Introduction

[Russia and the Universal Church] [Next]

A hundred years ago France, the vanguard of humanity, set out to inaugurate a new era with the proclamation of the Rights of Man. Christianity had indeed many centuries earlier conferred upon men not only the right but the power to become the sons of God — εδωκεν αυτοις εξουσιαν τεκνα Θεου γενεσθαι (John i. 12). But the new proclamation made by France was far from superfluous, for this supreme power of mankind was almost entirely ignored in the social life of Christendom. I am not referring so much to particular acts of injustice as to the principles which were recognized by the public conscience, expressed in the laws of the time, and embodied in its social institutions. It was by legal statute that Christian America robbed the Christian negroes of all their human rights and ruthlessly abandoned them to the tyranny of their masters who themselves professed the Christian religion. In God-fearing England it was the law which condemned to the gallows the man who stole food from his rich neighbor to save himself from starvation. Lastly, it was the laws and institutions of Poland and of “Holy” Russia which allowed the feudal lord to sell his serfs like cattle.1 I do not presume to pass judgment on the special circumstances of France, nor to decide whether, as distinguished writers more competent than myself declare,2 the Revolution did this country more harm than good. But let us not forget that if each nation in history works more or less for the whole world, France has the distinction of having taken a step of universal significance in the political and social sphere.

Though the revolutionary movement destroyed many things that needed to be destroyed, though it swept away many an injustice and swept it away forever, it nevertheless failed lamentably in the attempt to create a social order founded upon justice. Justice is simply the practical expression and application of truth; and the starting-point of the revolutionary movement was false. The declaration of the Rights of Man could only provide a positive principle for social reconstruction if it was based upon a true conception of Man himself. That of the revolutionaries is well-known: they perceived in Man nothing but abstract individuality, a rational being destitute of all positive content.

I do not propose to unmask the internal contradictions of this revolutionary individualism nor to show how this abstract “Man” was suddenly transformed into the no less abstract “Citizen,” how the free sovereign individual found himself doomed to be the defenseless slave and victim of the absolute State or “Nation,” that is to say, of a group of obscure persons borne to the surface of public life by the eddies of revolution and rendered the more ferocious by the consciousness of their own intrinsic nonentity. No doubt it would be highly interesting and instructive to follow the thread of logic which connects the doctrines of 1789 with the events of 1793. But I believe it to be still more important to recognize that the πρωτον ψευδος , the basic falsehood, of the Revolution — the conception of the individual man as a being complete in and for himself — that this false notion of individualism was not the invention of the revolutionaries or of their spiritual forbears, the Encyclopædists, but was the logical, though unforeseen, issue of an earlier pseudo-Christian or semi-Christian doctrine which has been the root cause of all the anomalies in the past history and present state of Christendom.

Men have imagined that the acknowledgment of the divinity of Christ relieves them of the obligation of taking His words seriously. They have twisted certain texts of the Gospel so as to get out of them the meaning they want, while they have conspired to pass over in silence other texts which do not lend themselves to such treatment. The precept “Render to Cæsar the things that are Cæsar’s, and to God the things that are God’s” is constantly quoted to sanction an order of things which gives Cæsar all and God nothing. The saying “My Kingdom is not of this world” is always being used to justify and confirm the paganism of our social and political life, as though Christian society were destined to belong to this world and not to the Kingdom of Christ. On the other hand, the saying “All power is given Me in Heaven and Earth” is never quoted. Men are ready to accept Christ as sacrificing Priest and atoning Victim; but they do not want Christ the King. His royal dignity has been ousted by every kind of pagan despotism, and Christian peoples have taken up the cry of the Jewish rabble: “We have no king but Cæsar!” Thus history has witnessed, and we are still witnessing, the curious phenomenon of a society which professes Christianity as its religion but remains pagan not merely in its life but in the very basis of that life.

