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George Samarin,1 a friend of Aksakov and like him a prominent member of the Slavophile party or group, in a letter on the subject of the Vatican Council wrote as follows: “Papal absolutism has not killed the vitality of the Catholic clergy; this should give us food for thought, for some day or other we shall hear promulgated the infallibility of the Tsar or rather that of the Procurator of the Holy Synod, for the Tsar is of comparatively no importance. . . . When that day comes, shall we find a single bishop, a single monk or a single priest who will protest? I doubt it. If anyone protests, it will be a layman, your obedient servant or Ivan Sergeyevich (Aksakov), if we are still in this world. As for our unfortunate clergy, whom you think deserving of pity rather than blame (and perhaps you are right), they will be dumb.”
It was a happy chance that brought these words to my notice, for I know few prophecies of the kind which have been fulfilled so exactly to the letter. The proclamation of Cæsaropapist absolutism in Russia, the profound silence and absolute submission of the clergy, and finally the solitary protest of a single layman — it has all come about exactly as Samarin foresaw.
In 1885 an official document emanating from the Russian Government2 declared that the Eastern Church had resigned its authority and placed it in the hands of the Tsar. Few people noticed this significant utterance. Samarin was already dead some years. Aksakov had only a few months to live; nevertheless, he published in his periodical Russ the protest of a lay writer who incidentally did not belong to the Slavophile group. This solitary protest, neither authorized nor supported by a single representative of the Church, only served by its isolation to throw into relief the deplorable state of religion in Russia.3
Indeed, the Cæsaropapist manifesto of the officials of St. Petersburg was merely the explicit admission of an established fact. It is undeniably true that the Eastern Church has abdicated in favor of the secular power; the only question is whether it had the right to do so and whether, having done so, it could still represent Him to Whom all power has been given in Heaven and Earth. Whatever violence may be done to the Gospel passages concerning the eternal powers left by Jesus Christ to His Church, they will never yield any mention of the right of surrendering those powers into the hands of a temporal authority. The authority which claims to take over the Church’s mission on Earth must have received at least the same promise of stability.
We do not believe that our prelates have willingly or deliberately surrendered their ecclesiastical authority. But if the Eastern Church has, in the course of events, lost that which once belonged to her by divine right, it is clear that the gates of Hell have prevailed against her and that therefore she is not the impregnable Church founded by Christ.
Nor do we wish to hold the secular government responsible for the anomalous relation of the Church to the State. The State has been justified in maintaining its independence and supremacy in regard to a spiritual authority which only represented one particular national Church in separation from the great Christian community. The declaration that the State should be subject to the Church can only refer to the one, indivisible and universal Church founded by God.
The government of a separated national Church is only a historical and purely human institution. But the Head of the State is the lawful representative of the nation as such, and a body of clergy which aims at being national and nothing more must, whether they like it or not, recognize the absolute sovereignty of the secular government. The sphere of national existence can include within itself only one single center, the Head of the State. The hierarchy of one particular Church can only claim to exercise over the State the sovereignty of apostolic authority in so far as it in fact forms the link between the nation and the universal, that is the international, Kingdom of Christ. A national Church that does not wish to be subject to the absolute authority of the State, that is to say, to surrender its existence as a Church and become a department of the civil administration, must needs possess a real point d’appui outside the confines of State and nation. With these it is connected by natural and historical ties; but as a Church it must belong to a wider social group with an independent center and a world-wide organization of which the local Church can only constitute a single individual member.
The leaders of the Russian Church could not rely on their religious metropolis in the struggle against the overpowering despotism of the State; for the Mother See was itself no more than a national Church which had been long subservient to the secular power. It is not ecclesiastical freedom but Cæsaropapism, which we have inherited from Byzantium, where this anti-Christian principle had developed unhindered ever since the ninth century. The Greek hierarchy, having repudiated the powerful support which it had possessed hitherto in the independent center of the Universal Church, found itself completely abandoned to the mercy of the State and its despot. Before the schism, each time that the Greek Emperors encroached upon the spiritual domain and threatened the freedom of the Church, her spokesmen — whether it was St. John Chrysostom, or St. Flavian, or St. Maximus the Confessor, or St. Theodore of the Studium, or the patriarch St. Ignatius — turned to the international center of Christendom and appealed to the judgment of the sovereign pontiff; and if they themselves fell victims to brute force, yet their cause, the cause of truth and justice and freedom, never failed to find at Rome a resolute champion who ensured its ultimate triumph. In those days the Greek Church was, and knew herself to be, a living part of the Universal Church, closely bound to the whole by the common center of unity, the apostolic Chair of Peter. This relation of salutary dependence upon a successor of the supreme Apostles, God’s pontiff, this purely spiritual, lawful and honorable relation, gave place to a worldly, unlawful and humiliating subjection to the power of mere laymen and unbelievers.
This is not simply an accident of history; it is an instance of the logic of events, which inevitably robs any merely national Church of its independence and dignity and brings it under the yoke of the temporal power, a yoke which may be more or less oppressive but is always ignominious. In every country which has been brought to accept a national Church, the secular government, be it autocratic or constitutional, enjoys absolute authority; the ecclesiastical institution only figures as a special Ministry dependent on the general State administration. In such a case it is the national State which is the real complete entity, existing by itself and for itself; the Church is only a section, or rather a certain aspect, of this social organism of the body politic, only existing for itself in the abstract.
