems of Dostoyevsky, who considered that Rus’ had preserved that Christ that the West had lost, and that the division of the Churches had taken place precisely because of different understandings of Christ.

 

     “Pushkin considered it necessary to say a few words also about the clergy, although Chaadaev had not directly criticised them in his first letter. ‘Our clergy,’ writes the poet, ‘were worthy of respect until Theophan [Prokopovich]. They never sullied themselves with the wretchednesses of papism…, and, of course, they would never have elicited a Reformation at a moment when mankind needed unity more than anything.’ In evaluating the role of the clergy in Russian history, Pushkin distinguished between two stages: before Peter and after Peter. The role of the clergy in Russian life before Peter was exceptionally great. Ancient Rus’ inherited from Byzantium, together with the two-headed eagle on her arms, the idea of the symphony of secular and ecclesiastical power. This idea was equally foreign both to caesaropapism and papocaesarism and the democratic idea of the separation of the Church from the State. Of course, symphony never found its full incarnation in State life, but it is important that as an idea it lived both in the Church and in the State, and the role of the clergy as the necessary subject of this symphony was naturally lofty and indisputable. But even outside the conception of ‘symphony’, the clergy played an exceptionally important role in the history of Russia. In the epoch of the Tatar-Mongol yoke they were almost the only educated class in Russian society: ‘The clergy, spared by the wonderful quick-wittedness of the Tatars alone in the course of two dark centuries kept alive the pale sparks of Byzantine education’. In another place Pushkin even found it necessary to contrast the Russian and Catholic clergy – true, without detailed explanations of his affirmation: ‘In Russia the influence of the clergy was so beneficial, and in the Roman-Catholic lands so harmful… Consequently we are obliged to the monks of our history also for our enlightenment’.

 

     “A new era began from the time of Theophan Prokopovich (more exactly: Peter I), according to Pushkin. In a draft of a letter dated 1836 he wrote to Chaadaev: ‘Peter the Great tamed (another variant: ‘destroyed’) the clergy, having removed the patriarchate’. Peter made the clergy into an institution obedient to himself and destroyed the age-old idea of symphony. Now they had begun to be excised from the consciousness both of the clergy and of the simple people, and of state officials. In losing their role in society, the clergy were becoming more and more backward, more and more distant from the needs and demands of the life of society. They were being forced to take the role of ‘fulfillers of the cult’.

 

     “In Pushkin’s opinion, a serious blow against the clergy was later delivered by Catherine II. And if we are to speak of the backwardness of the Russian clergy, it is there that we must see its source. ‘Catherine clearly persecuted the clergy, sacrificing it to her unlimited love of power, in the service of the spirit of the times… The seminaries fell into a state of complete collapse. Many villages did not have priests… What a pity! For the Greek confession gives us our special national character’. If Chaadaev reproaches Russia for not having ‘her own face’, then for Pushkin it is evident that Russia has ‘her own face’ and it was formed by Orthodoxy. Therefore a sad note is heard in Pushkin’s evaluation of the era of Catherine: she has her own face, her ‘special national character’, if only she does not lose it because of ill-thought-out reforms and orders foreign to the spirit of Russian life. In contrast to Chaadaev, Pushkin linked the backwardness of the contemporary clergy not with the reception of Christianity from Byzantium, but with the recent transformations in Russian State and Church life, and sought the roots of this backwardness not in the 10th century but in the 18th century, in the reforms of Peter and in the epoch of the so-called Enlightenment…”[598]

 

     Such was the debate in its main outlines. And yet, just as Pushkin moved towards the Slavophile position later in life, so, less surely and certainly, did Chaadaev. Thus in 1830 he praised Pushkin’s nationalist poems on the Warsaw insurrection. And later, in his Apology of a Madman (1837), he was inclined to think that the very emptiness of Russia’s past might enable her to contribute to the future. Indeed, he then believed that Russia was destined “to resolve the greater part of the social problems, to perfect the greater part of the ideas which have arisen in older societies, to pronounce judgement on the most serious questions which trouble the human race”.[599] Moreover, in the same Apology (1837), he spoke of the Orthodox Church as “this church that is so humble and sometimes so heroic”. And in a conversation with Khomiakov in 1843 he declared: “From Holy Byzantium holy Orthodoxy shines out for us”. [600]

 

     However, while Slavophile tendencies sometimes surfaced in Chaadaev, as in other westernizers, his fundamentally westernising radicalism was revealed by his anti-monarchical remark on the occasion of the European revolutions in 1848: “We don’t want any King except the King of heaven”…[601]

 

Russia and Europe: (2) Belinsky vs. Gogol

 

     The figure of Peter the Great continued to be a critical point of difference between the Westernizers and the Slavophiles. The Westernizers admired him (for Chaadaev he was, with Alexander I, almost the only significant Russian): the Slavophiles criticised him as the corrupter of the true Russian tradition. All felt they had to interpret his place in Russian history. Once again it was Pushkin who began the reappraisal with his famous poem on the statue of Peter, The Bronze Horseman. However, it was the literary critic Vissarion Belinsky who made the decisive contribution from the westernizers’ side.

 

     Unlike most of the intellectuals of the time, Belinsky was not a nobleman, but a raznochinets (that is, of undetermined or “sundry” rank). Moreover, he was an atheist. In fact, he rejected all the traditional pillars of Russian life. He was one of the first to recognize the greatness of Pushkin. And he was equally perceptive of the talent of Nicholas Vasilyevich Gogol and Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky. And yet these writers, “discovered” by Belinsky, turned decisively against his westernising philosophy…

 

     Belinsky was concerned, writes Walicki, “above all with the role of Peter the Great and the antithesis of pre-and post-reform Russia. In his analysis, he made use of a dialectical scheme current among the Russian Hegelians, although he was the first to apply it to Russian history. Individuals as well as whole nations, he argued, pass through three evolutionary stages: the first is the stage of ‘natural immediacy’; the second is that of the abstract universalism of reason, with its ‘torments of reflection’ and painful cleavage between immediacy and consciousness; the third is that of ‘rational reality’, which is founded on the ‘harmonious reconciliation of the immediate and conscious elements’.

 

     “Belinsky developed this idea in detail as early as 1841, in his long essay on ‘The Deeds of Peter the Great’, in which he wrote: ‘There is a difference between a nation in its natural, immediate and patriarchal state, and this same nation in the rational movement of its historical development’. In the earlier stage, he suggested, a nation cannot really properly be called a nation (natsiia), but only a people (narod). The choice of terms was important to Belinsky: during the reign of Nicholas the word narodnost’, used… by the exponents of Official Nationality [together with the words ‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘Autocracy’ to express the essence of Russian life], had a distinctly conservative flavour; natsional’nost’, on the other hand, thanks to its foreign derivation evoked the French Revolution and echoes of bourgeois democratic national developments.

 

     “Belinsky’s picture of pre-Petrine Russia was surprisingly similar to that presented by the Slavophiles, although his conclusions were quite different from theirs. Before Peter the Russian people (i.e. the nation in the age of immediacy) had been a close-knit community held together by faith and custom – i.e. by the unreflective approval of tradition idealized by the Slavophiles. These very qualities, however, allowed no room for the emergence of rational thought or individuality, and thus prevented dynamic social change.

 

     “Before Russians could be transformed into a nation it was necessary to break up their stagnating society… Belinsky argued that the emergence of every modern nation was accompanied by an apparently contradictory phenomenon – namely the cleavage between the upper and lower strata of society that so disturbed the Slavophiles. He regarded this as confirmation of certain general rules applying to the formation of modern nation-states: ‘In the modern world,’ he wrote, ‘all the elements within society operate in isolation, each one separately and independently… in order to develop all the more fully and perfectly… and to become fused once more into a new and homogeneous whole on a higher level than the original undifferentiated homogeneity’. In his polemics with the Slavophiles, who regarded the cleavage between the cultivated elite and the common people as the prime evil of post-Petrine Russia, Belinsky argued that ‘the gulf between society and the people will disappear in the course of time, with the progress of civilization’. This meant ‘raising the people to the level of society’, he was anxious to stress, and not ‘forcing society back to the level of the people’, which was the Slavophiles’ remedy. The Petrine reforms, which had been responsible for this social gulf, were therefore, in Belinsky’s view, the first and decisive step toward modern Russia. ‘Before Peter the Great, Russia was merely a people [narod]; she became a nation [natsiia] thanks to the changes initiated by the reformer.’”[602]

 

     Berlin writes: “The central question for all Russians concerned about the condition of their country was social, and perhaps the most decisive single influence on the life and work of Belinsky was his social origin. He was born in poverty and bred in the atmosphere, at once bleak and coarse, of an obscure country town in a backward province. Moscow did, to some degree, soften and civilise him, but there remained a core of crudeness, and a self-conscious, rought, sometimes aggressive tone in his writing. This tone now enters Russian literature, never to leave it. Belinsky spoke in this sort of accent becaue this kind of rasied dramatic tone, this harshness, was as natural to him as to Beethoven. Belinsky’s followers adopted his manner because they were the party of the enrages, and this was the traditional accent of anger and revolt, the earnest of violence to come, the rough voice of the insulted and the oppressed peasant masses proclaiming to the entire world the approaching end of their suffering at the hands of the discredited older order.

 

     “Belinsky was the first and most powerful of the ‘new men’, the radicals and revolutionaries who shook and in the end destroyed the classical aristocratic tradition in Russian literature. The literary elite, the friends of Pushkin, despite radical ideas obtained abroad after the Napoleonic wards, despite Decembrist tendencies, was on the whole conservative, if not in conviction, yet in social habits and temper, connected with the court and the army, and deeply patriotic. Belinsky, to whom this seemed a retrograde outlook, was convinced that Russia had more to learn from the West than to teach it, that the Slavophile movement was romantic illusion, at times blind nationalistic megalomania, that Western scientific progress offered the only hope of lifting Russia from her backward state. And yet this same prophet of material civilisation, who intellectually was so ardent a Westerner, was emotionally more deeply and unhappily Russian than any of his contemporaries, spoke no foreign language, could not breathe freely in any environment save that of Russia, and felt miserable and persecution-ridden abroad. He found Western habits worthy of respect and emulation, but to him personally quite insufferable. When abroad he began to sigh most bitterly for home and after a month away was almost insane with nostalgia. In this sense he represents in his person the uncompromising elements of a Slav temperament and way of life to a far sharper degree than any of his contemporaries, even Dostoevsky.

 

     “This deep inner clash between intellectual conviction and emotional – sometimes almost physical – predilection is a very characteristically Russian disease. As the nineteenth century developed, and as the struggle between social classes became sharper and more articulate, this psychological conflict which tormented Belinsky emerges more clearly: the revolutionaries, whether they are social democrats, or social revolutionaries, or communists, unless they are noblemen or university professors – that is, almost professionally members of an international society – may make their bow with great conviction and sincerity to the West in the sense that they believe in its civilisation, above all its sciences, its techniques, its political thought and practice, but when they are forced to emigrate they find life abroad more agonising than other exiles…

 

     “To some degree this peculiar amalgam of love and hate is intrinsic to contemporary Russian feeling about Europe: on the one hand intellectual respect, envy, admiration, desire to emulate and excel; on the other emotional hostility and suspicion and contempt, a sense of being clumsy, de trop, of being outsiders; leading as a result to an alternation between excessive self-prostration before, and aggressive flouting of, Western values. No recent visitor to the Soviet Union can have failed to remark this phenomenon: a combination of intellectual inadequacy and emotional superiority, a sense of the West as enviably self-restrained, clever, efficient and successful; also cramped, cold, mean, calculating and fenced in, incapable of large views or generous emotion, incapable of feeling which at times rises too high and overflows its banks, unable to abandon everything and sacrifice itself in response to some unique historical challenge; incapable of ever attaining a rich flowering of life. This attitude is the most constant element in Belinsky’s most personal and characteristic writings: if it is not the most valuable element in him, it is the most Russian: Russian history past and present is not intelligible without it, today more palpably than ever…”[603]

 

     The Slavophiles were free of this neurotic attitude to the West that Belinsky typified among the westernizers; they were both more critical of the West, and calmer in relation to it. The reason was that they, unlike the Westernizers, had discovered the heart of Russia, her Orthodox Christianity. For them, the critical event in European history was the schism between Eastern and Western Christianity in the middle of the eleventh century. In thus tracing the origins of the difference between East and West to the religious schism between the Orthodox and the Roman Catholics of the eleventh century, as opposed to later events such as the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century or the reforms of Peter the Great in the eighteenth, the Slavophiles made a very important step in the reintegration of Russian historical thought with the traditional outlook on history of Orthodox Christianity. This wider and deeper historical perspective enabled them to see that, having been sundered from the unity of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church of the East for so many centuries, it was inevitable that a new kind of man, homo occidentalis, with a new psychology, new aims and new forms of social and political organization, should have been created in the West.

 

     One of the first to see this clearly was Belinsky’s protégé, Nicholas Vasilyevich Gogol. Having made his name by satirical and fantastical works such as Notes of a Madman, The Greatcoat, The Government Inspector and, above all, Dead Souls, he suddenly and quite unexpectedly turned to Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood. This change of heart was clearly proclaimed in Correspondence with Friends.

 

     While Belinsky looked forward to the rationalism of Tolstoy, Gogol’s views on the Westernizer-Slavophile controversy both looked back to Pushkin and forward to Dostoyevsky’s Pushkin Speech. “All these Slavists and Europeans, or old believers and new believers, or easterners and westerners, they are all speaking about two different sides of one and the same subject, without in any way divining that they are not contradicting or going against each other.” The quarrel was “a big misunderstanding”. And yet “there is more truth on the side of the Slavists and easterners”, since their teaching is more right “on the whole”, while the westerners are more right “in the details”.[604]

 

     “The main theme of the book,” writes I.M. Andreev, “was God and the Church. And when Gogol was reproached for this, he replied, simply and with conviction: ‘How can one be silent, when the stones are ready to cry out about God.’

 

     “Like Khomiakov and Ivan Kireevsky, God summoned all ‘to life in the Church’.

 

     “The pages devoted to the Orthodox Church are the best pages of the book! No Russian writer had expressed as did Gogol such sincere, filial love for the Mother Church, such reverence and veneration for Her, such a profound and penetrating understanding both of Orthodoxy as a whole and of the smallest details of the whole of the Church’s rites.

 

     “’We possess a treasure for which there is no price,’ is how he characterizes the Church, and he continued: ‘This Church which, as a chaste virgin, has alone been preserved from the time of the Apostles in her original undefiled purity, this Church, which in her totality with her profound dogmas and smallest external rites has been as it were brought right down from heaven for the Russian people, which alone has the power to resolve all our perplexing knots and questions… And this Church, which was created for life, we have to this day not introduced into our life’…

 

     “The religio-political significance of Correspondence was huge. This book appeared at a time when in the invisible depths of historical life the destiny of Russia and Russian Orthodox culture was being decided. Would Russia hold out in Orthodoxy, or be seduced by atheism and materialism? Would the Russian Orthodox autocracy be preserved in Russia, or would socialism and communism triumph? These questions were linked with other, still more profound ones, that touched on the destinies of the whole world. What was to come? The flourishing and progress of irreligious humanistic culture, or the beginning of the pre-apocalyptic period of world history?

 

     “Gogol loudly and with conviction proclaimed that the Truth was in Orthodoxy and in the Russian Orthodox Autocracy, and that the historical ‘to be or not to be’ of Russian Orthodox culture, on the preservation of which there also depended the destiny of the whole world in the nearest future, was now being decided. The world was on the edge of death, and we have entered the pre-apocalyptic period of world history.

 

     Correspondence came out in 1847. Pletnev published it at Gogol’s behest.

 

     “This book, in its hidden essence, was not understood by its contemporaries and was subjected to criticism not only on the part of enemies, but also of friends (of course, the former and the latter proceeded from completely different premises).

 

     “The enemies were particularly disturbed and annoyed by Gogol’s sincere and convinced approval of the foundations of those social-political ordered which to so-called ‘enlightened’ people seemed completely unsustainable.”[605]

 

     Belinksy was furious. “Russia expects from her writers salvation from Orthodox, Nationhood and Autocracy,” he wrote in his Letter to Gogol in 1847. And he now called Gogol a “preacher of the knout, apostle of ignorance, champion of superstition and obscurantism”.

 

     Russia, he thundered, “does not need sermons (she has had her fill of them!), nor prayers (she knows them by heart), but the awakening in people of the feeling of human dignity, for so many centuries buried in mud and dung; she needs laws and rights compatible not with the doctrines of the church, but with justice and common sense.”[606]

 

     Gogol’s friends, continues Andreev, “criticized Correspondence for other reasons…

 

     “The most serious and in many respects just criticism belonged to the Rzhev Protopriest Fr. Matthew Konstantinovsky, to whom Gogol, who did not yet know him personally, sent his book for review. Fr. Matthew condemned many places, especially the chapter on the theatre, and wrote to Gogol that he ‘would give an account for it to God’. Gogol objected, pointing out that his intention had been good. But Fr. Matthew advised him not to justify himself before his critics, but to ‘obey the spirit living in us, and not our earthly corporeality’ and ‘to turn to the interior life’.

 

     “The failure of the book had an exceptionally powerful effect on Gogol. After some resistance and attempts to clarify ‘the whirlwind of misunderstandings’, without rejecting his principled convictions, Gogol humbled himself and acknowledged his guilt in the fact that he had dared to be a prophet and preacher of the Truth when he personally was not worthy of serving it. Even to the sharp and cruel letter of Belinsky Gogol replied meekly and humbly: ‘God knows, perhaps there is an element of truth in your words.’”[607]

 

Russia and Europe: (3) Herzen vs. Khomiakov

 

     Belinsky had deified the West, but never felt at home there. Alexander Ivanovich Herzen was the first Westernizer to symbolize the Westernizers’ exile from Russian values by permanently settling in the West, in London. From there, writes Berlin, “he established his free printing press, and in the 1850s began to publish two periodicals in Russia, The Pole Star [recalling the Masonic lodge of the same name] and The Bell (the first issues appeared in 1855 and 1857 respectively), which marked the birth of systematic revolutionary agitation – and conspiracy – by Russian exiles directed against the tsarist regime.”[608]

 

     Herzen followed Belinsky and the westernizers in his disdain for Russia’s pre-Petrine past: “You need the past and its traditions, but we need to tear Russia away from them. We do not want Russia before Peter, because for us it does not exist, but you do not want the new Russia. You reject it, but we reject ancient Rus’”.[609]

 

     However, after the failure of the 1848 revolution, Herzen began to lose faith in the western path to happiness. He began to see the futility (if not the criminality) of violent revolution, and of such slogans as Proudhon’s “all property is theft”, or Bakunin’s “the Passion to destroy is the same as the Passion to create”. The revolution had only left the poor poorer than they had been before, while the passion to destroy seemed as exhilarating as the passion to create only in the heat of the moment, and not when the pieces had to be picked up and paid for the next day… “A curse on you,” he wrote with regard to 1848, “year of blood and madness, year of the triumph of meanness, beastliness, stupidity!… What did you do, revolutionaries frightened of revolution, political tricksters, buffoons of liberty?… Democracy can create nothing positive… and therefore it has no future… Socialism left a victor on the field of battle will inevitably be deformed into a commonplace bourgeois philistinism. Then a cry of denial will be wrung from the titanic breast of the revolutionary minority and the deadly battle will begin again… We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general, just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.”[610]

 

     As V.F. Ivanov writes, “he was disillusioned with western civilization and found that it was deeply penetrated by the petty bourgeois spirit, and was built on ‘respect for the sacred right of property’ and ‘has no other ideals except a thirst for personal security’.

 

     “’Europe,’ said Herzen, ‘is approaching a terrible cataclysm. The medieval world is collapsing. The political and religious revolutions are weakening under the burden of their own powerlessness, they have done great things, but they have not fulfilled their task… They have destroyed faith in the throne and the altar, but have not realized freedom, they have lit in hearts a desire which they are not able to satisfy. Parliamentarism, Protestantism – all these were deferments, temporary salvation, powerless outposts against death and degeneration; their time has passed. From 1849 they began to understand that neither ossified Roman law nor cunning casuistry nor nauseating deistic philosophy nor merciless religious rationalism are able to put off the realization of the destinies of society.’

 

     “Herzen did not believe in the creative function of contemporary democracy, he considered that it possessed only a terrible power of destruction, but not the capacity to create.

 

     “’In democracy,’ said Herzen, ‘there is a terrible power of destruction, but when it takes it upon itself to create something, it gets lost in student experiments, in political etudes. There is no real creativity in democracy.’

 

     “Hence Herzen drew the merciless conclusion that the perishing order must be destroyed to its foundations.

 

     “This destruction had to be universal, it would come in a storm and blood.

 

     “’Who knows what will come out of this blood? But whatever comes out, it is enough that in this paroxysm of madness, revenge, discord and retribution the world that restricts the new man, and hinders him from living, hinders him for establishing himself in the future, will perish. And that is good, and for that reason let chaos and destruction flourish and may the future be constructed.’”[611]

 

     But then comes the unexpected: disillusioned with the West, this westernizer par excellence turns in hope to – Russia. “’The future,’ declared Herzen, not without some pride, ‘belongs to the Russian people, who is called to bring an end to the decrepit and powerless world and clear a place for the new and beautiful [world].’

 

     “In 1851 in a letter to Michelet Herzen wrote: ‘Amidst this chaos, amidst this dying agony and tormented regeneration, amidst this world falling into dust around its cradle, men’s gaze is involuntarily directed towards the East.’”[612] And when Alexander II emancipated the peasants in 1861, he hailed him in the words of Julian the Apostate to Christ: “You have conquered, Galilaean!” And yet he continued his revolutionary agitation against “the Galilaean”, especially in Poland. But when the Polish uprising failed in 1863, subscriptions to Kolokol fell by a factor of six times.

 

     But what in particular in Russian reality attracted the gaze and arouse the hopes of Herzen? The Russian peasant commune or mir. Perhaps, he thought, this was a specifically kind of socialism…

 

     As N.O. Lossky writes: “disappointed with Western Europe and its ‘petty bourgeois’ spirit, he came to the conclusion that the Russian village commune and the artel hold a promise of socialism being realized in Russia rather than in any other country. The village commune meant for him peasant communism [‘The Russian People and Socialism’, 1852, II, 148]. In view of this he came to feel that reconciliation with the Slavophils was possible. In his article ‘Moscow Panslavism and Russian Europeanism’ (1851) he wrote: Is not socialism ‘accepted by the Slavophils as it is by us? It is a bridge on which we can meet and hold hands’ (I, 338).”[613]

 

     Was there indeed a bridge between Slavophiles and westernizers in their common support of the Russian village commune, or mir? Certainly, the Slavophiles agreed with Herzen in their high estimate of the mir. Among them was the most famous among them, Alexis Stepanovich Khomiakov, who “attached the greatest value to the Russian village commune, the mir, with its meetings that passed unanimous decisions and its traditional justice in accordance with custom, conscience, and inner truth.”[614] 

 

     Moreover, there would seem to be some prima facie similarity between Herzen’s idea of “Russian socialism” and Khomiakov’s key idea of sobornost’. Let us explore this similarity here.

 

     Khomiakov had not gone through the tormenting journey from westernism to Orthodoxy that his friend Ivan Vasilyevich Kireevsky had undergone, but had remained that rarity in the Russian educated classes – a man completely au fait with modern developments (he had several inventions to his credit), but also a committed Orthodox who practised his faith openly and without shame. As Roy Campbell writes, “he was not reactionary, and neither did he romanticize the past, as fellow Slavophiles were sometimes apt to do. He was as far removed from the ‘ridiculousness of conservatism’ as he was from the revolution movement with its ‘immoral and passionate self-reliance’”.[615]

 

     “In contradistinction to Kireyevsky and K. Aksakov,” writes Lossky, “Khomiakov does not slur over the evils of Russian life but severely condemns them. At the beginning of the Crimean War (against Turkey, France and England, 1854-1855) he denounced with the fire and inspiration of a prophet, the Russia of his day (before the great reforms of Alexander II) and called her to repentance.

 

     “Western Europe has failed to embody the Christian ideal of the wholeness of life through overemphasizing logical knowledge and rationality; Russia has so far failed to embody it because complete, all-embracing truth from its very nature develops slowly… Nevertheless Khomiakov believes in the great mission of the Russian people when it comes fully to recognize and express ‘all the spiritual forces and principles that lie at the basis of Holy Orthodox Russia.’ ‘Russia is called to stand at the forefront of universal culture; history gives her the right to do so because of the completeness and manysidedness of her guiding principles; such a right given to a nation imposes a duty upon every one of its members.’ Russia’s ideal is not to be the richest or most powerful country but to become ‘the most Christian of all human societies’.

 

     “In spite of Khomiakov’s… critical attitude toward Western Europe,… [he] speaks of it in one of his poems as ‘the land of holy miracles’. He was particularly fond of England. The best things in her social and political life were due, he thought, to the right balance being maintained between liberalism and conservatism. The conservatives stood for the organic force of the national life developing from its original sources while the liberals stood for the personal, individual force, for analytical, critical reason. The balance between these two forces in England has never yet been destroyed because ‘every liberal is a bit of a conservative at bottom because he is English’. In England, as in Russia, the people have kept their religion and distrust analytical reason. But Protestant scepticism is undermining the balance between the organic and the analytic forces, and this is a menace to England in the future…”[616]

 

     In another place, Khomiakov saw the menace to England in her conservatism: “England with its modest science and its serious love of religious truth might give some hope; but – permit the frank expression of my thoughts – England is held by the iron chain of traditional custom.”[617]

 

     While attached to England, when it came to comparing the Eastern and Western forms of Christianity, Khomiakov was very severe in his judgements. Influenced by Elder Ambrose of Optina as Kireevsky had been by Elder Macarius, he had a deep, unshakeable confidence in the Orthodox Church. This enabled him to write perhaps the first completely Orthodox ecclesiological tract in Russian history, and one of the best of any age, The Church is One.

 

     The Church,” he wrote, “does not recognise any power over herself other than her own, no other’s court than the court of faith”.[618] The Church is One, declared Khomiakov, and that Church is exclusively the Orthodox Church. “Western Christianity has ceased to be Christianity,” he wrote. “In Romanism [Roman Catholicism] there is not one word, not one action, upon which the seal of spiritual life might lie”. “Both Protestantisms (Roman and German)… already bear death within themselves; it is left to unbelief only to take away the corpses and clean the arena. And all this is the righteous punishment for the crime committed by the ‘West’”.[619] This sharp rejection of the right of Catholics and Protestants to call themselves members of the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church was in itself remarkable after the mild ecumenism that was so prevalent in his time. This anti-ecumenism was shared by some of his educated contemporaries, such as Elder Ambrose and Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, but not by many.

 

     However, it was not only the Oneness of the Church that Khomiakov explicated with particular success, but also Her Catholicity, or sobornost’ in the Slavonic translation, which he defined as “unity-in-diversity”. “The Church is called Catholic,” writes Khomiakov, “because She belongs to the whole world, and not to some particular locality; because the whole of humanity and the whole of the earth is sanctified by Her, and not some particular people or country; because Her essence consists in the agreement and unity of spirit and life of all Her members who recognize Her throughout the earth.

 

     “It follows from this that when a community is called a local Church, like the Greek, Russian or Syrian, this signifies only the gathering of the members of the Church living in such-and-such a country (Greece, Russia, Syria, etc.), and does not contain within itself the presupposition that one community of Christians could express the teaching of the Church, or give a dogmatic interpretation to the teaching of the Church, without the agreement of the other communities; still less does it presuppose that some community or community pastor could prescribe its or his interpretation to others. The grace of faith is not separate from holiness of life and not one community of Christians or pastor can be recognized as preservers of the whole faith, just as not one pastor or community can be considered representative of the whole holiness of the Church.”[620] For “it is not people, or a multitude of people, that preserve tradition and write in the Church, but the Spirit of God, Who lives in the coming together of the Church.”[621]

 

     The principle of sobornost’, writes Lossky, “implies that the absolute bearer of truth in the Church is not the patriarch who has supreme authority, not the clergy, and not even the ecumenical council, but only the Church as a whole. ‘There have been heretical councils,’ says Khomiakov; ‘for instance, those in which a half-Arian creed was drawn up; externally, they differed in no way from the ecumenical councils – but why were they rejected? Solely because their decisions were not recognized by the whole body of the faithful as the voice of the Church.’ Khomiakov is referring here to the epistle of the Eastern Patriarchs to Pope Pius IX (1848), which says: ‘The invincible truth and immutable certainty of the Christian dogma does not depend upon the hierarchs of the Church; it is preserved by the whole of the people composing the Church which is the body of Christ’ (A letter to Palmer, October 11, 1850. II, 363).”[622]

 

     Although councils are not infallible, it is nevertheless in the coming together of the clergy and the people in councils to decide dogmatic and canonical questions that the Holy Spirit of truth reveals Himself, as in the Seven Ecumenical Councils. And so the Church is Conciliar by essence; Her truth is revealed to a multitude of Her members meeting in council, and not to just one of her members thinking in solitude, as the West supposes - whether that individual is the Roman Pope or a Protestant layman. It is at this point that the Slavonic translation of of the Greek word kaqolikh, “Catholic”, by the Slavonic word sobornaia becomes illuminating. For the word sobornaia is derived from sobor, meaning "council" (or a large church with two or three altars). This implies a direct link between the Church's Catholicity and Her Conciliarity. And this in turn suggests that the vital distinguishing quality of Orthodox Catholicity, as opposed to Roman Catholicism and Protestant democratism lies in its Conciliarity. For it is in Her conciliar life that the Church preserves Her unity and drives out heresies - which Protestant individualism cannot do, since it makes the opinion of every man the supreme arbiter of truth, and which Roman pseudo-Catholicism cannot do, since it makes the opinion of one man the supreme arbiter.

 

     Now, as Fr. Michael Pomazansky points out, "in Greek there is no philological or linguistic connection between the concepts "catholic" and "council" (ecumenical). A council of the Church is called in Greek SunodoV, and an ecumenical council, oikoumenikh SunodoV".[623] Nevertheless, the lack of a philological connection does not mean that there is no deeper semantic and theological connection, a connection seen by the translators Saints Cyril and Methodius when they chose this translation.

 

     And there is no serious difference between Khomiakov’s definition of Catholicity and Pomazansky’s: "Catholicity refers to the fact that the Church is not limited to space, by earthly boundaries, nor is it limited in time, that is, by the passing of generations into the life beyond the grave. In its catholic fullness, in its catholicity, the Church embraces both the Church of the called and the Church of the chosen, the Church on earth and the Church in Heaven."[624]

 

     Or St. Maximus the Confessor’s: "Men, women and children, profoundly divided as to race, nation, language, manner of life, work, knowledge, honour, fortune... are all recreated by the Church in the Spirit. To all equally she communicates a divine aspect. All receive from her a unique nature which cannot be broken asunder, a nature which no longer permits one henceforth to take into consideration the many and profound differences which are their lot. In that way all are raised up and united in a truly catholic manner."[625]

 

     Khomiakov's argument was as follows: "’Sobor’ expresses the idea of a gathering not only in the sense of an actual, visible union of many in a given place, but also in the more general sense of the continual possibility of such a union. In other words: it expresses the idea of unity in multiplicity. Therefore, it is obvious that the word kaqolikoV, as understood by the two great servants of the Word of God sent by Greece to the Slavs, was derived not from kata and ola, but from kata and olon; for kata often has the same meaning as our preposition 'according to', for instance: kata Matqaion, kata Markon, 'according to Matthew', 'according to Mark'. The Catholic Church is the Church according to all, or according to the unity of all, kaq'olwn twn pisteuontwn, the Church according to complete unanimity, the Church in which all peoples have disappeared and in which there are no Greeks, no barbarians, no difference of status, no slaveowners, and no slaves; that Church about which the Old Testament prophesied and which was realised in the New Testament - in one word, the Church as it was defined by St. Paul."[626]

 

     "The Apostolic Church of the ninth century (the time of Saints Cyril and Methodius) is neither the Church kaq' ekaston (according to the understanding of each) as the Protestants have it, nor the Church kata ton episkopon thV RwmhV (according to the understanding of the bishop of Rome) as is the case with the Latins; it is the Church kaq' olon (according to the understanding of all in their unity), the Church as it existed prior to the Western split and as it still remains among those whom God preserved from the split: for, I repeat, this split is a heresy against the dogma of the unity of the Church."[627]

 

     The Catholicity of the Orthodox Church was shared, according to Khomiakov, neither by the Roman Catholic “Church”, which sacrificed diversity for the sake of unity, nor with Protestantism, which sacrificed unity for diversity. Instead of Orthodox Catholicity, which belonged only to the Orthodox Church, the Papists had Romanism, that is, mechanical obedience to the Bishop of Rome and his ex cathedra definitions of truth. This guaranteed external unity (for a time), but no inner consensus. And so it violated the truth of the Church Herself, Her Catholicity.

 

     Moreover, Romanism contains the seeds of Protestantism insofar as the Pope was the first protester against the inner Catholicity of the Church as expressed in the Seven Ecumenical Councils accepted in both East and West. As Khomiakov put it: "having appropriated the right of independently deciding a dogmatic question within the area of the Ecumenical Church, private opinion carried within itself the seed of the growth and legitimation of Protestantism, that is, of free investigation torn from the living tradition of unity based on mutual love."[628]

 

     The truth, according to Khomiakov, is given, not to individuals as such, but to the Church, - “the pillar and ground of the truth” (I Timothy 3.15), in St. Paul’s words, - understood as a conciliar organism united in freedom and love. Thus “clarity of understanding is placed in dependence on the moral law. The communion of love is not only useful, but completely necessary for the attainment of the truth, and the attainment of the truth is based on it and is impossible without it. The truth, being unattainable for individualistic thought, is accessible only to the coming together of thoughts bound by love.”[629]

 

     We see, then, that Khomiakov’s conception of sobornost’ is strictly theological and ecclesiological, and cannot be identified with Herzen’s idea of the mir as the embryo of “Russian socialism”.

 

     However, some have accused him of just such a degradation of a theological mystery into a secular ideal, of confusing sobornost’ with democracy, the spiritual warmth of communion in Christ with the natural warmth of a family or society.

 

     “One could even say,” writes S. Khoruzhij, “that the social aspect, the interpretation of sobornost’ as the principle of social existence, in time came to occupy centre stage, leaving the original ecclesiological meaning of the concept in the background and almost forgotten. Here we see a fairly systematic evolution. From the beginning there lived in the minds of the early Slavophiles an idea of the communal ideal expressing the harmonious management of social life. They were in agreement in considering the closest historical approximation to it the village commune, the peasant mir, and, correspondingly, the ideal was usually called ‘communality’ or ‘communal unity’, being defined as ‘unity which consists in… the concept of a natural and moral brotherhood and inner justice’ (I, 99). It is a banal tradition to reproach the Slavophiles for idealizing the communal set-up and Russian history. For all its triteness, the reproach is just; although Khomiakov tried to moderate this tendency (especially after the Crimean war), he never managed to measure with one measure and judge with an equal judgement home and abroad, Russia and the West. But we must point something else out here. However embellished were his descriptions of the sources and bases of Russian history and statehood, embellishment never became deification, nor was communality identified with sobornost’. They were two different principles, and Khomiakov did not think of merging them into each other, bringing a human, secular matter to the level of the Theandric and grace-filled. He saw an impassible boundary between the one and the other.

 

     “However, it was not long before people with frightening ease lost the ability to discern this boundary – and then learned to deny it. Sobornost’ was inexorably, with greater and greater strength and openness, brought down to earth, deprived of its grace-filled content and reduced to a simple social and organic principle: to a certain degree this process was the very essence of the ideological evolution of Slavophilism, from its earlier to its later variants, and from it to the conservatism of the last reign, to post-revolutionary Eurasianism and still further. In this process of the degeneration of the path of sobornost’ it crossed paths with the socialist idea: as has been pointed out more than once, ‘in this attraction to the ideal of… the commune it is not difficult to discern a subconscious and erroneous thirst for sobornost’ [Florovsky]’. Therefore in the same descending line we find in the end all the communard variations on the theme of collectivisation, Soviet patriotism and even National Bolshevism… At the same as grace freedom is cast out – and, as a result, sobornost’ completely lost its spiritual nature, being turned into the regulative principle either of mechanical statehood, or of the organic life of the primitive community. The link with the Church, churchness, was for the main part preserved externally. However, it goes without saying the very idea of the Church could here become just as degenerate as the idea of sobornost’. In the first case the Church was approximated with the state to the point of being indistinguishable frm it, and in the second case it emerged as a primitively pagan institution for the sanctification of life and manners. They claimed to be preserving churchness, while rejecting the principle of freedom – and this was spiritual blindness. ‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom’, says Paul, and Orthodoxy reveals his covenant through the ascetic principle of synergy: the grace of the Holy Spirit lives in the Church, but each member of the Church acquires it by his personal spiritual activity, to the realization of his own personal liberty. And only in ‘the agreement of personal liberties’ (Khomiakov) is the grace-filled Body of the Lord put together.”[630]

 

Russia and Europe: (4) Kireevsky

 

     We have seen that the Slavophiles believed that western civilization since the Schism in the eleventh century had created a new kind of man, homo occidentalis. The question, then, was: what were the main characteristics of this new man, and in what did he differ from homo orientalis, the older, original kind of Christian and European, who was now to be found only in those Balkan lands conquered by the Turks and in the distant outpost of Kievan Rus’? The first clear answer to this question was expounded by Ivan Vasilievich Kireevsky in his Reply to Khomiakov (1839) and On the Character of European Civilization and Its Relationship to Russian Civilization (1852).