This dichotomy is not so much a logical non sequitur as a moral failure. That is obvious from the hypocrisy and sophistry which are characteristic of the arguments commonly used to justify this state of affairs. “Slavery and severe hardship,” said a bishop renowned in Russia thirty years ago, “are not contrary to the spirit of Christianity; for physical suffering is not a hindrance to the salvation of the soul, which is the one and only end of our religion.” As though the infliction of physical suffering by a man on his fellow-men did not imply in him a moral depravity and an act of injustice and cruelty which were certainly imperiling the salvation of his soul! Granted even — though the supposition is absurd — that a Christian society can be insensible to the sufferings of the oppressed, the question remains whether it can be indifferent to the sin of the oppressors.

Economic slavery, even more than slavery properly so called, has found its champions in the Christian world. Society and the State, they maintain, are in no way bound to take general and regular measures against pauperism; voluntary almsgiving is enough; did not Christ say that there would always be the poor on Earth? Yes, there will always be the poor; there will also always be the sick, but does that prove the uselessness of health services? Poverty in itself is no more an evil than sickness; the evil consists in remaining indifferent to the sufferings of one’s neighbor. And it is not a question only of the poor; the rich also have a claim on our compassion. These poor rich! We do everything to develop their bump of acquisitiveness, and then we expect them to enter the Kingdom of God through the imperceptible opening of individual charity. Besides, it is well known that authoritative scholars see in the phrase “the eye of a needle” simply a literal translation of the Hebrew name given to one of the gates of Jerusalem (negeb-hakhammath or khur-ha-khammath) which it was difficult for camels to pass through. Surely, then, it is not the infinitesimal contribution of personal philanthropy which the Gospel enjoins upon the rich, but rather the narrow and difficult, but nevertheless practicable, way of social reform.

This desire to limit the social action of Christianity to individual charity, this attempt to deprive the Christian moral code of its binding character and its positive legal sanction is a modern version of that ancient Gnostic antithesis (the system of Marcion, in particular) so often anathematized by the Church. That all human relationships should be governed by charity and brotherly love is undoubtedly the express will of God and the end of His creation; but in historic reality, as in the Lord’s Prayer, the fulfillment of the divine will on Earth is only realized after the hallowing of God’s Name and the coming of His Kingdom. The Name of God is Truth; His Kingdom is Justice. It follows that the knowledge of the truth and the practice of justice are necessary conditions for the triumph of evangelical charity in human society.

In truth, all are one; and God, the absolute Unity, is all in all. But this divine Unity is hidden from our view by the world of evil and illusion, the result of universal human sin. The basic condition of this world is the division and isolation of the parts of the Great Whole; and even Man, who should have been the unifying rationale of the material universe, finds himself split up and scattered over the Earth, and has been unable by his own efforts to achieve more than a partial and unstable unity, the universal monarchy of paganism. This monarchy, first represented by Tiberius and Nero, received its true unifying principle when grace and truth were manifested in Jesus Christ. Once united to God, the human race recovered its own unity. But this unity had to be threefold to be complete; it had to realize its ideal perfection on the basis of a divine fact and in the midst of the life of mankind. Since mankind is objectively separated from the divine unity, this unity must in the first place be given to us as an objective reality independent of ourselves — the Kingdom of God coming amongst us, the external, objective Church. But once reunited to this external unity, men must translate it into action, they must assimilate it by their own efforts — the Kingdom of God is to be taken by force, and the men of violence possess it. At first manifested for us and then by us, the Kingdom of God must finally be revealed in us in all its intrinsic, absolute perfection as love, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit.

Thus the Church Universal (in the broad sense of the word) develops as a threefold union of the divine and the human: there is the priestly union, in which the divine element, absolute and unchangeable, predominates and forms the Church properly so called (the Temple of God); there is the kingly union, in which the human element predominates and which forms the Christian State (the Church as the living Body of God); and there is lastly the prophetic union, in which the divine and the human must penetrate one another in free mutual interaction and so form the perfect Christian society (the Church as the Spouse of God).

