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In the sphere of religion and of the Church, two very different things may be understood by the word “freedom:” first, the independence of the ecclesiastical body, both the clergy and the faithful, in relation to the external power of the State, and secondly, the independence of individuals in matters of religion, that is to say, the concession to everyone of the right to belong openly to such and such a religious body, to pass freely from one of these bodies to another, or to belong to none and to profess with impunity any kind of religious belief or opinion whether positive or negative.1 To avoid confusion, we will call the former “ecclesiastical freedom” and the latter “religious freedom.” 2 Every Church takes for granted a certain number of common beliefs, and anyone who does not share these beliefs cannot enjoy the same community of rights as the believers. The power to take action by spiritual means against unfaithful members and definitely to exclude them from the community is one of the essential attributes of ecclesiastical freedom. Religious freedom does not come within the particular province of the Church except indirectly; it is only the temporal power of the State which can directly admit or restrict the right of its subjects to profess openly all their individual religious beliefs. The Church can only exert a moral influence to induce the State to be more or less tolerant. No Church ever regarded with indifference the propagation of strange beliefs which threatened to rob her of her faithful children.
But the question remains: What weapons should the Church employ against her enemies? Ought she to confine herself to spiritual means of persuasion, or should she have recourse to the State and avail herself of its material weapons, constraint and persecution? The two methods of struggle against the enemies of the Church are not mutually exclusive. Those who have the necessary equipment can distinguish between intellectual error and bad faith and, while bringing persuasion to bear on the former, can guard against the latter by depriving it of the means of doing harm.3 But there is one essential condition if the spiritual struggle is to be even possible, namely, that the Church herself should enjoy ecclesiastical freedom and should not be reduced to subservience to the State. A man who has his hands tied cannot defend himself by his own efforts, but is compelled to rely on the assistance of others. A State Church totally subject to the secular power and owing its continued existence to the favor of the latter has renounced its spiritual authority and can only be defended successfully by material weapons.4
In past times the Roman Catholic Church, which has always enjoyed a measure of ecclesiastical freedom and has never been a State Church, has encountered her enemies with the spiritual weapons of instruction and preaching and at the same time has authorized Catholic States to use the temporal sword in the name of religious unity. Today there are no longer any Catholic States; the State in the West is atheist, and the Roman Church continues to exist and to prosper in sole reliance upon the spiritual sword, upon her moral authority and upon the free proclamation of her principles. But how can a hierarchy that has committed itself to the temporal power, and thereby admitted its own lack of spiritual power, exert that moral authority which it has renounced? Our present established Church has espoused the interests of the State to the exclusion of all else, in order to receive in return the guarantee of its existence against the menace of dissent. Since the aim is a purely material one, the means are bound to be of the same character. The measures of constraint and violence prescribed by the Imperial Penal Code are in the last resort the only weapons of defense with which our “State Orthodoxy” can meet either dissent at home or religious bodies from without which would dispute its authority over the souls of our people. If, in recent times, the representatives of the clergy have made certain attempts to counter the sectarians by means of semi-public discussions,5 the lack of good faith which is only too evident in these conferences (in which one side is bound to be in the wrong whatever happens, and is able to say only what its opponents permit) has merely had the effect of showing up the moral impotence of an established Church which is too accommodating to the powers that be to win respect and too ruthless in its spiritual claims to win affection. And yet this is the Church that is to exemplify for us the free union of human consciences in the spirit of charity!
The Slavophiles, in their anti-Catholic propaganda, have labored to confuse ecclesiastical with religious freedom. Since the Catholic Church has not always been tolerant, and since she does not admit the principle of indifference in religious matters, it is only too easy to declaim against the despotism of Rome without mentioning the great prerogative of ecclesiastical freedom which Catholicism alone of all Christian communions has always maintained. But when it comes to our own case, nothing is gained by the confusion of these two freedoms since it is clear that we possess neither. No one has expounded this melancholy truth with greater power or conviction than the late I. Aksakov, the last notable representative of the old school of Slavophiles. We need not quote more than a few outstanding passages from his writings.6
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1. We are not concerned here with a third kind of freedom, that of the various cults recognized by the State. A certain freedom for the cults in their status quo is imposed by the force of circumstances upon an Empire such as Russia, which numbers more than 30,000,000 subjects outside the ruling Church.
2. The expressions commonly used in the latter sense, such as “freedom of conscience” or “freedom of profession of faith” should be rejected as inexact; conscience is always free and no one can prevent a martyr from confessing his faith.
3.We admit this distinction in theory (in abstracto) but we are far from recommending it as a practical policy.
4. Even our ecclesiastical writers admit as much with considerable naïveté. For instance, in a series of articles in the Orthodox Review (Pravoslavnoye Obozrenie) on the struggle of the Russian clergy against the dissenters, the author, M. Chistyakov, after exposing the exploits of Pitirim, the bishop of Nizhni-Novgorod, whose zeal was invariably supported by the troops of the vice-governor Rzhevski, reaches the conclusion that the famous missionary owed all his success to the help of the secular power and to the right of bringing the dissenters by force to listen to his preaching (Prav. Obozr., October 1887, p. 348). Similar admissions can be found in the same Review (of the year 1882) with regard to contemporary missions among the pagans of Eastern Siberia.
5. I refer to the “conversations (sobesedovanya) with the old believers” at Kazan, at Kaluga, and especially at Moscow. Despite the irksome conditions of these discussions and the absence of the leaders of the Raskol, the representatives of the official Church did not always have it their own way. A paper named The Moscow Voice (Golos Moskvy), which had the courage to publish in 1885 the shorthand reports of these conferences, has had reason to repent of its rashness. It no longer exists.
6. For a long time, Aksakov was persecuted by the Russian Government for the frankness of his criticisms. Only in his last years did he share with Karkov the privilege of free speech — a privilege which was peculiar to these two men and has not survived them.
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