 

     Kireevsky, a man of thoroughly western education, tastes and habits, who converted to the eastern ideal in adult life, found the answer to this question in the growth of western rationalism.

 

     The beginning of Kireevsky’s spiritual emancipation may be said to date to 1829, when, as Fr. Sergius Chetverikov writes, he “appeared for the first time in the field of literature with an article about Pushkin, which revealed a remarkably clear understanding of the works of this poet. In this article he already expressed doubt in the absolute truth of German philosophy and pointed out the pressing need for the development of a school of original Russian scientific thought. ‘German philosophy can not take root in us. Our philosophy must arise from current questions, from the prevailing interest of our people and their individual ways of life.’ But at the same time we must not reject the experience of Western European thought. ‘The crown of European enlightenment served as the cradle of our education. It was born when the other states had already completed the cycle of their intellectual development; and where they finished, there we began. Like a young sister in a large harmonious family, Russia was enriched by the experience of her older brothers and sisters prior to her entry into the world.’”[631]

 

     At this stage the full uniqueness and saving truth of Orthodoxy was perhaps not yet fully revealed to Kireevsky. The decisive moment in his conversion, as Nina Lazareva writes, was his marriage to Natalya Petrovna Arbeneva in 1834: “The beginning of his family life was for Ivan Vasilievich also the beginning of the transformation of his inner world, the beginning of his coming out of that dead-end in which his former rationalistic world-view had led him. The difference between the whole structure of Natalya Petrovna’s life, educated as she had been in the rules of strict piety, and that of Ivan Vasilievich, who had passed his days and nights in tobacco-filled rooms reading and discussing the latest philosophical works, could not fail to wound both of them.

 

     “In the note written by A.I. Koshelev from the words of N.P. Kireevsky and entitled ‘The Story of Ivan Vasilievich’s Conversion’, we read: ’In the first period after their marriage her fulfilment of our Church rites and customs made an unpleasant impression on him, but from the tolerance and delicacy that was natural to him he did not hinder her in this at all. She on her side was still more sorrowfully struck by his lack of faith and complete neglect of all the customs of the Orthodox Church. They had conversations which ended with it being decided that he would not hinder her in the fulfilment of her obligations, and he would be free in his actions, but he promised in her presence not to blaspheme and by all means to cut short the conversations of his friends that were unpleasant to her. In the second year of their marriage he asked his wife to read Cousin. She willing did this, but when he began to ask her for her opinion of this book, she said that there was much good in it, but that she had not found anything new, for in the works of the Holy Fathers it was all expounded in a much profounder and more satisfying way. He laughed and was quiet. He began to ask his wife to read Voltaire with him. She told him that she was ready to read any serious book that he might suggest to her, but she disliked mockery and every kind of blasphemy and she could neither hear nor read them. Then after some time they began to read Schelling together, and when great, radiant thoughts stopped them and I.V. Kireevsky demanded wonderment from his wife, she first said that she knew these thoughts from the works of the Holy Fathers. She often pointed them out to him in the books of the Holy Fathers, which forced Ivan Vasilievich to read whole pages sometimes. It was unpleasant for him to recognise that there really was much in the Holy Fathers that he had admired in Schelling. He did not like to admit this, but secretly he took his wife’s books and read them with interest.’

 

     “At that time the works of the Holy Fathers were hardly published in Russia, lovers of spiritual literature transcribed them themselves or for small sums of money they engaged transcribers. Natalya Petrovna made notes from those books which her spiritual father, Hieromonk Philaret (Puliashkin) gave her to read. In his time he had laboured much to prepare the Slavonic Philokalia for publication. These were works of the Holy Fathers collected by St. Paisius Velichkovsky which contained instructions on mental prayer, that is, on the cleansing of the soul from passions, on the means to attaining this and in particular on the union of the mind and the heart in the Jesus prayer. In 1836 Ivan Vasilievich for the first time read the works of St. Isaac the Syrian, who was called the teacher of silence. Thus the philosopher came into contact with the hitherto unknown to him, centuries-old Orthodox enlightenment, which always witnessed to the True Light, our Lord Jesus Christ.

 

     “’Acquaintance with the Novospassky monk Philaret, conversations with the holy elder and the reading of various works of the Holy Fathers gave him pleasure and drew him to the side of piety. He went to see Fr. Philaret, but each time as it were unwillingly. It was evident that he wanted to go to him, but forcing was always necessary.’ This continued until, according to the Providence of God, and thanks to the clairvoyance of Elder Philaret and his knowledge of the human soul, a truly wondrous event took place: ‘I.V. Kireevsky in the past never wore a cross round his neck. His wife had more than once asked him to do that, but Ivan Vasilyevich had not replied. Finally, he told her once that he would put on a cross if it would be sent to him by Fr. Philaret, whose mind and piety he warmly admired. Natalya Petrovna went to Fr. Philaret and communicated this to him. The elder made the sign of the cross, took it off his neck and said to Natalya Petrovna: ‘Let this be to Ivan Vasilyevich for salvation.’

 

     “When Natalya Petrovna went home, Ivan Vasilyevich on meeting her said: ‘Well, what did Fr. Philaret say?’ She took out the cross and gave it to Ivan Vasilyevich. Ivan Vasilyevich asked her: ‘What is this cross?’ Natalya Petrovna said to him that Fr. Philaret had taken it off himself and said: let this be to him for salvation. Ivan Vasilyevich fell on his knees and said: ‘Well, now I expect salvation for my soul, for in my mind I had determined: if Fr. Philaet takes off his cross and sends it to me, then it will be clear that God is calling me to salvation.’ From that moment a decisive turnaround in the thoughts and feelings of Ivan Vasilyevich was evident.’”[632]

 

     Soon Kireevsky met the famous Optina Elder Macarius, with whom he started the series of Optina translations of the works of the Holy Fathers into Russian. This, as well as being of great importance in itself, marked the beginning of the return of a part of the educated classes to a more than nominal membership of the Church. It was on the basis of the teaching of the Holy Fathers that Kireevsky determined to build a philosophy that would engage with the problems felt by the Russian intelligentsia of his day and provide them with true enlightenment.

 

     A very important element in this philosophy would be a correct “placing” of Russia in relation to Western Europe. According to Kireevsky, “three elements lie at the foundation of European [i.e. Western European] education: Roman Christianity, the world of the uneducated barbarians who destroyed the [western] Roman empire, and the classical world of ancient paganism.

 

     “This classical world of ancient paganism, which did not enter into the inheritance of Russia, essentially constitutes the triumph of the formal reason of man over everything that is inside and within him – pure, naked reason, based on itself, recognizing nothing higher than or outside itself and appearing in two forms – the form of formal abstraction and the form of abstract sensuality. Classicism’s influence on European education had to correspond to this same character.

 

     “Whether it was because Christians in the West gave themselves up unlawfully to the influence of the classical world, or because heresy accidentally united itself with paganism, the Roman Church differs in its deviation from the Eastern only in that same triumph of rationalism over Tradition, of external ratiocination over inner spiritual reason. Thus it was in consequence of this external syllogism drawn out of the concept of the Divine equality of the Father and the Son [the Filioque] that the dogma of the Trinity was changed in opposition to spiritual sense and Tradition. Similarly, in consequence of another syllogism, the pope became the head of the Church in place of Jesus Christ. They tried to demonstrate the existence of God with a syllogism; the whole unity of the faith rested on syllogistic scholasticism; the Inquisition, Jesuitism – in a word, all the particularities of Catholicism, developed by virtue of the same formal process of reason, so that Protestantism itself, which the Catholics reproach for its rationalism, proceeded directly from the rationalism of Catholicism…

 

     “Thus rationalism was both an extra element in the education of Europe at the beginning and is now an exclusive characteristic of the European enlightenment and way of life. This will be still clearer if we compare the basic principles of the public and private way of life of the West with the basic principles of the same public and private way of life which, if it had not developed completely, was at least clearly indicated in old Russia, when she was under the direct influence of pure Christianity, without any admixture from the pagan world.

 

     “The whole private and public way of life of the West is founded on the concept of individual, separate independence, which presupposes individual isolation. Hence the sacredness of formal relationships; the sacredness of property and conditional decrees is more important than the personality. Every individual is a private person; a knight, prince or city within his or its rights is an autocratic, unlimited personage that gives laws to itself. The first step of each personage into society is to surround himself with a fortress from the depths of which he enters into negotiations with others and other independent powers.

 

     “… I was speaking about the difference between enlightenment in Russia and in the West. Our educative principle consisted in our Church. There, however, together with Christianity, the still fruitful remnants of the ancient pagan world continued to act on the development of enlightenment. The very Christianity of the West, in separation from the Universal Church, accepted into itself the seeds of that principle which constituted the general colouring of the whole development of Greco-Roman culture: the principle of rationalism. For that reason the character of European education differs by virtue of an excess of rationalism.

 

     “However, this excess appeared only later, when logical development had already overwhelmed Christianity, so to speak. But at the beginning rationalism, as I said, appeared only in embryo. The Roman Church separated from the Eastern because it changed certain dogmas existing in the Tradition of the whole of Christianity into others by deduction. She spread other dogmas by means of the same logical process, again in opposition to Tradition and the spirit of the Universal Church. Thus a logical belief lay at the very lowest base of Catholicism. But the first action of rationalism was limited to this at the beginning. The inner and outer construction of the Church, which had been completed earlier in another spirit, continued to exist without obvious changes until the whole unity of the ecclesiastical teaching passed into the consciousness of the thinking part of the clergy. This was completed in the philosophy of scholasticism, which, by reason of the logical principle at the very foundation of the Church, could not reconcile the contradictions of faith and reason in any other way than by means of syllogism, which thereby became the first condition of every belief. At first, naturally, this same syllogism tried to demonstrate the truth of faith against reason and subdue reason to faith by means of rational arguments. But this faith, logically proved and logically opposed to reason, was no longer a living, but a formal faith, not faith as such, but only the logical rejection of reason. Therefore during this period of the scholastic development of Catholicism, precisely by reason of its rationality, the Western church becomes an enemy of reason, its oppressive, murderous, desperate enemy. But, taken to its extreme, as the continuation of this same logical process, this absolute annihilation of reason produced the well-known opposite effect, the consequences of which constitute the character of the present enlightenment. That is what I meant when I spoke of the rational element of Catholicism.

 

     “Christianity in the East knew neither this struggle of faith against reason, nor this triumph of reason over faith. Therefore its influence on enlightenment was dissimilar to that of Catholicism.

 

     “When examining the social construction of old Russia, we find many differences from the West, and first of all: the formation of society into so-called mirs [communes]. Private, personal idiosyncracy, the basis of western development, was as little known among us as was social autocracy. A man belonged to the mir, and the mir to him. Agricultural property, the fount of personal rights in the West, belonged with us to society. A person had the rights of ownership to the extent that entered into the membership of society.

 

     “But this society was not autonomous and could not order itself, or itself acquire laws for itself, because it was not separated from other similar communities that were ruled by uniform custom. The innumerable multitude of these small communes, which constituted Russia, was all covered with a net of churches, monasteries and the remote dwellings of hermits, whence there spread everywhere identical concepts of the relationship between social matters and personal matters. These concepts little by little were bound to pass over into a general conviction, conviction – into custom, whose place was taken by law, which established throughout the whole space of the lands subject to our Church one thought, one point of view, one aim, one order of life. This universal uniformity of custom was probably one of the reasons for its amazing strength, which has preserved its living remnants even to our time, in spite of all the opposition of destructive influences which, in the course of two hundred years, strove to introduce new principles in their place.

 

     “As a result of these strong, uniform and universal customs, it was impossible for there to be any change in the social order that was not in agreement with the order of the whole. Every person’s family relationships were defined, first of all, by his birth; but in the same predetermined order the family was subject to the commune, and the wider commune to the assembly, the assembly to the veche, and so on, whence all the private circles came together in one centre, in one Orthodox Church. No personal reasoning, no artificial agreement could found any new order, think up new rights and privileges. Even the very word right was unknown among us in its western sense, but signified only justice, righteousness. Therefore no power could be given to any person or class, nor could any right be accorded, for righteousness and justice cannot be sold or taken, but exist in themselves independently of conditional relationships. In the West, by contrast, all social relationship are founded on convention or strive to attain this artificial basis. Outside convention there are no correct relationships, but only arbitrariness, which in the governing class is called autonomy, in the governed – freedom. But in both the one and the other case this arbitrariness demonstrates not the development of the inner life, but the development of the external, formal life. All social forces, interests and rights exist there in separation, each in itself, and they are united not by a normal law, but either accidentally or by an artificial agreement. In the first case material force triumphs, in the second – the sum of individual reasonings. But material force, material dominance, a material majority, the sum of individual reasonings in essence constitute one principle only at different moments of their development. Therefore the social contract is not the invention of the encyclopaedists, but a real ideal to which all the western societies strove unconsciously, and now consciously, under the influence of the rational element, which outweighs the Christian element.”[633]

 

     “Private and social life in the West,’ Kireevsky wrote, ‘are based on the concept of an individual and separate independence that presupposes the isolation of the individual. Hence the external formal relations of private property and all types of legal conventions are sacred and of greater importance than human beings”. 

 

     “Only one serious thing was left to man, and that was industry. For him the reality of being survived only in his physical person. Industry rules the world without faith or poetry. In our times it unites and divides people. It determines one’s fatherland, it delineates classes, it lies at the base of state structures, it moves nations, it declares war, makes peace, changes mores, gives direction to science, and determines the character of culture. Men bow down before it and erect temples to it. It is the real deity in which people sincerely believe and to which they submit. Unselfish activity has become inconceivable; it has acquires the same significance in the contemporary world as chivalry had in the time of Cervantes.”[634]

 

     This long and tragic development had its roots, according to Kireevsky, in the falling away of the Roman Church. "In the ninth century the western Church showed within itself the inevitable seed of the Reformation, which placed this same Church before the judgement seat of the same logical reason which the Roman Church had itself exalted... A thinking man could already see Luther behind Pope Nicolas I just as… a thinking man of the 16th century could foresee behind Luther the coming of 19th century liberal Protestantism..."[635]

 

     According to Kireevsky, just as, in a marriage, separation or divorce takes place when one partner asserts his or her self against the other, so in the Church schisms and heresies take place when one party asserts itself over against Catholic unity.  In the early, undivided Church “each patriarchate, each tribe, each country in the Christian world preserved its own characteristic features, while at the same time participating in the common unity of the whole Church.”[636] A patriarchate or country fell away from that unity only if it introduced heresy, that is, a teaching contrary to the Catholic understanding of the Church. The Roman patriarchate fell away from the Unity and Catholicity of the Church through an unbalanced, self-willed development of its own particular strength, the logical development of concepts, by iintroducing the Filioque into the Creed in defiance of the theological consciousness of the Church as a whole. But it fell away from that Unity and Catholicity in another way, by preaching a heresy about Unity and Catholicity. For the Popes taught that the Church, in order to be Catholic, must be first and above all Roman – and “Roman” not in the sense employed by the Greeks when they called themselves Roman, that is, belonging to the Christian Roman Empire and including both Italians and Greeks and people of many nationalities. The Popes now understood “Rome”, “the Roman Church” and “the Roman Faith” in a different, particularist, anti-Catholic sense – that is, “Roman” as opposed to “Greek”, “the Roman Church” as opposed to “the Greek Church”, “the Roman Faith” as opposed to, and something different from and inherently superior to, “the Greek Church”. From this time that the Roman Church ceased to be a part of the Catholic Church, having trampled on the dogma of Catholicity. Instead she became the anti-Catholic, or Romanist, or Latin, or Papist church.

 

     “Christianity penetrated the minds of the western peoples through the teaching of the Roman Church alone – in Russia it was kindled on the candle-stands of the whole Orthodox Church; theology in the West acquired a ratiocinative-abstract character – in the Orthodox world it preserved an inner wholeness of spirit; there there was a division in the powers of the reason – here a striving for their living unity; there: the movement of the mind towards the truth by means of a logical chain of concepts – here: a striving for it by means of an inner exaltation of self-consciousness towards wholeness of heart and concentration of reason; there: a searching for external, dead unity – here: a striving for inner, living unity; there the Church was confused with the State, uniting spiritual power with secular power and pouring ecclesiastical and worldly significance into one institution of a mixed character – in Russia it remained unmixed with worldly aims and institution; there: scholastic and juridical universities – in ancient Russia: prayer-filled monasteries concentrating higher knowledge in themselves; there: a rationalist and scholastic study of the higher truths – here: a striving for their living and integral assimilation; there: a mutual growing together of pagan and Christian education – here: a constant striving for the purification of truth; there: statehood arising out of forcible conquest – here: out of the natural development of the people’s everyday life, penetrated by the unity of its basic conviction; there: a hostile walling-off of classes – in ancient Russia their unanimous union while preserving natural differences; there: the artificial connection of knights’ castles with what belonged to them constituted separate states – here: the agreement of the whole land spiritually expresses its undivided unity; there: agrarian property is the first basis of civil relationships – here: property is only an accidental expression of personal relationships; there: formal-logical legality – here: legality proceeding from everyday life; there: the inclination of law towards external justice – here: preference for inner justice; there: jurisprudence strives towards a logical codex – here: instead of an external connectedness of form with form, it seeks the inner connection of lawful conviction with convictions of faith and everyday life; there improvements were always accomplished by violent changes – here by a harmonious, natural growth; there: the agitation of the party spirit – here: the unshakeability of basic conviction; there: the pursuit of fashion – here: constancy of everyday life; there: the instability of personal self-rule – here: the strength of familial and social links; there: the foppishness of luxury and the artificiality of life – here: the simplicity of vital needs and the exuberance of moral courage; there: tender dreaminess – here: the healthy integrity of rational forces; there: inner anxiety of spirit accompanied by rational conviction of one’s moral perfection – among the Russians: profound quietness and the calm of inner self-consciousness combined with constant lack of trust of oneself and the unlimited demands of moral perfection – in a word, there: disunity of spirit, disunity of thoughts, disunity of sciences, disunity of state, disunity of classes, disunity of society, disunity of family rights and obligations, disunity of the whole unity and of all the separate forms of human existence, social and personal – in Russia, by contrast, mainly a striving for integrity of everyday existence both inner and outer, social and personal, speculative and practical, aesthetic and moral. Therefore if what we have said above is just, disunity and integrity, rationalism [rassudochnost’] and reason [razumnost’] will be the final expression of West European and Russian education.”[637]

 

     We may wonder whether the contrast between East and West has been drawn too sharply, too tidily here. But there can be no doubt that Kireevsky has unerringly pointed to the main lines of bifurcation between the development of the the Orthodox East and the Catholic-Protestant West. “Having himself been a son of the West and gone to study with the most advanced philosophers,” writes Fr. Seraphim Rose, ‘Kireyevsky was thoroughly penetrated with the Western spirit and then became thoroughly converted to Orthodoxy. Therefore he saw that these two things cannot be put together. He wanted to find out why they were different and what was the answer in one’s soul, what one had to choose.”[638]

 

Russia and Europe: (5) Dostoyevsky

 

     The young writer Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoyevsky had, like Gogol, been a protégé of Belinsky. But, again like Gogol, he had broken with Belinsky, because of the latter’s atheism and readiness to subordinate art to propaganda. However, he did not decisively cast off his socialist acquaintances, and his return to conscious Christianity was correspondingly tortuous, slow and punctuated by harsh lessons from life.

 

     Dostoyevsky’s Christian critique of socialism, though not yet fully articulate in the 1840s, had already begun to reveal itself in his relations with Belinsky, of whom he wrote much later: “Treasuring above all reason, science and realism, at the same time he comprehended more keenly than anyone that reason, science and realism alone can merely produce the ant’s nest, and not social ‘harmony’ within which man can organize his life. He knew that moral principles are the basis of all things. He believed, to the degree of delusion and without any reflex, in the new moral foundations of socialism (which, however, up to the present have revealed nothing but abominable perversions of nature and common sense). Here was nothing but rapture. Still, as a socialist he had to destroy Christianity in the first place. He knew that the revolution must necessarily begin with atheism. He had to dethrone that religion whence the moral foundations of the society rejected by him had sprung up. Family, property, personal moral responsibility – these he denied radically. (I may observe that, even as Herzen, he was also a good husband and father.) Doubtless, he understood that by denying the moral responsibility of man, he thereby denied also his freedom; yet, he believed with all his being (much more blindly than Herzen, who, at the end, it seems, began to doubt) that socialism not only does not destroy the freedom of man, but, on the contrary, restores it in a form of unheard-of majesty, only on a new and adamantine foundation.

 

     “At this juncture, however, there remained the radiant personality of Christ Himself to contend with, which was the most difficult problem. As a socialist, he was duty bound to destroy the teaching of Christ, to call it fallacious and ignorant philanthropy, doomed by modern science and economic tenets. Even so, there remained the beatific image of the God-man, its moral inaccessibility, its wonderful and miraculous beauty. But in his incessant, unquenchable transport, Belinsky did not stop even before this insurmountable obstacle, as did Renan, who proclaimed in his Vie de Jésus – a book permeated with incredulity – that Christ nevertheless is the ideal of human beauty, an inaccessible type which cannot be repeated even in the future.

 

     “’But do you know,’ he screamed one evening (sometimes in a state of great excitement he used to scream), ‘do you know that it is impossible to charge man with sins, to burden him with debts and turning the other cheek, when society is organized so meanly that man cannot help but perpetrate villainies; when, economically, he has been brought to villainy, and that it is silly and cruel to demand from man that which, by the very laws of nature, he is impotent to perform even if he wished to…?’

 

     “That evening we were not alone: there was present one of Belinsky’s friends whom he respected very much and obeyed in many ways. Also present was an author, quite young, who later gained prominence in literature [Dostoyevsky].

 

     “’I am even touched to look at him,’ said Belinsky, suddenly interrupting his furious exclamations, turning to his friend and pointing at me. ‘Every time I mention Christ his face changes expression, as if he were ready to start weeping… But, believe me, naïve man,’ he jumped at me again, ‘believe me that your Christ, if He were born in our time, would be a most imperceptible and ordinary man; in the presence of contemporary science and contemporary propellers of mankind, He would be effaced!’”[639]

 

     The essence of “The Parable of the Grand Inquisitor” in that scene, with Belinsky in the role of Inquisitor and Dostoyevsky - in that of the silent Christ.

 

     However, Dostoyevsky was not yet ready to break decisively with the socialist camp. As he wrote: “All these new ideas of those days carried to us, in Petersburg, a great appeal; they seemed holy in the highest degree and moral, and – most important of all – cosmopolitan, the future law of all mankind in its totality. Even long before the Paris revolution of ’48 we fell under the fascinating influence of these ideas. Already in ’46 I had been initiated by Belinsky into the whole truth of that future ‘regenerated world’ and into the whole holiness of the forthcoming communist society. All these convictions about the immorality of the very foundations (Christian) of modern society, the immorality of religion, family, right of property; all these ideas about the elimination of nationalities in the name of universal brotherhood of men, about the contempt for one’s native country, as an obstacle to universal progress, and so on, and so forth – all these constituted such influences as we were unable to overcome and which, contrarywise, swayed our hearts and minds in the name of some magnanimity. At any rate, the theme seemed lofty and far above the level of the then prevailing conceptions, and precisely this was tempting…

 

     “The human mind, once having rejected Christ, may attain extraordinary results. This is an axiom. Europe, in the persons of her highest intellectual representatives, renounces Christ, while we, as is known, are obligated to imitate Europe…”[640]

 

     The revolution of 1848 in Europe, writes V.F. Ivanov, “gave wings of hope to all the antichristian and destructive forces.

 

     “The profound thinker V.A. Zhukovsky, in January, 1848, in an excerpt from a letter, What is Going to Happen, prophetically foretold the bloody chaos of which we are the witnesses in our own days.

 

     “’We live,’ wrote Zhukovsky, ‘on the crater of a volcano which not long ago was giving out fire, which calmed down and which is now again preparing to throw up. Its first lava flow has not yet cooled, and already in its depths a new one is bubbling, and the thunder of stones flying out of the abyss is announcing that it will soon pour out. One revolution has ended, and another stepping on its toes, and what is remarkable is that the course of the last is observing the same order as did the first, in spite of the difference in their characters. The two are similar in their first manifestations, and now, as then, they are beginning with a shaking of the main foundation of order: religion. But now they are doing it in a bolder way and on a broader scale. Then they attack the faith obliquely, preaching tolerance, but now they are directly attacking every faith and blatantly preaching atheism; then they were secretly undermining Christianity, apparently arming themselves against the abuses of Church authorities, but now they are yelling from the roots that both Christianity and the Church and the Church authorities and every authority is nothing other than abuse. What is the aim of the present reformers? – I am speaking about those who sincerely desire what is better, sincerely believe in the reality and beneficence of their speculations – what is the aim of the present reformers?, who are entering on the same path which their predecessors trod, whose end we saw with shuddering, knowing that the desired improvement would never be found there. What is the aim of the present reformers? They themselves do not clearly see it. It is very probable that many of them are deceiving themselves, and, while going forward with banners on which there shine the words of our age: forward, freedom, equality, humanity, they themselves are sure that their path leads straight to the promised land. And perhaps it is fated for them, as for many others of their predecessors, to shudder on the edge or on the bottom of this abyss, which will soon open up under their feet.

 

     “’Behind these preachers of education and progress, who are acting openly, others are acting in secret, who are not blinded, who have a practical aim which they see clearly in front of them: for them it is no longer a matter of political transformation, or of the destruction of privileges and age-old historical formations (that was already accomplished in the first revolution), but simply of the annihilation of the difference between yours and mine, or, more correctly, of turning yours into mine.’”[641]

 

     The first revolutionary movement in Russia after 1848 was the abortive “Petrashevtsy” rebellion of 1849, named after its leader, Michael Butashevich Petrashevsky. He expressed his “realist” views with typically Russian explicitness: "[Naturalism] means a science which holds that by thought alone, without the help of tradition, revelation, or divine intervention, man can achieve in real life a state of permanent happiness through the total and independent development of all his natural faculties. In the lower phases of its evolution, naturalism considers the appearance of the divine element in positive religions to be a falsehood, the result of human rather than divine action. In its further evolution, this science - having absorbed pantheism and materialism - conceives divinity as the supreme and all-embracing expression of human understanding, moves towards atheism, and finally becomes transformed into anthropotheism - the science that proclaims that the only supreme being is man himself as a part of nature. At this stage of its rational evolution, naturalism considers the universal fact of the recognition of God in positive religions to be a result of man's deification of his own personality and the universal laws of his intellect; it considers all religions that reflected the historical evolution of mankind to be a gradual preparation for anthropotheism, or - in other words - total self-knowledge and awareness of the vital laws of nature."[642]

 

     The Petrashevtsy especially admired Fourier; and at a meeting on his birthday D.D. Akhsharumov declared: “We venerate his memory because he showed us the path we must follow, he revealed the source of wealth, of happiness. Today is the first banquet of the Fourierists in Russia, and we are all here: ten people, not much more! Everything begins from something small and grows into something big. Our aim is to destroy the capitals and cities and use all their materials for other buildings, and turn the whole of this life of torments, woes, poverty and shame into a life that is luxurious, elegant, full of joy, wealth and happiness, and cover the whole poor land with palaces and fruits and redecorate them in flowers. We here, in our country, will begin its transfiguration, and the whole land will finish it. Soon the human race will be delivered from intolerable sufferings…”[643]

 

     One member of the circle, the proud, silent and handsome Nikolai Speshnev, considered all distinctions between beauty and ugliness, good and evil to be “a matter of taste”. He did not believe in the transformation of Russia from the top, but in a socialist revolution from below, to which end only verbal propaganda was necessary. “I intend to use it, without the slightest shame or conscience, to propagandise or socialism, atheism, terrorism, and all that is good.”[644]

 

     Speshnev formed his own “Russian Society”, which was joined by Dostoyevsky. He probably modelled Stavrogin in The Possessed on Speshnev, and who called him his “Mephistopheles”. Dostoyevsky was fascinated by these revolutionaries, but was never with them wholly, and continued to believe in Christ.

 

      However, in April, 1849 the Petrashevtsy, including Dostoyevsky, were arrested, imprisoned in the Peter and Paul fortress, and then, after a mock-execution, sent to four years’ hard labour in Siberia. The experience – recounted in The House of the Dead – weaned Dostoyevsky forever from his revolutionary leanings and brought him to repentance. As he wrote to his brother: “In my absolute spiritual solitude [in the Peter and Paul fortress], I re-examined the whole of my former life. I scrutinized every minute detail. I thought very carefully about my past. Alone as I was, I judged myself harshly, without mercy. Sometimes I even thanked my fate because it had sent me into solitude, for without it, this new judgement of myself would never have happened…”[645] As St. Ambrose of Optina said of him in the 1870s: “This is a man who repents!”[646]

 

     Then, in Siberia, by being “personally classed with villains”, he came to know the Russian people as they really were for the first time. And through them, as he wrote later, “I again received into my soul Christ, Who had been revealed to me in my parents’ home and Whom I was about to lose when, on my part, I transformed myself into a ‘European liberal’.”[647] And so, as with Pushkin and Gogol, another great writer was rescued from atheism and revolution and converted to Christ…

 

     “The moral idea is Christ. In the West, Christ has been distorted and diminished. It is the kingdom of the Antichrist. We have Orthodoxy. As a consequence, we are the bearers of a clear understanding of Christ and a new idea for the resurrection of the world… If faith and Orthodoxy were shaken in the people, then they would begin to disintegrate… The whole matter lies in the question: can one believe, being civilized, that is, a European, that is, believe absolutely in the Divinity of the Son of God, Jesus Christ? (for all faith consists in this)… You see: either everything is contained in faith or nothing is: we recognize the importance of the world through Orthodoxy. And the whole question is: can one believe in Orthodoxy? If one can, then everything is saved: if not, then better to burn… But if Orthodoxy is impossible for the enlightened man, then… all this is hocus-pocus and Russia’s whole strength is provisional… It is possible to believe seriously and in earnest. Here is everything, the burden of life for the Russian people and their entire mission and existence to come…”[648]

 

The Slavophiles on Autocracy

 

     We have discussed Orthodoxy and Nationhood. But we have said little about the central element in the tripartite formula of Nicholas I’s reign: Autocracy, which was coming more and more under attack from the westernizers as the century wore on. What did the Slavophiles have to say about this?

 

     If we exclude Kireevsky, the answer is: not much. As Lev Tikhomirov writes, “the greatest merit of the Slavophiles consisted not so much in their working out of a political teaching, as in establishing the social and psychological bases of public life.”[649] They were not opposed to the autocracy; but the emphasis of their thought, especially Khomiakov’s, was on the people rather than on the autocracy.[650] Thus Khomiakov wrote: “The people transferred to the Emperor all the power with which it itself was endowed in all its forms. The sovereign became the head of the people in Church matters as well as in matters of State administration. The people could not transfer to its Emperor rights that it did not itself have. It had from the beginning a voice in the election of its bishops, and this voice it could transfer to its Emperor. It had the right, or more precisely the obligation to watch that the decisions of its pastors and their councils were carried out – this right it could entrust to its chosen one and his successors. It had the right to defend its faith against every hostile attack upon it, - this right it could also transfer to its Sovereign. But the Church people did not have any power in questions of dogmatic teaching, and general Church piety – and for that reason it could not transfer such power to its Emperor.”

 

     Here again we see the myth of an early pact between the Tsar and the people which Karamzin believed in, and which Tikhomirov criticised (see above). For this was what the Slavophiles were above all concerned to emphasize: that the Tsar is not separated from his people, that Tsar and people form one harmonious whole and have a single ideal.

 

     Khomiakov was also concerned to emphasize that it was not the Tsar who ruled the Russian Orthodox Church, as the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire might have suggested. “’It is true,’ he says, ‘the expression “the head of the local church” has been used in the Laws of the Empire, but in a totally different sense than it is interpreted in other countries’ (II, 351). The Russian Emperor has no rights of priesthood, he has no claims to infallibility or ‘to any authority in matters of faith or even of church discipline’. He signs the decisions of the Holy Synod, but this right of proclaiming laws and putting them into execution is not the same as the right to formulate ecclesiastical laws. The Tsar has influence with regard to the appointment of bishops and members of the Synod, but it should be observed that such dependence upon secular power is frequently met with in many Catholic countries as well. In some of the Protestant states it is even greater (II, 36-38, 208).”[651]

 

     “The whole pathos of Slavophilism,” writes Bishop Dionysius (Alferov), “lay in ‘sobornost’’, ‘zemstvo’, in ‘the popular character of the monarchy, and not its service as ‘he who restrains [the coming of the Antichrist]’. Byzantium, in which there were neither Zemskie Sobory nor self-government of the land, elicited only irritation in them and was used by them to put in the shade the free ‘Slavic element’. The Russian Tsar for the Slavophiles was first of all ‘the people’s Tsar’, and not the Tsar of the Third Rome. According to the witness of Konstantin Leontiev, Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich himself noticed that under the Slavophiles’ Russian caftan there stuck out the trousers of the most vulgar European democracy and liberalism (K. Leontiev, ‘Slavophilism in theory and Slavophilism in life’).”[652]

 

     This estimate is probably least true in relation to Kireevsky, although of all the Slavophiles he had the most problems with the Tsarist censor. At one point he was required to give an assurance to the minister of popular enlightenment that in his thinking he did not “separate the Tsar from Russia”. Offended by the very suggestion, Kireyevsky proceeded to give one of the earliest, and, with Metropolitan Philaret’s writings on the subject, one of the best justifications of the Autocracy in post-Petrine Russian history.

 

     He began from the fact that “the Russian man loves his Tsar. This reality cannot be doubted, because everyone can see and feel it. But love for the Tsar, like every love, can be true and false, good and bad – I am not speaking about feigned love. False love is that which loves in the Tsar only one’s advantage; this love is base, harmful and, in dangerous moments, can turn to treachery. True love for the Tsar is united in one indivisible feeling with love for the Fatherland, for lawfulness and for the Holy Orthodox Church. Therefore this love can be magnanimous. And how can one separate in this matter love for the Tsar from the law, the Fatherland and the Church? The law is the will of the Tsar, proclaimed before the whole people; the Fatherland is the best love of his heart; the Holy Orthodox Church is his highest link with the people, it is the most essential basis of his power, the reason for the people’s trust in him, the combination of his conscience with the Fatherland, the living junction of the mutual sympathy of the Tsar and the people, the basis of their common prosperity, the source of the blessing of God on him and on the Fatherland.

 

     “But to love the Tsar separately from Russia means to love an external force, a chance power, but not the Russian Tsar: that is how the Old Believer schismatics and Balts love him, who were ready to serve Napoleon with the same devotion when they considered him stronger than Alexander. To love the Tsar and not to venerate the laws, or to break the laws given or confirmed by him under the cover of his trust, under the protection of his power, is to be his enemy under the mask of zeal, it is to undermine his might at the root, to destroy the Fatherland’s love for him, to separate the people’s concept of him from their concept of justice, order and general well-being – in a word, it is to separate the Tsar in the heart of the people from the very reasons for which Russia wishes to have a Tsar, from those good things in the hope of which she so highly venerates him. Finally, to love him without any relation to the Holy Church as a powerful Tsar, but not as the Orthodox Tsar, is to think that his rule is not the service of God and His Holy Church, but only the rule of the State for secular aims; it is to think that the advantage of the State can be separated from the advantage of Orthodoxy, or even that the Orthodox Church is a means, and not the end of the people’s existence as a whole, that the Holy Church can be sometimes a hindrance and at other times a useful instrument for the Tsar’s power. This is the love of a slave, and not that of a faithful subject; it is Austrian love, not Russian; this love for the Tsar is treason before Russia, and for the Tsar himself it is profoundly harmful, even if sometimes seems convenient. Every counsel he receives from such a love bears within it a secret poison that eats away at the very living links that bind him with the Fatherland. For Orthodoxy is the soul of Russia, the root of the whole of her moral existence, the source of her might and strength, the standard gathering all the different kinds of feelings of her people into one stronghold, the earnest of all her hopes for the future, the treasury of the best memories of the past, her ruling object of worship, her heartfelt love. The people venerates the Tsar as the Church’s support; and is so boundlessly devoted to him because it does not separate the Church from the Fatherland. All its trust in the Tsar is based on feeling for the Church. It ses in him a faithful director in State affairs only because it knows that he is a brother in the Church, who together with it serves her as the sincere son of the same mother and therefore can be a reliable shield of her external prosperity and independence…

 

     “He who has not despaired of the destiny of his Fatherland cannot separate love for it from sincere devotion to Orthodoxy. And he who is Orthodox in his convictions cannot not love Russia, as the God-chosen vessel of His Holy Church on earth. Faith in the Church of God and love for Orthodox Russia are neither divided nor distinguished in the soul of the true Russian. Therefore a man holding to another confession cannot love the Russian Tsar except with a love that is harmful for the Tsar and for Russia, a love whose influence of necessity must strive to destroy precisely that which constitutes the very first condition of the mutual love of the Tsar and Russia, the basis of his correct and beneficent rule and the condition of her correct and beneficent construction.