The moral basis of the priestly union, or of the Church in the strict sense of the word, is faith and religious devotion; the kingly union of the Christian State is based on law and justice; while the element proper to the prophetic union or the perfect society is freedom and love.

The Church, in the narrower sense, represented by the hierarchy, re-unites mankind to God by the profession of the true faith and the grace of the sacraments. But if the faith communicated by the Church to Christian humanity is a living faith, and if the grace of the sacraments is an effectual grace, the resultant union of the divine and the human cannot be limited to the special domain of religion, but must extend to all Man’s common relationships and must regenerate and transform his social and political life. Here opens up a field of action which is man’s own proper sphere. The divine-human action is no longer an accomplished fact, as in the priestly Church, but a task awaiting fulfillment, the task of making the divine Truth a reality in human society, of putting Truth into practice; and Truth, expressed in practice, is called Justice.

Truth is the absolute existence of all in unity; it is the universal solidarity which exists eternally in God, but which has been lost by the natural man and recovered in principle by Christ, the spiritual Man. It remains for human activity to continue the unifying work of the God-Man by contesting the world with the contrary principle of egoism and division. Each single being, whether nation, class, or individual, in so far as it asserts its own individuality in isolation from the divine human sum of things, is acting against Truth; and Truth, if it is alive in us, must react and manifest itself as Justice. Thus having recognized the universal solidarity, the All-in-One, as Truth, and having put it into practice as Justice, regenerate Man will be able to perceive it as his inmost essence and to enjoy it fully in the spirit of freedom and love.

All are one in the Church through the unity of hierarchy, faith, and sacraments; all are made one in the Christian State through justice and law; all must be one in natural charity and free co-operation. These three modes, or rather degrees, of unity are inseparably connected. In order to impose that universal solidarity which is the Kingdom of God on nations and classes and individuals, the Christian State must believe in it as absolute Truth revealed by God Himself. But the divine revelation cannot be made directly to the State as such, that is to say, to a natural humanity outside the sphere of the divine operation: God has revealed Himself, He has entrusted His truth and His grace to an elect humanity, that is, to the Church, sanctified and organized by Himself. If the State, itself the product of human agencies and historic circumstances, is to bring mankind under the sway of absolute Justice, it must justify itself by submission to the Church which provides the moral and religious sanction and the actual basis for its work. It is equally clear that the perfect Christian society, or the prophetic union, the reign of love and spiritual freedom, presupposes the priestly and kingly union. For the divine truth and grace cannot fully control the moral being of mankind nor effect its inner transformation unless they first have an objective force in the world, unless they are incarnate in a religious fact and upheld by law, unless, that is, they exist as Church and State.

Since the priestly institution is a fact, and the brotherhood of perfect freedom is an ideal, it is the middle term especially — the State in its relation to Christianity — which determines the historic destiny of mankind. The State exists in order to protect human society against evil in its external and public form — that is, against manifest evil. The true social good being the solidarity of the whole, universal justice and peace, social evil is simply the violation of this solidarity. The actual life of mankind shows a threefold violation of that universal solidarity which is justice: justice is violated, firstly, when one nation attacks the existence or freedom of another, secondly, when one social class oppresses another, and thirdly, when an individual by committing a crime openly revolts against the social order. As long as there existed in the history of mankind several separate States, absolutely independent of one another, the immediate task of each in the sphere of foreign policy was confined to maintaining this independence. But the ideal or rather the instinct of international solidarity persisted throughout human history, and found its expression either in that tendency to universal monarchy which culminated in the ideal and the historic reality of the pax Romana, or (among the Jews) in the religious principle which affirmed the natural unity and common origin of the whole human race, of all the sons of Adam (bene-Adam) — a conception afterwards completed by the Christian religion which added to this natural unity the spiritual fellowship of all those who are regenerate and made sons of the second Adam, the Christ (bene-Mashiah).

