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The general aide-de-camp’s shoulder-knots (Achselband) with which Mgr. Ireneus, archbishop of Pskov and member of the Holy Synod, was decorated in the reign of Paul I are a symbol of the relations between Church and State in Russia. It should cause no surprise to see this secular, not to say military, decoration upon the archbishop’s cassock; it merely proves that the fundamental conception of our ecclesiastical constitution has been consistently developed ever since the time of Peter the Great.” 1
“As is well known, the Russian Church is governed by an administrative council called a Spiritual Conclave or Holy Synod, whose members are nominated by the Emperor and are presided over by a civil or military official, the High Procurator of the Holy Synod, who has complete control of the government of the Church. The dioceses, or eparchies, are nominally ruled by bishops nominated by the Head of the State on the recommendation of the Synod, that is, of the High Procurator who may subsequently depose them at pleasure.
“The various degrees in the clerical hierarchy have been recorded in the List of Ranks and made to correspond exactly with the various military grades. A metropolitan is equivalent to a marshal (‘full general’ according to the Russian expression), an archbishop to a divisional general (or ‘lieutenant-general), and a bishop to a brigade general (or ‘major-general’). Priests may, with a little keenness, reach the rank of colonel. Paul I was only being consistent in bestowing military decorations on the dignitaries of the Church.” 2
“Are such things unimportant details or matters of purely external significance? On the contrary, it is these outward features that reflect the inner condition of our Church. Enrolled in the service of the State, the servants of the altar regard themselves as the employees and agents of the secular power. If the latter rewards the services of the clergy with lay decorations, it is because the clergy themselves covet these rewards.3 The Synod of St. Petersburg, from its earliest years, insisted upon its character as an imperial institution and never failed to quote the temporal power as the true source of its authority. In all its early official acts, it repeats over and over again that ‘command has been given’ (poveleno) by the sovereign to everyone, ‘to persons of every rank, ecclesiastics and laity, to regard the Synod as an important and powerful body’ and in no way to disparage ‘the dignity bestowed upon it by His Majesty the Tsar.’ It is easy to see that the element of temporal authority from which the Synod thought to draw its strength was bound inevitably to prevail over every other element in its composition and to dominate completely this hybrid institution which, though declaring itself to be an organ of the secular power, none the less claimed the authority of an ecclesiastical council.4
The dignity bestowed upon it by His Majesty the Tsar was to be disparaged by no one — excepting His Majesty. And it was thus that the High Procurator Yakovlev obtained an imperial order severely forbidding the Synod to carry on direct correspondence with anyone whatsoever; all communications (‘every document’ according to the Russian expression) concerning Church affairs were to be transmitted to the Procurator.
“Thus, our Church on its administrative side has the appearance of a kind of huge bureau or chancellery which brings to the task of feeding Christ’s flock all the methods of German bureaucracy with all its inherent official insincerity.5 When once the government of the Church is organized as a department of the secular administration and her ministers are reckoned as civil servants, there is little to prevent the Church herself from being transformed into an agency of the secular power and undisguisedly entering the service of the State. With ‘the rights and privileges of fiscal administration (kazna)’ which Russian law grants to the Established Church, the fiscal (kazenny) element has penetrated deep into her life. Outwardly all that was done was to introduce the necessary discipline into the Church; actually, she was robbed of her soul. The ideal of a truly spiritual administration was replaced by that of a purely formal and external discipline. It was not a question merely of the secular power, but principally of the secular way of thinking which found its way into the heart of our Church administration and gained such a hold upon the minds and souls of our clergy that they have well nigh lost all notion of the true and living meaning of the Church’s mission.” 6
This statement is supported by a whole collection of tracts and proposals for Church reform sent to Aksakov by the “intelligentsia and progressives” among our clergy and all without exception marked by the same anti-religious secularism.7 “Some suggest that the enthusiasm of preachers should be revived by a new system of official rewards in the shape of special decorations. Others insist that the State must formally guarantee the lower clergy protection against the power of the bishops. Others believe that our religious future depends upon an increase in the ecclesiastical revenues; they would therefore have the State grant the Churches the monopoly of certain branches of industry. Some even suggest the introduction of a scale of charges for the administration of the holy sacraments. . . . Some go so far as to assert that our religious life is not sufficiently regulated by the government, and they demand a new code of laws and rules for the Church. And yet in the present Imperial Code there are more than a thousand articles regulating the supervision of the Church by the State and defining the duties of the police in the sphere of religious belief and practice. The secular administration is declared by our Code to be the upholder of the dogmas of the established religion and the guardian of good discipline in the holy Church.” We see this guardian, with sword raised, ready to deal sternly with any offence against this Orthodoxy which owes its establishment not so much to the aid of the Holy Spirit as to that of the penal laws of the Russian Empire.8