Such enslavement of the Church is incompatible with its spiritual dignity, its divine origin and its universal mission. On the other hand, reason demonstrates, and history confirms the conclusion, that it is absolutely impossible for two powers and two governments, equally sovereign and independent and confined to the same territory, to exist for long side by side within the bounds of a single national State. Such a dyarchy inevitably produces an antagonism which can only end in a complete triumph for the secular government since it is this which really represents the nation, whereas the Church, by its very nature, is not a national institution and cannot become one without forfeiting the true reason for its existence.
We are told that the Emperor of Russia is a son of the Church. That is only what he should be as head of a Christian State. But if he is to be so in actual fact, then the Church must exercise an authority over him; she must possess a power that is independent and superior to that of the State. With the best will in the world the secular monarch cannot be truly the son of a Church of which he is at the same time the head and which he governs through his officials.
The Church in Russia, deprived of any point d’appui or center of unity outside the national State, has inevitably come to be subservient to the secular power; and the latter, acknowledging no authority upon Earth superior to itself, recognizing no one from whom it may receive religious sanction, that is to say, a partial delegation of the authority of Christ, has just as inevitably engendered an anti-Christian despotism.
If the national State asserts itself as a complete and self-sufficient social organism, it cannot belong as a living member to the universal body of Christ. And if it is outside that body, then it is not a Christian State and is only reviving the ancient Cæsarism which was abolished by Christianity.
God assumed manhood in the person of the Jewish Messiah at the moment when Man was assuming godhead in the person of the Roman Cæsar. Jesus Christ did not attack Cæsar or dispute his authority; He spoke the truth about him. He said that Cæsar was not God and that Cæsar’s power was external to the Kingdom of God. The rendering to Cæsar of the money that he coins and to God of all the rest, that is what is called nowadays the separation of Church and State, a separation which is essential as long as Cæsar remains pagan, but impossible as soon as he becomes Christian. A Christian, be he king or emperor, cannot remain outside the Kingdom of God and set up his own authority against God’s. The supreme commandment: “Render to God the things that are God’s” is necessarily binding upon Cæsar himself if he would be a Christian. He too must render to God what is God’s, and to God belongs, above all, supreme and absolute power upon Earth; for if we would understand the words about Cæsar which our Lord addressed to His enemies before His Passion, we must complete them with that other more solemn utterance after His Resurrection. To His disciples, the representatives of His Church, He said: “All power is given to Me in Heaven and on Earth’ (Matt. xxviii. 18). This is an explicit and decisive passage which cannot honestly be interpreted in more than one way. Those who really believe in Christ’s words will never recognize a State as an absolutely independent and sovereign temporal power, separate from the Kingdom of God. There is only one power upon Earth and that belongs not to Cæsar, but to Jesus Christ. The words about the tribute-money have already robbed Cæsar of his divinity; this new utterance robs him of his despotic authority. If he wishes to reign upon Earth, he can no longer do so in his own right; he must receive his commission from Him to Whom all power is given upon Earth. How then is he to obtain this commission?
Jesus Christ, in revealing to men the Kingdom of God which is not of this world, gave them all the necessary means of realizing this Kingdom in the world. Having affirmed in His high-priestly prayer that the final aim of His work was the perfect unity of all, our Lord desired to provide an actual organic basis for this work by founding His visible Church and by giving it a single head in the person of St. Peter as the guarantee of its unity. If there is in the Gospels any delegation of authority, it is this. Jesus Christ gave no sanction or promise whatsoever to any temporal power. He founded only the Church, and He founded it on the monarchical power of Peter: “Thou art Peter, and on this rock I will build My Church.”
The Christian State, therefore, must be dependent upon the Church founded by Christ, and the Church itself is dependent upon the head which Christ has given it. In a word, it is through Peter that the Christian Cæsar must share in the kingship of Christ. He can possess no authority apart from him who has received the fullness of all authority; he cannot reign apart from him who holds the keys of the Kingdom. The State, if it is to be Christian, must be subject to the Church of Christ; but if this subjection is to be genuine, the Church must be independent of the State, it must possess a center of unity outside and above the State, it must be in truth the Universal Church.
It has latterly begun to be realized in Russia that a merely national Church, left to its own resources, is bound to become a passive and worthless instrument of the State, and that ecclesiastical independence can only be ensured by an international center of spiritual authority. But while the necessity of such a center is admitted, attempts have been made to bring it into being within the boundaries of Eastern Christendom This plan to create an Eastern quasi-Pope is the last anti-Catholic ambition left for us to examine.
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1. Yury (George) Fedorovich Samarin (d. 1876), an ardent disciple of Khomyakov, whose brilliant qualities he lacked, but whom he surpassed in learning and critical acumen, deserved well of Russia for the very active part he played in the emancipation of the serfs in 1861. Apart from that, his cultured intelligence and remarkable talent remained almost entirely unproductive, as so often happens in Russia. He left behind him no works of importance and as a writer chiefly distinguished himself by controversial writings against the Jesuits and the Germans of the Baltic provinces. The letter from which we quote was addressed to a Russian lady (Mme. A. O. Smirnov) and is dated 10/22 December 1871.
2. Regulations for State examinations in the Faculty of Laws.
3. Note to Russian readers. I did not sign the article in question (“State philosophy in the University curricula,” Russ, September 1885), because I believed myself to be expressing the general feelings of Russian society. This was an illusion and I can now assert my sole claim to this vox clamantis in deserto. But it must not be forgotten that besides what is called “society” there are in Russia twelve to fifteen million dissenters who did not wait for the year 1885 to make their protest against the Cæsaropapism of Moscow and St. Petersburg.
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