This new ideal was realized, however incompletely, in medieval Christendom, which despite its turbulent condition did, as a rule, regard any war between Christian peoples as a civil war and therefore as a sin and a crime. The modern nations, having shattered the papal monarchy which was the foundation of this imperfect but genuine unity, have had to substitute for the ideal of Catholic Christendom the fiction of the European balance of power. On all hands it is recognized, whether sincerely or not, that the true objective of international politics must be universal peace.

Two equally obvious facts, then, are to be noted: first, that there exists a general consciousness of the solidarity of mankind and a desire for international unity, for the pax Christiana or, if you will, the pax humana; secondly, that this unity does not exist in fact, and that the first of the three problems of society is as far from being solved at the present day as it was in the ancient world. The same is true of the other two problems.

Universal solidarity implies that each element of the sum total — each nation, society or individual — not only has the right to exist, but possesses in addition a peculiar and intrinsic worth which forbids its being treated as a mere means to the general well-being. The true positive conception of justice can be expressed in the following formula: each particular being, whether collective or individual, has always a place to itself in the universal organism of the race. This positive justice was unknown to the ancient State; the State protected itself and maintained the social order by exterminating its enemies in war, reducing its laboring class to a condition of slavery, and torturing or killing its criminals. Christianity, regarding every human being as of infinite worth, was bound to bring about a complete change in the character and action of the State. The ills of society remained the same, in their threefold form: international, civil, and criminal; the State, as before, had to fight evil in these three spheres, but the specific objective and the methods of the struggle could not remain the same. It was no longer a matter of defending a particular social group; this negative aim was replaced by a positive task; universal solidarity had to be established in the face of national differences; there had to be a reaction against class-antagonism and individual egoism in the name of true social justice. The pagan State had to deal with the enemy, the slave and the criminal; the enemy, the slave and the criminal had no rights. But the Christian State has only to deal with the members of Christ, whether suffering, sick or corrupt; it must pacify national hatreds, mend the iniquities of society, and correct the vices of individuals. In it the foreigner has a right to citizenship, the slave a right to freedom, and the criminal a right to moral regeneration. In the city of God there is no enemy or foreigner, no slave or proletarian, no criminal or convict. The foreigner is simply a brother from a far country; the proletarian is an unfortunate brother who needs succor; the criminal is a fallen brother who must be helped up.

It follows that in the Christian State three things are absolutely ruled out: first, wars inspired by national selfishness, or conquests which build up one nation upon the ruins of another (for the prime objective of the Christian State is universal solidarity or the pax Christiana); next, civil and economic slavery which makes one class the passive instrument of another; and lastly, vindictive punishment, especially capital punishment, inflicted by society upon the guilty individual in order to make him a buttress of public safety. By committing a crime, the individual shows that he regards society simply as a means to, and his neighbors as the instrument of, his own selfishness. But this injustice must not be countered with the further injustice of belittling the criminal’s own human divinity and of reducing him to the level of passive instrumentality by a punishment which leaves no room for his amendment or regeneration.

In the purely human order, the sphere of temporal relations, it was the duty of the State to give expression to that absolute solidarity of each individual with the whole universe which the Church represents in the spiritual order by the unity of her priesthood, her faith and her sacraments. Belief in this unity had to precede its realization in practice; before becoming Christian in fact, the State had to accept the Christian faith. This first step was taken at Constantinople; it sums up the whole Christian achievement of the Second Empire.

The Byzantine transformation of the Roman Empire, begun by Constantine the Great, continued by Theodosius and finally achieved by Justinian, produced no more than a nominally Christian state. Its laws, its institutions, and a good deal of its public morality, all retained unmistakable characteristics of the old paganism. Slavery continued to be legal; and crimes, especially political misdemeanors, were punished by law with an exquisite cruelty. This contrast between professed Christianity and practical savagery is aptly personified in the founder of the Second Empire; Constantine believed sincerely in the Christian God, paid honor to the bishops and discussed the Trinity with them; yet he had no scruple about exercising the right of a pagan husband and father, and putting Fausta and Crispus to death.