 

     “Therefore to wish that the Russian government should cease to have the spirit and bear the character of an Orthodox government, but be completely indifferent to the confessions, accepting the spirit of so-called common Christianity, which does not belong to any particular Church and was thought up recently by some unbelieving philosophers and half-believing Protestants – to wish for this would signify for the present time the tearing up of all bonds of love and trust between the government and the people, and for the future, - that is, if the government were to hide its indifference to Orthodoxy until it educates the people in the same coldness to its Church, - it would produce the complete destruction of the whole fortress of Russia and the annihilation of the whole of her world significance. For for him who knows Russia and her Orthodox Faith, there can be no doubt that she grew up on it and became strong by it, since by it alone is she strong and prosperous.”[653]

 

     In a critical review of an article by the Protestant Pastor Wiener, who was defending the principle of complete separation of Church and State and the most complete tolerarnce, Kireevsky wrote: “The author says very justly that in most states where there is a dominant religion, the government uses it as a means for its own private ends and under the excuse of protecting it oppresses it. But this happens not because there is a dominant faith in the state, but, on the contrary, because the dominant faith of the people is not dominant in the state apparatus. This unfortunate relationship takes place when, as a consequence of some chance historical circumstances, the rift opens up between the convictions of the people and of the government. Then the faith of the people is used as a means, but not for long. One of three things must unfailingly happen: either the people wavers in its faith and then the whol state apparatus wavers, as we see in the West; or the government attains a correct self-knowledge and sincerely converts to the faith of the people, as we hope; or the people sees that it is being deceived, as we fear.

 

     “But what are the normal, desirable relations between the Church and the State? The state must not agree with the Church so as to search out and persecute heretics and force them to believe (this is contrary to the spirit of Christianity and has a counter-productive effect, and harms the state itself almost as much as the Church); but it must agree with the Church so as to place as the main purpose of its existence to be penetrated constantly, more and more, with the spirit of the Church and not only not look on the Church as a means to its own most fitting existence, but, on the contrary, see in its own existence only a means for the fullest and most fitting installation of the Church of God on earth.

 

     “The State is a construction of society having as its aim earthly, temporal life. The Church is a construction of the same society having as its aim heavenly, eternal life. If society understands its life in such a way that in it the temporal must serve the eternal, the state apparatus of this society must also serve the Church. But if society understands its life in such a way that in it earthly relationships carry on by themselves, and spiritual relations by themselves, then the state in such a society must be separated from the Church. But such a society will consist not of Christians, but of unbelievers, or, at any rate, of mixed faiths and convictions. Such a state cannot make claims to a harmonious, normal development. The whole of its dignity must be limited by a negative character. But there where the people is bound inwardly, by identical convictions of faith, there it has the right to wish and demand that both its external bonds – familial, social and state – should be in agreement with its religious inspirations, and that its government should be penetrated by the same spirit. To act in hostility to this spirit means to act in hostility to the people itself, even if these actions afford it some earthly advantages.”[654]

 

     Another Russian supporter of Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality who is sometimes classified as a Slavophile was the poet and diplomat F.I. Tiutchev. Already at the age of 19, in his poem, “On Pushkin’s Ode on Freedom”, he had rebuked his fellow-poet for disturbing the hearts of the citizens by his call to freedom.[655] While sharing the world-view of the Slavophiles, he took their sympathies and antipathies to their logical conclusions. As Demetrius Merezhkovsky expressed it, Tiutchev put bones into the soft body of Slavophilism, crossed its ‘t’s and dotted its ‘i’s…[656]

 

     Thus he posed the contrast between Russia and the West as a struggle between Christ and Antichrist. “The supreme power of the people,” he wrote, “is in essence an antichristian idea.” Popular power and Tsarist power mutually exclude each other. So it was not a question of two cultures living side by side with each other and complementing each other in some sense. No: it was a fight to the death between the Russian idea and the European idea, between the Rome of the Papacy and the political and social structures it evolved, and the Third Rome of the Orthodox Tsar…

 

     Tiutchev believed in the Empire, whose soul was the Orthodox Church and whose body was the Slavic race. More particularly, he believe in “the Great Greco-Russian Eastern Empire”, whose destiny was to unite the two halves of Europe under the Russian Emperor, with some Austrian lands going to Russia. Then there would be an Orthodox Pope in Rome and an Orthodox Patriarch in Constantinople. The Empire was a principle, and indivisible. Western history had been a struggle between the schismatic Roman papacy and the usurper-empire of Charlemagne and his successors. This struggle “ended for the one in the Reformation, i.e. the denial of the Church, and for the other in the Revolution, i.e. the denial of the Empire”. The struggle between Russia and Napoleon had been the struggle “between the lawful Empire and the crowned Revolution”.[657]

 

     As a diplomat Tiutchev knew much about the threat both to the Orthodox autocracy posed by the 1848 revolution under the new Napoleon in Europe; and in April, 1848, just as this revolution was gathering pace, he wrote: “There have long been only two real powers in Europe – the revolution and Russia. These two powers are now opposed to each other, and perhaps tomorrow they will enter into conflict. Between them there can be no negotiations, no treaties; the existence of the one is equivalent to the death of the other! On the outcome of this struggle that has arisen between them, the greatest struggle that the world has ever seen, the whole political and religious future of mankind will depend for many centuries.

 

     “The fact of this rivalry is now being revealed everywhere. In spite of that, the understanding of our age, deadened by false wisdom, is such that the present generation, faced with a similar huge fact, is far from completely comprehending its true significance and has not evaluated its real causes.

 

     “Up to now they have sought for its explanation in the purely political sphere; they have tried to interpret by a distinction of concepts on the exclusively human plane. In fact, the quarrel between the revolution and Russia depends on deeper causes. They can be defined in two words.

 

     “Russia is first of all the Christian Empire; the Russian people is Christian not only by virtue of the Orthodoxy of its convictions, but also thanks to something more in the realm of feelings than convictions. It is Christian by virtue of that capacity for self-denial and self-sacrifice which constitutes as it were the basis of her moral nature. The revolution is first of all the enemy of Christianity! Antichristian feeling is the soul of the revolution: it is its special, distinguishing feature. Those changes in form to which it has been subjected, those slogans which it has adopted in turn, everything, even its violence and crimes have been secondary and accidental. But the one thing in it that is not accidental is precisely the antichristian feeling that inspires it, it is that (it is impossible not to be convinced of this) that has acquired for it this threatening dominance over the world. He who does not understand this is no more than a blind man present at a spectacle that the world presents to him.

 

     “The human I, wishing to depend only on itself, not recognising and not accepting any other law besides its own will – in a word, the human I, taking the place of God, - does not, of course, constitute something new among men. But such has it become when raised to the status of a political and social right, and when it strives, by virtue of this right, to rule society. This is the new phenomenon which acquired the name of the French revolution in 1789.

 

     “Since that time, in spite of all its permutations, the revolution has remained true to its nature, and perhaps never in the whole course of this development has it recognized itself as so of one piece, so sincerely antichristian as at the present moment, when it has ascribed to itself the banner of Christianity: ‘brotherhood’. In the name of this we can even suppose that it has attained its apogee. And truly, if we listen to those naively blasphemous big words which have become, so to speak, the official language of the present age, then will not everyone think that the new French republic was brought into the world only in order to fulfil the Gospel law? It was precisely this calling that the forces created by the revolution ascribed to themselves – with the exception, however, of that change which the revolution considered it necessary to produce, when it intended to replace the feeling of humility and self-denial, which constitutes the basis of Christianity, with the spirit of pride and haughtiness, free and voluntary good works with compulsory good works. And instead of brotherhood preached and accepted in the name of God, it intended to establish a brotherhood imposed by fear on the people-master. With the exception of these differences, its dominance really promises to turn into the Kingdom of Christ!

 

     “And nobody should be misled by this despicable good will which the new powers are showing to the Catholic Church and her servers. It is almost the most important sign of the real feeling of the revolution, and the surest proof of the position of complete power that it has attained. And truly, why should the revolution show itself as hostile to the clergy and Christian priests who not only submit to it, but accept and recognize it, who, in order to propitiate it, glorify all its excesses and, without knowing it themselves, become partakers in all its unrighteousness? If even similar behaviour were founded on calculation alone, this calculation would be apostasy; but if conviction is added to it, then this is already more than apostasy.

 

     “However, we can foresee that there will be no lack of persecutions, too. On that day when concessions have reached their extreme extent, the catholic church will consider it necessary to display resistance, and it will turn out that she will be able to display resistance only by going back to martyrdom. We can fully rely on the revolution: it will remain in all respects faithful to itself and consistent to the end!

 

     “The February explosion did the world a great service in overthrowing the pompous scaffolding of errors hiding reality. The less penetrating minds have probably now understood that the history of Europe in the course of the last thirty three years was nothing other than a continuous mystification. And indeed with what inexorably light has the whole of this past, so recent and already so distant from us, been lit up? Who, for example, will now not recognize what a laughable pretension was expressed in that wisdom of our age which naively imagined that it had succeeded in suppressing the revolution with constitutional incantations, muzzling its terrible energy by means of a formula of lawfulness? After all that has happened, who can still doubt that from the moment when the revolutionary principle penetrated into the blood of society, all these concessions, all these reconciling formulas are nothing other than drugs which can, perhaps, put to sleep the sick man for a time, but are not able to hinder the further development of the illness itself…”[658]

 

     In spite of his fervent support for the Autocracy, Tiutchev criticised the Tsarist imposition of censorship.

 

     In 1857 he wrote: “It is impossible to impose on minds an absolute and too prolonged restriction and yoke without substantial harm for the social organism…. Even the authorities themselves in the course of time are unable to avoid the disadvantages of such a system. Around the sphere in which they are present there is formed a desert and a hugh mental emptiness, and governmental thought, not meeting from outside itself either control or guidance or even the slightest point of support, ends by weakening under its own weight even before it destined to fall under the blows of events.”[659]

 

     “Why,” he wrote to his daughter Anna in 1872, “can we oppose to harmful theories and destructive tendencies nothing except material suppression? Into what has the true principle of conservatism been transformed with us? Why has our soul become so horribly stale? If the authorities because of an insufficiency of principles and moral convictions passes to measures of material oppression, it is thereby being turned into the most terrible helper of denial and revolutionary overthrow, but it will begin to understand this only when the evil is already incorrigible.”

 

     This “liberal monarchism” was characteristic of all the early Slavophiles to a greater or lesser extent.

 

     Thus “K. Aksakov,” writes N. Lossky, “was against the idea of limiting the autocratic power of the Tsar, but at the same time he championed the spiritual freedom of the individual. On the accession of Alexander II to the throne in 1855 Aksakov submitted to him, through Count Bludov, a report ‘On the Inner Condition of Russia’. In it he reproached the Government for suppressing the people’s moral freedom and following the path of despotism, which has led to the nation’s moral degradation. He pointed out that this might popularise the idea of political freedom and create a striving to attain it by revolutionary means. To avoid these dangers he advised the Tsars to allow freedom of thought and of speech and to re-establish the practice of calling Zemski Sobors.”[660]

 

     There was undoubtedly some truth in this. The government’s oppressive measures were sometimes undiscerning, and its ability to develop a coherent philosophy to counteract the revolutionary propaganda – limited. This was due in large part to the superficial Orthodoxy of the ruling circles, which Tiutchev expressed as follows:

 

Not flesh, but spirit is today corrupt,

And man just pines away despairingly.

He strives for light, while sitting in the dark,

And having found it, moans rebelliously.

From lack of faith dried up, in fire tossed,

The unendurable he suffers now.

He knows right well his soul is lost, and thirsts

For faith – but ask for it he knows not how.

Ne’er will he say, with prayers and tears combined,

However deep before the closed door his grief:

“O let me in, my God, O hear my cry!

Lord, I believe! Help Thou mine unbelief!”[661]

 

     By contrast, Tiutchev continued to believe in the Orthodoxy of the common people and in the unique destiny of Russia, poor in her exterior aspect but rich in inner faith and piety:

 

These poor villages which stand

Amidst a nature sparse, austere –

O beloved Russian land,

Long to pine and persevere!

 

The foreigner’s disdainful gaze

Will never understand or see

The light that shines in secret rays

Upon your humility.

 

Dear native land! While carrying

The Cross and struggling to pass through,

In slavish image Heaven’s King

Has walked across you, blessing you.[662]

 

     However, the successes of government measures are easily forgotten. We have already noted the conversion of Pushkin and Gogol. In 1849 the revolutionary “Petrashevtsy” circle was arrested and after a fake execution its leaders sent to Siberia. Among them was the young Dostoyevsky. Far from being embittered by the experience, and he came back changed for the better, a fervent monarchist who devoted his life to providing precisely that coherent philosophy of life which could justify Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality in the eyes of the educated classes.

 

     Moreover, those who were urging the government to remove censorship were not supported by the leading churchmen of the age, and showed a dangerous naivety about the way in which the forces of evil could – and, in the reign of Alexander II, did – exploit this freedom. This naivety manifested itself in a certain anti-statism, an attempt to bypass the state as being irrelevant to the deeper life of the people, the “ancient Russian freedom” that existed in the peasant communes and the Church. We see this particularly clearly, as Walicki writes, “in the historical writings of Konstantin Aksakov. Republican liberty, he argued, was political freedom, which presupposed the people’s active participation in political affairs; ancient Russian freedom, on the other hand, meant freedom from politics – the right to live according to unwritten laws of faith and tradition, and the right to full realization in a moral sphere on which the state would not impinge.

 

     “This theory rested on a distinction the Slavophiles made between two kinds of truth: the ‘inner’ and the ‘external’ truth. The inner truth is in the individual the voice of conscience, and in society the entire body of values enshrined in religion, tradition, and customs – in a word, all values that together form an inner unifying force and help to forge social bonds based on shared moral convictions.  The external truth, on the other hand, is represented by law and the state, which are essentially conventional, artificial, and ‘external’ – all the negative qualities Kireevsky and Khomiakov ascribed to institutions and social bonds that had undergone a rationalizing and formalizing process. Aksakov went even further than the other Slavophiles in regarding all forms of legal and political relations as inherently evil; at their opposite pole was the communal principle embodied in the village commune, based (in Aksakov’s view) purely on truth and unanimity and not on any legal guarantees or conditions and agreements characteristic of a rational contract. For Aksakov the difference between Russian and the West was that in Russia the state had not been raised to the ‘principle’ on which social organization was largely founded. When the frailty of human nature and the demands of defense appeared to make political organization necessary, Russians ‘called’ their rulers from ‘beyond the sea’ in order to avoid doing injury to the ‘inner truth’ by evolving their own statehood; Russian tsars were given absolute powers so that the people might shun all contacts with the ‘external truth’ and all participation in affairs of state. Relations between ‘land’ (that is the common people who lived by the light of the inner truth) and state rested upon the principle of mutual non-interference. Of its own free will the state consulted the people, who presented their point of view at Land Assemblies but left the final decision in the monarch’s hands. The people could be sure of complete freedom to live and think as they pleased, while the monarch had complete freedom of action in the political sphere. This relationship depended entirely on moral convictions rather than legal guarantees, and it was this that constituted Russia’s superiority to Western Europe. ‘A guarantee is an evil,’ Aksakov wrote. ‘Where it is necessary, good is absent; and life where good is absent had better disintegrate than continue with the aid of evil.’ Aksakov conceded that there was often a wide gap between ideal and reality, but ascribed this entirely to human imperfections. He strongly condemned rulers who tried to interfere in the inner life of the ‘land’, but even in the case of Ivan the Terrible, whose excessed he condemned, he would not allow that the ‘land’ had the right to resistance and he praised its long-suffering loyalty.”[663]

 

     Although there is some truth in this account, it is exaggerated. Certainly, the “inner truth” of Orthodoxy was more important than the “external truth” of government and law; and it was true that the presence of this inner truth in Russia had prevented statehood becoming the “primary principle” it had become in the West, where “inner truth” had been lost. And yet the State had always taken a very active and essential role in Russian life from the beginning in protecting and fostering the internal freedom provided by the Orthodox way of life, and was accepted as such with gratitude by the people. Moreover, it was inaccurate to represent the power of the Russian tsars as being “external” to the true life of the people. For the tsars were themselves Orthodox Christians anointed for their role by the Church and guided in their decisions by the Church, the Holy Scriptures and the dogmas and decrees of the Ecumenical and Local Councils.

 

     Paradoxically, Aksakov betrays the influence of precisely that western political tradition – in its English liberal “hands off” approach to government – which he sincerely claimed to deplore.

 

     As Walicki writes, “he subconsciously adopted and applied to Russia’s past one of the chief assumptions of Western European liberal doctrine – the principle of the total separation of the political and social spheres. At the same time he rejected both liberal constitutionalism and the very content of the liberal idea of freedom. Aksakov’s interpretation of the freedom of the ‘land’ is not to be confused with the freedom of the individual, since in his interpretation freedom only applied to the ‘land’ as a whole; it was not the freedom of the individual in the community, but the community’s freedom from outside interference in matters of faith, traditions, or customs. This non-interference had nothing to do with the liberal doctrine of laissez-faire, since, according to Aksakov, the moral principles of the ‘land’ rendered economic individualism out of the question. Even his call for freedom of speech was not a truly liberal postulate since it did not envisage the acceptance of pluralistic beliefs or of minority oppositions within society. While demanding freedom in the non-political sphere, Aksakov wanted every individual to submit totally to his mir – a submission, moreover, that was to be ‘according to conscience’ and not only ‘according to law’. His ideal was a ‘free unity’ based on a total unanimity that would reduce external constraints to a minimum but at the same time exclude individual autonomy and any departure from communal tradition.”[664]

 

     With the failure of the 1848 revolution in Europe, and in view of Russia’s prominent role in suppressing it, hopes were raised in the hearts of Russian intellectuals of a Slavophile orientation that the time had at last come for the fulfilment of the age-old dream of Russia the Third Rome. Tiutchev had his own idiosyncratic version of this dream, seeing Russia as the new Slavic Empire which could liberate the East Europeans, including even the Czechs and Moravians (the first disciples of SS. Cyril and Methodius), from the false empire, church and civilization of the West.

 

     According to V. Tsimbursky, Tiutchev called on Nicholas I “to play on the revolutionary self-destruction of western civilization to place on its ruins the ‘ark’ of the new Empire: may ‘the Europe of Peter’ take the place of ‘the Europe of Charles’. With Tiutchev, as in the fears of the West, the europeanization of Russia becomes the growth of a power called to take the place and replace Romano-German Europe. Tiutchev… in return for the Florentine unia of 1439, puts forward a project for helping the Roman papacy out of the corner it was driven into by the Italian revolution on condition of its honourable return to Orthodoxy.”[665] However, Nicholas did not share this particular vision, and in 1849 he imprisoned K. Aksakov for disseminating a similar Pan-Slavism. For, almost alone among the rulers of Europe, he believed in the legitimacy and inviolability of Europe’s existing regimes, with the exception of revolutionary France but including Austria’s, in which many of the Slavs lived.

 

     For Nicholas, as K.N. Leontiev wrote, “was a true and great ‘legitimist’. He did not like even the Orthodox ‘rayas’ [peoples of the Ottoman Empire] permitting themselves to rebel against the Sultan, reasonably ascribing to himself alone the lawful right to conquer the Sultan and bring him into submission, as the Tsar of a tsar… The unsuccessful and lightmindedly liberal Decembrist rebellion of the nobility had a less profound influence on his royal mind that the later events of the 1830s, which shook him and made him understand. From that time the Tsar began an opponent of all emancipation, all equalization, all confusion both in Russia and in other countries…. The explanatory note which the young [I.S.] Aksakov was forced to present in reply to the questions of the Third Department in 1849 was interesting. Some passages in this reply were underlined by Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich, and objections against them were made by the Tsar in his own hand. Opposite the place where Aksakov writes about ‘the heartfelt sympathy of the so-called Slavophiles for the western Slavs and in general for the situation of their co-religionist and consanguineous brothers’, the Emperor made the following comment: ‘Under the guise of sympathy for the Slavic tribes supposedly oppressed in other states, there is hidden the criminal thought of a rebellion against the lawful authority of neighbouring and in part allied states, and of a general union, which they expect to attain not through the will of God’…. By these ‘states’ we must understand, of course, first of all Austria, and then in part Turkey. And I have already mentioned the fact that Nicholas Pavlovich recognized himself to have the right of exerting pressure on the Sultan in favour of his co-religionists, the right to war with him and even subject him to himself, but did not recognize the right of the subjects of the Sultan to carry out their own self-willed liberation…. Tsar Nicholas Pavlovich did not live to the end of the 19th century, when ‘reaction’ is beginning little by little to acquire for itself theoretical justifications and foundations. However, he felt by his political instinct not only that the West was on the path to a corruption which could be contagious for us, too, but also that our Russia herself under him had attained its cultural-state apogee, after which living state construction would come to an end and on which it was necessary to stop as far as possible and for as long as possible, not fearing even a certain stagnation. And all his major political actions and sympathies are explained by this conservative instinct of genius: his revulsion from the liberal monarchy of Louis Philippe; his defence of the ‘crafty’, but necessary for some time to come, perhaps, Austria; the Hungarian war; his helping of the Sultan against Mehmed Ali; his good disposition toward England, which was still at that time aristocratic and conservative; his desire that the Eastern Christians should not of their own will rise up against the lawful and autocratic Turkish government; and finally, his disillusionment in emancipated Greece, which was expressed in his words (legendary or historical, it doesn’t matter): ‘I will not give an inch of land to this demagogic people.’”[666]

   

The Crimean War

 

     However legitimate the Tsar might consider most of the governments of Europe (except that of Napoleon III) to be, this was not how they looked at him. The 1848 revolution, while in general unsuccessful, had changed the political atmosphere and balance of forces in Europe. Gratitude to Russia for keeping the peace in Europe, never strong, had completely disappeared with the rise of a new generation of leaders, such as the rabidly anti-Russian Palmerston in England and the French Emperor Napoleon III, who was looking to challenge the Vienna settlement of 1815 and divide Austria and Russia. [667] In 1851 the exiled Hungarian revolutionary Kossuth denounced Russian “despotism” in front of a cheering crowd in London. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable turn-around for these countries to ally themselves with the Ottoman empire against a Christian state. How had this radical change in the international situation taken place?

 

     One factor making for instability was the gradual weakening of the power of Turkey, “the sick man of Europe”, in the Tsar’s phrase. Clearly, if Turkey collapsed, its subject peoples of Orthodox Christian faith would look to Russia to liberate them, if not incorporate them into the Russian Empire. But the Western Powers were determined to prevent this, which would threaten their hegemony in the Eastern Mediterranean and greatly increase the power of their rival Russia. Before 1848 a Metternich might have stayed the hand of the Western Powers. But now there was no Metternich…

 

     There were also religious rivalries. The Tsar saw himself as the natural protector of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman empire. But the Catholics, whose main political protector was France, were not prepared to allow him to play this role.

 

     “The spark to the tinderbox,” writes Trevor Royle, “was the key to the main door of the Church of the Nativity in Bethelehem. By tradition, history, and a common usage which had been built up over the centuries, the great key was in the possession of the monks of the eastern, or Greek Orthodox… Church; they were the guardians of the grotto in which lay the sacred manger where Christ himself was… born. That state of affairs was contested with equal fervour by their great rivals, the monks of the Roman Catholic, or Latin, church who had been palmed off with the keys to the lesser inner doors to the narthex (the vestibule between the porch and the nave). There was also the question of whether or not a silver star adorned with the arms of France should be permitted to stand in the Sanctuary of the Nativity, but in the spring of 1852 the rivals’ paramount thoughts were concentrated on the possession of the great key to the church’s main west door….

 

     “[The first historian of the Crimean war Alexander] Kinglake wrote: ‘When the Emperor of Russia sought to … keep for his Church the holy shrines of Palestine, he spoke on behalf of fifty millions of brave, pious, devoted subjects, of whom thousands for the sake of the cause would joyfully risk their lives. From the serf in his hut, even up to the great Tsar himself, the faith professed was the faith really glowing in his heart…’”[668]

 

     “Nicolas I had both temporal and spiritual reasons for wanting to extend his protection of the eastern church within the Ottoman Empire. Napoleon III’s were rather different. Having dismissed the French parliament he needed all the support he could get, most especially from the Roman Catholics, before he could declare himself emperor. It suited him therefore to have France play a greater role in Palestine and ‘to put an end to these deplorable and too-frequent quarrels about the possession of the Holy Places’. To that end the Marquis de Lavalette, his ambassader to the Porte – or the Sublime Porte, the court or government of the Ottoman Empire – insisted that the Turks honour the agreement made in 1740 that confirmed that France had ‘sovereign authority’ in the Holy Land. Otherwise, hinted de Lavalette, force might have to be used.

 

     “On 9 February 1852 the Porte agreed the validity of the Latin claims but no sooner had the concession been made than the Turks were forced to bow once more, this time to Russian counter-claims. Basing his argument on an agreement, or firman, of 1757 which restored Greek rights in Palestine and on the Treaty of Kutchuk-Kainarji (1774) which gave Russia protection of the Christian religion within the Ottoman Empire, Nicholas’s ambassador succeeded in getting a new firman ratifying the privileges of the Greek Church. This revoked the agreement made to the French who responded by backing up their demands with a show of force.

 

     “Later that summer, much to Nicholas’s fury and to Britain’s irritation, Napoleon III ordered the 90-gun steam-powered battleship Charlemagne to sail through the Dardanelles. This was a clear violation of the London Convention of 1841 which kept the Straits closed to naval vessels, but it also provided a telling demonstration of French sea power. It was nothing less than gunboat diplomacy and it seemed to work. Impressed by the speed and strength of the French warship, and persuaded by French diplomacy and money, Sultan Abd-el-Medjid listened ever more intently to the French demands. At the beginning of December he gave orders that the keys to the Church of the Nativity were to be surrendered to the Latins and that the French-backed church was to have supreme authority over the Holy Places. On 22 December a new silver star was brought from Jaffa and as Kinglake wrote, in great state ‘the keys of the great door of the church, together with the keys of the sacred manger, were handed over to the Latins’.

 

     “Napoleon III had scored a considerable diplomatic victory. His subjects were much gratified, but in so doing he had also prepared the ground for a much greater and more dangerous confrontation. Given the strength of Russian religious convictions Tsar Nicholas was unwilling to accept the Sultan’s decision – which he regarded as an affront not just to him but to the millions of Orthodox Christians under his protection – and he was determined to have it reversed, if need be by using force himself.”[669]

 

     In October, 1852, the Tsar arrived in Kiev and confided to the metropolitan: “I do not want to shed the blood of the faithful sons of the fatherland, but our vainglorious enemies are forcing me to bare my sword. My plans are not yet made – no! But my heart feels that the time is nearing and they will soon be brought to fulfilment.” Seeking advice on his political projects, the Tsar asked if there were any holy elders in Kiev. The Metropolitan mentioned the clairvoyant fool-for-Christ, Hieroschemamonk Theophilus. They set off there immediately. On the way, they saw Blessed Theophilus lying by the side of the road in the middle of an ant-hill, not moving. His arms were folded on his chest crosswise, as in death, and his eyes were completely closed. Ants swarmed in masses all over his body and face, but he, as if feeling nothing, pretended to be dead. Puzzled, the Tsar and the Metropolitan returned to Kiev…

 

     Russian troops moved into the Romanian Principalities, and on July 2, 1853, Tsar Nicholas proclaimed: “By the occupation of the Principalities we desire such security as will ensure the restoration of our dues [in the Holy Land]. It is not conquest that we seek but satisfaction for a just right so clearly infringed.” As he told the British ambassador in St. Petersburg, Seymour: “You see what my position is. I am the Head of a People of the Greek religion, our co-religionists of Turkey look up to me as their natural protector, and these are claims which it is impossible for me to disregard. I have the conviction that good right is on my side, I should therefore begin a War, such as that which now impends, without compunction and should be prepared to carry it on, as I have before remarked to you, as long as there should be a rouble in the Treasury or a man in the country.”[670] Nevertheless, when the Powers drew up a compromise “Note”, which Nicholas promptly accepted. However, the Turks rejected it, having been secretly assured of Franco-British support. On October 4, 1853 the Turks delivered an ultimatum to the Russians to leave the Principalities within a fortnight. When the Russians rejected the ultimatum, war broke out. On the same day A.F. Tiutcheva noted in her diary: “A terrible struggle is being ignited, gigantic opposing forces are entering into confict with each other: the East and the West, the Slavic world and the Latin world, the Orthodox Church in her struggle not only with Islam, but also with the other Christian confessions, which, taking the side of the religion of Mohammed, are thereby betraying their own vital principle.”[671]

 

     A.S. Khomiakov wrote: “Whatever political bases and excuses for the struggle there may be for the struggle that is convulsing Europe now, it is impossible not to notice, even at the most superficial observation, that on one of the warring sides stand exclusively peoples belonging to Orthodoxy, and on the other – Romans and Protestants, gathered around Islam.”

 

     And Khomiakov quoted from an epistle of the Catholic Archbishop of Paris Sibur, who assured the French that the war with Russia “is not a political war, but a holy war; not a war of states or peoples, but solely a religious war”. All other reasons were “in essence no more than excuses”. The true reason was “the necessity to drive out the error of Photius; to subdue and crush it”. “That is the recognized aim of this new crusade, and such was the hidden aim of all the previous crusades, even if those who participated in them did not admit it.”[672]

 

     The British, the French and later the Sardinians joined the Turks. The British foreign minister Palmerston, in a letter to the Prime Minister John Russell, made clear that his war aim was not the restoration of some supposed injustice, but the weakening of Russia and the giving of different parts of her territory to different western powers.

 

     On February 18, 1855, the Tsar, worn out and intensely grieved by the losses in the war, died. (According to one version, he was poisoned by the the medic Mandt on the orders of Napoleon III.[673]) Metropolitan Philaret asked his valet whether he remembered the trip with the Tsar to Blessed Theophilus, and the fool-for-Christ’s strange behaviour. “Up to now I could not understand his strange behaviour. Now, the prophecy of the Starets is as clear as God’s day. The ants were the malicious enemies of our fatherland, trying to torment the great body of Russia. The arms folded on his chest and the closed eyes of Theophilus were the sudden, untimely death of our beloved Batiushka-Tsar….”[674]

 

     After the taking of Sebastopol, the new Tsar, Alexander II, signed the Treaty of Paris bring the war to an end. While the Russians had lost some battles and the major port of Sebastopol, the allies were hardly able to touch Russia proper – and on the Anatolian front the Russians conquered Kars and Erzurum with forces less than half those of the Turks.[675] At the Peace Conference in Paris in March, 1856, both Russia and Turkey were forbidden to have fleets in the Black Sea (although Alexander II abrogated this clause in 1870), the Straits were closed for warships, and the Aland islands in the Baltic were demilitarised. On the other hand, as the Russian representative A.F. Orlov telegraphed to St. Petersburg: “The English claims on the independence of Mingrelia, the Trans-Caucasus and other demands have been completely rejected. The quarrels over Nikolaev stirred up by Lord Clarendon have been resolved by our replies.”[676] The allies evacuated Sebastopol in exchange for the Russians’ withdrawal from Kars. Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, the Bishop of the Caucasus, wrote to N.N. Muraviev, the conqueror of Kars: “The allies cannot make up for their losses: the gates of Asia Minor were opened before you – these gates no longer exist… The taking of Kars produced general rejoicing in the capital. One can say that everyone understood the importance of the consequences of the fall of this, as you call it, fortress of Asia Minor.”[677] As Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow put it: “In spite of all this, in Europe we were unconquered, while in Asia we were conquerors. Glory to the Russian army!”[678]

 

     So in purely military terms, the Crimean war was not such a disaster for Russia; and if the war had continued, might well have ended with victory as superior Russian manpower began to tell. The situation had been much more perilous for Russia in 1812, and yet they had gone on to enter Paris in triumph. As Tsar Alexander II had written to the Russian commander Gorchakov after the fall of Sebastopol: “Sebastopol is not Moscow, the Crimea is not Russia. Two years after we set fire to Moscow, our troops marched in the streets of Paris. We are still the same Russians and God is still with us.” And within a generation, Russian armies were at the gates of Constantinople…

 

St. Petersburg: the Third Rome?