“The High Procurator of the Synod, as the responsible head of the Church, presents to the Emperor an annual report on the state of that institution. In form and style there is no difference between this report and those of other ministries, for instance the Ministry of Transport. Its contents are divided and subdivided in the same way; only instead of such titles as ‘Highways,’ ‘Railways,’ ‘Navigable Rivers,’ the report of the High Procurator contains the headings: ‘Maintenance and spread of the faith,’ ‘Pastoral activity,’ ‘Manifestations of religious feeling, of devotion to the sacred person of His Majesty,’ etc.” 9 The report for the year 1866, analyzed by Aksakov, concludes in the following characteristic manner: “The Russian Church, infinitely indebted for her prosperity to the august solicitude of the Sovereign, has embarked upon a new year of her existence with renewed strength and greater promise for the future.” 10
The Church has renounced her ecclesiastical freedom; and the State in return has guaranteed her existence and her position as the established Church by suppressing religious freedom throughout Russia. “Where there is no living inward unity,” says Aksakov, “outward uniformity can only be maintained by violence and deception.” 11 These are harsh words from a patriotic Russian; but they are none the less true. The precarious and uncertain unity of our Church rests upon nothing but deception and violence practiced by, or at least under the ægis of, the government. From the forged decrees of a fictitious council against an imaginary heretic12 up to the recent falsifications in the translation of the decrees of the Œcumenical Councils published by the Ecclesiastical Academy of Kazan, the whole activity of our Church, both in propaganda and in defense, is simply a series of deceptions carried out in complete security, thanks to the watchful protection of the ecclesiastical censorship which forestalls every attempt at exposure. As for the use of violence in religious matters, it is recognized in theory and developed in detail in our Penal Code. Any person born in the established Church or converted to Orthodoxy who embraces another religion, even though it is Christian, incurs a criminal charge and must be tried before the courts on the same footing as counterfeiters and highwaymen. Whoever induces anyone to leave the established Church, even if only by persuasion, without any constraint or violence, is deprived of civil rights and deported to Siberia or thrown into prison. Such severity is by no means a dead letter with us; Aksakov had the opportunity of observing it at work in the cruel persecution of a Protestant sect in Southern Russia.
“To stifle with imprisonment the thirst for religion, for lack of anything wherewith to satisfy it, to answer with imprisonment the genuine desire for faith and the questionings aroused in the religious mind, to use imprisonment as an argument for the truth of Orthodoxy — this is to undermine the whole of our religion and to surrender to victorious Protestantism. Such weapons of defense and such methods of establishing orthodox truth must soon supersede and destroy all pastoral zeal, and must stamp out every spark of true religion. The stringent orders issued by the ecclesiastical officials compelling the clergy under threat of fines to establish schools can never introduce real popular religious instruction; and we hope that it will not seem too sceptical to suggest that the recent ukase which grants to priests engaged in the work of popular education the right to the Cross of St. Anne of the 3rd class and to the rank of knighthood will not succeed in raising up new Apostles.” 13
And yet it is a fact that the penal laws are absolutely essential to the maintenance of this “established Church.” The sincerest champions of that Church, such as the historian Pogodin, whom our author quotes, admit that, if religious freedom were once introduced into Russia, half the peasants would go over to the Raskol and half the upper classes, especially the women, would become Catholics. “What does such an admission imply?” asks Aksakov. “That half the members of the Orthodox Church belong to her only in name; that they are kept within her fold only by the fear of temporal penalties. This is what our Church has come to! It is a dishonorable, depressing and monstrous state of affairs, this riot of sacrilege in the sacred precincts, of hypocrisy ousting truth, of terror in place of love, of corruption under the guise of outward order, of bad faith in violent defense of the true faith! What a denial, within the Church herself, of her own vital principles, of all that justifies her existence, that falsehood and unbelief should reign where everything should live and move and have its being in truth and faith! And yet the gravest danger is not that the evil has spread among the faithful, but that it has been legalized, that this state of affairs in the Church has been established by statute and that such an anomaly should be the inevitable outcome of the standard accepted by the State and by the whole of our society.14