So glaring a contradiction between faith and life, however, could not last long without some attempt at reconciliation. Rather than sacrifice its actual paganism, the Byzantine Empire attempted in self-justification to pervert the purity of the Christian idea. This compromise between truth and error lies at the heart of all those heresies (often devised by the imperial power and always, except in certain individual instances, favored by it) which distracted Christendom from the fourth century to the ninth.

The fundamental truth and distinctive idea of Christianity is the perfect union of the divine and the human individually achieved in Christ, and finding its social realization in Christian humanity, in which the divine is represented by the Church, centered in the supreme pontiff, and the human by the State. This intimate relation between Church and State implies the primacy of the former, since the divine is previous in time and superior in being to the human. Heresy attacked the perfect unity of the divine and the human in Jesus Christ precisely in order to undermine the living bond between Church and State, and to confer upon the latter an absolute independence. Hence it is clear why the emperors of the Second Rome, intent on maintaining within Christendom the absolutism of the pagan State, were so partial to all the heresies, which were but manifold variations on a single theme: —

Jesus Christ is not the true Son of God, consubstantial with the Father; God has not become incarnate; nature and mankind remain cut off from divinity, and are not united to it; and consequently the human State may rightly keep its independence and supremacy intact. Constantius and Valens had indeed good reason to support Arianism.

The humanity of Jesus Christ constitutes a person complete in itself, and is united only by a relationship to the Word of God. From which follows the practical conclusion that the human State is a complete and absolute entity, acknowledging no more than an external relationship to religion. This is the essence of the Nestorian heresy, and it becomes clear why on its appearance the Emperor Theodosius II took it under his protection and did all he could to uphold it.

The humanity in Jesus Christ is absorbed by His divinity: here is a heresy apparently the exact opposite of the preceding. Nothing of the sort; if the premise is different, the conclusion is exactly the same. If Christ’s human nature exists no longer, the Incarnation is simply a past event, nature and humankind remain utterly outside the sphere of the Divine. Christ has borne away to Heaven all that was His and has abandoned the Earth to Cæsar. It was an unerring instinct which moved the same Theodosius, regardless of the apparent inconsistency, to transfer his favor from vanquished Nestorianism to the new-born Monophysitism, and to bring about its formal adoption by a quasi-œcumenical council, the “robber-council” of Ephesus. And even after the authority of a great Pope had prevailed over that of a heretical council, the emperors, more or less abetted by the Greek hierarchy, did not cease to attempt fresh compromises. The henoticon of the Emperor Zeno (which caused the first prolonged rupture between East and West, the schism of Acacius) and the unprincipled intrigues of Justinian and Theodora were followed by a new imperial heresy; Monothelitism maintained that there is no human will or activity in the God-Man, that His human nature is purely passive, entirely controlled by the absolute fact of His divinity. This was, in effect, to deny human freedom and energy; it was that fatalism or quietism which would give human nature no share in the working out of its own salvation; for it is God alone Who operates, and the whole duty of the Christian consists in passive submission to the divine fact which is represented in its spiritual aspect by the unchanging Church and in its temporal aspect by the sacred power of the god Cæsar. Maintained for more than fifty years by the Empire and the whole Eastern hierarchy with the exception of a few monks who had to seek refuge at Rome, the Monothelite heresy was condemned at Constantinople in 680, only to make room before long for a new imperial compromise between Christian truth and the spirit of Antichrist.

