[Russia and the Universal Church] [Previous] [Next]
The distinctively religious character of the Russian people as well as the mystical tendency exhibited in our philosophy, our literature1 and our arts seem to indicate for Russia a great religious mission. Moreover, when our patriots are pressed to state what it is that constitutes the supreme vocation of our country, or the Russian “idea,” as it is called nowadays, they have no choice but to appeal to religion. According to them, Orthodoxy, or the religion of the GrecoRussian Church, in contrast to the religious bodies of the West, constitutes the true basis of our national being. Here, to begin with, is an obvious vicious circle. If we ask how the separated Eastern Church justifies its existence, we are told: By having formed the Russian people and provided its spiritual nurture. And when we enquire how that people justifies its existence, the answer is: By belonging to the separated Eastern Church. We are brought to this impasse by the difficulty of really deciding what we mean by this “Orthodoxy” of which we would claim the monopoly. This difficulty does not exist for those folk who are really orthodox in all good conscience and in the simplicity of their heart. When questioned intelligently about their religion, they will tell you that to be Orthodox is to be baptized a Christian, to wear a cross or some holy image on your breast, to worship Christ, to pray to the Blessed Virgin most immaculate2 and to all the saints represented by images and relics, to rest from work on all festivals and to fast in accordance with traditional custom, to venerate the sacred office of bishops and priests, and to participate in the holy sacraments and in divine worship. That is the true Orthodoxy of the Russian people, and it is ours also. But it is not that of our militant patriots. It is obvious that true Orthodoxy contains nothing particularist and can in no way form a national or local attribute separating us in any sense from the Western peoples; for the greater part of these peoples, the Catholic part, has precisely the same religious basis that we have. Whatever is holy and sacred for us is also holy and sacred for them. To indicate only one essential point: not only is devotion to the Blessed Virgin one of the characteristic features of Catholicism — generally practiced by Russian Orthodoxy,3 but there are even special miraculous images venerated in common by Roman Catholics and Russian Orthodox (for example, the holy Virgin of Czestochowa in Poland). If “piety” is indeed the distinctive characteristic of our national genius, the fact that the chief emblems of that piety are common to us and the Westerns compels us to recognize our oneness with them in what we regard as the most essential thing of all. As regards the profound contrast between the contemplative piety of the East and the active religion of the Westerns, this contrast, being purely human and subjective, has nothing to do with the divine objects of our faith and worship; so far from being a good reason for schism, it should rather bring the two great parts of the Christian world into a closer and mutually complementary union.
But under the influence of that evil principle which is constantly at work on Earth, this difference has been abused and twisted into a division. At the moment when Russia was receiving baptism from Constantinople, the Greeks, though still in formal communion with Rome after the temporary schism of Photius,4 were already strongly imbued with national particularism which was fostered by the contentious spirit of the clergy, the political ambitions of the emperors, and the disputes of the theologians. The result was that the pearl of the Gospel purchased by the Russian people in the person of St. Vladimir was all covered with the dust of Byzantium. The bulk of the nation was uninterested in the ambitions and hatreds of the clergy and understood nothing of the theological quibbles which were their fruit; the bulk of the nation received and preserved the essence of orthodox Christianity pure and simple, that is to say, faith and the life of religion formed by divine grace and expressed in works of piety and charity. But the clergy, recruited in the early days from the Greeks, and the theologians accepted the disastrous inheritance of Photius and Cerularius as an integral part of the true religion.
This pseudo-Orthodoxy of our theological schools, which has nothing in common with the faith of the Universal Church or the piety of the Russian people, contains no positive element; it consists merely of arbitrary negations produced and maintained by controversial prejudice:
“God the Son does not contribute in the divine order to the procession of the Holy Spirit.”
“The Blessed Virgin was not immaculate from the first moment of her existence.” 5
“Primacy of jurisdiction does not belong to the see of Rome and the Pope has not the dogmatic authority of a Pastor and Doctor of the Universal Church.”