“Generally speaking, among us in Russia, in Church affairs as in all other matters it is outward decorum that must be preserved at all costs; and with that our love for the Church, our idle love, our indolent faith, is satisfied. We readily shut our eyes and, in our childish fear of scandal, attempt to blind ourselves and everyone else to all that great evil which, under the veil of respectability, is eating like a cancer into the living core of our religious organism.15 Nowhere else is truth regarded with such horror as in the domain of our Church administration; nowhere else is there greater servility than in our spiritual hierarchy; nowhere is the ‘salutary falsehood’ practiced on a larger scale than in the place where all falsehood should be held in detestation. Nowhere else are there admitted on grounds of policy so many compromises which lower the dignity of the Church and rob her of her authority. The root cause of it all is the lack of a sufficient faith in the power of truth.16 And the most serious part of it is that, though we are aware of all these evils in our Church, we have come to terms with them and are content to live at peace. But such a shameful peace, such dishonorable compromise, can never promote the true peace of the Church; in the cause of truth it signifies defeat, if not betrayal.17
“Our Church, if we are to take the word of her champions, is a huge but wayward flock, shepherded by the officers of the law who with the lash force the straying sheep into the fold. Does such a picture correspond to the true conception of Christ’s Church? If not, she is no longer the Church of Christ. What is she, then? A State institution which can be used in the interests of the State for moral discipline. But it must not be forgotten that the Church is a domain the moral basis of which admits of no change, a domain in which disloyalty to the very principle of her life cannot go unpunished, in which a lie is a lie not to men but to God. A Church that is unfaithful to Christ’s covenant is the most barren and anomalous phenomenon in the world; she stands condemned already by the word of God.18 A Church which is a department of State, that is, of a ‘kingdom of this world,’ has renounced her mission and will inevitably share the fate of all the kingdoms of this world.19 She has no intrinsic reason for existence; she has doomed herself to impotence and death.20
“The Russian conscience is not free in Russia; religious thought remains paralyzed; the ‘abomination of desolation’ stands in the holy place; the breath of mortality banishes the life-giving Spirit; the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God, is left to rust and its place is taken by the sword of the State, while in the Church’s precincts are seen, not the angels of God watching over the faithful in their going out and coming in, but the officers of the law and inspectors of police — as guardians of Orthodoxy and directors of our consciences.” 21
We have not forgotten that the Slavophiles see in our Church the one true Church of Christ and the living synthesis of freedom and unity in the spirit of charity. And this is the conclusion reached by the latest representative of that party after an impartial enquiry into the state of the Church: “It is the spirit of truth, the spirit of charity, the spirit of life, the spirit of freedom, of whose invigorating breath the Church of Russia stands in need.” 22
Thus, according to the unimpeachable testimony of an eminent Russian Orthodox and patriot, our national Church has been deserted by the Spirit of Truth and Charity and is not the true Church of God. In order to escape from this inevitable conclusion, we have a habit of recalling for the moment the other Eastern Churches, to which otherwise we do not give a thought. We do not belong, we say, to the Russian Church, but to the Orthodox and Œcumenical Church of the East. It will be readily understood that the champions of the separated Eastern Church desire nothing better than the ascription to her of a real and positive unity. It remains to be seen whether she possesses this unity in any effective sense.
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1. I. S. Aksakov, Complete Works, vol. iv., p. 119.
2. ibid., p. 120.
3. ibid., p. 121.
4. ibid., p. 122.
5. ibid., p. 124.
6. ibid., pp. 125, 126.
7. ibid., p. 126.
8. Ibid., p. 84.
9. Ibid., p. 75.
10. Ibid., p. 77.
11. Ibid., p. 100.
12. I refer to the decrees of the imaginary council of Kiev in 1157, in which all the opinions of the “old believers” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were imputed to Martin the Armenian, a heretic of the twelfth century, who in fact never existed. This imposture was so crude and improbable that even our ecclesiastical schools were for a time ashamed of it. But latterly the recrudescence of official obscurantism has brought about the revival of this invention of Bishop Pitirim (v. the article already quoted from Prav. Obozr., October 1887. pp. 306, 307, 314).
13. Aksakov, ibid., p. 72.
14. ibid., p. 91.
15. ibid., p. 42
16. ibid., p. 35.
17. ibid., p. 43.
18. ibid., pp. 91, 92.
19. ibid., p. iii.
20. ibid., p. 93.
21. ibid., pp. 83, 84.
22. ibid., p. 127.
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