 

     However, the fact remained that while the war of 1812-14 had ended in the rout of Russia’s enemies, this had not happened in 1854-56. Moreover, Russia’s primary war-aim, the retention of her right to act as guardian of the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire, had not been achieved. And this turned out to be costly for, for example, the Orthodox of Damascus, who in 1860 were subjected to a massacre which the Russians were not able to prevent or avenge.[679]

 

     Still more serious was the dispiriting effect that the war had on public opinion in Russia. Observers had noted the enthusiasm of the simple people for the war, which they considered to be a holy, religious war; the soldiers in the Crimea had shown feats of heroism; and the intercession of the Mother of God had clearly been seen in the deliverance of Odessa through her “Kasperovskaya” icon.[680] However, examples of unbelief had been seen among the commanding officers at Sebastopol; some of the intelligentsy, such as B.N. Chicherin, openly scoffed the idea of a holy war; and the nation as a whole could not be said to have been as united behind their Tsar as in 1812, which divisions were accentuated after its unsuccessful conclusion. The conclusion drawn by Konstantin Aksakov (who, somewhat contrary to his anti-statist views, had ardently supported the war) was as follows: “From the very beginning of the matter the reason for all our failures has lain, not in the power, strength or skill of our enemies, but in us ourselves; we ourselves, of course, have been our most terrible adversaries. It is no wonder that we have been overcome when we ourselves give in and retreat… Believe me, the danger for Russia is not in the Crimea, and not from the English, the French and the Turks, no, the danger, the real danger is within us, from the spirit of little faith, the spirit of doubt in the help of God, a non-Russian, western spirit, a foreign, heterodox spirit, which weakens our strength and love for our brothers, which cunningly counsels us to make concessions, to humiliate ourselves, to avoid quarrels with Germany, to wage a defensive war, and to go on the offensive, and not go straight for the liberation of our brothers. We have protected ourselves! That is the source of our enslavement and, perhaps, of our endless woes. If we want God to be for us, it is necessary that we should be for God, and not for the Austrian or in general for the German union, for the sake of which we have abandoned God’s work. It is necessary that we should go forward for the Faith and our brothers. But we, having excited the hopes of our brothers, have allowed the cross to be desecrated, and abandoned our brothers to torments… The struggle, the real struggle between East and West, Russia and Europe, is in ourselves and not at our borders.”[681]

 

     Opinion was also divided among the Orthodox of the Ottoman empire. The Slavs looked to the Russians to liberate them from the Ottoman yoke. But the Greek bishops and merchants had in some ways a privileged life under the cosmopolitan and increasingly liberal Ottoman regime. During the period 1839-76, writes Mansel, Turkey was effectively ruled by “a trio of able if autocratic pashas, Reshid, Fuad and Ali… Under their aegis, the two great imperial decrees of 1839 and 1856 were issued, forming the basis for what was known as tanzimat: the policy of reform followed by the Ottoman government after 1839. They promised Christians and Muslims equality before the law in place of their separate legal systems, equal liability to military service and access to government positions, freedom from confiscation and, in the words of the 1856 decree, ‘the attainment of full happiness for all classes of our imperial subjects who are bound to one another by the heartfelt bonds of a common patriotism and are all equal in our equitable compassionate view’. The last execution of a convert to Islam, who had reverted to Christianity, took place on 4 October 1843.”[682]

 

     In view of this comfortable relationship with the Turkish authorities, it is perhaps not surprising that the Greek bishops, according to Mansel, “feared that ‘protection’ would mean ‘slavery’. They told a Russian diplomat: ‘We are now rich and strong. Nine million souls in the hands of the Patriarch, his synod and seventy bishops. You with the right of protectorate will deprive us of everything.’”[683]

 

     However, this was not the position of the more religious Greeks, and especially of the monks of Mount Athos. Thus we read in the Life of Hieroschemamonk Hilarion the Georgian (whom we have met before as Fr. Ise, the confessor of the Imeretian King Solomon II) that during the Crimean War he instructed his disciple, Hieromonk Sabbas, every day to celebrate the Divine Liturgy and pray for the Russians during it, and read the whole Psalter and make many prostrations for the aid of “our Russian brethren”. Hieromonk Sabbas witnesses: “In this way we celebrated the Divine Liturgy every day. When some time had passed, the elder [Hilarion] said to me: ‘Let’s go to the monastery, let’s ask the abbot what they know about the war, whether the Russians are winning or the enemies.’ When we arrived at the monastery, the abbot with the proestoses showed us a paper which the Patriarch and one other hierarch had sent from Constantinople, for distributing to the serving hieromonks in all the monasteries. The Patriarch wrote that they were beseeching God, at the Great Entrance in the Divine Liturgy, to give strength to the Turkish army to subdue the Russians under the feet of the Turks. To this was attached a special prayer which had to be read aloud. When the abbot, Elder Eulogius, had read us this patriarchal epistle and said to the elder: ‘Have you understood what our head, our father is writing to us?’, my elder was horrified and said: ‘He is not a Christian,’ and with sorrow asked: ‘Have you read this in the monastery during the Liturgy, as he writes?’ But they replied: ‘No! May it not be!’ But in the decree the Patriarch was threatening any monastery that did not carry out this order that it would suffer a very severe punishment. The next day we went back to our cell. A week passed. A monk came from Grigoriou monastery for the revealing of thoughts, and my elder asked him: ‘Did you read this prayer which the Patriarch sent to the monasteries?’ He replied: ‘Yes, it was read last Sunday during the Liturgy.’ The elder said: ‘You have not acted well in reading it; you have deprived yourselves of the grace of Holy Baptism, you have deprived your monastery of the grace of God; condemnation has fallen on you!’ This monk returned to the monastery and told his elders and abbot that ‘we have deprived the monastery of the grace of God, the grace of Holy Baptism – that is what Papa Hilarion is saying.’ On the same day a flood swept away the mill, and the fathers began to grumble against the abbot: ‘You have destroyed the monastery!’ In great sorrow the abbot hurried to make three prostrations before the icon of the Saviour and said: ‘My Lord Jesus Christ, I’m going to my spiritual father Hilarion to confess what I have done, and whatever penance he gives me I will carry it out, so that I should not suffer a stroke from sorrow.’ Taking with him one hierodeacon and one monk, he set off for the cell of the Holy Apostle James, where we living at the time. When they arrived, my elder was outside the cell. The abbot with his companions, on seeing my elder, fell face downwards in prostrations to the earth and said: ‘Bless, holy spiritual father.’ Then they went up to kiss his hand. But my elder shouted at them: ‘Go away, away from me; I do not accept heretics!’ The abbot said: ‘I have sinned, I have come to ask you to give me a penance.’ But the elder said: ‘How did you, wretched one, dare to place Mohammed higher than Christ? God and the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ says to His Son: “Sit Thou at My right hand, until I make Thine enemies the footstool of Thy feet’ (Psalm 109.1), but you ask Him to put His Son under the feet of His enemies! Get away from me, I will not accept you.’ With tears the abbot besought the elder to receive him in repentance and give him a penance. But my elder said: ‘I am not your spiritual father, go, find a spiritual father and he will give you a penance.’ And leaving them outside his cell weeping, the elder went into it and locked the door with a key. What could we do? We went into my cell and there served an all-night vigil, beseeching God to incline the elder to mercy and give a penance to the abbot. In the morning the elder went into the church for the Liturgy, not saying a word to those who had arrived, and after the dismissal of the Liturgy he quickly left for his cell. Those who had arrived with the abbot began to worry that he would suffer a heart attack; they asked me to go in to the elder and call him; perhaps he would listen to me. I went, fell at his feet and asked him: ‘Be merciful, give them a penance – the abbot may suffer a stroke in the heart attack with fatal consequences.’ Then the elder asked me: ‘What penance shall I give them? God on high is angry with them. What epitimia should I give them which would propitiate God?’ When I said to my father: ‘Elder, since I read the whole Psalter of the Prophet-King David every day, as you told me, there is one psalm there which fits this case – the 82nd: “O God, who shall be likened unto Thee? Be Thou not silent, neither be still, O God…” Command them to read this psalm tomorrow during the Liturgy, when the Cherubic hymn is being sung, at the Great Entrance; let the hieromonk who read the prayer of the Patriarch before stand under the great chandelier, and when all the fathers come together during the Great Entrance, the priest must come out of the altar holding the diskos and chalice in his hands, then let one monk bring a parchment with this psalm written on it in front, and let the hieromonk, who has been waiting under the chandelier, read the whole psalm loudly to the whole brotherhood, and while they are reading it from the second to the ninth verses let them all repeat many times: “Lord, have mercy”. And when the remaining verses are being read, let them all say: “Amen!” And then the grace of God will again return to their monastery.’ The elder accepted my advice and asked me to call them. When they joyfully entered the cell and made a prostration, the elder said to them: ‘Carry out this penance, and the mercy of God will return to you.’ Then they began to be disturbed that the exarch sent by the Patriarch, who was caring for the fulfilment of the patriarchal decree in Karyes, might learn about this and might bring great woes upon the monastery. They did not know what to do. The elder said: ‘Since you are so frightened, I will take my hieromonk and go to the monastery; and if the exarch or the Turks hear about it, tell them: only Monk Hilarion the Georgian ordered us to do this, and we did it, and and you will be without sorrow.’ Then the abbot said: ‘Spiritual father, we are also worried and sorrowful about you, because when the Turks will learn about this, they will come here, take you, tie you up in sacks and drown you both in the sea.’ My elder replied: ‘We are ready, my hieromonk and I, let them drown us.’ Then we all together set off in the boat for Grigoriou monastery. When the brothers of the monastery saw us, they rejoiced greatly. In the morning we arranged that the hieromonk who had read the prayer of the Patriarch should himself liturgize; they lit the chandelier during the Cherubic hymn, and when all the fathers were gathered together and the server had come out of the altar preceded by the candle and candle-holder and carrying the chalice and diskos on his head and in his hands, he declared: “May the Lord remember you all in His Kingdom”, and stopped under the great chandelier. Then one monk, having in his hand the parchment with the 82nd psalm written on it, stood in front of the priest and began to read: “O God, who shall be likened unto Thee? Be Thou not silent, neither be still, O God…” – to the end. Meanwhile the fathers called out: “Lord, have mercy” until the 10th verse, and then everyone said: “Amen” many times. And they all understood that the grace of God had again come down on the monastery, and the elders from joy embraced men, thanking me that I had done such a good thing for them; and everyone glorified and thanked God.’

 

     “All this took place under Patriarch Anthimus VI. At the end of the [Crimean] war he was for a second time removed from his throne [on September 20, 1855]. After this he came to Athos and settled in the monastery of Esphigmenou, where he had been tonsured. Once, in 1856, on a certain feast-day, he wanted to visit the monastery of St. Panteleimon, where Fr. Hilarion was at that time. During the service the Patriarch was standing in the cathedral of the Protection on the hierarchical see. Father Hilarion passed by him with Fr. Sabbas; he didn’t even look at the venerable Patriarch, which the latter immediately noticed. The Patriarch was told about the incident with the prayer in Grigoriou monastery. At the end of the service, as usual, all the guests were invited to the guest-house. The Patriarch, wanting somehow to extract himself from his awkward situation in the eyes of the Russians and Fr. Hilarion, started a conversation on past events and tried to develop the thought that there are cases when a certain ‘economia’ is demanded, and the care of the Church sometimes requires submission also to some not very lawful demands of the government, if this serves for the good of the Church. ‘And so we prayed for the granting of help from on high to our Sultan, and in this way disposed him to mercifulness for our Church and her children, the Orthodox Christians.’ When Patriarch Anthimus, under whom the schism with the Bulgarians took place, arrived on Athos after his deposition, and just stepped foot on the shore, the whole of the Holy Mountain shuddered from an underground quake and shook several times. All this was ascribed by the Athonites to the guilt of the Patriarch, and the governing body sent an order throughout the Mountain that they should pray fervently to God that He not punish the inhabitants of the Holy Mountain with His righteous wrath, but that He have mercy according to His mercy.”[684]

 

     Thus there was a fine line to be drawn between submission to the Sultan as the lawful sovereign of the Balkan Orthodox, and a too-comfortable adaptation to the conditions of this Babylonian captivity, forgetting the Jerusalem of a truly Orthodox polity. The Russian tsar, as we have seen, considered that the Orthodox peoples did not have the right to rebel against the Sultan of their own will, without his blessing – a blessing that he alone could give as being the Emperor of the Third Rome and therefore the true political ruler of all the Orthodox Christians. But the corollary of this view was that when the Tsar entered into war with the Sultan, it was the duty of the Orthodox subjects of the Sultan to pray for victory for the Tsar. For, as Schema-Hieromonk Hilarion said: “The other peoples' kings often make themselves out to be something great, but not one of them is a king in reality, but they are only adorned and flatter themselves with a great name, but God is not favourably disposed towards them, and does not abide in them. They reign only in part, by the condescension of God. Therefore he who does not love his God-established tsar is not worthy of being called a Christian.[685]

 

Relations with Heretics and Schismatics

 

     The views of Hieroschemamonk Hilarion were shared by the Russian Fathers. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow was very disturbed by the Old Believers’ and uniates’ not commemorating the Emperor during their services. He considered the commemoration of the Emperor to be an obligatory condition of the reunion of the uniates with the Orthodox Church.[686]

 

     From 1843 the Old Ritualists had begun to seek a degree of legality from the State and permission to build churches and prayer houses. Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow strongly resisted these moves. And he reported that in the Preobrazhensky workhouse the Old Ritualists were distributing books that taught “that no marriages should be recognised; the schismatics in marital unions with people not belonging to the schism should have their union broken; that bodily relationship should not be recognized in the Christian marriages; that from 1666… married Christians are a satanic nest of vipers and the most shameful dwelling-place of his demons; that now satan is thinking about the multiplication of the human race and a soul is being given from the devil for the conception of a child.”[687]

 

     In spite of Metropolitan Philaret’s protests, little was done to restrain the schismatic and heretical activities of the Old Ritualists. Then the Popovtsi began to look for a bishop overseas. No such bishop was found in the Caucasus, Syria, Palestine, Persia and Egypt. Finally, writes Dobroklonsky, they “lured to themselves a former metropolitan of Bosnia, the Greek Ambrose, who had been deprived of his see and was living in Constantinople. In 1846 he was brought to Belaia Krinitsa (in Bukovina, in Austria) and was received into the communion of the Popovtsi by cursing some supposed heresies and chrismation. In 1847, in accordance with the wish of the schismatics, he consecrated Bishop Cyril as his deputy and Arcadius for the Nekrasovtsy (in Turkey). Thus was the existence of the Belokrinitsy hierarchy established. Although in the following year, at the insistence of the Russian government, Ambrose was removed from Belaia Krinitsa to restricted residence in the city of Tsilla (in Styria) and the Belokrinitsky monastery was sealed, in 1859 the Austrian government again recognised the lawfulness of the Belokrinitskaia metropolia and the monastery was unsealed. Cyril, who succeeded Ambrose, took care to consecrate new bishops, and such soon appeared for the Turkish, Moldavian and, finally, Russian schismatics. The first of the Russians was the shopkeeper Stephen Zhirov, who was made bishop of Simbirsk with the name Sophronius in 1849; by 1860 there were already up to 10 schismatic dioceses within the boundaries of Russia. A ‘spiritual council’ was formed in Moscow to administer church affairs; it was composed of false bishops and false priests. Sophronius was dreaming of founding a patriarchate, and even set up a patriarch, but, at the insistence of the schismatics, himself condemned his own undertaking. At first the government repressed the Old Believer hierarchs and the priests ordained by them. However, the Austrian priesthood continue to spread. From the time of Alexander II it began to enjoy toleration, although the government did not recognize it as lawful. In spite of a visible success, the Austrian hierarchy from the very beginning of its existence displayed signs of disintegration. Quarrels constantly arose between the schismatic bishops. They became especially fierce after the publication in 1862 in the name of the spiritual council of a certain ‘encyclical of the one, holy, catholic and apostolic church’. It was composed by an inhabitant of Starodub, Hilarion Egor. Kabanov with the aim of condemning the reasonings of the Bespopovtsi, whose distribution had dealt a blow to the Austrian priesthood. Having examined several books of the Bespopovtsi, the epistle expressed [the following] view of the Orthodox Church: ‘The ruling church in Russia, as also the Greek, believe in the same God as we (the Old Believers), the Creator of heaven and earth… Therefore, although we pronounce and write the name of the Saviour ‘Isus’, we do not dare to condemn that which is written and pronounced ‘Iisus’ as being the name of some other Jesus, the opponent of Christ, as certain Bespopovtsi think to do. Similarly, we do not dishonour and blaspheme the cross with four ends…’ It was also recognised that the true priesthood of Christ continued in the Orthodox Church (Great Russian and Greek) and would remain until the day of judgement. While some accepted the epistle, others condemned it. Thus there appeared mutually opposing parties of ‘encylicalers’ and ‘anti-encyclicalers’. The latter, who had tendencies towards Bespopovschina, began to affirm that the name ‘Iisus’, as accepted by the Orthodox Church, is the name of another person that ‘Isus’, and is the name of the Antichrist. Both parties had their own bishops…”[688]

 

     After the creation of the Belokrinitskaia hierarchy, the attitude of the Russian government towards the Old Ritualists became stricter. In 1854 the schismatics were deprived of all rights as merchants, and their chapel in the Rogozhsky cemetery was closed. However, from the beginning of Alexander II’s reign in 1856, they were allowed to have services in the Rogozhsky cemetery. In 1865 the government wanted to introduce a further weakening of the legislation against the Old Ritualists, and only the voice of Metropolitan Philaret stopped it.

 

     “The struggle of the holy hierarch with the schism in the last years of his life had, if not a very large, at any rate a definite success. Many of the schismatics joined either Orthodoxy or the Edinoverie [i.e. the Orthodox Church, but with permission to use the Old Ritual]. Thus in 1854 a certain number of schismatics from the Preobrazhensky cemetery joined the Edinoverie, and in 1865 the following activists of the Belokrinitskaia metropolia joined with the rights of the Edinoverie: among the bishops, the metropolitan’s deputy, Onuphrius of Braila, Paphnutius of Kolomna, Sergius of Tula and Justin of Tulchinsk; Hieromonk Joasaph; the archdeacon of Metropolitan Cyril, his secretary and the keeper of the archives Philaret; Hierodeacon Melchizedek, who was able to take the archive of the metropolia and transfer it across the Russian frontier.

 

     “The success might have been greater if the government had more actively supported Philaret and his undertakings in the struggle against the schism…”[689]

 

     It was in the reign of Tsar Nicholas I that the beginning of what may be called “ecumenical relations” with the western confessions can be discerned. The pioneer in this on the Orthodox side was A.S. Khomiakov, whose correspondence with the Anglican William Palmer may be considered not only the earliest, but also the best, exemplar of how to conduct ecumenical relations without betraying the truth. He was very well informed about the religious situation in bothe East and West, clearly longed for union, and was not seeking merely to “score points” over an adversary. He was generous in what was good in the West, and not afraid to admit weaknesses in the East. But he was politely but unbendingly firm in his defence of the Orthodox position on questions of faith (e.g. the Filioque) and ecclesiology (where the True Church is and where it is not).

 

     In spite of his ardent desire for union, Khomiakov was pessimistic about its prospects; and this not so much because of the doctrinal obstacles, as of the moral obstacles. As he explained to Palmer: “A very weak conviction in points of doctrine can bring over a Latin to Protestantism, or a Protestant to the Latins. A Frenchman, a German, an Englishman, will go over to Presbyterianism, to Lutheranism, to the Independents, to the Cameronians, and indeed to almost every form of belief or misbelief; he will not go over to Orthodoxy. As long as he does not step out of the circles of doctrines which have taken their origin in the Western world, he feels himself at home; notwithstanding his apparent change, he does not feel that dread of apostasy which renders sometimes the passage from error to faith as difficult as from truth to error. He will be condemned by his former brethren, who will call his action a rash one, perhaps a bad one; but it will not be utter madness, depriving him, as it were, of his rights of citizenship in the civilized world of the West. And that is natural. All the Western doctrine is born out of the Latins; it feels (though unconsciously) its solidarity with the past; it feels its dependence from one science, from one creed, from one line of life; and that creed, that science, that life was the Latin one. This is what I hinted at, and what you understand very rightly, viz., that all Protestants are Crypto-Papists; and, indeed, it would be a very easy task to show that in their theology (as well as philosophy) all the definitions of all the objects of creed or understanding are merely taken out of the old Latin System, though often made negative in the application. In short, if it was to be expressed in the concise language of algebra, all the West knows but one datum, a; whether it be preceded by the positive sign +, as with the Latins, or with the negative -, as with the protestants, the a remains the same. Now, a passage to Orthodoxy seems indeed like an apostasy from the past, from its science, creed, and life. It is rushing into a new and unknown world, a bold step to take, or even to advise.

 

     “This, most reverend sir, is the moral obstacle I have been speaking about; this, the pride and disdain which I attribute to all the Western communities. As you see, it is no individual feeling voluntarily bred or consciously held in the heart; it is no vice of the mind, but an involuntary submission to the tendencies and direction of the past. When the unity of the Church was lawlessly and unlovingly rent by the Western clergy, the more so inasmuch as at the same time the East was continuing its former friendly intercourse, and submitting to the opinion of the Western Synods the Canons of the Second Council of Nicaea, each half of Christianity began a life apart, becoming from day to day more estranged from the other. There was an evident self-complacent triumph on the side of the Latins; there was sorrow on the side of the East, which had seen the dear ties of Christian brotherhood torn asunder – which had been spurned and rejected, and felt itself innocent. All these feelings have been transmitted by hereditary succession to our time, and, more or less, either willingly or unwillingly, we are still under their power. Our time has awakened better feelings; in England, perhaps, more than anywhere else, you are seeking for the past brotherhood, for the past sympathy and communion. It would be a shame for us not to answer your proferred friendship, it would be a crime not to cultivate in our hearts an intense desire to renovate the Unity of the Church; but let us consider the question coolly, even when our sympathies are most awakened.

 

     “The Church cannot be a harmony of discords; it cannot be a numerical sum of Orthodox, Latins, and Protestants. It is nothing if it is not perfect inward harmony of creed and outward harmony of expression (notwithstanding local differences in the rite). The question is, not whether the Latins and protestants have erred so fatally as to deprive individuals of salvation, which seems to be often the subject of debate – surely a narrow and unworthy one, inasmuch as it throws suspicion on the mercy of the Almighty. The question is whether they have the Truth, and whether they have retained the ecclesiastical tradition unimpaired. If they have not, where is the possibility of unity?…

 

     “Do not, I pray, nourish the hope of finding Christian Truth without stepping out of the former protestant circle. It is an illogical hope; it is a remnant of that pride which thought itself able and wished to judge and decide by itself without the Spiritual Communion of heavenly grace and Christian love. Were you to find all the truth, you would have found nothing; for we alone can give you that without which all would be vain – the assurance of Truth.”[690]

 

     In 1864, four years after Khomiakov’s death, Pastor Jung, a delegate of the New York convocation of the Episcopalian Church with authority from some of the bishops there to enter into relations with the older Russian hierarchs, came to Russia. In a meeting with Metropolitan Philaret and other bishops, he explained the significance of the 39 articles for the Anglicans and Episcopalians. The metropolitan said that a rapprochement between the Russian and American Episcopalian Churches might create problems with their respective “mother churches” in England and Greece.

 

     Thus the Greeks were less accommodating with regard to the canonicity of baptism by pouring than their Russian co-religionists. The metropolitan probably had in mind here the experience of William Palmer, who, being a member of the “Oxford movement” and its “branch theory” of the Church (i.e. that the True Church consists of three branches: the Orthodox, the Catholic and the Anglican), had been shocked to find that the Greeks would receive him into communion by baptism, and the Russians by chrismation only. In spite of Khomiakov’s attempts to explain the Orthodox use of condescension or “economy”, Palmer remained dissatisfied by what he saw as a difference in ecclesiology between the Greeks and the Russians, and eventually joined the Roman Catholic Church.[691]

 

     In another meeting with Pastor Jung, Metropolitan Philaret posed five questions relating to the 39 articles:

 

1.      How can the 39 articles not being a stumbling-block to the union of the Churches?

2.      How can the teaching of the American Episcopalian Church’s teaching on the procession of the Holy Spirit [the Filioque] being made to agree with the teaching of the Eastern Church?

3.      Is the uninterruptedness of apostolic hierarchical ordination fully proven in the American Church?

4.      Does the American Church recognize reliable Church Tradition to be a subsidiary guiding principle for the explanation of Holy Scripture and for Church orders and discipline?

5.      What is the view of the American Church on the sevenfold number of sacraments in the Eastern Church?

 

     At another meeting the pastor gave preliminary replies to the questions, and insisted that the 39 articles had a political rather than a spiritual meaning, and did not have a fully dogmatic force.

 

     Although the two sides parted on friendly terms, nothing positive came from the meeting. The public in America were not ready for this, and there even began something in the nature of a reaction. Learning about this, Philaret sadly remarked: “The reconcilers of the churches… are weaving a cover for division, but are not effecting union.” “How desirable is the union of the Churches! But how difficult to ensure that the movement towards it should soar with a pure striving for the Truth and should be entirely free from attachment to entrenched opinions.” “O Lord, send a true spirit of union and peace.”[692]

 

The Caucasian Wars

 

     Coming from Georgia, Schemahieromonk Hilarion had another reason for insisting on loyalty to the Tsar: Georgia depended for her very survival on the support of Russia against the Muslim peoples to the south. Correspondingly, Russia’s constant aim in the Caucasus region was to establish a firm and reliable bridge with her protectorate, Georgia.

 

     To this end, as Protopriest Lev Lebedev writes, “it was necessary to overcome the opposition of Persia and Turkey and the warlike mountain peoples of the Northern Caucasus and the Caspian and Black Sea coasts whom they often stirred up.

 

     “It is fashionable to talk about the cruelties committed by the Russian armies in this ‘Caucasian war’. But it is not fashionable to talk about the beastly acts of the Muslim mountaineers in relation to the Russians, and also in relation to those of their own people who had accepted Orthodoxy (for example, the Osetians and Georgians). And these acts exceeded all human imagination. War is war! The mutual hardening of the sides was, alas, inevitable here. And so there were also excesses of violence and cruelty on the side of the Russians. But it is not by the cruelty of the Russians that such measures as the periodical mass extermination of the male population of Chechnya is to be explained! They did not resort to such measures in relation to other Caucasian tribes. But the Chechens ‘deserved’ such harsh punitive actions by their exceptional ferocity and cunning. However, this does not apply to the whole Chechen people. The blame here lies on the fanatics from Islam. This fanaticism makes itself felt today also… Gradually, at a dear price, Russia managed to break the opposition of the mountaineers and thereby guarantee a constant safe ‘bridge’ of communication with Orthodox Georgia. This is the main meaning and result of the Caucasian war.”[693]

 

     Russia first made contact with the Caucasian mountaineers at precisely the time that she achieved her great victory over the Tatar Muslims at the taking of Kazan. In 1552 two Cherkessian princes asked Ivan IV, the conqueror of Kazan, to receive them as subjects to help them in their struggle against the Turkish sultan and his vassal, the Crimean Khan. In 1557 two Kabardinian princes, Temryuk and Tizryut, asked for the same in their struggle against Shamkhal of Tarki.

 

     Soon there were Cossacks on the banks of Terek, and in 1586 the Russian Tsar and King Alexander of Georgia formed an alliance against Shamkhal, as a result of which Tarki was stormed in 1594. But Sultan-Muta, son of Shamkhal, and the whole of Dagestan rebelled against the Russians. Tarki was destroyed in 1604 and the Russian armies were destroyed.

 

     It was not until over a century later, in 1722, that Peter I resumed the Russian advance and conquered the Caspian coast. This brought the Russians in conflict with the Shah of Persia, who in 1741 tried to conquer the area, but was defeated.

 

     “To some extent,” writes Dominic Lieven, “the Russians were pulled into the Trans-Caucasus – in other words, across the mountains – by appeals for support from the Georgians, a fellow Orthodox people. Georgia was too weak to defend itself against increasing pressure from both the Ottomans and the Persians. Georgia had good reason to seek the protection of empire and to escape the anarchy, economic devastation and loss of population that had resulted from existing in an insecure borderland. In the mid-thirteenth century there were five million Georgians, by 1770 there barely 500,000. In the last decades of the eighteenth century Petersburg wavered as to whether it was worthwhile to take on the burden of defending and ruling Georgia. In the end what mattered most were strategic and geopolitical considerations. Given both traditional hostility to the Ottoman Empire and growing rivalry with Napoleonic France and Britain in Persia and the Ottoman Empire, it was decided to annex Georgia as Russia’s base and centre of power beyond the Caucasus. Once established in the region, however, the Russians to some extent had to obey the laws of local geopolitics. This entailed, for example, conquering the land and sea communications between the Trans-Caucasus and Russia. Subduing the mountain peoples of the North Caucasus proved a hugely expansive and time-consuming struggle, not concluded until the 1860s.”[694]

 

     In 1785-87 Sheikh Mansur led Chechnya and Dagestan in rebellion against the Russians. He was defeated. However, in 1812 rebellion flared up again.

 

     Then, “in 1826,” writes Lebedev, “for the sake of her interests in Georgia and without a declaration of war, Persia invaded the Transcaucasus. General Ermolov, the commander-in-chief of the Russian armies in the Caucasus, was not able with his forces to deal with the invasion. There came to his help the armies led by General Paskevich. In a series of battles Paskevich defeated the Persians, took Erivan (Yerevan), invaded Persia and headed for its capital – Teheran. The Persian Shah sought peace, which was concluded in 1828 in Turkmanchai, in accordance with which the lands of present-day Armenia and Azerbaidjan passed permanently to Russia. An end was placed to Persia’s pretensions. Nicholas I bestowed the title of Count of Erivan on Paskevich. It was more difficult to bring into submission the mountain tribes of the Northern Caucasus, with whom the Russian Cossack settlements on the Terek and Kuban had long had dealings. The Chechens, the Cherkessy and other warlike peoples not only warred against the Cossacks, they also lived next to them and entered into peaceful relations with the Russians, encountering in these cases a completely friendly response from the Russians. But in 1825 there began the ‘Miurizm’ movement, which was introduced from Turkey. The ‘Miuridy’ (novices) were obliged to wage a holy war against the ‘infidel’ Russians under the leadership of ‘holy elders’ – imams and sheiks – with the aim of creating an extensive ‘caliphate’ from Stambul to the Kuban. The imams Kazi-mullah and later Shamil became popular leaders.”[695]

 

     From the middle of the 1840s Shamil became both the political and the religious leader of the state of Imamat, taking the title of “ruler of the right-believing”; all executive, judicial and legislative power was in his hands. Declaring all the tribal leaders who submitted to the Russians to be traitors and apostates, he united all the North Caucasus mountaineers for the first time.[696]

 

     In the 1840s the French consul in Tiflis wrote: “We have to distinguish two personalities united in Shamil.... On the one hand, - the political leader, dictator, to whom limitless power was presented by events with a democratic system based on the principle of absolute equality. But at the same time he is a religious leader, to whom the calling of the great imam, the supreme head of the right believers, a sacred character is attached. Having this dual calling, he is the only judge in the question of offering the sacrifices demanded by the war… His power is firmly organized.”[697]

 

     However, God was with the Russian armies. Thus on December 24, 1853 Archbishop Isidore, the exarch of Georgia, wrote to Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow: “The captured Turks told us openly that when the battle near Alexandropol’ became fierce, and the whole Russian detachment became involved, the Turks saw a radiant woman coming down from heaven holding a banner in her hands and accompanied by two warriors. The light from her was so bright that it was like the shining of the sun, and no eye could stand it. This appearance produced horror in the ranks of the fighters and was the reason why, on seeing that God was on the side of Rus’, all the Turks turned to flight and lost the battle.

 

     “The Russians did not see this appearance. By the Providence of God our foreign enemies witnessed to it.”[698]

 

     In 1859 Shamil was captured, and by 1864 the Caucasian wars had come to an end, having claimed the lives of nearly 100,000 Russians killed since 1801.

 

     At this point, writes Lieven, most of the population of the western region of the Caucasus “were ‘encouraged’ to emigrate to the Ottoman Empire amidst great suffering and loss of life. The Chechens and Dagestanis of the eastern region, who had resisted the Russians with equal determination, were allowed to remain in their homeland. The reason for this was that the western region, bordering on a Black Sea on which Russia [following the Crimean War] was not permitted to have a navy, was acutely vulnerable to Ottoman or British attack. In the aftermath of the Crimean War, St. Petersburg’s perception was that Russia was dangerously weak, and Palmerston’s England on the offensive worldwide. Palmerston himself commented that ‘these half-civilized governments such as those of China, Portugal, Spanish America require a Dressing every eight or ten years to keep them in order’, and no one who knew his views on Russia could doubt his sense that she too deserved to belong to this category of states. The Russians were not therefore prepared to leave on this coastline a Sunni population whom they quite rightly believed to be potential allies of the Ottomans in any future war. A British historian of the ‘Great Game’ (i.e. Anglo-Russian nineteenth-century rivalry in Central Asia) comments that ‘the forcible exile of six hundred thousand Circassians from the Black Sea Coast deprived the Turks and the British of their most valuable potential allies within the Russian Empire.’”[699]

 

Orthodox America

 

     Russia the Third Rome was extending her civilizing and Christianizing influence far beyond the borders of Europe and the Middle East. Her missions to Siberia and Central Asia were to bring forth rich fruit. But perhaps her most striking success was on the American continent, in Alaska.

 

     In the eighteenth century the Russian Holy Synod sent a mission to convert the Indians of Alaska to Orthodoxy. The most famous member of this mission was the Valaam monk St. Herman of Alaska, who died in 1837 and was canonized by the Russian Church Abroad in 1970. “From 1823,” writes Lebedev, “there begins a second special Church mission, whose most prominent representative turned out to be the young priest Fr. John Popov-Veniaminov, later Metropolitan Innocent of Moscow and Kolomna. This great and wonderful man was born in 1797 in the village of a poor village reader near Irkutsk. He finished his studies at the Irkutsk seminary, where he displayed great interest both in theological and in secular sciences. In 1823, with the whole of his family, wife and children, he arrived at the island of Unalaska and began his apostolic ministry among the Aleuts, Kadyaks, Eskimos and Indians of the west coast of Alaska and Northern California (the city of Novo-Arkhangelsk on the island of Sitka). Teaching the local inhabitants various arts and household crafts, he with their help built a church, introduced schools, work-houses and hospitals, and baptised thousands of natives without ever resorting to violence or any pressure, but acting only through love and the word of truth. Fr. John mastered six local languages, and studied and described the everyday life, manners and anthropology of the bribes, the local geography and climates, becoming a true father of the ‘wild’ peoples, or, as St. Herman of Alaska used to say about himself, their ‘nanny’! For the Aleuts he composed an alphabet and translated the Gospel of Matthew and some necessary prayers and other books into their language. His works on the ethnography of the peoples of Alaska, California and the adjacent islands are still used in science to this day and are considered models. Even then, during his lifetime, they were highly valued by the academies of science of Russia and Europe! Father John Popov-Veniaminov continued the best traditions of the Russian missionaries of Siberia, the Altai and the Far East. In those times that was not simply, it demanded courage, asceticism. The point is that the interests of the apostolate of the Church in those places often contradicted the interests of the Russian-American Company (RAC), which traded in furs and sea animals. ‘Industrial’ people and RAC officials sometimes displayed cruelty, and sometimes were inclined mercilessly to exploit the natives, although one has to say that these were excesses, but not the rule! As a rule, even our ‘industrials’ behaved in a friendly and fraternal manner to the native population of America. Shelikhov considered marriages between Russian and Indians as very desirable. There were mixed marriages. The children from these marriages (Creoles) often turned out to be very capable people, while some of them attained high rank in state service in Russia. Catherine II and Paul I prescribed only friendly relations towards the natives under threat of punishment. A special decree of Emperor Alexander I ordered the RAC ‘first of all to venerate humanity’ in all the peoples of America, and in no case to resort to cruelty and violence. Russia often sent notes of protest to the USA, whose merchants sold firearms to the Indians. The USA replied that they were ‘free’, and that they could not ban this trade in death… But in the 19th century among our workers in RAC there were people who were completely foreign to Orthodox, who simply did not understand it (for example, the RAC’s ‘chronicler’, Khlebnikov). And sometimes it was difficult for our missionaries to defined whom they had to enlighten first of all – the Aleuts and Indians, or our own people, the Russians!… In such circumstances only an all-encompassing (spiritual and secular) education of the apostles of America, like Fr. John Popov, could force some of the officials of RAC to venerate the Church and her missionary work. In 1840, on the recommendation of Metropolitan Philaret (Drozdov), who had become friends with Fr. John, Tsar Nicholas I appointed the priest Popov-Veniaminov, who had been widowed by this time and had accepted monasticism, as the first bishop of the newly formed Kamchatka, Kurile islands and Aleut diocese. When the Tsar gave this name to the diocese, people remarked to him: ‘But Your Majesty! There is not a single church on the Kurile islands!’ ‘Build them!’ snapped the Emperor. That is how the new hierarch of the Russian Church Innocent (Veniaminov) appeared…”

 

     Bishop Innocent, of whom Metropolitan Philaret said that he recognized the apostolic spirit in him, later succeeded him in the see of Moscow and is counted among the saints of the Russian Church. His labours, together with those of Archimandrite Macarius in the Altai and Archbishop Nicholas in Japan, give the lie to the idea that Russian Orthodoxy was “ossified” or “paralysed”. In fact, the missionary labours of these men, supported as always by the Tsars of the period, prove both the vitality of Russian Orthodoxy in general and the continuing existence of Church-State “symphony” in particular.

 

     In the Tsar’s encouragement of the American mission “was reflected, as in a drop of water, the essence of the politics of the Third Rome – the widening of the boundaries of the Church. In her expansion to Alaska and Northern California, to the possessions of Japan and China, and to the sands of Central Asia, Russia derived not only commercial and military-strategic advantages (although these, too, were not of little importance), but brought to the new lands the light of her Orthodox Faith and spirituality. Besides, as has already been pointed out, she related to the peoples of these new lands with great respect. In contrast to the expansion of the Roman Catholic church, the Russian Orthodox Church and state did not convert one people to Christianity by forcible means! Amidst the pagan tribes of Siberia, the North, the Far East and America, the Russian spiritual missions were very active in preaching the Word of God, building churches and monasteries, hospitals, homes for invalids and the elderly, providing medical help and what would now be called ‘social security’, often quarrelling because of these good works with the local secular bosses. As regards the Muslim peoples of Central Asia and the Caucasus, here there was almost no missionary work.[700] After the unsuccessful attempts to create spiritual missions for the Tatars and Kalmyks in the 18th century, Russia renounced special ecclesiastical missions in Muslim areas distinguished for their strong predeliction for Islam. Orthodoxy was not imposed on the Muslim people; they were left to live freely in accordance with their own customs, but Orthodox churches naturally arose on their lands for the Russians who had settled there, so that all those desiring it among those peoples received the opportunity to learn Orthodoxy! And not more than that. The widening of the boundaries of Russia (and of the Russian Church!) encountered the interests of the USA, Japan, China and England. The latter in those times was striving to expand northwards from India, Afghanistan and Persia, threatening mainly the Central Asian interests of Russia. To forestall England, and stop her advancement … was a very important task of Russia in Central Asia, in the basin of the Caspian sea, a task that she would carry out in the middle and second half of the 19th century…”[701]

 

     This being so, why did Tsar Alexander II sell Alaska and the Aleutian islands to the United States in 1867 for $7.2 million (Fort Ross in California had been sold already in 1848 for $30,000)? The parlous finances of Russia after the Crimean War were one reason; another was the fact that only 10,000 Russians lived in Alaska (there were 40,000 Indians), and that the defence of the vast and distant territory against the expected influx of American explorers and settlers was not considered practical. A third was the desire to secure the United States as a friend and not a foe. All these were weighty reasons – although it was already known that there were gold deposits under the Alaskan soil...[702]

 

     But was not the Third Rome obliged to protect the interests of her converts in the New World? Those interests were protectd; permission was granted to the Russian Spiritual Mission to continue to work in Alaska. And within fifty years Russia herself came under the yoke of the atheists…

 

Nihilist Realism: “Fathers and Sons”

 

     In sharp contrast to the God-inspired and enormously fruitful activity of her missionaries in the East was the wholly destructive activity of Russia’s false sons both at home and abroad, the lovers of the West, who were spreading socialist and anti-monarchist propaganda. The generation that came of age after the Crimean War was characterised by a sharp and categorical rejection of the values of their fathers, whether these were Slavophile or westernising. Such people were called “nihilists” by Turgenev in his famous novel Fathers and Sons: “a person who does not take any principle for granted, however much that principle may be revered”.