Such are the principal negations which we shall have to examine in due course. For our present purpose it is enough to observe in the first place that these negations have received no sort of religious sanction, and do not rest on any ecclesiastical authority accepted by all the Orthodox as binding and infallible. No œcumenical council has condemned or even passed judgment on the Catholic doctrines anathematized by our controversialists; and when we are offered this new kind of negative theology as the true doctrine of the Universal Church, we can see in it only an extravagant imposture originating either in ignorance or in bad faith. In the second place, it is obvious that this false Orthodoxy is no more adequate than true Orthodoxy as a positive basis for the “Russian idea.” Let us try to substitute real values for this unknown quantity called “Orthodoxy” over which a pseudo-patriotic press is always working up an artificial enthusiasm. According to you the ideal essence of Russia is Orthodoxy, and this Orthodoxy, which you especially contrast with Catholicism, amounts in your view simply to the divergences between the two professions of faith. The real religious basis which is common to us and the Westerns seems to have no more than a secondary interest for you; it is the differences between us to which you are really attached. Very well, then, substitute these specific differences for the vague term “Orthodoxy” and declare openly that the religious ideal of Russia consists in denying the Filioque, the Immaculate Conception, and the authority of the Pope. It is the last point that you are chiefly concerned with. The others, you know well, are only pretexts; the Sovereign Pontiff is your real bugbear. All your “Orthodoxy,” all your “Russian idea” is, at bottom, then, simply a national protest against the universal power of the Pope. But in the name of what? Here begins the real difficulty of your position. This bitter protest against the monarchy of the Church, if it is to win men’s minds and hearts, should be justified by some great positive principle. You should confront the form of theocratic government of which you disapprove with another and better form. And that is exactly what you cannot do. What kind of ecclesiastical constitution would you confer upon the Western peoples? Are you going to extol conciliar government and talk to them of œcumenical councils? Medice, cura teipsum. Why has not the East set up a true œcumenical council in opposition to those of Trent or the Vatican? How are we to explain this helpless silence on the part of Truth when faced with the solemn self-assertion of Error? Since when have the guardians of Orthodoxy become mean-spirited curs that can only bark from behind a wall? In point of fact, while the great assemblies of the Church continue to fill a prominent place in the teaching and life of Catholicism, it is the Christian East which has for a thousand years been deprived of this important feature of the Universal Church, and our best theologians, such as Philaret of Moscow, themselves admit that an œcumenical council is impossible for the Eastern Church as long as she remains separated from the West. But it is the easiest thing in the world for our self-styled Orthodox to confront the actual councils of the Catholic Church with a council that can never take place and to maintain their cause with weapons that they have lost and under a flag of which they have been robbed.
The Papacy is a positive principle, an actual institution, and if Eastern Christians believe this principle to be false and this institution to be evil, it is for them to create the organization which they desire to see in the Church. Instead of doing so, they refer us to antiquarian traditions, though they admit that they can have no relevance to the present situation. Our anti-Catholics have indeed good reason for going so far afield in search of support for their thesis; the fact is that they dare not expose themselves to the ridicule of the whole world by declaring the synod of St. Petersburg or the patriarchate of Constantinople to be the real representative of the Universal Church. But how can they talk of appealing, after all this time, to œcumenical councils when they are obliged to admit that they are no longer feasible? Such beating of the air is only a complete revelation of the weakness of this anti-Catholic Orthodoxy. If the normal organization and proper constitution of the Universal Church requires œcumenical councils, it is obvious that the Orthodox East, fatally deprived of this essential organ of Church life, possesses no longer a true Church constitution or a regular Church government. During the first three centuries of Christianity, the Church, cemented by the blood of the martyrs, convoked no world-wide councils because she had no need of them; the Eastern Church of to-day, paralyzed and dismembered, is unable to convoke them though she feels her need of them. Thus we are placed in a dilemma: either we must admit, with our extreme sectarians, that since a certain date the Church has lost her divine character and no longer actually exists upon Earth; or else, to avoid, so dangerous a conclusion, we must recognize that the Universal Church, having no organs of government or representation in the East, possesses them in her Western half. This will involve the recognition of a historical truth now admitted even by the Protestants, namely that the present-day Papacy is not an arbitrary usurpation, but a legitimate development of principles which were in full force before the division of the Church and against which that Church never protested. But if the Papacy is recognized as a legitimate institution, what becomes of the “Russian idea” and the privilege of national Orthodoxy? If we cannot base our religious future on the official Church, perhaps we can find deeper foundations for it in the Russian people.
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1. Our best modem writers have been impelled by a religious idealism which has proved stronger than their æsthetic vocation to abandon the too restricted sphere of literature and to appear with varying success as moralists and reformers, apostles and prophets. The untimely death of Pushkin debars us from deciding whether the religious tendency shown in his most finished productions was deep enough to become in time predominant in his thought and to make him quit the domain of pure poetry, as happened with Gogol (in Correspondence with my friends), with Dostoyevski (in An author’s diary) and with Tolstoy (in My Confession, My Religion, etc.). It seems that the Russian genius does not discover in poetic expression its final objective or the medium suited to the embodiment of its essentially religious ideal. If Russia is called to convey her message to the world, that message must sound forth not from the dazzling regions of art and literature, nor from the proud heights of philosophy and science, but only from the sublime and lowly peaks of religion. My Russian and Polish readers will find a detailed proof of this thesis in the second edition of my work, La Question nationale en Russie, the last chapter of which has been translated into Polish by M. Bénoni and published as a pamphlet entitled Russia and Europe.
2. “Most immaculate” or “all-immaculate” (vseneporochnaya) is the epithet regularly added to the name of the Blessed Virgin in our liturgical books, being the translation of the Greek παντάµωµος and other kindred words.
3. By this term I do not exclude the “old believers” properly so called, whose differences with the State Church are not concerned with the true object of religion.
4. The final rupture, which did not occur till later, in 1054, was nothing in fact but a mere event without any kind of legal or binding sanction. The anathema of the legates of Pope Leo IX was not aimed against the Eastern Church, but solely against the person of the patriarch Michael Cerularius and against “the partners of his folly” (folly obvious enough, to be sure); and, on the other hand, the Eastern Church has never been able to assemble an œcumenical council which, even according to our own theologians, is the only tribunal competent to pass judgment on our differences with the Papacy.
5. Thus these theologians blinded by hatred have the temerity to deny the manifest belief of the Eastern Church, both Greek and Russian, which has never ceased to declare the Blessed Virgin to be all-immaculate, immaculate par excellence.
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