 

     “The figure of Bazarov in that novel,” writes Fr. Seraphim Rose, “is the type of the ‘new men’ of the ‘sixties’ in Russia, simple-minded materialists and determinists, who seriously thought (like D. Pisarev) to find the salvation of mankind in the dissection of the frog, or thought they had proved the non-existence of the human soul by failing to find it in the course of an autopsy. (One is reminded of the Soviet Nihilists, the ‘new men’ of our own ‘sixties’, who fail to find God in outer space.) This ‘Nihilist’ is the man who respects nothing, bows before no authority, accepts (so he thinks) nothing on faith, judges all in the light of a science taken as absolute and exclusive truth, rejects all idealism and abstraction in favor of the concrete and factual. He is the believer, in a word, in the ‘nothing-but’, in the rejection of everything men have considered ‘higher’, the things of the mind and spirit, to the lower or ‘basic’: matter, sensation, the physical.

 

     “As opposed to Liberal vagueness, the Realist world-view seems perfectly clear and straightforward. In place of agnosticism or an evasive deism, there is open atheism; in place of vague ‘higher values’, naked materialism and self-interest. All is clarity in the Realist universe – except what is most important and most requires clarity: its beginning and end. Where the Liberal is vague about ultimate things, the Realist is childishly naïve: they simply do not exist for him; nothing exists but what is most obvious.

 

     “Such Realism, of course, is a self-contradiction, whether it takes the form of a ‘naturalism’ that tries to establish an absolute materialism and determinism, or a ‘positivism’ that purports to deny the absolute altogether, or the doctrinaire ‘agnosticism’ that so readily discourses on the ‘unknowability’ of ultimate reality…”[703]

 

     “Brainwashing in favour for the revolution was already being carried out by Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov, Pisarev, Lavrov and Mikhailovsky. Chernyshevsky was a Fourierist in his world-view. His views and arguments were drawn from western socialist arsenals. He did not know Russian reality, he had not studied the way of life of the villages and agricultural relations, but he was categorical. Chernyshevsky saw in the village commune a possible earnest of the future socialist order and called on people to struggle for the establishment of this order.

 

    “He was helped by the talented Dobroliubov, who directed the whole force of his exceptional talent to the criticism of the whole of contemporary social life, the whole of the Russian reality of ‘the dark kingdom’.

 

     “Debunking the liberals, and mercilessly persecuting the gradualists, Dobroliubov sharply expressed his sympathies with real radicalism. His heroes were the radical leaders of democracy, the Masons Mazzini and Garibaldi.

 

     “The rulers of the minds of the young generation were Herzen, Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov.

 

     “Herzen’s Bell was freely passed from hand to hand, and went throughout Russia.

 

     “Chernyshevsky’s and Dobroliubov’s articles were taken for revelations.

 

     “The propaganda of political and socialist ideas alternated with the preaching of atheism. In 1859 Metropolitan Philaret wrote about the state of the Moscow diocese: ‘A sad sight is presented, and still sadder anxieties are inspired by this negative and blasphemous literature, which is as widely, if not more widely distributed [here] than in a certain European state of the last century, where it turned out to be destructive. Callings, posts and persons are all subjected to cruel denials and are portrayed in an ugly, unbelievably exaggerated and slanderous form. It is not necessary to point to many examples: contemporary publications are full of them… May the Lord direct the wisdom of the Most Holy Synod and the Orthodox government to seek means to heal and conserve.’

 

     “In 1860 there came out of the ranks of the university youth a new prophet of the younger generation – Pisarev.

 

     “’Allow us, youths,’ he wrote in May, 1861, ‘to speak, write and publish, allow us to shake off through our natural scepticism those things which have become stale, that clapped-out junk, which you call general authorities.’ ‘Here is the concluding word of our youth camp: what can be broken should be broken; that which withstands a blow can stay, but that which will fly off into fragments is rubbish; in any case beat to the right and to the left, no harm will come of it nor can come of it…’ ‘Literature in all its varieties must strike at one point; it must with all its powers emancipate the human person from those various restrictions which make him ashamed of his own thought, caste prejudices, the authority of tradition, the striving for a common ideal and all that outdated rubbish which hinders the living man from breathing and developing freely.’

 

     “In his striving to free the human mind from the influence of feeling Pisarev nurtured in himself a hatred for all aesthetics and denied art on principle. He completely denied any significance for portraiture, sculpture, the plastic arts and music. He gave almost the same secondary role to poetry.

 

     “Pisarev recognized Turgenev after he had created Bazarov, but he with a special inspiration debunked the old literary gods, calling, for example, the works of Pushkin ‘soft-boiled boots’.

 

     “Chernyshevsky, Dobroliubov and Pisarev revolutionised youth and prepared the cadres of the destroyers.

 

     “Chernyshevsky and Dobroliubov called for the liberation of the people from political and social oppression. Pisarev concentrated all his attention on the liberation of the person and human thought from all religious, everyday and family paths and prejudices.

 

     “The seed sown by these ‘luminaries’ excited the young people…

 

     “The movement of youth was encouraged by the movement among the nobility demanding ‘the crowning of knowledge’, that is, a constitution…”[704]

 

The Great Reforms: (1) The Emancipation of the Serfs

 

     Paradoxically, the rise of nihilism and revolutionary sentiment in Russia coincided with a series of liberal reforms unparalleled in any country on earth, and undertaken by Tsar Alexander himself, for which he earned the title of “Tsar-Liberator”. These were elicited, in the first place, by the fact that after the Crimean war, which exposed various inadequacies in Russia’s internal life, both Slavophile and Westernizing intellectuals began to focus more and more on serfdom as the underlying cause of Russia’s ills.

 

     Geoffrey Hosking writes: “As the Westerner and close friend of Granovskii, B.N. Chicherin put it, ‘Someone bound hand and foot cannot compete with someone free to use all his limbs. Serfdom is a shackle which we drag around with us, and which holds us back just when other peoples are racing ahead unimpeded. Without the abolition of serfdom none of our problems, political, administrative or social, can be solved.’ He gave as an example the way in which the Tsar had had to revoke the decree creating a milita because it aroused among serfs the false hope that they would be freed…

 

     “The existence of serfdom obstructed modernization of the army and thereby burdened the treasury with huge and unproductive military expenditure. As the military reformer R.A. Fadeev pointed [out], ‘Under serfdom, anyone becoming a soldier is freed; hence one cannot, without shaking the whole social order, admit many people to military service. Therefore we have to maintain on the army establishment in peacetime all the soldiers we need in war.’

 

     “[The Slavophile] Iurii Samarin summed up serfdom as a moral and legal split running right down the middle of Russian society. ‘Why should twenty-two million subjects who pay poll tax to the state be place outside the law and outside any direct relationship with the supreme power, appearing on official lists merely as the lifeless chattels of another social estate?’”[705]

 

     Moreover, these were not merely theoretical concerns. Violence was building up in the countryside. Hobsbawm writes: “There were 148 outbreaks of peasant unrest in 1826-34, 216 in 1835-44, 348 in 1844-54, culminating in the 474 outbreaks of the last years preceding the emancipation of 1861.”[706] These were not caused by poverty alone – as English observers noted, the Russian peasants were on the whole richer than their British or Irish counterparts.[707] No less important was a feeling of injustice. For the peasants’ understanding of their relationship with their noble masters was: “we are yours, but the land is ours”, or even: “we are yours, and you are ours”.[708]

 

     And so, whatever the merits of the previous system, it could not continue to exist unaltered if not only the intellectuals clamoured for its removal, but also the deeply Orthodox peasantry. Nicholas I had long planned to emancipate the serfs, and his son Alexander II brought these plans to fruition in 1861. In essence, the peasants were to given their personal freedom gratis, but they would have to pay the nobles for the land which they worked (about a third). They would be given 49 years to pay for the land, helped by generous loans from the government.

 

     Emancipation changed the relationship between landowners and peasants from patriarchal to civil. From a purely material, economic point of view, it had the advantage that it paved the way for more efficient agriculture and the provision of labour for the industrialization of Russia, so sorely needed in view of the relative failure of the Crimean War. Moreover, “more than 80% of the small and middle nobility were in debt to the state on the security of their own estates, and this debt would have been unrepayable if it had not been for the reform. The value of the payments for the land cleared many debts.”[709] Nor did they have to wait for the peasants to pay them: the government immediately paid them 80% of the value of the land by wiping out their debts, while the peasants were given a 49-year period at a cheap rate of interest. The remaining 20% was paid by the peasants directly to the landowners in cash payments or labour.

 

     Among the disadvantages of the reform was the disillusion of the peasants, many of whom had not expected to pay for the land, and found the payments greater than the rents they had been paying earlier. Moreover, once liberated they lost access to timber and firewood in landowners’ forests.

 

     There is much disagreement about the most far-reaching social transformation produced by the reform: the replacement of the authority of the landowner by that of the village commune, or mir, for those peasants who did not take advantage of their freedom to leave the land and until they had paid their redemption payments. The commune had the right to redistribute the land among the peasants, and the collective responsibility to pay for taxes, the building of bridges and roads, etc. If one member of the commune could not contribute payments or labour, he fell into debt, as it were, to the commune.

 

     The intellectuals, as we have seen, regarded the commune as the essence of Russianness. And the socialists saw it as quintessentially “Russian socialism”. However, Fr. Lev Lebedev points out that the commune was by no means as anciently Russian as was then thought: “In ancient Rus’ (Russia) the peasants possessed or used plots of land completely independently, according to the right of personal inheritance or acquisition, and the commune (mir) had no influence on this possession. A certain communal order obtained only in relation to the matter of taxes and obligations… To this ancient ‘commune’ there corresponds to a certain degree only the rule of ‘collective responsibility’ envisaged by the Statute of 1861 in relation to taxes and obligations. But in Rus’ there was never any ‘commune’ as an organization of communal land-use with the right of the mir to distribute and redistribute plots among members of the ‘commune’…”[710]

 

     The institution of serfdom came into being in the first place as a result of military needs. As Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov wrote: “Russia from the very beginning of her existence until almost the most recent times was an extensive military camp. Her history has been a history of unceasing war. Russia has sometimes attacked neighbouring peoples, and sometimes repulsed their attacks. For two centuries [during the Kievan period of Russian history] she was occupied in incessant civil war, while not ceasing to fight her neighbours. Then she fought to overthrow the Tatar yoke, she fought for the restoration of the autocracy, she fought to enter those frontiers in which she had been under the Equal-to-the-Apostles Vladimir. She fought in order to open for herself communications with Europe, so as to occupy a place in the number of its states. Finally, she fought against the whole of Europe for the liberation of Europe.

 

     “With the military character of the state, it was impossible for the military class not to occupy the first place in the state. In particular in ancient and middle-period Russia the military element absorbed and overshadowed all the other elements…

 

     “The necessity of muzzling the self-will of the simple people and the impossibility of having a police force in an unorganised state forced Tsar Boris Godunov to tie the peasants to the lands. Then all the Russian peasants were turned into unfree peasants [by Catherine II]…

 

     “From the time of Alexander I views on the subject changed: the state finally became organized, a police force consisting of officials was established everywhere, the people began to emerge from their condition of childhood, received new ideas, felt new needs. The nobility began to chafe with their condition of guardianship over the peasants, the peasants began to chafe at the restrictions on their liberty, at their patriarchal way of life. All this began to appear and express itself strongly in the second half of the reign of Emperor Nicholas I.

 

     “Now the prosperously reigning Emperor Alexander II has found the matter already prepared and has found it necessary to change the form of administration of landowners’ peasants. What is the essential significance of the improvement in the peasants’ way of life? It is the change in the form of their administration. They are being given freedom, but not self-will. They are coming out from under the jurisdiction of the landowners as if from under the supervisions of educators and guardians, into a relationship of personal service to the state…”[711]

 

     Bishop Ignatius summarised the Church’s views on the subject in two points:

 

     “1. That both the Word of God and the Church – both the Universal Church and the Russian Church – in the persons of the Holy Fathers, has never said anything at all about the abolition of civil slavery, that there is nothing in common between spiritual and civil freedom, that both slaves and masters were constantly taught by the Church the most exact and conscientious fulfilment of their obligations, that the violators of Christ’s commanment on love were subject to rebukes and exhortations.

 

     “2. That the emancipation of slaves has always been recognized by the Church as a good deed, a deed of mercy, a deed of brotherly Christian love.

 

     “… The most pious Russian Autocrat has indicated to the class of the nobility the accomplishing of a great Christian work, a work of love. The Church invokes the blessing of God upon the great work of the fatherland with her warmest prayers. Her pastors invite the nobility to noble self-renunciation, to sacrifice, to the immediate sacrifice of material goods for the sake of moral goods, while they instruct the peasants to accept this gift of the Tsar with due veneration and humility – the true indications that the gift will be used wisely and usefully.

 

     “But one must not think that civil liverty morally exalts only the peasants: the class of the nobility must unfailingly enter onto a higher level of moral acheivement in renouncing the ownership of slaves. That is the characteristic of self-sacrifice and the offering of material goods as a sacrifice for spiritual goods: it exalts, changes and perfects man.”[712]

 

     Bishop Ignatius saw the Tsar’s decree as “a most happy initiative, a majestic order amazing Europe”. However, Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow was worried. He considered “that Russia was not sufficiently prepared for emancipation, that there was no unity even among those who had been called to put it into effect, and that, finally, the nobility were not acquainted with the subject presented to them.

 

    “We can clearly see in what form the holy hierarch wanted to see a resolution of the peasant question from his letter to Archimandrite Anthony [Bochkov] dated 3 January, 1858: “’In Austria,’ he wrote to his deputy, ‘the new organization of the peasants, which ours wishes to resemble, has not turned out successfully. Some lands, which used to be worked when they were under the authority of the landowners, remain unworked after the liberation of the peasants. The estates appropriated by the peasants are being sold off at auctions because dues are not being paid, with the result that poverty is on the increase.

 

     “But with us, it seems, things could be better if the good landowners correctly interpreted the matter to the peasants and established some well-thought-out agreements with them. One landowner summoned the elders among his peasants, and gave them to read through what the government proposed; and although their first word was: it was better the old way, still, seeing the necessity of it, they began to discuss an agreement. The landowner offered them estates, not through redemption payments, but as a gift; then he said how much land he was giving them for agriculture, with what payment per dessiatina [2.7 acres], while he offered that his own landowner’s arable land could be hired for ploughing; and they, agreeing to all the rest, said about the last article: “No, governor, you’ll destroy yourself; hiring free labourers will be expensive; say that we work this portion for you as before; it’s not difficult for us.” Continuing the agreement in this way, they drew up rules in which they took precautions also against disorders arising from self-will. If that’s how best to set about the task, the matter could be worked out also with the worse with less fear of harm. But will many understand and make the effort?’

 

     “In essence, of course, the holy hierarch was not an opponent of the emancipation of the serfs, he only wanted it to take place in a better way than that marked out by the government. ‘We must pray,’ wrote Philaret to Archimandrite Anthony, ‘that the Lord will instruct them [the reformers] in that which is true and useful.’

 

     “However, all this was only the thoughts of the holy hierarch with his spiritual father: in society he preferred to be silent.

 

     “’The peasant question is dark, contentious, unresolved,’ wrote Philaret to Bishop Alexis of Tula, ‘it does not yet allow us to foresee how it will be resolved, so that we can talk about it only through necessity and obligation, and that with great caution… and it may happen that we are not discerning the thought of the government, which is as yet not completely revealed; and in such a situation it is vain for us to depart from the ecclesiastical way in order to fall into a pit on the political way.’

 

     “The fear of falling into a pit forced Philaret to watch the development of events with regard to the peasant question in silence. But when the matter was coming to a conclusion, a manifesto on the liberation had to be composed. And at this point, willy-nilly, the hierarch was, so to speak, forcibly dragged into the political whirlpool, from he had tried so hard to keep away, as from something that did not concern him. The hierarch was asked to compose the project of a manifesto. True, the original composition of this document was entrusted to Yu. Samarin under the editorship of N. Miliutin and with the participation in the composition of Great Prince Constantine Nikolaevich and Bludov. But the project composed by Samarin, both because of its excess of details not understandable to the people, and because of the weightiness of its style, did not satisfy expectations. It was then decided that this work should be placed on the metropolitan of Moscow.

 

     “Philaret refused, referring to the fact that “the subject of the task was difficult for him, being far from the circle of [his] understanding and occupation’, but agreed to compose the project of the manfesto after long discussions with the secret counsellor Topilsky, and that not for the sake of his consciousness of satisfying a demand, but for the sake of obedience to the Tsar.

 

     “In the opinion of various contemporaries, the manifesto turned out to be heavy, without sufficient uplift of spirit, without the spark from God in it. And this is completely understandable. The hierarch wrote it without inner fire, simply as a duty, as a necessity, with many doubts about the successful outcome of the reform itself.

 

     “Philaret feared the ‘great affair’, he feared its consequences. The transformation of the life of the landowners’ peasants was not a matter of joy for him; and he deliberately made no mention of joy in the project of the manfesto. ‘People who believe in theoretical progress delight in the broad transformation that is being undertaken,’ he wrote on February 19, 1861, ‘but many well-intentioned people with experience are waiting for it with perplexity, foreseeing difficulties.’

 

    “In intimation of some disturbances, three days before the signing of the manifesto, the hierarch wrote with sincerity: ‘O Lord, save the Tsar and have mercy on all of us. It has been noted that the expectations of the people are strongly trained on the 19th; but it will hardly produce what they are expecting… Now they are writing from Petersburg about their anxieties, including that the first blow will fall on the higher clergy, the monasteries, the churches.’

 

     “The great matter was carried out, it became ‘great’ also in the eyes of Philaret. And only now did the hierarch express himself in defence of the reform and castigate all those who said that an inadequate freedom had been granted.”[713]

 

     It was the liberals who talked about “inadequate freedom”, stirring up feelings against the government because of the “scandal” of serfdom. Herzen in particular “sounded his outrageous bell and called on the peasants to take up their axes”, as Bishop Ignatius put it.[714] And this spirit of rebellion crept into ecclesiastical circles, too, which involved Herzen and Bishop Ignatius in a fiery debate…

 

     Metropolitan Philaret “remarked that ‘true freedom is Christian freedom – internal, not external freedom, - moral and spiritual, not carnal, - always doing good and never rebellious, which can live in a hut just as comfortably as in an aristocrat’s or tsar’s house, - which a subject can enjoy as much as the master without ceasing to be a subject, - which is unshakeable in bonds and prison, as we can see in the Christian martyrs’ (‘Spiritual Bouquet’, Moscow, 1903). According to the remark of Bishop Plato, ‘Christian freedom is the freedom to say no, to restrict oneself, and it is also the weight of Christian love. This weight would be beyond the strength of man, if the same love did not indicate to it blessed eternity..’[715]

 

     However, it was not so much “inadequate freedom” that remained the real criticism to which the emancipation act was subject, so much as the fact that it introduced “the wrong kind of freedom”. The problem was, to use a distinction made by Dostoyevsky, that the change in formal structures brought about by the emancipation of the serfs introduced a change in the spiritual content of the serfs’ lives. The old order, as we have seen, was never really one of traditional slavery. It had been dictated by the military situation of the time, in which Russia had vast extended borders with no natural defences. A quasi-monastic way of life was developed in which everyone from the Tsar to the humblest peasant had his “obedience”. The Tsar had to obey his calling; the nobles had to obey the Tsar (by providing military service or service in the bureaucracy); and the peasants had to obey the landowners. It was a common effort for a common cause – the preservation of Orthodox Russia. Nobody literally “owned” anybody else; but there were relations of obedience enforced by law that were carried out in the Spirit of Orthodoxy. For, as St. John of Kronstadt said, “the varied forms of service... to the tsar and the fatherland are an image of the main service to our heavenly King, which must continue forever. Him first of all are we obliged to serve, as fervent slaves of His by creation, redemption and providence… Earthly service is a test, a preparatory service for service in the heavens”.[716]

 

     The old patriarchal system began to break down as the nobles lost their Orthodoxy, their feeling of duty and obedience to the State for Orthodoxy’s sake. Correspondingly, the peasants began to feel their obedience to the nobles as a burden that was not justified, as in the past, by the common defence of the land. As such, the formal structure probably had to change in view of the change in its spiritual content. But the change in formal structure meant that the sanctifying bonds of obedience broke down still faster than they would have done otherwise. To that extent, the reform, though rational from a politico-economic point of view, was harmful. As Schema-Monk Boris of Optina said: “The old order was better, even though I would really catch it from the nobleman… Now it’s gotten bad, because there’s no authority; anyone can live however he wants.”[717]

 

     Again, Solzhenitsyn writes, citing Gleb Uspensky: “Under serfdom our peasantry was placed in a more correct relationship to the land than today; the landowner had to support everything that made agriculturalists out of his peasants. Even military service was more just: they first took those who belonged to large families; they had been preceded by all those who were incapable and the drunkards, so that there were no workers in the village who prevented the mouzhik from being an agriculturalist. ‘Our ancestors knew their people, they wanted the best for them and gave them Christianity, the best that mankind has come to in centuries of suffering. While now we rummage around in every kind of national and European bric-à-brac, in rubbish dumps.’ In the same way, ‘the parish school, the school of the people, was founded on the principle: transform the egoistical heart into a heart open to all suffering.”[718]

 

     Fr. Lev Lebedev writes: “Later critics of the reform also justly point out that it suffered from an excessive ‘slant’ in one direction, being inspired most of all by the idea of the immediate emancipation of the serfs from the landowners, but without paying due attention to the question how and with what to substitute the guiding, restraining and, finally, educating function of ‘the lords’ (the landowners) for the peasants. Indeed, delivered as it were in one moment to themselves, to their own self-administration (after 100 years of the habit of being guided by the lord), could the Russian peasants immediately undertake their self-administration wisely and truly, to their own good and that of the Fatherland? That is the question nobody wanted to think about at the beginning, being sometimes ruled by the illusion of the ‘innateness’ of the people’s wisdom!… They began to think about this, as often happens with us, ‘in hindsight’, after they had encountered disturbances and ferment among the peasantry. All the indicated mistakes in the reform of 1861 led to the peasantry as a whole being dissatisfied in various respects. Rumours spread among them that ‘the lords’ had again deceived them, that the Tsar had given them not that kind of freedom, that the real ‘will of the Tsar’ had been hidden from them, while a false one had been imposed upon them. This was immediately used by the ‘enlighteners’ and revolutionaries of all kinds. The peasants gradually began to listen not to the state official and the former lord, but to the student, who promised ‘real’ freedom and abundant land, attracting the peasant with the idea of ‘the axe’, by which they themselves would win all this from the deceiver-lords… In such a situation only the Church remained in her capacity of educator and instructor of the people, which task she immediately began to fulfil, although it was very difficult because of the restricted and poor condition of the Church herself. Therefore there soon arose the question of the broadening and strengthening of the rights and opportunities of the Russian Church. The most powerful and influential person who completely understood this was Pobedonostsev, who did a great deal in this respect, thereby eliciting the hatred of all ‘democrats’.

 

     “But in spite of inadequacies and major mistakes, the reform of 1861, of course, exploded and transfigured the life of Great Russia. A huge mass of the population (about 22 million people) found themselves nevertheless a free and self-governing estate (class), juridically equal to the other estates. This immediately elicited the need to build its life and activity on new foundations…”[719]

 

     Dostoyevsky thought that emancipation strengthened the bond between the Tsar and the people, the union in faith and love which was at the very heart of Holy Russia. For the peasants had always looked to the Tsar as their father, and as protector against the greed of the landowners. They had been expecting the Tsar to liberate them, and their expectations had been fulfilled. For Dostoyevsky, “the reform of 1861 created a historical precedent of exceptional importance. It presented an example of voluntary renunciation of an age-old [100-year-old] historical injustice, a peaceful resolution of a social conflict that threatened to have terrible consequences. In this sense the emancipation of the peasants was as it were the first step to ‘the Russian resolution of the question’: the action taken from above hinted at the possibility of the creation of a world-order that would be founded on just – and only on justice.”[720]

 

     As he wrote very shortly before his death: “Is the saying that ‘the Tsar is their father’ a mere phrase, an empty sound in Russia? He who so believes understands nothing about Russia! Nay, this is a profound and most original idea, - a live and mighty organism of the people merging with the Tsar. This idea is a force which has been moulding itself in the course of centuries, especially the last two centuries, which were so dreadful to the people, but which we so ardently eulogize for European enlightenment, forgetting the fact that this enlightenment was bought two centuries ago at the expense of serfdom and a Calvary of the Russian people serving us. The people waited for their liberator, and he came. Why, then, shouldn’t they be his own, true children? The Tsar to the people is not an extrinsic force such as that of some conqueror (as were, for instance, the dynasties of the former Kings of France), but a national, all-unifying force, which the people themselves desired, which they nurtured in their hearts, which they came to love, for which they suffered because from it alone they hoped for their exodus from Egypt. To the people, the Tsar is the incarnation of themselves, their whole ideology, their hopes and beliefs.

 

     “So recently these hopes have been completely realized. Would the people renounce their further hopes? Wouldn’t the latter, on the contrary, be strengthened and reinforced, since after the peasants’ reform the Tsar became the people’s father not merely in hope but in reality. This attitude of the people toward the Tsar is the genuine, adamant foundation of every reform in Russia. If you wish, there is in Russia no creative, protective and leading force other than this live organic bond of the people with their Tsar, from which everything is derived. For instance, who would have ventured to dream about the peasants’ reform without knowing and believing in advance that the Tsar was a father to the people, and that precisely this faith of the people in the Tsar as their father would save and protect everything and stave off the calamity?…”[721]

 

The Great Reforms: (2) The Zemstvo Assemblies

 

     “In 1864,” continues Lebedev, “the ‘Statute on the provincial and uyezd zemstvos’ was issued. Instead of the former institutions of estate self-administration there were now created institutions applying to all estates. From now on elected glasnijs from all estates of the population, including the peasant communes, were called to regulate economic and social matters in each province. The zemstvo assemblies at the uyezd level decided common affairs under the presidency of a leader of the uyezd nobility. The zemstvo assemblies at the provincial level were correspondingly directed by the provincial leader of the nobility. For routine matters the meetings elected uyezd and provincial ustavy that were constantly in session. All this was under the supervision of the provincial governors and the Ministry of internal affairs. In controversial cases the zemstva could refer to the Senate. Within the administration of the zemstva there came popular education (schools), health (hospitals), charity (‘social security and defence’), food provision, the upkeep of roads and bridges, insurance, etc. To secure these matters the zemstva received the right to collect a special local ‘zemstvo tax’ and to acquire property. The priest, the zemstvo teacher, the zemstvo doctor (or medical orderly), the local policeman and the excise officer (the inspection of taxes (excise) on wine, sugar, tobacco and salt) now constituted the village intelligentsia and became key figures in the village, no less, and perhaps more authoritative and influential than the landowner. But at the level of the uyezd the leader was the representative of the landowners, the nobility. The same at the level of the province. The ‘City Statute’ of 1870 established an omni-estate self-administration similar to that of the zemstvo. Representatives of the merchants, industrialists, craftsmen and shopkeepers – all those who had a certain amount of property and capital – were elected to the city dumas (assemblies) and upravas. Here the influence of the nobility was significantly less. The city leader was, as a rule, a rich merchant or industrialist. But the ‘provincial office for city affairs’ was under the authority of the provincial governor, a nobleman. Moreover, the uyezd and provincial assemblies of the nobility continued to operate like the former narrowly estate-based representations. Thus the nobility, having ceased to be the ruling estate, and becoming the, as it were, first among equals of the other estates, nevertheless kept a definite leading position. The city dumas and upravas were in charge of the same matters as the zemstva. These and other very nearby and closely related zemstva constantly tried bring their actions into unity and agreement. The city and zemstvo self-administrations livened up local economic, social and cultural life to an exceptional degree. And although the system of these institutions was under the control of the state, it became a wonderful mechanism for the penetration into the very depths of Russian life of the influence and activity of Masonry, which did not for one moment cease its activity in Russia!… That is why the zemstva and city dumas very soon began to strive for their representatives’ participation in the administration of the state, that is, towards a parliamentary form of state structure. The zemstva had to be forcibly restrained within the sphere of only local concerns, and the creation of inter-city corporations of the zemstva of neighbouring provinces had to be forbidden.”[722]

 

     The initiative here came from Moscow. Ivanov writes: “In January, 1865, the Moscow nobility agitated for the convening of the people’s representatives, thanking the Tsar for his wise beginnings. The Moscow nobility, who always strove for the good of the State, asked him not to stop on his chosen path and bring to completion the state building begun by him ‘through the convening of a general assembly of elected delegates from the Russian land for the discussion of the needs that are common to the whole state’. Emperor Alexander did not accept this appeal. He underlined that ‘not one assembly can speak in the name of the other classes’ and that the right to care for what is useful and beneficial for the state belonged to him as emperor.

 

     “Alexander thought and wisely foresaw that the granting of a constitution for Russia would be disastrous for the latter.

 

     “In a private conversation with one of the composers of the appeal (Golokhvostov), Alexander said: ‘What do you want? A constitutional form of administration? I give you my word, at this table, that I would be ready to sign any constitution you like if I were convinced that it was useful for Russia. But I know that if I do this today, tomorrow Russia will disintegrate into pieces.

 

     “The Tsar’s forebodings had solid foundations.

 

     “On April 4, 1868 Karakozov made an attempt on the life of the Tsar.

 

     “It was necessary to speak, not about a constitution, but about the salvation of the state…”[723]

 

The Great Reforms: (3) Crime and Punishment

 

     The juridical reforms of 1864, writes Lebedev, “came down to making Russian jurisprudence on all levels and in all regions maximally just, incorruptible, based not on the whim of judges, but on the law and (which is very important!) on the public understanding of the law and its application in every individual case! For the resolution of civil suits, property and other quarrels, and also small criminal cases there were created special ‘volost’ courts’ for the peasants. For all the other classes there were created two systems – ‘secular courts’ (for civil matters and petty criminal ones) that were elected by uyezd and city assembly, and ‘circuit courts’, the members of which were appointed by the State.  In the latter particularly important matters and major criminal cases were examined. In criminal cases in the circuit courts ‘jurors’ too part; they had been chosen by lot from the population. All this, that is, the investigation in court, took place publicly, in the presence of the people. The final decision belonged, not to the judge, but to the jurors, who pronounced a ‘verdict’ after a secret consultation amongst themselves. On the basis of the verdict the judges formulated the sentence. The court did not depend on any institutions of the authorities. Thus was created the most perfect juridical system in the world (!) of that time, which quickly taught all the feelings of legality and a good consciousness of one’s rights. In this connection humiliating corporal punishments were abolished, and the system of punishments was in general made softer.”[724]

 

     Surprisingly, Lebedev does not seem to be aware that this “most perfect juridical system in the world” was purely Anglo-Saxon in inspiration, and that the introduction of the jury system did not prevent some extraordinary miscarriages of justice, notably the acquittal of Vera Zasulich for the attempted murder of Tsar Alexander II in 1878. Moreover, “consciousness of one’s rights” was a quintessentially western characteristic in the eyes of Slavophiles, something that derived from feudalism and that the Orthodox East was fortunate to have escaped. Perhaps there were indeed good things deriving from the juridical reforms; but there is no question that they introduced a new spirit into Russian jurisprudence.

 

     Dostoyevsky was more perceptive. He did not comment directly on the rightness or wrongness of the juridical reforms. But he sensed that something was deeply wrong in the spirit in which they were applied.

 

     “For several years in succession, I have been living abroad. When I left Russia, the new courts were merely beginning to function. How avidly I used to read there in our newspapers everything concerning the Russian courts… I would be reading: a wife, who murdered her husband, was acquitted. The crime was an obvious and proved one; she confessed to it. And yet: ‘No, not guilty.’ Then, again, a young man breaks open a strong box and steals the cash: ‘He was very much in love, you see; he had to get money to please his sweetheart. – No, not guilty.’ And if at least all these cases could be explained by compassion or pity! But the thing I could not understand was the reason for the acquittals – and I got confused…”[725]

 

     The problem, as so often, was that while the westernising reform might be formally superior to the existing Russian practice, its spirit was profoundly subversive of, and inferior to, the traditional ideas of the Russian people, rooted as they were in the Orthodox Faith. For what was the use of importing the best western model of juridical practice in the form of prosecution and defence counsels and a twelve-man jury, while at the same time importing the worst western theory of morality – that is, Benthamite utilitarianism, according to which the criterion of morality is “the greatest happiness of the greatest number”? And what was the use of the most incorruptible judges if they worked on the assumption that man is not free, and that his actions are exclusively the result of his upbringing and environment? It was ironic that the West, whose god was individual freedom, had come to believe, by the logic of its own ideology, to deny that freedom. And still more ironic that the freedom and responsibility of the individual was upheld precisely in “despotic” Russia, the so-called “prison of the peoples”, and by such champions of traditional Russian values as Dostoyevsky.

 

     Speaking from his experience as a former convict, he knew that he had sinned freely, and had been punished justly. And yet belief in crime and punishment has to be tempered, he believed, with genuine compassion for the criminal and the knowledge that we ourselves are no better than he. And this was the traditional point of view of the Russian people.

 

     “In fact,” he wrote, “if we believe that, at times, we ourselves are worse than the criminal, we thereby also admit that we are half-guilty of his crime. If he broke the law which the country prescribed for him, we ourselves are at fault that he stands now before us. For if we all were better, he, too, would be better, and he would not be standing facing us…

 

     “So, then, we should be acquitting at this juncture?”

 

     “No, on the contrary, at this juncture it is necessary to state the truth, and to call evil – evil. As against this, however, we should assume half the burden of the verdict. This distress of the heart which nowadays everybody fears so much, and with which we shall leave the courtroom, will be our punishment. If the pain is genuine and sharp, it will purify us and make us better. In fact, having ourselves become better, we will improve our environment and will make it better. This alone can rectify it. Because escapism from one’s own compassion for the sake of evading personal suffering and wholesale acquittals is easy. In this way, by-and-by, we may reach the conclusion that there are no crimes at all, and that ‘environment is guilty’ of everything. We will come to the point, following the thread of a ball, that crime is even a duty, a noble protest against ‘environment’. ‘Since society is wickedly organized, it is impossible to struggle out of it without a knife in hand.’

 

     “Indeed, this is what the doctrine of the environment contends in opposition to Christianity which, fully recognizing the pressure of the milieu, and which, having proclaimed mercy for him who has sinned, nevertheless makes it a moral duty for man to struggle against environment, and draws a line of demarcation between where environment ends and duty begins. Making man responsible, Christianity eo ipso also recognizes his freedom. However, making man dependent on any error in social organization, the environmental doctrine reduces man to absolute impersonality, to a total emancipation from all personal moral duty, from all independence; reduces him to a state of the most miserable slavery that can be conceived.”[726]

 

     These ideas were explored in Notes from Underground (1864), which affirmed the ineluctable free will of man, and his freedom to commit evil, and especially in his novel Crime and Punishment (1865). The hero of the novel is called Raskolnikov, which comes from the Russian raskolnik, meaning “schismatic”. For he is in schism from the real springs of life, from God, the Church and Holy Russia. That is what enables him to murder an old woman moneylender and convince himself, by the most rational of arguments,  - arguments derived from utilitarianism, - that he has done no wrong but actually benefited mankind thereby. For an avaricious and worthless woman has been disposed of; and her money, which was going to a monastery, can now be used not only to help the impoverished student Raskolnikov (who might, after all, turn out to be a genius, an immense benefactor of mankind), but also, more altruistically, to rescue Raskolnikov’s sister Dunya from a dishonourable marriage and the prostitute Sonya Marmeladov from death, both spiritual and physical. So from the utilitarian point of view his crime was no crime, and merited no punishment.

 

     Who was to gainsay such reasoning? Conscience? But what was conscience, according to the westernizers, if not a learned product of one’s environment? And if the environment was as bad as the liberals considered contemporary Russia to be, what blame was to be attached to crimes determined by it? Was it not the system that was to be blamed, and especially the apex of it, the autocracy, rather than those victims of the system who were conventionally called criminals?

 

     However, by a series of extraordinary coincidences that mimic the workings of Divine Providence, Raskolnikov is brought to repentance. As he wrote to Katkov: “The truth of God and the law of the earth take their toll and in the end he has an inner compulsion to go and confess. He is compelled to do this, for even if he is to perish in prison, he will be in touch with the people again; the feeling of being isolated and separated from mankind, which he began to experience immediately after he had committed the crime, had tortured him beyond endurance. The law of truth and human nature has won out. The criminal himself resolves to accept suffering and thereby atone for his deed.”[727]

 

     Dostoyevsky believed firmly in the need of the criminal to atone for his deed through suffering; so just as he believed that crime was really crime, and not merely the result of ignorance or environmental determinism, so he believed that punishment had to be real punishment – the soul of the criminal, or at any rate the Russian criminal, in whom Orthodoxy was not completely extinguished, thirsted for it.

 

The Autocracy, the Church  and the Revolution

 

     But what if the criminal felt no remorse? And what if he had ventured on the greatest crime – that of parricide, attempted murder of the father of the nation, the Tsar himself? Was execution of the criminal the answer?

 

     For example: “On September 1, 1866 Dmitri Karakazov, condemned to death by hanging, decided to ask the Tsar for clemency. His letter ended thus: ‘And now, your Majesty, I ask forgiveness from you as a Christian from a Christian, and as a man from a man.’

 

     “Alexander II smiled meekly as he listened to these words which were read to him by the Minister of Justice. And with regret he threw out his hands.

 

     “The following day, September 2, the president of the Supreme Criminal Court, the 77-year-old Prince Gagarin (incidentally, in 1849 he had conducted the investigation into the affair of Dostoyevsky and the other Petrashevtsy) summoned the condemned man and said: ‘Karakazov, the sovereign Emperor has ordered me to declare to you that his Majesty forgives you as a Christian, but as a Sovereign he cannot forgive you. You must prepare for death…’

 

     “On September 3, Karakazov was hanged.”[728]

 

     Dostoyevsky never disputed the guilt of the terrorists, nor the right of the Tsar to punish them. But he had serious doubts whether the terrorist sons were more guilty than their liberal fathers, a theme he explored in the relationship between Stepan and Peter Verkhovensky in The Devils. And so when the police chief General Mezentsov was assassinated in 1878, and the liberal press rose up in indignation, Dostoyevsky commented in a letter to Putsykovich, the editor of The Citizen: “All these are articles of liberal fathers in disagreement with the diversions of their nihilist children, who went further than them” – further, that is, on essentially the same path of apostasy from God and Holy Russia. “If you’re going to write about the nihilist Russians, then for God’s sake don’t abuse them more than their fathers. Introduce this thought, for the root of nihilism is not only in the fathers, but it is the fathers who are still more nihilist than their children. Our underground evil-doers at any rate have a certain disgusting ardour, but in the fathers there are the same feelings, but [also] cynicism and indifferentism, which are still worse.”[729]

 

     Volgin writes: “One of the characters of The Devils cites the Apocalypse: ‘And to the Angel of the Church of Laodicea write: thus says the Amen, the faithful and true Witness, the Beginning of the creation of God: I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot; O if only you were cold or hot! But since you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spue you out of My mouth’.

 

     “In the letter to Putsykovich he was in essence talking about the same thing. Ardour, albeit ‘disgusting’, witnesses to sincerity and faith: ‘lukewarmness’ is a property of the fathers; ‘to the Angel of the Church of Laodicea…’ does not extend to the children. If guilt is not removed completely from the revolutionaries of the ‘70s, then to a significant degree it is transferred onto the shoulders of the people of the ‘40s.

 

     “Here we discern, perhaps, a not very prominent, but still very essential trait distinguishing Dostoyevsky from the camp to which Putsykovich belonged.

 

     “Like Katkov, who tirelessly demanded that the whole weight of ‘the punishing sword of the state’ should descend upon the heads of the nihilists, Putsykovich expected the authorities, and only the authorities, to eradicate the rebellion: force had to be broken by force.

 

     “Not in one declaration of Dostoyevsky in the years 1878-81 – neither in his letters, nor in The Diary of a Writer, nor in utterances recorded by memoirists – do we meet any indication that the author of The Brothers Karamazov considered it possible to solve the problem by purely administrative means. A supporter of the monarchy, he found not a single word of approval for the repressions to which the monarchical authority resorted in order to preserve itself.

 

     “In the duel between the revolution and the autocratic state he saw not so much a struggle between the existing political forces (‘who conquers whom’), so much as a profound historical drama. For the rift with the people was characteristic, in his opinion, not only for the revolutionary underground, but also that which resisted this underground: for the whole system of Russian statehood. The authorities were just as guilty of the rift with the people as those who were trying to destroy this authority. The sources of the drama were one.

 

     “The thought of universal guilt (the guilt of the whole of educated society) did not leave Dostoyevsky to his last day. In his ‘before-death’ notebook he wrote: ‘Nihilism has appeared among us because we are all nihilists. We have only been frightened by a new form of its manifestation…’

 

     “The Russian revolution, therefore, was not the cause, but the consequence: it was only an ‘original form’ of a very old national disease. This disease… would not submit to healing ‘by blood and iron’.”[730]

 

     Volgin (and perhaps also Dostoyevsky) is here identifying the autocracy too closely with the educated classes. The next age, until the Russian revolution of 1917, would see the autocracy drawing further away from the westernised educated classes and closer to the Orthodox people, not out of fear but for conscience’s sake. But the main point is true: a disease of the mind cannot be healed by physical means, but only by a spiritual healing.

 

     For the spiritual disease of the Russian educated classes, therefore, a disease contracted in the West and now after a long period of incubation coming to its climax in the East, only the spiritual healing provided by the Church, the One, Holy, Catholic-Orthodox and Apostolic Church, would suffice – the healing provided by her God-inspired confession of faith, her holy sacraments and, not least, the blood of her martyrs. “For whatever is born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world – our faith. Who is he that overcomes the world, but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?” (I John 5.4-5). And so the coming age, the Age of the Antichrist, would witness the final, climactic, unprecedently bloody (in both physical and spiritual terms) battle between the Church and the revolution, between Christ as revealed in the Orthodox Church of the East and the Antichrist as born and grown to awful maturity in the apostasy of the West…

 

 

 

    

 

 

    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

         



[1] Hieromonk Damascene Christensen, Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Works, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2003, p. 708.

[2] Gribanovsky, Besedy s sobstvennym serdtsem, Jordanville, 1998, p. 33 (in Russian).

[3] Hobsbawn, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, London: Abacus, 1992, p. 75.

[4] Quoted in Stephen J. Lee, Aspects of European History, 1494-1789, London & New York: Routledge, 1994, p. 279.

[5] De Tocqueville, l’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856, book 3, chapter 4.

[6] Hobsbawn, op. cit., p. 79. As the Princes of the Blood wrote to Louis XVI: “The French monarchy must decline into despotism or become a democracy – two opposite kinds of revolution, but both calamitous” (quoted in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 515).

[7] Quoted in Foi Transmise et Sainte Tradition, N 68, January, 1993, p. 13 (in French).

[8] Quoted in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon, Warsaw: Synodal Press, part III, p. 238 (in Russian).

[9] Burke, Remarks on the Policy of the Allies (1793), in David P. Fidler and Jennifer M. Welsh (eds.), Empire and Community: Edmund Burke’s Writings and Speeches on International Relations, Oxford: Westview Press, 1999, p. 280.

[10] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 516.

[11] In Russian: Komitet Gosudarstvennoj Besopasnosti – KGB.

[12] Norman Davies, op. cit., p. 694.

[13] Quoted in Jocelyn Hunt, The French Revolution, London & New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 25-26.

[14] William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution, Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 114-115.

[15] In 1791 Olympe de Gouges wrote The Rights of Women and the Citizen, in which she declared: “1. Woman is born free, and remains equal to Man in rights… 4. The exercise of Woman’s natural rights has no limit other than the tyranny of Man’s opposing them… 17. Property is shared or divided equally by both sexes.” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 518). In 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she denies that there are any specifically feminine qualities. Thus “I here throw down my gauntlet, and deny the existence of sexual virtues, not excepting modesty.” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 483) Her daughter was Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein…

[16] Davies, op. cit., pp. 713-714.

[17] Rejection was probably his more constant and sincere opinion. In October, 1789 he wrote to the Spanish King, his cousin, protesting “against all the decrees contrary to royal authority to which I have been compelled by force to assent, since 15th July of this year. I beg your Majesty to keep my protest secret until its publication becomes necessary” (Mark Almond, Revolution, London: De Agostini Editions, 1996, p. 74. See also Munro Price, “Countering the Revolution”, BBC History Magazine, vol. 3, ¹ 7, July, 2002, pp. 18-20).

[18] The day before his attempted escape the king declared: “What remains to the King other than a vain semblance of royalty?…The King does not think it possible to govern a kingdom of such great extent and importance as France through the means established by the National Assembly… The spirit of the clubs and dominates everything… In view of all these facts, and the impossibility of the King’s being able to do the good and prevent the evil which is being committed, is it surprising that the King has sought to recover his liberty and find security for himself and his family?” (Hunt, op. cit., p. 41).

[19] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 86.

[20] Hunt, op. cit., p. 34.

[21] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 60-62.

[22] Roy Porter, Enlightenment, London: Penguin books, 2000, p. 451.

[23] Mark Goldie, “John Locke: Icon of Liberty”, History Today, vol. 54 (10), October, 2004, pp. 35, 36.

[24] Goldie, op. cit., p. 36.

[25] Witness his famous remark: “Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 503).

[26] Burke, Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791).

[27] Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico, 1998, pp. 256-257.

[28] Scruton, Modern Philosophy, London : Arrow Books, 1997, p. 417.

[29] Tikhomirov, “Demokratia liberal’naia i sotsial’naia”, in Kritika Demokratii, Moscow: “Moskva”, 1997, p. 122 (in Russian).

[30] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, quoted in Fidler & Welsh, op. cit., p. 30.

[31] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, quoted in Fidler & Welsh, op. cit., p. 30.

[32] Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, quoted in Fidler & Welsh, op. cit., p. 31.

[33] Gooch, “Europe and the French Revolution”, in The Cambridge Modern History, Cambridge University Press, 1934, vol. VIII, p. 757.

[34] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 167-168.

[35] This greatly increased influence of the printed word, which has become such an important feature of the modern world, was another of Burke’s correct predictions: “What direction the French spirit of proselytism is likely to take, and in what order it is likely to prevail in the several parts of Europe, it is not easy to determine. The seeds are sown almost everywhere, chiefly by newspaper circulations, infinitely more efficacious and extenseive than ever they were. And they are a more important instrument than is generally imagined. They are a part of the reading of all, they are the whole of the reading of the far greater number. There are thirty of them in Paris alone. The language diffuses them more widely than the English, though the English too are much read. The writers of these papers indeed, for the greater part, are either unknown or in contempt, but they are like a battery in which the stroke of any one ball produces no great effect, but the amount of continual repetition is decisive. Let us only suffer one person to tell us his story, morning and evening, but for one twelvemonth, and he will become our master” (Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), in Fidler and Welsh, op. cit., p. 240).

[36] Paine, The Rights of Man, London: Penguin Books, 1984, part I.

[37] Paine, op. cit., p. 48.

[38] Paine, op. cit., pp. 41-42, 65-66.

[39] Norman Hampson, “What Difference did the French Revolution Make?” History, vol. 74, ¹ 241, June, 1989, p. 233.

[40] Hampson, op. cit., p. 233.

[41] In the Romantic age, “feeling” was considered higher than rational knowing.

[42] Burke, quoted in Golo Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 90-91.

[43] Paine, The Age of Reason, 1793, in Davies, op. cit., p. 679.

[44] Paine, Rights of Man, op. cit.., p. 86.

[45] Paine, quoted in Porter, op. cit., p. 454.

[46] Paine, op. cit., p. 87.

[47] Paine, op. cit., p. 69.

[48] Paine, op. cit., p. 69.

[49] Hamilton, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 510.

[50] Jefferson, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 510.

[51] Jefferson, in Almond, op. cit., p. 69.

[52] Washington, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 509.

[53] Ellis, Founding Brothers, New York: Vintage Books, 2002, p. 59. See also Simon Collinson, “President or King?”, History Today, vol. 50 (11), November, 2000, pp. 12-13.

[54] Ellis, op. cit., pp. 91-92, 93.

[55] Ellis, op. cit., p. 158.

[56] Ellis, op. cit., p. 108.

[57] Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 51.

[58] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 64-65.

[59] May 1, which has been adopted as International Labour Day by the Socialists, was a feast “of satanic forces – witches, sorcerers, evil spirits, demons” (O.A. Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii, Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, p. 194 (in Russian)). It was called “Walpurgisnacht” in Germany after the eighth-century English missionary to Germany, St. Walburga, whose feast is May 1.

[60] Nesta Webster, Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, Christian Book Club of America, 1924, p. 205. According to his second-in-command, Baron von Knigge, Weishaupt, had a “Jesuitical character” and his organisation was “such a machine behind which perhaps Jesuits may be concealed” (quoted in Webster, op. cit., p. 227). He was in fact “a Jew by race who had been baptized a Roman Catholic and had become professor of canon law at the Roman Cathlic university of Ingoldstadt in Bavaria” (Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 114).

[61] Platonov, op. cit., p. 195.

[62] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 195-196.

[63] Webster, op. cit., p. 221.

[64] Webster, op. cit., p. 205.

[65] Henri Martin, Histoire de France, XVI, 533; in Webster, op. cit., p. 207.

[66] Webster, op. cit., pp. 213-217.

[67] Webster, op. cit., pp. 218-219.

[68] Ridley, op. cit., p. 115.

[69] Webster, op. cit., pp. 241-242.

[70] Webster, op. cit., pp. 244-245.

[71] Rose, Nihilism, Forestville, Ca.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1994, p. 54.

[72] Doyle, op. cit., p. 183.

[73] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 75-76.

[74] Doyle, op. cit., p. 193.

[75] At Valmy the Prussian army was led by the Duke of Brunswick, the leader of German Masonry, who quite clearly betrayed his country and an overwhelmingly superior position in order to let the forces of the revolution win (L.A. Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religious-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, pp. 460-461 (in Russian)).

[76] Hunt, op. cit., 1998, p. 37.

[77] Doyle, op. cit., p. 195. The Robespierrist lawyer Bertrand Barère said, borrowing a phrase from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty does not flourish unless moistened with the blood of kings. I vote for death” (in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 522).

[78] Ridley, op. cit., pp. 136-137.

[79] Eliphas Levi, in Fomin, op. cit., p. 38.  Who was Jacob? There are various theories. Some think it was Jacob Molet, the leader of the Templars who was executed by the Catholic Church. Others think it refers to Masons of the Scottish rite who were supporters of the Stuart Jacobites. Others think it was a reference to the Patriarch Jacob’s “struggle with God” in Genesis 32.

[80] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 1-2.

[81] Camus, The Rebel, New York, 1956, p. 120.

[82] Doyle, op. cit., p. 201.

[83] Doyle, op. cit., p. 199.

[84] Doyle, op. cit., p. 210.

[85] General Westermann reported to the Convention: “The Vendée is no more… I have buried it in the woods and marshes of Savenay… According to your orders, I have trampled their children beneath our horses’ feet; I have massacred their women, so they will no longer give birth to brigands. I do not have a single prisoner to reproach me. I have exterminated them all. The roads are sown with corpses. At Savenay, brigands are arriving all the time claiming to surrender, and we are shooting them non-stop… Mercy is not a revolutionary sentiment” (in Davies, op. cit., p. 705).

[86] Doyle, op. cit., p. 227.

[87] Doyle, op. cit., p. 226.

[88] Doyle, op. cit., p. 242.

[89] David’s painting of the dead Marat in his bath gave the revolution and “iconic” representation of its first martyr. (V.M.)

[90] Ridley, op. cit., p. 140.

[91] As Pierre Vergniaud said before the Convention in March, 1793: “It must be feared that the Revolution, like Saturn, will devour its children one after the other” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 522).

[92] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 458.

[93] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 460.

[94] Doyle, op. cit., p. 250.

[95] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 251-252.

[96] Doyle, op. cit., p. 252.

[97] Doyle, op. cit., p. 254.

[98] Hunt, op. cit., p. 63.

[99] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 258, 259. For precise figures with breakdown according to class and sex, see Hunt, op. cit., p. 70.

[100] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 524.

[101] Roland, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 523.

[102] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 64.

[103] Doyle, op. cit, pp. 143-144, 145.

[104] Catherine II, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 520.

[105] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 523.

[106] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 25.

[107] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 35.

[108] Hobsbawn, op. cit., p. 80.

[109] Hobsbawn, op. cit., p. 80.

[110] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 88.

[111] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 63-64.

[112] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 71-72.

[113] Gascoigne, A Brief History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 215.

[114] He said: “There are people who are superstitious in perfectly good faith. They are sick people whom we must restore to good health by winning their confidence. A forced curé would drive them to fanaticism. Priests have been denounced for saying the Mass. They will continue to do so all the longer if you try to prevent them. He who wants to prevent them is more fanatical than the priest himself” (in Gascoigne, op. cit., p. 214). (V.M.).

[115] He said: “Atheism is aristocratic; the idea of a great being who watches over oppressed innocence, is altogether popular... If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him” (Hunt, op. cit., p. 68). (V.M.)

[116] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 259-262.

[117] Raynal, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 518.

[118] Hunt, op. cit., p. 66.

[119] Doyle, op. cit., p. 277.

[120] On February 12, 1792 the Jacobin club had ceremoniously called Voltaire, Rousseau, Franklin and Mirabeau “gods” (Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 67).

[121] Doyle, op. cit., p. 288.

[122] Hampson, op. cit., p. 234.

[123] Hampson, op. cit., p. 235.

[124] Hampson, op. cit. p. 235.

[125] Hampson, op. cit, p. 238.

[126] Wilson, To the Finland Station, London: Phoenix, 2004, p. 71.

[127] Wilson, op. cit., pp. 72-74, 79.

[128] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 530.

[129] Johnson, Napoleon, London: Phoenix, 2002, p. 46.

[130] Davies, op. cit., p. 701.

[131] The result of the plebiscite was 3,571,329 ‘yes’ votes to 2,570 ‘noes’. As Johnson points out, “Bonaparte was the first dictator to produce fake election figures.” (op. cit., pp. 49-50). (V.M.)

[132] Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon, 1996, pp. 589-590.

[133] Mansel, “Napoleon the Kingmaker”, History Today, vol. 48 (3), March, 1998, pp. 40, 41.

[134] Mansel, op. cit., p. 43.

[135] Mansel, op. cit., p. 43.

[136] Johnson writes: “He liked the vague and abstract notion of Rousseau’s concept, the General Will, offering a ruling elite that knew its business the opportunity to harness the people to a national effort without any of the risks of democracy. In practice an elite always formed itself into a pyramid, with one man at its summit. His will expressed the General Will… and gave it decisiveness, the basis for action. Constitutions were important in the sense that window-dressing was important in a shop. But the will was the product to be sold to the nation and, once sold, imposed” (op. cit, p. 17). (V.M.)

[137] As he said to Metternich: “You see me master of France; well, I would not undertake to govern her for three months with liberty of the press” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 530). (V.M.)

[138] Johnson writes: “Fouché, who operated the world’s first secret police force, and who was the prototype of Himmler or Beria, was an important element in Bonaparte’s legacy of evil, for some of his methods were widely imitated in Austria and Prussia, where they became permanent, and even in harmless Sweden, where they were carried out by Bonaparte’s marshal Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte” (op. cit., p. 105). (V.M.)

[139] Hunt, op. cit., pp. 104, 105-106, 107, 108, 112. He had no time for the press either.

[140] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 531.

[141] De Tocqueville, L’Ancien Régime et la Révolution, 1856, book 3, chapter 8 ; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 527.

[142] Johnson, op. cit., p. 119.

[143] De Staël, in Johnson, op. cit., p. 119.

[144] Quoted in Cronin, op. cit., p. 202.

[145] Quoted in Cronin, op. cit., p. 211.

[146] Quoted in Gascoigne, op. cit., p. 216.

[147] Quoted in Gascoigne, op. cit., p. 217.

[148] Quoted in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 532. In 1816 Napoleon gave another, less honest account of his motives: “As soon as I had power, I immediately re-established religion. I made it the groundwork and foundation upon which I built. I considered it as the support of sound principles and good morality, both in doctrine and in practice. Besides, such is the restlessness of man, that his mind requires that something undefined and marvellous which religion offers; and it is better for him to find it there, than to seek it of Cagliostro, of Mademoiselle Lenormand, or of the fortune-tellers and imposters” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 532).

[149] Doyle, op. cit., pp. 385-386.

[150] Cronin, op. cit., p. 212.

[151] Cronin, op. cit., pp. 216-217.

[152] Johnson, op. cit., p. 48.

[153] Cronin, op. cit., p. 220.

[154] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 532.

[155] Peter De Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam Press, 1988, p. 66.

[156] Cronin, op. cit., pp. 220-223.

[157] Cronin, op. cit., p. 221.

[158] Vincent Cronin, Napoleon, London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 253.

[159] Davies, op. cit., p. 675.

[160] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 110.

[161] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 130.

[162] In fact, with regard to the abolition of slavery the revolutionary French were behind their enemies, the anti-revolutionary Birtish. “Gradually in the 18th century an anti-slavery lobby built up in Europe, notably in Britain, the superpower of the seas. In 1772 Lord Mansfield, a judge, ruled that a runaway slave there could not be forced back by his master to the West Indies. The ruling was interpreted (questionably, but this was the effect) as confirming that there could be no slavery in Britain. In America, it created fears that Britain might try to abolish slavery in its colonies. The desire to maintain slavery was not the least motive for the American war of independence, in which some blacks fought on the British side. In 1807 Britain banned the slave trade, and began using its navy to stop it. But slavery itself did not end in the British Caribbean until 1838, in the United States (in practice) 1865, in Spanish-owned Cuba 1886, in Brazil 1888” (“Guilty Parties”, The Economist, December 31, 1999, p. 90).

[163] For example, during the siege of Saragossa in 1808-09, 54,000 Spanish civilians were killed. A French officer later recorded one episode: “With a petard, we brought down the door of the church, which the monks were defending to the death. Behind them a mass of men, women and children had taken refuge at the foot of the altar, and were crying for mercy. But the smoke was too thick for us to distinguish the victims we would have wished to spare. We wrought havoc everywhere, and death alone stifled their cries…” (Quoted in The Economist, December 31, 1999, p. 41). The counter-revolution could be almost as brutal: on November 4, 1794 Russian troops broke into the Warsaw suburb of Praga and killed 20,000 people (Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 93).

[164] Doyle, op. cit., p. 419.      

[165] Doyle, op. cit., p. 417.

[166] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 109.

[167] Doyle, op. cit., p. 411.

[168] Webster, op. cit., p. 247.

[169] David Vital, A People Apart, Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 35-36.

[170] Webster, op. cit., p. 247.

[171] Paul Johnson, A History of the Jews, London: Phoenix, 1987, 1995, p. 306.

[172] Vital, op. cit., p. 49.

[173] Vital, op. cit.,

[174] Vital, op. cit., pp. 43-45.

[175] General A. Nechvolodov, L’Empéreur Nicolas II et les Juifs, Paris, 1924, pp. 216-220 (in French).

[176] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 365.

[177] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 306-307.

[178] Vital, op. cit., p. 101.

[179] Vital, op. cit., p. 103.

[180] Stone, Europe: A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 843.

[181] Socrates, Ecclesiastical History, III, 20; Sozomen, Ecclesiastical History, V, 22; Theodoret, Ecclesiastical History, III, 15; Karen Armstrong, A History of Jerusalem, London: HarperCollins, 1997, pp. 194-196.

[182] Nechvolodov, op. cit., pp. 221-222.

[183] Johnson, op. cit., p. 310.

[184] Nechvolodov, op. cit., pp. 225-226.

[185] Vital, op. cit., p. 57.

[186] O.A. Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii, Moscow: Rodnik, 1998, p. 266 (in Russian).

[187] This did not mean, however, that the complaints of the citizens of Alsace were ignored. According to the “infamous decree” of March 17, 1808, writes Vital, “existing debts to Jews [in Alsace] were to be heavily and arbitrarily reduced. But the stipulations of the decree went a great deal further. Restrictions were to be levelled on the freedom of Jews to engage in a trade of their choice and to move from one part of the country to another without special permission. They were to submit to special commercial registration. They were not to employ the Hebrew language in their commercial transactions. Unlike all other citizens, they were to be forbidden to offer substitutes in case of conscription for military service. And the entry of foreign Jews into France was to be conditional either on military performance or on satisfaction of specified property qualifications.” (op. cit., p. 59). The decree lasted for ten years, but was not then renewed by the Restoration government.

[188] Reed, The Controversy of Zion, Durban, SA, p. 130.

[189] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 267-268.

[190] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 366.

[191] Nechvolodov, op. cit., p. 226.

[192] Vital, op. cit., p. 62.

[193] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 151.

[194] Almond, op. cit., p. 89.

[195] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 156.

[196] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 229.

[197] Quoted in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 546.

[198] “Mixed Blessing”, The Economist, December 31, 1999, p. 68.

[199] Horton Box, The Origins of the Paraguayan War, University of Illinois, 1927.

[200] Lanes, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 330, 331.

[201] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 230.

[202] Barzun, op. cit., p. 491.

[203] Berlin, “The Essence of European Romanticism”, The Power of Ideas, op. cit., pp. 201-204.

[204] Berlin, “My Intellectual Path”, The Power of Ideas, op. cit., pp. 10-11.

[205] Berlin, "The Bent Twig: On the Rise of Nationalism", The Crooked Timber of Humanity. London: John Murry, p. 245.

[206] Thus: “The genius of foreigners will be like the amiable hummingbird [or] the industrious and skilful been which gathers in the honey… but the German spirit will be the eagle which will lift his heavy body on powerful wings and, through a long and exciting flight, climbs ever higher and higher towards the sun” (Addresses to the German Nation). (V.M.)

[207] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 162, 163-165.

[208] F.M. Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, May-June, 1877, chapter III, 1; Haslemere: Ianmead, 1984, pp. 727, 728-730. “It may perhaps be accidental,” writes Sir Karl Popper, “but it is in any case remarkable, that there is still a cultural frontier between Western Europe and the regions of Central Europe which coincide very nearly with those regions that did not enjoy the blessings of Augustus’ Roman Empire, and that did not enjoy the blessings of the Roman peace, i.e. of the Roman civilization. The same ‘barbarian’ regions are particularly prone to be affected by mysticism, even though they did not invent mysticism. Bernard of Clairvaux had his greatest successes in Germany, where later Eckhart and his school flourished, and also Boehme.

     “Much later Spinoza, who attempted to combine Cartesian intellectualism with mystical tendencies, rediscovered the theory of a mystical intellectual intuition, which, in spite of Kant’s strong opposition, led to the post-Kantian rise of ‘Idealism’, to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel” (The Open Society and its Enemies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, p. 353.

[209] Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, 1807; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 535.

[210] Johnson, The Birth of the Modern, World Society 1815-1830, London: Phoenix, 1992, pp. 810-811.

[211] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 455.

[212] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 166, 167-168, 169-170.

[213] George L. Mosse, The Culture of Western Europe, Boulder & London: Westview Press, 1988, p. 68.

[214] Görres, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 535.

[215] Mosse, op. cit., p. 83.

[216] Mann, op. cit, p. 35.

[217] Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, pp. 762-763.

[218] Hence Tom Paine’s declaration: “My country is the world, and my religion is to do good” (The Age of Reason (1793)).

[219] Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789-1848, London: Abacus, 1992, pp. 116-117.

[220] Johnson, op. cit., 1991, p. 662.

[221] Johnson, op. cit., pp. 665-666. The highest members of the Carbonari swore the following oath: “Property boundaries shall be erased, all possessions shall be reduced to communal wealth, and the one and only patria, most gentle of mothers, shall furnish food, education and work to the whole body of her beloved and free children. This is the redemption invoked by the wise. This is the true recreation of Jerusalem. This is the manifest and inevitable decisions of the Supreme Being” (Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 547). (V.M.)

[222] In Spain, for example, the left-wing and Masonic Isabelinos “were supported by Palmerston and by the British Legion of volunteers from Britain… They were also supported by the government of Louis Philippe [of France]. Metternich and Tsar Nicholas were not in a position to help the Carlists” (Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 200).

[223] Johnson, op. cit., p. 691.

[224] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 129.

[225] “Suddenly the door opened; and silently there entered vice leaning on the arm of crime, M. de Talleyrand supported by Fouché… the trusty regicide, kneeling, put the hand which had made Louis XVI’s head roll in the hands of the martyred king’s brother; the apostate bishop stood surety for the oath” (Viscount de Chateaubriand, Mémoires d’Outremer, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 543).

[226] Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 542.

[227] De Maistre, The St. Petersburg Dialogues; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 543.

[228] De Bonald, On Opposition to the Government and the Liberty of the Press, 1827; in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 544.

[229] Berlin, “The Counter-Enlightenment”, in The Proper Study of Mankind, London: Pimlico, 1998, pp. 264-268.

[230] Baidin, “Ikonosphera russkoj kultury” (“The iconosphere of Russian culture”), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dviznenia (Gazette of the Russian Christian Movement), ¹¹ 162-163, 1991, p. 45 (in Russian).

[231] Metropolitan Philaret, “Rassuzhdenie o nrastvennykh prichinakh neimovernykh uspekhov nashikh v nastoiaschej vojne” (“Reflection on the moral reasons for our amazing successes in the present war”), Philareta Mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo Tvorenia (The Works of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and Kolomna), Moscow, 1994, p. 314 (in Russian).

[232] St. John Maximovich, Proiskhozhdenie Zakona o Prestolonasledovanii v Rossii (The Origin of the Law on the Succession to the Throne in Russia), Shanghai, 1936, Podolsk, 1994; quoted in “Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel” (“Holy Tsar-Martyr Paul”), Svecha Pokayania (Candle of Repentance), ¹N 4, February, 2000, p. 18 (in Russian).

[233] Tsar Paul, in V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo: ot Petra I do nashikh dnej (The Russian Intelligentsia and Masonry from Peter I to our days), Harbin, 1934, Moscow, 1997, p. 211 (in Russian).

[234] The decree said: “The Law of God given to us in the ten commandments teaches us to devote the seventh day to God; which is why on this day, which is glorified by the triumph of the Faith, and on which we have been counted worthy to receive the sacred anointing and royal crowning on our Forefathers’ Throne, we consider it our duty before the Creator and Giver of all good things to confirm the exact and constant fulfilment of this law throughout our Empire, commanding each and every one to observe it, so that no one should have any excuse to dare to force his peasants to work on Sundays….”

[235] Lebedev, Velikorossia (Great Russia), St. Petersburg, 1999, pp. 239-240 (in Russian).

[236] “Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, Svecha Pokaiania, ¹ 4, February, 2000, p. 18 (in Russian).

[237]  Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 240, 241.

[238] “Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, op. cit.

[239] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op. cit., p. 242. A.P. Dobroklonsky writes: “At the beginning of the [19th] century the over-procurator Yakovlev planned to place [the consistories] in a position more independent of the bishops and presented to the sovereign a report about establishing in them a special post of procurator subject only to the over-procurator; but the realisation of this report was hindered by Metropolitan Ambrose Podobedov of St. Petersburg, who presented a report on his part that in such a case the canonical authority of the bishops would be shaken and they would become dependent on secular officials” (Rukovodstvo po istorii russkoj tserkvi (Handbook on the History of the Russian Church), Moscow, 2001, p. 534 (in Russian)).

[240] Fr. Alexis Nikolin, Tserkov’ i Gosudarstvo (The Church and the State), Moscow, 1997, p. 106 (in Russian).

[241] Papmehl, Metropolitan Platon of Mosow (Petr Levshin, 1737-1812): The Enlightened Prelate, Scholar and Educator, Newtonville, Mass.: Oriental Research Partners, 1983, p. 78.

[242] “Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, op. cit.

[243] Ioseliani, A Short History of the Georgian Church, Jordanville, 1983, pp. 190-193.

[244] “Tower of Virtue: The Life and Ascetic Labors of St. Hilarion the Georgian of Mount Athos”, The Orthodox Word, vol. 39, ¹¹ 3-4 (230-231), May-August, 2003, pp. 117-118.

[245] Glazkov, “K voprosu o edinoverii v sviazi s ego dvukhsotletiem” (“Towards the Question of the ‘One Faith’ in connection with its 200th anniversary”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox Way), 2000, pp. 74-75, 76-77 (in Russian).

[246] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 211.

[247] Suvorov’s extraordinarily successful career was based, according to Lebedev, “on Orthodox spirituality. He taught the soldiers prayer and life according to the commandments of God better than any preacher, so that at times it was difficult to say what Suvorov taught his soldiers more – to be a warrior or to be a real Orthodox Christian!” (Velikorossia, op. cit., p. 234).

[248] Not too much should be of the fact that the Tsar was sympathetic towards Catholicism, which, as Nikolin points out, “was to a large extent linked with fear of the French revolution, which had dealt cruelly with believing Catholics, monks and clergy. This relationship is attested by such facts as his offering the Pope of Rome to settle in Russia, his cooperation with the establishment of the Jesuit order in Russia, and his support for the establishment of a Roman Catholic chapel in St. Petersburg. At the same time attention should be drawn to Paul I’s ukaz of March 18, 1797, which protected the consciences of peasants whom landowners were trying to detach forcibly from Orthodoxy into the unia or convert to Catholicism.” (Nikolin, op. cit., p. 106). “On October 12, 1799 the holy things of the Order were triumphantly brought to Gatchina: the right hand of St. John the Baptist, a particle of the Cross of the Lord and the icon of the Filerma Odigitria icon of the Mother of God. Only a spiritually blind man, on learning this fact, would not see the Providence of God in the fact that the Tsar became Master of the Maltese Order. October 12 was introduced into the number of festal days by the Church, and a special service to this feast was composed…” (“Svyatoj Tsar-Muchenik Pavel”, op. cit.).

[249] This was, of course, a great mistake. Napoleon was a child of the revolution and the instrument of the spread of its ideas throughout Europe. (V.M.)

[250] Another mistake, for it did precisely the opposite, weakening the continental economies and allowing England, with her superior navy, to seize the colonies of her rivals around the world. (V.M.)

[251] They had crossed the Volga on March 18 when they heard of the death of the Tsar…

 

[252] Alan Palmer writes: “One of the older conspirators, more sober than the others, pertinently asked the question which Alexander had always ignored: what would happen if the Tsar offered resistance? ‘Gentlemen,’ Pahlen replied calmly, ‘you cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs’. It was an ominous remark, difficult to reconcile with his assurance to Alexander” (Alexander I, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974, p. 44). (V.M.)

[253] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op. cit., pp. 245-249.

[254] “Monk Abel ‘the Prophet’ of Valaam”, The Orthodox Word, vol. 36, ¹ 1, January-February, 2000.

[255] Shabelsky-Bork, in Fomin S., Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Sergiev Posad, 1993, p. 121 (in Russian).

[256] Alexander had once said to his tutor {La Harpe, a Swiss republican}: “Once… my turn comes, then it will be necessary to work, gradually of course, to create a representative assembly of the nation which, thus directed, will establish a free constitution, after which my authority will cease absolutely” (in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People and Empire 1552-1917, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 123).

[257] Palmer, op. cit., p. 50.

[258] The Masonic historian Richard Rhoda writes: “The tradition exists that Alexander became a Mason in 1803 and there is evidence that he was the member of a lodge in Warsaw” (“Russian Freemasonry: A New Dawn”, paper read at Orient Lodge no. 15 on June 29, 1996, http”//members.aol.com/houltonme/ru.htm. (V.M.)

[259] Hartley, op. cit., pp. 233-235.

[260] Andrzej Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon, 1988, p. 73.

[261] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 247.

[262] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 249.

[263] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 255.

[264] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 246.

[265] Palmer, op. cit., pp. 59-60.

[266] Palmer, op. cit., pp. 63-64.

[267] Palmer, op. cit., pp. 81-82.

[268] Palmer, op. cit., p. 84.

[269] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 260. Cf. Cronin, Napoleon, London: HarperCollins, 1994, p. 315; Palmer, op. cit., pp. 126-127.

[270] Solzhenitsyn, Le ‘problème russe’ à la fin du xxe siècle (The ‘Russian Problem’ at the End of the 20th Century), Paris: Fayard, 1994, pp. 52-53 (in French).

[271] Palmer, op. cit., p. 138.

[272] Papmehl, op. cit., p. 84.

[273] Papmehl, op. cit., p. 125.

[274] Quoted in Palmer, op. cit., p. 148.

[275] Professor Theodore Shiman, Alexander I, Moscow, 1908. L. A. Tikhomirov writes: “From the beginning of the 19th century, the Petrine institutions finally collapsed. Already the practice of our 19th century has reduced ‘the collegiate principle’ to nothing. Under Alexander I the elegant French system of bureaucratic centralisation created by Napoleon on the basis of the revolutionary ideas captivated the Russian imitative spirit. For Russians this was ‘the last word’ in perfection, and Speransky, an admirer of Napoleon, together with the Emperor, an admirer of the republic, created a new system of administration which continued essentially until Emperor Alexander II.

     “Alexander I’s institutions completed the absolutist construction of the government machine. Until that time, the very imperfection of the administrative institutions had not allowed them to escape control. The supreme power retained its directing and controlling character. Under Alexander I the bureaucracy was perfectly organised. A strict separation of powers was created. An independent court was created, and a special organ of legislation – the State Council. Ministries were created as the executive power, with an elegant mechanism of driving mechanisms operating throughout the country. The bureaucratic mechanism’s ability to act was brought to a peak by the strictest system of centralisation. But where in all these institutions was the nation and the supreme power?

     “The nation was subjected to the ruling mechanism. The supreme power was placed, from an external point of view, at the intersection of all the administrative powers. In fact, it was surrounded by the highest administrative powers and was cut off by them not only from the nation, but also from the rest of the administrative mechanism. With the transformation of the Senate into the highest judicial organ, the supreme power lost in it an organ of control.

     “The idea of the administrative institutions is that they should attain such perfection that the supreme power will have no need to conduct any immediate administrative activity. As an ideal this is correct. But in fact there is hidden here the source of a constant usurpation of administrative powers in relation to the supreme power. The point is that the most perfect administrative institutions act in an orderly fashion only under the watchful control of the supreme power and his constant direction. But where control and direction by the supreme power is undermined, the bureaucracy becomes the more harmful the more perfectly it is constructed. With this it acquires the tendency to become de facto free of the supreme power and even submits it to itself…” (Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 342-343 (in Russian)).

    

[276] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 255-258.

[277] Palmer, op. cit., p. 203.

[278] Papmehl, op. cit., p. 85. In 1805 Platon remarked to an English visitor that “the English government had done a very wicked thing in tolerating Popery” (op. cit., p. 82).

[279] Debidour, Histoire des rapports de l’église et de l’état en France (History of Church-State Relations in France), p. 255; in M.V. Zyzykin, Patriarkh Nikon (Patriarch Nicon), Warsaw Synodal Press, 1931, part III, p. 251 (in Russian).

[280] Palmer, op. cit., p. 206.

[281] Palmer, op. cit., p. 215.

[282] Leontiev, “Vizantizm i Slavianstvo” (“Byzantinism and Slavdom”), Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavdom), Moscow, 1996, p. 104 (in Russian).

[283] That same icon which was to reappear miraculously on March 2, 1917, at another time of mortal danger for the State.

[284] 70,000 men fell in one day, the largest death-toll in a single day until the Battle of the Somme in 1916.

[285] For details, see Adam Zamoyski’s 1812: Napoleon’s Fatal March on Moscow, London: HarperCollins, 2004.

[286] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 261.

[287] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 262. This estimate of Kutuzov is supported by Zamoyski, 1812, op. cit.

[288] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 264-265.

[289] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 269-270, 272.

[290] Dobroklonsky, op. cit., p. 666.

[291] Bishop Theophan, Mysli na kazhdij den’ (Thoughts for every day), p. 461 (in Russian).

[292] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 172.

[293] Hosking, op. cit., p. 137.

[294] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 172-173.

[295] Elagin, “The Life of Countess Anna Orlova-Chesmenskaya”, The Orthodox Word, 1977, vol. 13, ¹ 6 (77), pp. 240-241.

[296] Zhmakin, “Eres’ esaula Kotel’nikova” (“The Heresy of Cossack Captain Kotelnikov”), Khristianskoe Chtenie (Christian Reading), November-December, 1882, pp. 739-745 (in Russian).

[297] Fr. Georges Florovsky, The Ways of Russian Theology, Belmont: Nordland, 1979, part I, pp. 202-203.

[298] Palmer, op. cit., pp. 260-261.

[299] Palmer, op. cit., p. 333.

[300] Palmer, op. cit., p. 335.

[301] Palmer, op. cit., pp. 333-334. The mocking attitude of the British to the Holy Alliance is revealed by the fact that, as Norman Stone writes, “in each of the subsequent Congresses held at Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821), and Verona (1822), the British held strong reservations about the successive expeditions for crushing revolution in Naples, Greece, and Spain. On the critical issue of the revolt of Spain’s South American colonies, the British Foreign Secretary, George Canning, joined the US President, James Monroe, in forbidding any sort of European intervention in the Americas. ‘I called the New World into existence,’ he told the House of Commons in 1826, ‘to redress the Balance of the Old.’ In effect, he killed the Congress System stone dead. ‘Things are getting back to a wholesome state,’ he remarked shortly before his death. ‘Every nation for itself, and God for us all’” (Europe: A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 763).

[302] Quoted in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 541.

[303] Quoted by Fr. Georges Florovsky, “Philaret, mitropolit Moskovskij” (“Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow”), in Vera i Kul’tura (Faith and Culture), St. Petersburg, 2002, p. 265 (in Russian).

[304] Quoted in Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev), Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ mitropolita Philareta (The Life and Activity of Metropolitan Philaret), Tula, 1994, p. 121 (in Russian).

[305] Gascoigne, A Brief History of Christianity, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 218.

[306] Thus Archimandrite (later Metropolitan) Philaret (Drozdov) wrote in his Conversations between one testing and one convinced of the Orthodoxy of the Greco-Russian Church (1815) wrote: “Insofar as the one [the Eastern Church] and the other [the Western Church] confess Jesus Christ as having come in the flesh, in this respect they have a common Spirit, which ‘is of God’… Know that, holding to the above-quoted words of Holy Scripture, I do not dare to call any Church which believes ‘that Jesus is the Christ’ false” (Philareta Mitropolita Moskovskogo i Kolomenskogo Tvorenia, op. cit., pp. 402, 408 (in Russian)). However, in defence of the holy metropolitan, it should be pointed out that in the above-quoted work he rejected the heresies of papism, and that he never served with heterodox hierarchs or sought union with the heterodox churches. And he revered his mentor, Metropolitan Platon of Moscow, who during his journey to Kiev and other Russian cities in 1804 reproached “the Russian authorities for following ‘that new-fangled mode of thinking which is called tolerance’ in their relations with the Jesuits, and blames the Jews for the impoverishment of the Christian population in the areas in which they are numerous” (Papmehl, op. cit., p. 81).

[307] Madame de Staël claimed that “the Poles are the only Europeans who can serve under the banners of Napoleon without blushing” (Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 199).

[308] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 201.

[309] As Palmer writes, the Constitutional Charter drawn up by his Polish minister Czartoryski “was a liberal instrument of government. The Polish nation was promised ‘for all time to come’ a bi-cameral Diet (Sejm), which would share legislative power with the Tsar-King, and a separate executive State Council of five ministers and a number of royal nominees. The Charter guaranteed to the Poles freedom of worship for the ‘Christian faiths’, freedom of the press, and freedom from arbitrary arrest; and it also provided for an independent judiciary… The Upper House, the Senate, was a nominated body, with preference given to the older aristocracy and the Catholic episcopate; and the right to elect to the Lower House (in which there were nominated representatives as well as deputies) was limited to the gentry in the countryside and to property-owners in the towns. Moreover the Diet met for only one month in every two years and possessed no right to initiate legislation, being permitted only to discuss laws laid before it. Neverthless these provisions did at least give the Poles the opportunity of internal self-government with a system of tariffs and taxation of their own, and the terms of the Charter were accepted by Alexander with perfect sincerity. Whatever other at St. Petersburg might feel, the Tsar himself consciously separated in his mind the ‘Kingdom of Poland’ from the Empire as a whole. On more than one occasion in the following seven years he gave his advisers the impression that he was using Poland as a field for constitutional experiments which might be implemented on a larger scale in Russian proper…” (op. cit., pp. 340-341). Moreover, he offered the hope of adding the other Polish lands to the Kingdom.

[310] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op. cit., p. 287.

[311] Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, pp. 169-170.

[312] Janet M. Hartley, A Social History of the Russian Empire, 1650-1825, London and New York: Longman, 1999, p. 15.

[313] In 1800, I.G. Friesel, governor of Vilna, reported: “Having established their own administrative institution, called Synagogues, Kahals, or associations, the Jews completely separated themselves from the people and government of the land. As a result, they were exempt from the operation of the statutes which governed the peoples of the several estates, and even if special laws were enacted, these remained unenforced and valueless, because the ecclesiastical and temporal leaders of the Jews invariably resisted them and were clever enough to find means to evade them.” (Isaac Levitats, The Jewish Community in Russia, 1772-1844, New York, 1970, p. 29; quoted in Hartley, op. cit., pp. 98-99). (V.M.)

[314] Platonov, op. cit., pp. 242, 243-245.

[315] In fact they were not negligible at all. The Pale of Settlement was exceedingly porous!

[316] The kahal was abolished in 1821 in Poland and in 1844 in the rest of the Russian empire.

[317] Vital, op. cit., pp. 95-96.

[318] Vital, op. cit., p. 105. As a result, in the whole of the 19th century only 69,400 Jews converted to Orthodoxy (Vladimir Gubanov (ed.), Nikolai II-ij i novie mucheniki (Nicholas II and the New Martyrs), St. Petersburg, 2000, p. 698 (in Russian). Gubanov took this figure from the Jewish Encyclopaedia.

[319] Vital, op. cit., pp. 86-87.

[320] Platonov, op. cit., p. 245.

[321] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 278.

[322] I.A. Chistovich, Istoria perevoda Biblii na russij iazyk (A History of the Translation of the Bible into Russian), St. Petersburg, 1873, pp. 50-55 (in Russian).

[323] O.A. Platonov, Ternovij Venets Rossii (Russia’s Crown of Thorns), Moscow: “Rodnik”, 1998, pp. 262-263 (in Russian).

[324] Two weeks before he died, in March, 1821, he wrote to the Emperor: “Your Majesty, when this epistle reaches you, I will no longer be in this world. I have communicated nothing except the truth to people, especially now, when in my actions I am preparing to give an account to the Supreme Judge” (Snychev, op. cit., p. 147). (V.M.)

[325] Snychev, op. cit., pp. 148-149.

[326] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 280.

[327] “In 1822 Prince A.N. Golitsyn became acquainted with Photius and tried to incline him to his side. The meetings of Prince Golitsyn with Archimandrite Photius made a great impression on the former, which he noted in his letters to Countess Orlova. In these letters to Countess Orlova Prince Golitsyn calls Photius ‘an unusual person’ and recognises that ‘the edifying conversation of Photius has a power that only the Lord could give’. In one of his letters to Countess Orlova Prince Golitsyn expresses regret that he cannot enjoy the conversation of ‘our Chrysostom’ and that he ‘wants to quench my thirst with pure water drawn up by a pure hand and not by the hand of one who communicates to others stingily.’

     “Prince Golitsyn’s attempt by subtle flattery to bring Archimandrite to his side was unsuccessful. A rapprochement and union between Archimandrite Photius, a pure and true zealot of Orthodoxy, with Prince Golitsyn, an enemy of the faith and the Church, was impossible.

     “On April 22, 1822 Archimandrite Photius went to Petersburg. There his ‘great toil’ began. Every day, according to the witness of Archimandrite Photius himself, he was called to various people to talk about the Lord, the Church, the faith, and the salvation of the soul. Eminent and learned noblemen and noblewomen gathered to hear him talk about the Lord. But such conversations took place especially in the house of the virgin Anna, Abba Photius’ daughter, of the noblewoman Daria Derzhavina, and sometimes in the Tauris palace.

     “Without fear or hypocrisy Photius reproved the enemies of Orthodoxy.

     “Once in 1822 Archimandrite Photius began to reprove Golitsyn, who could not stand it and began to leave the living-room, but Photius loudly shouted after him: ‘Anathema! Be accursed! Anathema!’

     “By this time the Emperor Alexander himself returned.

     “Rumours about the cursing of Prince Golitsyn had reached the ears of the Emperor, and he demanded that Photius come and explain himself. At first the Emperor received the fearless reprover threateningly, but then he changed his wrath for mercy. The Emperor was struck by the bold speech of the simple monk against the lofty official, who also happened to be a close friend of the Emperor himself. Photius described Golitsyn to the Emperor as an atheist, and the Bible Society headed by him  - as a nest of faithlessness that threatened to overthrow the Orthodox Church. At the end of the conversation Photius began to speak to the Emperor about what was most necessary.

     “These are his remarkable words:

     “’The enemies of the holy Church and Kingdom have greatly strengthened themselves; evil faith and temptations are openly and boldly revealing themselves, they want to create evil secret societies that are a great harm to the holy Church of Christ and the Kingdom, but they will not succeed, there is nothing to fear from them, it is necessary immediately to put an end to the successes of the secret and open enemies in the capital itself.’

     “The Emperor ‘repeatedly kissed the hand that blessed him’ and, when Photius was leaving, ‘the Tsar fell to his knees before God and, turning to face Photius, said: ‘Father, lay your hands on my head and say the Lord’s prayer over me, and forgive and absolve me’. (Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 280-282)

[328] Lebedev, Velikorossia, op. cit., p. 289.

[329] Elagin, op. cit., p. 243.

[330] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 282-283.

[331] This, however, did not stop him from firmly refusing Golitsyn’s request to distribute a work published by the Tatarinova group. See Snychev, op. cit., p. 144.

[332] Snychev, op. cit., pp. 160-161.

[333] Florovsky, “Philaret, mitropolit Moskovskij”, op. cit., p. 272.

[334] Florovsky, “Philaret, mitropolit Moskovskij”, pp. 273-275. Thus not only did Shishkov ban Philaret’s Catechism: he ordered the reintroduction of a work, On the Duties of Man and the Citizen, which had been banned at Philaret’s suggestion in 1819 (Snychev, op. cit., p. 168).

[335] Snychev, op. cit., p. 181.His patience was rewarded in 1827, when the Holy Synod permitted the republication of the Catechism after Philaret had turned all the Russian scriptural quotations back into Slavonic. However, his dream of seeing the whole Bible translated into Russian was not realised in his lifetime, although the project was finally approved under Alexander II.

[336] Anzulovic, Heavenly Serbia, London and New York: New York University Press, 1999, p. 25.

[337] Anzulovic, op. cit., p. 42. Friendly relations between Serbian Orthodox hierarchs and Turkish rulers continued well into the 19th century. Thus Bishop Nikolai Velimirovic tells the following story: “In the first half of the last [19th] century, Jeladin Bey ruled over Ochrid. He was a rebel against the Sultan and an independent governor. At that time the Church was ruled by Metropolitan Kalinik. Jeladin and Kalinik, although of different faiths, were very good friends and often visited each other. It happened that Jeladin Bey condemned twenty-five Christians to death by hanging, and the execution was to take place on Great Friday. The Metropolitan, deeply distressed by this event, went to Jeladin and besought him to mitigate the sentence. While they were talking, the hour of the mid-day meal arrived, and the Bey invited the Metropolitan to eat with him. A dish of lamb had been prepared for the meal. The Metropolitan excused himself, as the fast prevented him from remaining to eat, and prepared to leave. The Bey was angered and said to him: ‘Choose; either you eat with me and free twenty-five people from hanging, or you refrain and they hang.’ The Metropolitan crossed himself and sat down to lunch, and Jeladin freed the people from the death sentence.” (The Prologue from Ochrid, Birmingham: Lazarica Press, 1985, part I, January 27, p. 104)

[338] Adrian Fortescue, The Orthodox Eastern Church, London: Catholic Truth Society, 1920, p. 308. Originally, the Karlovtsy metropolitanate had jurisdiction over the Romanians of Hungarian Transylvania. However, in 1864 the authorities allowed the creation of a separate Romanian Church in Hungary, the metropolitanate of Hermannstadt (Nagy-Szeben) (Fortescue, op. cit., p. 316). From 1873 there was also a metropolitanate of Cernovtsy with jurisdiction over all the Orthodox (mainly Serbs and Romanians) in the Austrian lands (Fortescue, op. cit., pp. 323-325).

     Significantly, when the Russian Church in Exile sought refuge in Serbia in the 1920s, their administration was set up in the former capital of the Serbian Church’s exile, Karlovtsy.

[339] However, the Serbian pashalik was made a subject of international law (Elena Kudriavtsev, “Blagie namerenia: Serbia i russkaia diplomatia v pervoj polovine XIX veka” (“Good Intentions: Serbia and Russian Diplomacy in the first Half of the 19th Century”), Rodina (Homeland), ¹10, 2003, p. 52. (V.M.).

[340] Judah, The Serbs, London: Yale University Press, 1997, pp. 51-52, 52-54.

[341] Fortescue, op. cit., p. 309.

[342] Quotations in Anzulovic, op. cit., pp. 51-52, 55.

[343] Velimirovic, Religija Njegoševa (The Religion of Njegoš), p. 166, quoted in Anzulovic, op. cit., p. 55.

[344] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 318.

[345] Benjamin, Stoikheia tis Metaphysikis (The Elements of Metaphysics), 1820 (in Greek); quoted in Richard Clogg, A Concise History of Greece, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 33.

[346] “It is better,” he said, “my brother, for you to have a Greek school in your village rather than fountains and rivers, for when your child becomes educated, then he becomes a human being. The school opens churches; the school opens monasteries.” And to the people of Parga he said: “Take care to establish without fail a Greek school in which your children will learn all that you are ignorant of [because] our faith wasn’t established by ignorant saints, but by wise and educated saints who interpreted the Holy Scriptures accurately and who enlightened us sufficiently by inspired teachings” (Nomikos Michale Vaporis, Witnesses for Christ: Orthodox Christian Neomartyrs of the Ottoman Period 1437-1860, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000, p. 202).

[347] The Europeans were originally interested in the ancient monuments. Hence the removal of the Elgin marbles and the Venus of Milo to London and Paris respectively. However, attitudes were changed, as Zamoyski points out, “by Lord Byron’s visit to Greece in 1809, whose fruits were the second canto of Childe Harold, published in 1809, The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos (1813), and The Siege of Corinth (1816). More interested in people than in stones, Byron concentrated on depicting the craggy nobility of the natives. He was also much affected by the notion of a once great people under alien oppression. The negative picture of the Turks and their culture – rococo Ottomania had given way to priggish neoclassical contempt – made the oppression all the crueller to the European imagination, in which the Turk combined lustfulness with barbarity. The educated European of 1800 was as disgusted by the idea of the ‘terrible’ Turk defiling Greece as his twelfth-century forebear had been at the idea of Saracens profanating the Holy Land. And just as the Holy Land called out to Christendom for vengeance and crusade, so the oppressed Greek land called out for liberation” (op. cit., p. 233). (V.M.)

     There is a tradition in Greece that Byron died as an Orthodox Christian…

[348] Clogg, op. cit., pp. 27-28.

[349] Vaporis, op. cit., p. 337.

[350] Frazee, The Orthodox Church and Independent Greece 1821-1853, Cambridge University Press, 1969, p. 8.

[351] St. Gregory, An Explanation of the Apostolic Lections. The movement to reject the sacraments of the Latin and Protestant heretics had been initiated by Patriarch Cyril V in his famous synodal decree of 1752, and was supported by the monk Auxentios and the Chian doctor Eustratios Argenti. Cyril was opposed by Patriarchs Paisios and Callinicus IV, who exiled him to Rhodes.

[352] Michael Binyon writes: “A letter from Alexander I, signed by Capo d’Istrias, … denounced Yspilanti’s actions as ‘shameful and criminal’, upbraided him for misusing the tsar’s name, struck him from the Russian army list, and called him to lay down his arms immediately” (Pushkin, London: HarperCollins, 2002, p. 133). By a strange irony, the officer sent by the Russian government to report on the insurrection was Pestel, the future leader of the Decembrist rebellion (op. cit., p. 134).

[353] Gavalas, “St. Gregory V, Patriarch of Constantinople”, Orthodox Life, vol. 28, ¹ 2, March-April, 1978, p. 22.

[354] Clogg, op. cit., p. 35, footnote.

[355] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 243, 245.

[356] St. Gregory, op. cit., p. 48.

[357] Adrian Fortescue, The Orthodox Eastern Church, London: Catholic Truth Society, 1920, p. 313.

[358] Frazee, op. cit., chs. 7 and 8; Fortescue, op. cit., pp. 313-314. On this period of Greek Church history, see the series of articles being published in Agios Agathangelos Esfigmenites (St. Agathangelos of Esphigmenou) under the title "To atheon dogma tou oikoumenismou, Prodromos tou Antikhristou" (“The Atheist Dogma of Ecumenism, Forerunner of the Antichrist”) (in Greek).

[359] Especially St. Macarius of Corinth (1731-1805), St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain (1749-1809), St. Nicephorus of Chios (1750-1821) and St. Arsenius of Paros (1800-1877).

[360] Constantine Cavarnos, St. Macarios of Corinth, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1972, pp. 17,18.

[361] Cavarnos, op. cit., p. 21.

[362] Cavarnos, op. cit., pp. 22-23.

[363] Cavarnos, op. cit., p. 27.

[364] Walicki, op. cit., pp. 58, 59, 60.

[365] Walicki, op. cit., p. 61.

[366] Walicki, op. cit., p. 67.

[367] Walicki, op. cit., pp. 62-63.

[368] Benita Eisler, Byron, London: Penguin books, 1999, p. 753.

[369] Platonov, op. cit., p. 265. Lebedev describes this incident as follows: once “a young officer came up to his and, taking off his cap, asked for his blessing. The always meek and quiet elder Seraphim was suddenly filled with such anger as nobody had ever seen in him. He began to shout loudly at the officer and cursed him. The unfortunate one, struck as if by thunder, went away, swaying from the shock and forgetting to put on his cap… An involuntary witness of the event had been a young monk who had brought Elder Seraphim some food. ‘Did you see?’ the elder asked him. ‘I saw,’ replied the monk. The elder pointed at the source, which he had so carefully tended: ‘Look!’ The monk glanced and saw that the source of grace-filled water, which had healed many sick people, and which was always clean and transparent, this time had become completely disturbed. ‘That’s how these gentlemen want to disturb Russia,’ said St. Seraphim. Soon Russia learned of the plot and the attempt at rebellion of the ‘Decembrists’ (the officer was one of them)…” (op. cit., p. 295).

[370] “Some soldiers, standing on Senate square and shouting, at their commanders’ behest: ‘Constantine! Constitution!’ sincerely understood by ‘Constitution’ the wife of Constantine” (Lebedev, op. cit., p. 316).

[371] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 318.

[372] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 307-308.

[373] Yu.K. Begunov, A.D. Stepanov, K.Yu. Dushenov (eds.), Tajna Bezzakonia (The Mystery of Iniquity), St. Petersburg, 2000, pp. 61-64 (in Russian).

[374] St. Seraphim, quoted by Protopriest Victor Potapov, "God is betrayed by silence" (in Russian). See also Literaturnaya Ucheba, January-February, 1991, pp. 131-134 (in Russian).

[375] Stone, Europe: A History, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 768.

[376] Metternich, in J.L. Talmon, Romanticism and Revolt: Europe 1815-1848, London: Thames & Hudson, 1967, p. 35.

[377] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital (1848-1875), London: Abacus, 1975, p. 39.

[378] Southey, in Talmon, op. cit., pp. 9-10.

[379] Blake, in Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence, New York: Perennial, 2001op. cit., p. 470.

[380] This is not to say that Romanticism influenced only the political left. On the contrary, as M.S. Anderson writes, “the distinguishing feature of a romantic was not that his conclusions were revolutionary or reactionary, progressive or conservative, but that he reached them by an essentially non-rational and subjective route. Romanticism was a mould in which any idea might be shaped, a palette from which it might be coloured. It did not depend on any specific idea or even any specific emotion but was rather something which pervaded life itself, something which could always be recognized though never defined. No political or social ideology escaped the romantic influence” (The Ascendancy of Europe, 1815-1914, Harlow: Longman, 1985, p. 343).

[381] Adam Zamoyski, Holy Madness: Romantics, Patriots and Revolutionaries, 1776-1871, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999, p. 256.

[382] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, “Pushkin, Lermontov and Nekrasov”, 1877, London: Cassell, p. 939.

[383] Benita Eisler, Byron, London: Penguin Books, 1999, p. 13.

[384] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 473-474.

[385] Berlin, “The Essence of European Romanticism”, in The Power of Ideas, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, pp. 202-203.

[386] In fact, when the Nicene Creed calls God the Creator of the universe, the word used for “Creator” is “poietes”, from which we get the word “poet”. (V.M.)

[387] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 255.

[388] Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 257.

[389] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 257-262.

[390] De Tocqueville, in Cohen & Major, op. cit., p. 553. Again he said that “the July revolution was carried out by the people, but the middle class which had touched it off and led it, was the chief beneficiary” (Cohen & Major, op. cit. p. 556).

[391] Tsar Nicholas, in M.J. Cohen and John Major (eds.), History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 551.

[392] Lebedev, Velikorossia, St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 326 (in Russian).

[393] Chopin, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 551.

[394] Mickiewicz, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 551.

[395] Chopin also blamed the French. For “Lafayette moved heaven and earth to make France go to war in support of Poland, but he could not move Louis Philippe. He formed a committee to help the Poles, with the participation of Victor Hugo and a string of artists and heroes” (Zamoyski, op. cit., p. 278). (V.M.)

[396] The passage continues: “And three days have already passed; the first ending with the first fall of Warsaw; the second day with the second fall of Warsaw; and the third day cometh but it shall have no end. As at the resurrection of Christ the sacrifice of blood ceased upon the earth, so at the resurrection of the Polish Nation shall war cease in Christendom.” “This,” comments Neal Ascherson, “was the extraordinary doctrine of Messianism, the identification of the Polish nation as the collective reincarnation of Christ. Messianism steadily gained strength over the next century-and-a-half. History saw to that” (Black Sea, London: Vintage, 1995, p. 160). (V. M.)

[397] Zamoyski, op. cit., pp. 284-287.

[398] Van der Kiste, The Romanovs: 1818-1959, Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999, p. 35.

[399] Guizot, in Mark Almond, Revolution, London: De Agostini, 1996, p. 92.

[400] As Guizot said in December, 1830: “the spirit of revolution, the spirit of insurrection, is a spirit radically opposed to liberty” (in Almond, op. cit., 1996, p. 95).

[401] Guizot, in Almond, op. cit., 1996, p. 93.

[402] Guizot, in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 552.

[403] As he said in a speech from the throne in January, 1831: “We seek to hold to the juste milieu [golden mean] equally distant from the excesses of popular power and the abuses of royal authority” (in Cohen and Major, op. cit., p. 552).

[404] Rose, Nihilism, Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1994, pp. 28-30.

[405] Davies, Europe, op. cit., p. 802.

[406] Smith, in Robert Harvey, Global Disorder, London: Robinson, 2003, p. 392.

[407] Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon, 1996, pp. 571-573.

[408] A.N. Wilson, The Victorians, London: Arrow Books, 2003, p. 60.

[409] Trevelyan, in Harvey, op. cit., p. 268.

[410] Millman, in A.N. Wilson, The Victorians, London: Arrow Books, 2003, p. 12.

[411] Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, London: Granta Books, 1998, pp. 9-11.

[412] Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, London: Abacus, 1992, pp. 230-232.

[413] K. Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966, volume II, p. 200. 

[414] Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World, London: Penguin, 2004, p. 253.

[415] Wilson, op. cit., p. 80.

[416] Wilson, op. cit., p. 76.

[417] Wilson, op. cit., pp. 82-83.

[418] Ferguson, op. cit, pp. xxi-xxii.

[419] Ferguson, op. cit., pp. xxiii-xxiv.

[420] Ferguson, op. cit., p. 13.

[421] Ferguson, op. cit., chapter 6.

[422] De Tocqueville, Democracy in America, New York: Fontana, 1968, vol. I, pp. 305-306.

[423] De Tocqueville, op. cit., in Barzun, op. cit., p. 538.

[424] De Tocequeville, On the Effects of Future Democratization, 1840, in Barzun, op. cit., p. 539.

[425] De Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 306-307.

[426] De Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 307-308.

[427] De Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 309-310.

[428] De Tocqueville, op. cit., pp. 311- 313.

[429] Barzun, op. cit., p. 529.

[430] Mill, On Liberty, London: Penguin Classics, 1974, pp. 68-69.

[431] Mill, On Liberty, p. 69.

[432] Mill, On Liberty, p. 69.

[433] Dostoyevsky described how a Member of Parliament, Sir Edward Watkins, welcomed Don Carlos to England: “Of course, he himself knew that the newly arrived guest was the leading actor in a bloody and fratricidal war; but by meeting him he thereby satisfied his patriotic pride and served England to the utmost of his ability. Extending his hand to a blood-stained tyrant, in the name of England, and as a member of of Parliament, he told him, as it were: ‘You are a despot, a tyrant, and yet you came to the land of freedom to seek refuge in it. This could have been expected: England receives everybody and is not afraid to give refuge to anyone: entreé et sortie libres. Be welcome’” (The Diary of a Writer, 1876, London: Cassell, part I, trans. Boris Brasol, pp. 262-263).

[434] Mill, On Liberty, p. 77.

[435] Mill, On Liberty, p. 79.

[436] Mill, On Liberty, p. 81.

[437] Mill, On Liberty, p. 84.

[438] Mill, On Liberty, p. 91.

[439] Mill, On Liberty, p. 96.

[440] Snyder, “War is Peace”, Prospect, November, 2004, p. 33.

[441] Himmelfarth, in Mill, On Liberty, p. 40.

[442] Himmelfarth, in Mill, On Liberty, p. 41.

[443] Devlin, in Jonathan Wolff, An Introduction to Political Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1996, p. 141.

[444] Wolff, op. cit., pp. 140-141.

[445] Mill, On Liberty, p. 127.

[446] J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of Europe, London: Penguin Books, 1997, p. 382.

[447] Wilson, op. cit., p. 53.

[448] Carlyle, Sartor Resartus (1831).

[449] Ferguson, op. cit., p. 296.

[450] Khomiakov, First Letter to William Palmer, in W.J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, London: Rivington, Percival& Co., 1895, p. 6. Cf. the Fourth Letter: “An almost boundless Individualism is the characteristic feature of Germany, and particularly of Prussia. Here in Berlin it would be difficult to find one single point of faith, or even one feeling, which could be considered as a link of true spiritual communion in the Christian meaning of the word. Even the desire for harmony seems to be extinguished, and that predominance of individualism, that spiritual solitude among the ever-busy crowd, send to the heart a feeling of dreariness and desolation…. Still the earnestness of the German mind in all intellectual researches is not quite so disheartening as the frivolous and self-conceited gaiety of homeless and thoughtless France.” (Birkbeck, op. cit., pp. 77-78).

[451] Khomiakov, Sixth Letter to William Palmer, in Birkbeck, op. cit., p. 99.

[452] Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky: A Writer’s Life, London: Macmillan, 1987, p. 145.

[453] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, London: Cassell, trans. Boris Brasol, vol. I, pp. 265-266.

[454] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, op. cit., p. 266.

[455] Hobsbawm, op. cit., pp. 54-55.

[456] Berlin, Karl Marx, London: Fontana, 195, pp. 32-33. Owen also wanted to abolish the family….

[457] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 527-528.

[458] Talmon, op. cit., pp. 58-65.

[459] Wilson, To the Finland Station, London: Phoenix, 2004, pp. 84-85.

[460] Stone, op. cit., p. 790.

[461] Hieromonk Damascene (Christensen), Father Seraphim Rose: His Life and Writings, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2003, p. 623.

[462] Wilson, op. cit., p. 89. These early socialists, in spite of their materialist bent of mind, were peculiarly susceptible to quasi-religious visions. Thus Saint-Simon had visions of Charlemagne, and it was revealed to him “in a vision that it was Newton and not the Pope whom God had elected to sit beside Him and to transmit to humanity His purposes” (Wilson, op. cit., p. 83). As for Owen, “he came in his last days to believe that all the magnanimous souls he had known, Shelley, Thomas Jefferson, Channing, the Duke of Kent… - all those who when living had listened to him with sympathy, of whom he had felt that they had really shared his vision, and who were lost to him now through death – he came to believe that they were returning from the other world, to make appointments with him and keep them, to talk to him and reassure him” (Wilson, op. cit., p. 97).

[463] Cf. Owen’s words: “Every day will make it more and more evident that the character of man is, without a single exception, always formed for him; that it may be, and is, chiefly created by his predecessors: that they give him, or may give him, his ideas and habits, which are the powers that govern and direct his conduct. Man, therefore, never did, nor is it possible he ever can, form his own character” (in M.S. Anderson, The Ascendancy of Europe, 1815-1914, London: Longman, 1985, p. 341). (V.M.)

[464] Talmon, op. cit., pp. 68-71.

[465] Sir Isaiah Berlin, Karl Marx, London: Fontana Press, 1995, pp. 82-83.                                                                                                                                                  

[466] Wilson, op. cit., pp. 29-30, 31.

[467] Richard Wurmbrand, Was Karl Marx a Satanist?, Diane Books (USA), 1976.

[468] Wilson, op. cit., p. 122.

[469] Wilson, op. cit., pp. 118-119.

[470] Wilson, op. cit., p. 152.

[471] Feuerbach, in Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy, vol. 7, part II: Schopenhauer to Nietzsche, Garden City, NY: Image Books, 1965, p. 63.

[472] Berlin, op. cit., pp. 106-107.

[473] Fr. Michael Azkoul, Anti-Christianity: The New Atheism, Montreal: Monastery Press, 1984, p. 34.

[474] Azkoul, op cit., pp. 77-78.

[475] Barzun, op. cit., pp. 508-509.

[476] And a nonsensically self-contradictory one. Thus Popper writes: “Hegel… teaches that everything is in flux, even essences. Essences and Ideas and Spirits develop; and their development is, of course, self-moving and dialectical… History, as he sees it, is the thought process of the ‘Absolute Spirit’ or ‘World Spirit’. It is the manifestation of this Spirit. It is a kind of huge dialectical syllogism; reasoned out, as it were, by Providence. The syllogism is the plan which Providence follows; and the logical conclusion arrived at it’s the end which Providence pursues – the perfection of the world. ‘The only thought,’ Hegel writes in his Philosophy of History, ‘with which Philosophy approaches History, is the simple conception of Reason; it is the doctrine that Reason is the Sovereign of the World, and that the History of the World, therefore, presents us with a rational process. This conviction and intuition is… no hypothesis in the domain of Philosophy. It is there proven… that Reason… is Substance; as well as Infinite Power;… Infinite Matter…; Infinite Form…; Infinite Energy… That this “Idea” or “Reason” is the True, the Eternal, the absolutely Powerful Essence; that it reveals itself in the World, and that in that World nothing else is revealed but this and its honour and glory – this is a thesis which, as we have said, has been proved in Philosophy, and is here regarded as demonstrated.’ This gush does not carry us far…” (op. cit., pp. 46, 47)

[477] Scruton, Modern Philosophy, London : Arrow, 1997, pp. 463-464.

[478] Trilling, “The Honest Soul and the Disintegrated Consciousness”, in Sincerity and Authenticity, London: Oxford University Press, 1974, pp. 35-38.

[479] However, he did say that America was “the final embodiment of the Absolute Idea, beyond which no further development would be possible” (in Stone, op. cit., p. 790). (V.M.)

[480] “’The deeds of Great Men, of the Personalities of World History,… must not be brought into collision with irrelevant moral claims. The Litany of private virtues, of modesty, humility, philanthropy, and forbearance, must not be raised against them. The History of the World can, in principle, entirely ignore the circle within which morality… lies’.” (Popper, op. cit., pp. 67-68) (V.M.)

[481] Mann, The History of Germany since 1789, London: Pimlico, 1996, pp. 46-48. Cf. Popper: “We see that Hegel replaces the liberal elements in nationalism, not only by a Platonic-Prussian worship of the state, but also by a worship of history of historical success. (Frederick William had been successful against Napoleon.)” (op. cit., p. 58)

[482] “And after a eulogy of Prussia, the government of which, Hegel assures us, ‘rests with the official world, whose apex is the personal decision of the Monarch; for a final decision is, as shown above, an absolute necessity’, Hegel reaches the crowning conclusion of his work: ‘This is the point,’ he says, ‘which consciousness has attained, and these are the principal phases of of that form in which Freedom has realized itself; for the History of the World is nothing but the development of the Idea of Freedom… That the History of the World… is the realization of Spirit, this is the true Theodicy, the justification of God in History… What has happened and is happening… is essentially His Work…’

     “I ask whether I was not justified when I said that Hegel presents us with an apology for God and Prussia at the same time, and whether it is not clear that the state which Hegel commands us to worship as the Divine Idea on earth is not simply Frederick William’s Prussia from 1800 to 1830.” (Popper, op. cit., pp. 48-49). (V.M.)

[483] “’The Nation State is Spirit in its substantive rationality and immediate actuality,’ he writes; ‘it is therefore the absolute power on earth…The State is the Spirit of the People itself. The actual State is animated by this spirit, in all its particular affairs, its Wars, and its Institutions… The self-consciousness of one particular Nation is the vehicle for the… development of the collective spirit;… in it, the Spirit of the Time invests its Will. Against this Will, the other national minds have no rights: that Nation dominates the World.’” (Popper, op. cit., p. 58).

[484] Hegel goes on: “We must therefore worship the State as the manifestation of the Divine on earth, and consider that, if it is difficult to comprehend Nature, it is infinitely harder to grasp the Essence of the State… The State is the march of God through the world…. The State must be comprehended as an organism… To the complete State belongs, essentially, consciousness and thought. The State knows what it wills… The State is real; and… true reality is necessary. What is real is eternally necessary… The State… exists for its own sake… The State is the actually existing, realized moral life.” (in Popper, op. cit., p. 31).

 

[485] Russell, A History of Western Philosophy, London: Allen Unwin, 1946, pp. 763-764, 765-769. It is true that, as Barzun says: “What intelligent German who remembered 200 years of helplessness would want a weak [state]? In Hegel’s day, the state created by the Prussian awakening was less than 20 years old and must not be allowed to droop again.” (op. cit., p. 508). But while this reflection helps us to understand Hegel’s theory of the state from a psychological point of view, it in no way helps us to justify it from a moral point of view.

[486] Copleston, A History of Philosophy, op. cit., vol. 7, part I: Fichte to Hegel, pp. 255-256.

[487] Popper, op. cit., pp. 62-63.

[488] Barzun, op. cit., p. 508.

[489] Popper, op. cit., p. 63.

[490] Wilson, op. cit., p. 143.

[491] Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

[492] Berlin, op. cit.

[493] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto, London: Penguin Books, 2004, p. 7.

[494] Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, pp. 11-12.

[495] Popper, op. cit., p. 116.

[496] Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, op. cit., pp. 370-371.

[497] As predicted by Count Cavour, the future architect of a united Italy, in 1846: “If the social order were to be genuinely menaced, if the great principles on which it rests were to be a serious risk, then many of the most determined oppositionists, the most enthusiastic republicans would be, we are convinced, the first to join the ranks of the conservative party” (in Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op. cit., p. 28).

[498] Karr, The Wasps, January, 1849, p. 305; in Cohen & Major, op. cit., p. 563.

[499] De Tocqueville , in Almond, op. cit., p. 98.

[500] Almond, op. cit., pp. 103, 104.

[501] Norman Davies, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 823.

[502] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op. cit., p. 25.

[503] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op. cit., pp. 31-32.

[504] Tikhomirov, Religiozno-Filosofskie Osnovy Istorii (The Religio-Philosophical Foundations of History), Moscow, 1997, pp. 463-464 (in Russian).

[505] Jasper Ridley, The Freemasons, London: Constable, 1999, p. 207.

[506] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op. cit., pp. 14-15.

[507] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op. cit., p. 33.

[508] Anderson, The Ascendancy of Europe, 1815-1914, Harlow: Longman, 1985, pp. 99-100.

[509] Engels’ resentment against these “reactionary peoples” was summed up as follows: “There is no country in Europe which does not have in some corner or other one or several ruined fragments of peoples… Thse relics of a nation mercilessly trampled under foot in the course of history… always become fanatical standard-bearers of counter-revolution” (in Almond, op. cit., p. 111).

[510] This idea could be said to be a development of one part of Kant’s philosophy, that concerning the moral law. According to Russell, “Schopenhauer’s system is an adaptation of Kant’s, but one that emphasizes quite different aspects of the Critique from those emphasized by Fichte or Hegel. They got rid of the thing-in-itself, and thus made knowledge metaphysically fundamental. Schopenhauer retained the thing-in-itself, but identified it with will… Kant had maintained that a study of the moral law can take us beyond phenomena, and give us knowledge which sense-perception cannot give; he also maintained that the moral law is essentially concerned with the will” (op. cit., p. 783).

[511] Copleston, A History of Philosophy, op. cit., vol. 7, part II, pp. 37-39.

[512] Copleston, op. cit., p. 43.

[513] Copleston, op. cit., pp. 47-48.

[514] Schopenhauer, in Russell, op. cit., p. 785. Here, perhaps, we see the influence of Buddhism. “In his study,” notes Russell, “he had a bust of Kant and a bronze Buddha.” (op. cit., p. 785).

[515] Schopenhauer, in Russell, op. cit., p. 785.

[516] Copleston, op. cit., pp. 48.

[517] Copleston, op. cit., pp. 48.

[518] Russell, op. cit., p. 752.

[519] Barzun, op. cit., p. 501.

[520] Barzun, op. cit., p. 502.

[521] Barzun, op. cit., p. 571.

[522] Barzun, op. cit., p. 571.

[523] Quammen, “Was Darwin Wrong?”, National Geographic, November, 2004, p. 9.

[524] Lewis, “Is Theology Poetry?”, in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses, New York: Macmillan, 1949.

[525] Wilson writes that Marx’s task was “to convert the ‘Will’ of German philosophy… this abstraction into a force in the practical world” (op. cit., p. 126).

[526] Alferov, Pravoslavnoe Mirovozzrenie i Sovremennoe Estesvoznanie (The Orthodox World-View and the Contemporary Science of Nature), Moscow: “Palomnik”, 1998, p. 158 (in Russian)).

[527]Wurmbrand, op. cit., p. 44.

[528] Hieromonk Damascene, in Fr. Seraphim Rose, Genesis, Creation and Early Man, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, p. 339, note.

[529] Elder Barsonuphius of Optina, St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000.

[530] Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers, New York: Vintage Books, 2002, p. 77.

[531] Roberts, History of the World, Oxford: Helicon, 1992, p. 620.

[532] Buchan, in Susan-Mary Grant, “For God and Country: Why Men Joined Up for the US Civil War”, History Today, vol. 50 (7), July, 2000, p. 21.

[533] Stone, Europe, London: Pimlico, 1997, pp. 812, 813.

[534] See James Ostrowski, “An Analysis of President Lincoln’s Legal Arguments against Secession”. Paper delivered at the first-ever academic conference on secession-- "Secession, State, and Economy", sponsored by the Mises Institute, Auburn, Alabama, held at the College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina, April 7-9, 1995.

[535] Quoted in Grant, op. cit., p. 27.

[536] Roberts, op. cit., p. 620.

[537] Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, op. cit., pp. 170-173.

[538] Owen, in Wilson, op. cit., p. 89.

[539] Roberts, op. cit., pp. 621-622.

[540] Robertson, “The Christian Soldier: General Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson”, History Today, vol. 53 (2), February, 2003, pp. 31-32.

[541] Archbishop Averky (Taushev), Rukovodstvo k izucheniu Sviaschennago Pisania Novago Zaveta (Guide to the Study of the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament), Jordanville, N.Y.: Holy Trinity Monastery, vol. II, pp. 354-355 (in Russian). Italics mine (V. M.).

[542] Ridley, op. cit., pp. 207-208.

[543] Ridley, op. cit., p. 209.

[544] According to Alexander Selyanin, on October 15, 1852, the Masons addressed Napoleon and said: “Guarantee the happiness of us all and put the emperor’s crown on your noble head” (Tainaia sila masonstva (The Secret Power of Masonry), St. Petersburg, 1911, p. 82 (in Russian)).

[545] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 465.

[546] Davies, op. cit., pp. 823-824.

[547] Duggan, A Concise History of Italy, Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 143.

[548] Peter de Rosa, Vicars of Christ, London: Bantam books, 1988, pp. 242-243.

[549] Thierry, quoted by Metropolitan Anastasy (Gribanovsky) of New York, Besedy s sobstvennym serdtsem (Conversations with my own heart), in Troitskij Pravoslavnij Russkij Kalendar’ na 1998 g. (Holy Trinity Orthodox Russian Calendar for 1998), Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1998, p. 62 (in Russian).

[550] Some of these propositions were: “Every man is free to embrace and profess that religion which, guided by the light of reason, he shall consider true… In the present day it is no longer expedient that the Catholic religion should be the only religion of the state, to the exclusion of all other forms of worship… The Roman pontiff can and should reconcile himself, and come to terms with progress, liberalism and modern civilization” (De Rosa, op. cit., pp. 146, 245, 246)

[551] “In 1867, with Garibaldi’s small force in premature action only fifteen miles from the Vatican, the pope, still defiant, said: ‘Yes, I hear them coming.’ Pointing to the Crucifix: ‘This will be my artillery’” (De Rosa, op. cit., p. 148).

[552] Popovich, “Reflections on the Infallibility of European Man”, in Orthodox Faith and Life in Christ, Belmont, Mass.: Institute for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, 1994, pp. 104-105. As Archimandrite Charalampos Vasilopoulos writes, “Papism substituted the God-man Christ with the man Pope! And whereas Christ was incarnate, the Pope deincarnated him and expelled Him to heaven. He turned the Church into a worldly kingdom. He made it like an earthly state… He turned the Kingdom of God in the kingdom of this world.(O Oikoumenismos khoris maska (Ecumenism unmasked)), Athens, 1988, p. 34 (in Greek). Indeed, although the Pope calls himself “the vicar of Christ”, we should rather say, writes Nikolaos Vasileiades, “that the Pope is Christ’s representative on earth and Christ… the Pope’s representative in heaven” (Orthodoxia kai Papismos en dialogo (Orthodoxy and Papism in Dialogue)), Athens, 1981, p. 23 (in Greek).

[553] Price, A Concise History of France, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 188-189.

[554] Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, London: Pan Books, 2003, p. 282.

[555] Cf. Victor Hugo’s appeal on September 9: “It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities. Paris is the city of men. There has been an Athens, there has been a Rome, and now there is Paris… Is the nineteenth century to witness this frightful phenomenon? A nation fallen from polity, to barbarism, abolishing the city of nations; Germans extinguishing Paris… Can you give this spectacle to the world” (Horne, op. cit., p. 287).

[556] Price, op. cit., pp. 189-191.

[557] Almond, op. cit., pp. 112-113, 114-115.

[558] Tiutchev, in Sergius and Tamara Fomin, Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow: Rodnik, 1994, vol. 2, pp. 83 –84 (in Russian).

[559] Bishop Theophan, Sobranie pisem (Collection of Letters), VII, p. 289, from a sermon uttered on September 8, 1864.

[560] Nikolai Gogol indeed expressed a monarchical consciousness, but in rejecting the westernizers’ arguments he went too far in an absolutist direction. Thus he wrote in 1847: “A State without an absolute monarch is an orchestra without its conductor… The more deeply one looks into the workings of our administration, the more one admires the wisdom of its founders; the more one feels that God Himself, unseen by us, built it through the hands of the sovereigns. Everything is perfect, everything is sufficient unto itself. I cannot conceive what use could be found for even one more official” (Selected Passages from My Correspondence with My Friends; in Cohen & Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassell, 2004, p. 552).

     However, Gogol’s conversion to True Orthodoxy late in life was sincere and deep. As St. Barsanuphius of Optina said in 1909: “Our great writer Gogol was spiritually reborn under the influence of talks with Elder Macarius, which took place in this very cell, and a great turning point resulted in him. As a man of sound nature, not fragmented, he was not capable of compromise. Having understood that he could not live as he had done previously, he, without looking back, turned to Christ and strove towards the Heavenly Jerusalem. From Rome and the holy places which he visited, he wrote letters to his friends, and these letters comprised an entire book, for which his contemporaries condemned him. Gogol had not yet begun to live in Christ – hardly had he begun to wish for this life – and the world, which is at enmity with Christ, raised a persecution against him and passed a harsh sentence on him, considering him half crazy” (Victor Afanasiev, Elder Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 2000, p. 326). (V.M.)

[561] Tikhomirov, Monarkhicheskaia Gosudarstvennost’ (Monarchical Statehood), St. Petersburg, 1992, pp. 307-310 (in Russian).

[562] V.F. Ivanov, Russkaia Intelligentsia i Masonstvo ot Petra I do nashikh dnej (The Russian Intelligentsia and Masonry from Peter I to our days), Harbin, 1934, Moscow, 1997, pp. 316-317 (in Russian).

[563] Lebedev, Velikorossia, St. Petersburg, 1999, p. 331 (in Russian).

[564] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 319.

[565] “Orthodoxy as the everyday faith of the Russian people can be respected also by others, even by non-Christians. This is, so to speak, the inner pledge of the life of the Russian people, and it is completely possible to respect it and even make up to it while remaining in the sphere of personal conscience a complete and irreconcilable opponent of ‘ecclesiastical-dogmatic Orthodoxy’. It is hardly likely that the government of the 30s of the 19th century reasoned like that: but it seems undoubted that unconsciously it understood the matter in this way. It truly represented Orthodoxy as an ecclesiastical-everyday institution founded a long time ago for the enlightenment of the people; and as such the people got used to it completely in the sense of a cult and especially as a ‘teaching on unquestioning obedience to the civil, God-given authorities’. In this form, truly, Orthodoxy closely touches the sphere of the State and fits in well into the general picture for the programme of state education. With Orthodoxy of such a kind, strictly speaking, anyone can get on, of whatever faith he may be – since he only recognises the main part of the programme, its root – Autocracy (absolutism, according to the official understanding, also). This part was obligatory for absolutely everybody; but the first and third were meant only to serve as a certain ethnographic colouring for the middle member [of the programme’s triad]: everyone was obliged to recognise that its essence was Autocracy. Of what kind? Russian. But the concept of what is Russian falls into two parts: the Orthodox-Russian and the ethnographic-Russian. Thus for a purely Russian youth the programme had its complete significance, that is, the first and last concepts were obligatory only as defining the sole completely essential concept in it, ‘Autocracy’ (absolutism). Of course, however diluted the concept of Orthodoxy may be so as to fit into the government’s programme of civil education, it was, to a large degree, inseparable from the Church’s teaching and dogma. But in the present case we have to firmly establish the position that, without in any way rejecting the absolute significance of Orthodoxy as the expression of the faith and the ethics that flows from that, we are dealing with it here in a somewhat different sense, as it is placed at the foundation of civil education, that is, in the sense of its application to civil and cultural life, which are expressed firstly by the term ‘Autocracy’ and secondly by the term ‘Nationhood’: and this is because (to repeat) Orthodoxy in the absolute sense can stand only ‘for itself’ and excludes the possibility of a union with any state task whatever, and even with any national task. Orthodoxy is universal, it is far higher than states and peoples; it denies neither statehood nor nationalities, but it is united with nothing…

     “None of these questions were clarified officially; and the Orthodoxy of Nicholas Pavlovich and Count Uvarov remained the same diffuse concept as the liberté of the French revolution. It in fact remained at the level only of a negative concept, as did the concept ‘Nationhood’. Only ‘Autocracy’ received a positive meaning, because, firstly, this is in essence a more concrete concept than the other two; and then mainly because it was and is a term clearly understood by those who established the formula. Autocracy for them is, both theoretically and practically, absolutism. Nobody was mistaken in this meaning and there were no misunderstandings concerning it: the more so in that it indeed revealed itself graphically. But Orthodoxy was understood only as not Roman Catholicism – a very convenient faith from the state’s point of view; and not Protestantism, which unleashed the undesirable liberty, not only in the sphere of the faith alone (if you can criticise the faith, then all the more the rest, also); and not as sectarianism – also a teaching displeasing to the police. In the same way ‘Nationhood’ did not find a concrete expression of itself; and in the absence of this it settled on language: the spread of the Russian language was respected as the spread also of the Russian spirit – its nationality…” (Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie, Narodnost’ (Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationhood), Minsk: Belaruskaia Gramata, 1997, pp. 13-15 (in Russian).)

[566] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 321.

[567] A.P. Dobroklonsky, Rukovodstvo po Istorii Russkoj Tserkvi (Handbook to the History of the Russian Church) Moscow, 2001, pp. 654-657 (in Russian).

[568] Nicholas entrusted this work to the Mason Speransky, because his expertise in the subject was unrivalled. However, above him he placed his former teacher Balugiansky, saying: “See that he (Speransky) does not get up to the same pranks as in 1810. You will answer for that to me” (in Ivanov, op. cit., p. 317).

[569] Metropolitan Ioann (Snychev), Zhizn’ i deiatel’nost’ mitropolita Philareta (The Life and Activity of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow), Tula, 1994, p. 238 (in Russian).

[570] Fr. Maximus Kozlov, introduction to Filareta mitropolita moskovskogo i kolomenskogo Tvorenia (The Works of Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and Kolomna), Moscow, 1994, pp. 14-15 (in Russian).

[571] Kozlov, op. cit., pp. 25-26.

[572] Sergius and Tamara Fomin, Rossia pered vtorym prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Moscow, 1994, vol. I, p. 322 (in Russian).

[573] Khomiakov, “Eighth Letter to William Palmer”, in W.J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church: Containing a correspondence between Mr. William Palmer, Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and M. Khomiakoff, in the years 1844-1855, London, 1895, pp. 126-127; Living Orthodoxy, 142, vol. XXIV, no. 4, July-August, 2004, p. 26.

[574] Brianchaninov, “Christians, you must know Christ!”

[575] Elder Anthony, in Polnoe Sobranie Tvorenij Sviatitelia Ignatia Brianchaninova (Complete Collection of the Works of the Holy Hierarch Ignatius Brianchaninov), Moscow, 2001, vol. II, p. 616 (in Russian).

[576] Metropolitan Ioann, op. cit., 1994, p. 177.

[577] V. Shokhin, “Svt. Philaret, mitropolit Moskovskij i ‘shkola veruiushchego razuma’ v russkoj philosophii” (“Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow and the ‘school of believing reason’ in Russian philosophy”), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia (Herald of the Russian Christian Movement), 175, I-1997, p. 97 (in Russian).

[578] “Already in the reign of Alexander I the hierarch used to submit the thought of the restoration of Local Councils and the division on the Russian Church into nine metropolitan areas. At the command of Emperor Alexander he had even composed a project and given it to the members of the Synod for examnation. But the Synod rejected the project, declaring: ‘Why this project, and why have you not spoken to us about it?’ ‘I was ordered [to compose it]’ was all that the hierarch could reply, ‘and speaking about it is not forbidden’” (Metropolitan Ioann, op. cit., pp. 226). (V.M.)

[579] Florovsky, “Philaret, mitropolit Moskovskij” (“Metropolitan Philaret of Moscow”), in Vera i Kul’tura (Faith and Life), St. Petersburg, 2002, pp. 261-264 (in Russian).

[580] Metropolitan Philaret, quoted in Lev Regelson, Tragedia Russkoj Tservki, 1917-1945 (The Tragedy of the Russian Church, 1917-1945), Paris: YMCA Press, 1977, pp. 24-25 (in Russian).

[581] Metropolitan Philaret, Sochinenia (Works), 1848 edition, volume 2, p. 169 (in Russian).

[582] Tsar Alexander III, quoted in Fomin, S. & Fomin, T. Rossia pered Vtorym Prishestviem (Russia before the Second Coming), Sergiev Posad, 1998, third edition, volume I, p. 354 (in Russian).

[583] Fomin and Fomina, op. cit., p. 355.

[584] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., volume I, pp. 320-321.

[585] Metropolitan Philaret, “Slovo v den’ Blagochestivejshego Gosudaria Imperatora Nikolaia Pavlovich”, in Kozlov, op. cit., pp. 274-275, 277-279.

[586] For example, Chaadaev, according to Andrej Kompaneets, “attached a great importance to history in his investigations. Chaadaev was sure: if humanity allowed itself to see in their true light the causes and consequences of the historical process, then even nationalities divided up to now ‘would unite for the attainment of an agreed and general result’. The aim of the philosophy of history is ‘to attain a clear representation of the general law governing the succession of epochs’, but this law constituted a certain idea (a moral idea) moving civilisations. But when this idea is exhausted, the state perishes. Thus, for example, the Roman Empire, Egypt, Alexandria: ‘these were rotting corpses; they (the barbarians – A.K.) only scattered their dust in the wind’” (“Vo chto veril Chaadaev?”, http://religion.russ.ru/people/20011206-kompaneets.html) (in Russian).

[587] Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History; quoted in M.J. Cohen and John Major, History in Quotations, London: Cassel, 2004, p. 175.

[588] Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: Empire & People, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 270.

[589] The idea that Church regulations and customs, such as fasting on Wednesdays and Fridays, could be dispensed with was an attitude of the nobility which St. Seraphim of Sarov, in particular, criticised. He said that he who does not fast is not Orthodox. (V.M.)

[590] Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952, p. 48.

[591] Translated in Serena Vitale, Pushkin’s Button, London: Fourth Estate, 2000, p. 82.

[592] Berlin, “Russian Intellectual History”, in The Power of Ideas, London: Chatto & Windus, 2000, pp. 74-75.

[593] Michael Binyon, Pushkin, London : HarperCollins, 2002, p. 551.

[594] Pushkin, “To Chaadaev”, quoted in Walicki, op. cit., p. 81.

[595] Yury Druzhnikov, “O Poetakh i Okkupantakh”, Russkaia Mysl’, ¹ 4353, February 15-21, 2001, p. 8 (in Russian).

[596] At the time of the baptism of Rus’ in 988, Rome was still formally Orthodox and in communion with Constantinople. Nevertheless, the tendencies that led to the schism in 1054 were already clearly evident and deeply rooted.

[597] For Chaadaev “the supreme principle” was “unity”, which he saw incarnate in Western Catholic Christendom – completely forgetting that the West was torn by the division between Catholicism and Protestantism. See Pushkin’s remark below.

[598] Lepakhin and Zavarzin, “Poet i Philosoph o Sud’bakh Rossii”, Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia, ¹ 176, II-III, 1997, pp. 167-196 (in Russian).

[599] Walicki, op. cit., p. 89.

[600] But Byzantium, he notes, was still in communion with Rome at that time, and “there was a feeling of common Christian citizenship”. (Wil van den Bercken, Holy Russia and Christian Europe, London: SCM Press, 1999, p. 198).

[601] Lossky, op. cit., p. 49.

[602] Walicki, op. cit., pp. 93-94.

[603] Berlin, “The Man who became a Myth”, in The Power of Ideas, op. cit., pp. 85-87.

[604] V. Sapov, “Gogol, Nikolai Vasilyevich”, in Russkaia Filosofia: malij entsiklopedicheskij slovar’ (Russian Philosophy: A Small Encyclopaedic Dictionary), Moscow: Nauka, 1995, pp. 132-133 (in Russian).

[605] Andreev, “Religioznoe litso Gogolia” (“The Religious Face of Gogol”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox Way), 1952, pp. 173, 174 (in Russian).

[606] Hosking, op. cit., p. 299.

[607] Andreev, op. cit., p. 175.

[608] Berlin, “A Revolutionary without Fanaticism”, in The Power of Ideas, op. cit., p. 91.

[609] Herzen, in Lebedev, op. cit., p. 333.

[610] Herzen, From the Other Shore, 1849; in Cohen & Major, op. cit., p. 563.

[611] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 341-342.

[612] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 342.

[613] Lossky, History of Russian Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1952, p. 58.

[614] Lossky, op. cit., p. 39.

[615] Roy E. Campbell, “Khomiakov and Dostoevsky: A Genesis of Ideas”, 1988 (MS).

[616] Lossky, op. cit., p. 40.

[617] Khomiakov, “First Letter to William Palmer”, in Birkbeck, op. cit., p. 6; Living Orthodoxy, ¹ 138, vol. XXIII, ¹ 6, November-December, 2003, p. 13.

[618] Khomiakov, The Church is One.

[619] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij (Complete Works), Moscow, 1907, vol. II, 127, 139, 141; quoted in S. Khoruzhij, “Khomiakov i Printsip Sobornosti” (“Khomiakov and the Principle of Sobornost’”), Vestnik Russkogo Khristianskogo Dvizhenia, ¹¹ 162-163, II-III, 1991, p. 103 (in Russian).

[620] Khomiakov, The Church is One, 4. Quotations from Bishop Gregory (Grabbe), “Istinnaia Sobornost’” (“True Sobornost’”), 1930; in Tserkov’ i ea Uchenie v Zhizni (The Church and her Teaching in Life), Montreal: Brotherhood of St. Job of Pochaev, 1964, pp. 112-113 (in Russian).

[621] Khomiakov, The Church is One, 5. In Grabbe, op. cit., p. 113.

[622] Lossky, op. cit., p. 35. The epistle continues: “With us neither Patriarchs nor Councils could ever introduce anything new, because the defender of religion is the very body of the Church, or the people itself, who wanted their religion to remain forever unchanged and in accord with the religion of their Fathers.”

[623] Pomazansky, "Catholicity and Cooperation in the Church", in Selected Essays, Holy Trinity Monastery, Jordanville, 1996, p. 50.

[624] Pomazansky, op. cit., p. 49.

[625] St. Maximus the Confessor, Mystagogy, I, P.G. 91, 665-668.

[626] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij, Moscow, 1907, vol. II, pp. 312-313 (in Russian).

[627] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij, vol. II, p. 313.

[628] Khomiakov, "On the Western Confessions of Faith", translated by Schmemann, A. (ed.), Ultimate Questions, New York: Holt, Tinehard & Winston, 1965, p. 49.

[629] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij, vol. I, p. 283.

[630] Khoruzhij, op. cit., pp. 97-99.

[631] Chetverikov, Elder Ambrose of Optina, Platina, CA: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1997, pp. 124-125.

[632] Lazareva, “Zhizneopisanie” (“Biography”), introduction to I.V. Kireevsky, Razum na puti k Istine (Reason on the Path to Truth), Moscow: “Pravilo very”, 2002, pp. XXXVI- XXXIX (in Russian).

[633] Kireevsky, “V otvet A.S. Khomiakovu” (“In Reply to A.S. Khomiakov”), Razum na puti k Istine, Moscow, 2002, pp. 6-12 (in Russian).

[634] Kireevsky, Polnoe sobranie sochinenij (Complete Works), Moscow, 1911, vol. I, pp. 113, 246; quoted in Walicki, op. cit., pp. 94, 95.

[635] Kireevsky, quoted by Fr. Alexey Young, A Man is His Faith: Ivan Kireyevsky and Orthodox Christianity, London: St. George Information Service, 1980.

[636] Kireevsky, in Young, op. cit. Cf. St. Maximus the Confessor (Mystagogy, P.G. 91: 665-668): “Men, women and children, profoundly divided as to race, nation, language, manner of life, work, knowledge, honour, fortune… are all recreated by the Church in the Spirit. To all equally she communicates a divine aspect. All receive from her a unique nature which cannot be broken asunder, a nature which no longer permits one henceforth to take into consideration the many and profound differences which are their lot. In that way all are raised up and united in a truly Catholic manner.”

[637] Kireevsky, “O kharaktere prosveschenia Evropy i o ego otnoshenii k prosvecheniu Rossii” (“On the Character of the Enlightenment of Europe and its Relationship to the Enlightenment of Russia”), in Razum na puti k istine, op. cit., pp. 207-209 (in Russian).

[638] Monk Damascene Christenson, Not of this World: The Life and Teaching of Fr. Seraphim Rose, Forestville, Ca.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1993, pp. 589-590

[639] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, 1873, London: Cassell, p. 7.

[640] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, 1873, pp. 148-149, 151.

[641] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 337-338.

[642] Quoted in Andrezj Walicki, A History of Russian Thought, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988, pp. 157-58.

[643] Akhsharumov, in Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 323-324.

[644] Geir Kjetsaa, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, London: Macmillan, 1987, p. 63.

[645] Dostoyevsky, in Kjetsaa, op. cit., p. 105.

[646] Fr. Sergius Chetverikov, Elder Ambrose of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Brotherhood, 1997, p. 213.

[647] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, 1880.

[648] Dostoyevsky, in K. Mochulsky, Dostoyevsky: His Life and Work, Princeton, 1967.

[649] Tikhomirov, op. cit., p. 310.

[650] Khomiakov, “Suschnost’ zapadnogo khristianstva”, Montreal, 1974 (in Russian).

[651] Lossky, op. cit., pp. 35-36.

[652] Alferov, “Ob Uderzhanii i Simfonii”, http://www.monarhist-spb.narod.ru/D-ST/Dionisy-1.htm, p. 11 (in Russian).

[653] Kireevsky, “Ob otnoshenii k tsarskoj vlasti”, in Razum na puti k istine, op. cit., pp. 51-53, 62.

[654] Kireevsky, in L.A. Tikhomirov, “I.V. Kireevsky”, Kritika Demokratii (A Critique of Democracy), Moscow, 1997, pp. 520-521 (in Russian).

[655] However, this did not prevent him attacking the Tsar later in life with his withering Epitaph.

[656] Merezhkovsky, Dve tajny russkoj poezii. Nekrasov i Tiutchev (Two Mysteries of Russian Poetyr. Nekrasov and Tiutchev), St. Petersburg, 1915 (in Russian).

[657] Tiutchev (1849), in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 327.

[658] Tiutchev, “Rossia i revoliutsia” (“Russia and the Revolution”), Politicheskie Stat'i (Political Articles), Paris: YMCA Press, 1976, pp. 32-36 (in Russian).

[659] Tiutchev, “O tsenzure v Rossii” (“On Censorship in Russia”) (in Russian).

[660] Lossky, op. cit., pp. 44-45.

[661] Tiutchev, “Nash Vek” (“Our Age”) (in Russian).

[662] Tiutchev, translated in Christensen, op. cit., p. 645.

[663] Walicki, op. cit., pp. 96-97.

[664] Walicki, op. cit., pp. 97-98.

[665] Tsimbursky, in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 327.

[666] Leontiev, Vostok, Rossia i Slavianstvo (The East, Russia and Slavdom), in Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 333-334.

[667] Philip Mansel, Constantinople, London: Penguin, 1995, p. 268.

[668] Royle, Crimea: The Great Crimean War 1854-1856, London: Abacus, 1999, pp. 15, 17.

[669] Royle, op. cit., 19-20.

[670] Royle, op. cit., p. 52.

[671] Tiutcheva, Pri Dvore Dvukh Imperatorov (At the Court of Two Emperors), Moscow, 1990, p. 52; in N.Yu. Selischev, “K 150-letiu nachala Krymskoj vojny” (To the 150th Anniversary of the Crimean War”), Pravoslavnaia Rus’ (Orthodox Rus’), ¹ 24 (1741), December 15/28, 2003, p. 11 (in Russian).

[672] Khomiakov, Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenij, Moscow, 1994, vol. II, pp. 74-75; in Selischev, op. cit., pp. 10-11.

[673] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 327.

[674] Hieroschemamonk Feofil, Jordanville: Holy Trinity Monastery, 1970, pp. 108, 111.

[675] As Royle writes, the Russian forces in this theatre were superior, though numerically inferior. “Fought in the mountainous areas where Armenia borders Georgia, the advantage should have been with the Ottoman army. Not only did they have the support of the robber baron Shamyl, for many years a thorn in the flesh of Russian forces, but as Humphrey Sandwith, a British doctor in the Ottoman forces observed, ‘Here you have Turks posted on their own soil in the midst of a Mussulman population. At the summons of the fiery crescent thousands of warlike tribes will rush to the standard of Islam.’ Alas, matters did not turn out in that easy way…” (op. cit., p. 416).

[676] Orlov, in Selischev, op. cit., p. 12.

[677] Brianchaninov, Pis’ma (Letters), Moscow, 2002, pp. 870, 873 (in Russian); in Selischev, op. cit., p. 13.

[678] Metropolitan Philaret, in Selischev, op. cit., p. 13.

[679] One of the victims of this massacre was the great defender of Orthodoxy, Hieromartyr Joseph the Damascene (http://aaron.org/midwest/Articles/St._Joseph_Of_Damascus_A.htm).

[680] See “Zhitie sviatitelia Innokentia Khersonskogo” (“The Lifen of the holy Hierarch Innocent of Cherson”), in Zhitia i Tvorenia Russikh Sviatykh (The Lives and Works of the Russian Saints), Moscow: Triphonov Pechegskij Monastyr’, “Kovcheg”, 2001, pp. 701-702 (in Russian).

[681] K. Aksakov, in E.N. Annenkov, “’Slaviano-Khristianskie’ idealy na fone zapadnoj tsivilizatsii, russkie spory 1840-1850-kh gg.” (“’Slavic-Christian’ ideas against the background of western civilization, Russia quarrels in the 1840s and 50s”), in V.A. Kotel’nikov (ed.), Khristianstvo i Russkaia Literatura (Christianity and Russian Literature), St. Petersburg: “Nauka”, 1996, pp. 143-144 (in Russian). Cf. Yury Samarin: “We were defeated not by the external forces of the Western alliance, but by our own internal weakness… Stagnation of thought, depression of productive forces, the rift between government and people, disunity between social classes and the enslavement of one of them to another… prevent the government from deploying all the means available to it and, in emergency, from being able to count on mobilising the strength of the nation” (“O krepostnom sostoianii i o perekhode iz nego k grazhdanskoj svobode” (“On serfdom and the transition from it to civil liberty”), Sochinenia (Works), vol. 2, Moscow, 1878, pp. 17-20; quoted in Geoffrey Hosking, Russia: People & Empire, London: HarperCollins, 1997, p. 317).

[682] Mansel, op. cit., pp. 265-266.

[683] Mansel, op. cit., p. 269.

[684] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, pp. 331-333.

[685] Hieromonk Anthony of the Holy Mountain, Ocherki Zhizni i Podvigov Startsa Ieroskhimonakha Ilariona Gruzina (Sketches of the Life and Struggles of Elder Hieroschemamonk Hilarion the Georgian), Jordanville, 1985, p. 95 (in Russian).

[686] Fomin & Fomina, op. cit., vol. I, p. 338.

[687] Snychev, op. cit., p. 319.

[688] Dobroklonsky, op. cit., pp. 702-703. For more on Bishop Ambrose, see S.G. Wurgaft, I.A. Ushakov, Staroobriadchestvo (Old Ritualism), Moscow: “Tserkov’”, 1996, pp. 18-22 (in Russian).

[689] Snychev, op. cit., p. 359.

[690] Khomiakov, “Third Letter to William Palmer, in Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church, op. cit., pp. 67-69, 71; Living Orthodoxy, ¹ 138, vol. XXIII, ¹ 6, November-December, 2003, pp. 26-27.

[691] See W.J. Birkbeck, Russia and the English Church during the Last Fifty Years, London: Rivington, Percival & co., 1895.

[692] Snychev, op. cit., p. 357.

[693] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 324, 325.

[694] Lieven, Empire, London: John Murray, 2000, pp. 212-213.

[695] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 324.

[696] S.M. Kaziev (ed.), Shamil, Moscow: Ekho Kavkaza, 1997, p. 31 (in Russian).

[697] Kaziev, op. cit., p. 53.

[698] Snychev, op. cit., p. 325.

[699] Lieven, op. cit., pp. 213-214. The historian referred to is David Gillard.

[700] Although Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov, during his short period of service as Bishop of the Caucasus, did his best. See Zhizneopisanie Episkopa Ignatia Brianchaninova, op. cit. (V.M.)

[701] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 302-303.

[702] See M.V. Krivosheev, Yu. V. Krivosheev, Istoria Rossijskoj Imperii, 1861-1894 (A History of the Russian Empire, 1861-1894), St. Petersburg, 2000, pp. 130-137 (in Russian).

[703] Rose, Nihilism, Forestville, Ca.: Fr. Seraphim Rose Foundation, 1994, pp. 34-35.

[704] Ivanov, op. cit., pp. 338-340.

[705] Hosking, op. cit., pp. 317-318.

[706] Hobsbawm, op. cit., p. 363.

[707] Krivosheev and Krivosheev, op. cit., pp. 10-11.

[708] Archimandrite Konstantin (Zaitsev), “Velikaia Reforma Osvobozhdenia Krestian. 1861-1961” (“The Great Reform of the Emancipation of the Serfs. 1861-1961”), Pravoslavnij Put’ (The Orthodox Way), 1961, p. 24 (in Russian).

[709] Krivosheev and Krivosheev, op. cit., p. 20.

[710] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 341-342.

[711] Polnoe Zhizneopisanie Sviatitelia Ignatia Brianchaninova (A Complete Biography of the holy Hierarch Ignatius Brianchaninov), Moscow, 2002, pp. 317, 319-320 (in Russian).

[712] Polnoe Zhizneopisanie Sviatitelia Ignatia, pp. 335-336.

[713] Snychev, op. cit., pp. 342-344 (in Russian).

[714] Polnoe Zhizneopisanie Sviatitelia Ignatia, p. 357. Ivanov writes: “With regard to the reforms of Alexander II Dobroliubov wrote a letter to Slavutinsky, in which he set out his view on the tactics of struggle with the government: ’We must gather together the facts of Russian life… We must call on the readers to pay heed to what surrounds them, we must prick their eyes with all kinds of horrors, persecute them, torment them, give them no rest – so that the whole of this kingdom of dirt may become repulsive to the reader, so that, cut to the quick, he may jump up and cry out ardently: what kind of slave labour is this! It would be better to die, I do not want to live any longer in this maelstrom.’” (op. cit., p. 340)

[715] Metropolitan Philaret, in Bishop Plato, On the Question of Freedom of Conscience, Kiev, 1902 (in Russian).

[716] John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ, Moscow, 1894 (in Russian).

[717] Victor Afanasyev, Elder Barsanuphius of Optina, Platina, Ca.: St. Herman of Alaska Press, 2000, pp. 216, 217.

[718] Solzhenitsyn, op. cit., pp. 76-77.

[719] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 342-343.

[720] Igor Volgin, Poslednij God Dostoevskogo (Dostoyevsky’s Last Year), Moscow, 1986, pp. 32-33 (in Russian).

[721] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, January, 1881, London: Cassell, pp. 1032-1033.

[722] Lebedev, op. cit., pp. 343-344.

[723] Ivanov, op. cit., p. 340.

[724] Lebedev, op. cit., p. 344.

[725] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, 1873, London: Cassell, p. 17.

[726] Dostoyevsky, The Diary of a Writer, 1873, London: Cassell, p. 13.

[727] Dostoyevsky, in Leonid Grossman, Dostoevsky, London: Allen Lane, 1974, p. 350.

[728] Igor Volgin, Poslednij God Dostoevskogo (Dostoyevsky’s Last Year), Moscow, 1986, p. 43 (in Russian).

[729] Dostoyevsky, in Volgin, op. cit., p. 17.

[730] Volgin, op. cit., pp. 17-18.