The intimate union of the Creator and the creature is not confined in Christian belief to the rational being of Man; it includes also his corporeal being and, through the latter, the material nature of the whole universe. The compromise of the heretics tried in vain to abstract in principle from the divine-human unity, first, the very substance of Man’s being, at one time by declaring it absolutely separate from the Divinity (in Nestorianism), at another by making it vanish completely into the latter (in Monophysitism); secondly, it tried to abstract human will and activity, the rational being of Man, by absorbing it into the divine operation (in Monothelitism); there only remained, thirdly, the corporeal nature, the external being of Man and, through him, of the whole of Nature. The denial to the material and sensible world of all possibility of redemption, sanctification and union with God; that is the idea at the root of the Iconoclastic heresy.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ in the flesh has proved that bodily existence is not excluded from the union of the human and the Divine, and that external and sensible objectivity can and must become the real instrument and visible image of the divine power. Hence the cult of holy images and relics, hence the legitimate belief in material miracles wrought by these sacred objects. Thus in declaring war on the images the Byzantine Emperors were not attacking a religious custom or a mere detail of worship so much as a necessary and infinitely important application of Christian truth itself. To claim that divinity cannot be sensibly expressed or externally manifested, or that the divine power cannot employ visible and symbolic means of action, is to rob the divine incarnation of all its reality. It was more than a compromise; it was the suppression of Christianity. Just as in the previous heresies under the semblance of a purely theological dispute there lay hidden a grave social and political issue, so the Iconoclastic movement under the guise of a ritual reformation threatened to shatter the social organism of Christendom. The material realization of the Divine, signified in the sphere of religious worship by holy images and relics, is represented in the social sphere by an institution. There is in the Christian Church a materially fixed point, an external and visible center of action, an image and an instrument of the divine power. The apostolic see of Rome, that miraculous ikon of universal Christianity, was directly involved in the Iconoclastic struggle, since all the heresies were in the last resort denials of the reality of that divine incarnation, the permanence of which in the social and political order was represented by Rome. It is indeed historically evident that all the heresies actively supported or passively accepted by the majority of the Greek clergy encountered insuperable opposition from the Roman Church and finally came to grief on this Rock of the Gospel. This is especially true of the Iconoclastic heresy; for in denying all external manifestation of the divine in the world it was making a direct attack on the raison d’être of the Chair of Peter as the real objective center of the visible Church.

The pseudo-Christian Empire of Byzantium was bound to engage in decisive combat with the orthodox Papacy; for the latter was not only the infallible guardian of Christian truth but also the first realization of that truth in the collective life of the human race. To read the moving letters of Pope Gregory II to the barbarous Isaurian Emperor is to realize that the very existence of Christianity was at stake. The outcome of the struggle could not be in doubt; the last of the imperial heresies went the way of its predecessors, and with it the circle of theoretic or dogmatic compromises which Constantine’s successors had attempted between Christian truth and the principle of paganism was finally closed. The era of imperial heresies was followed by the emergence of Byzantine “orthodoxy.” To understand this fresh phase of the anti-Christian spirit we must revert to its origins in the preceding period.

Throughout the history of the great Eastern heresies, extending over five centuries from the time of Arius to that of the last Iconoclasts, we constantly find in the Empire and Church of the East three main parties whose alternating victories and defeats form the framework of this curious evolution. We see in the first place the champions of formal heresy, regularly instigated and supported by the imperial court. From the religious point of view, they represented the reaction of Eastern paganism to Christian truth; politically, they were the declared enemies of that independent ecclesiastical government founded by Jesus Christ and represented by the apostolic see of Rome. They began by conceding to sar, whose protégés they were, unbounded authority not only in the government of the Church but even in matters of doctrine; and when Cæsar, impelled by the orthodox majority of his subjects and by the fear of playing into the hands of the Pope, ended by betraying his own creatures, the leaders of the heretical party sought more solid support elsewhere by exploiting the separatist and semi-pagan tendencies of the various nations which were free, or were aiming at freedom, from the Roman yoke. Thus Arianism, the religion of the Empire under Constantius and Valens, but abandoned by their successors, claimed the allegiance of the Goths and Lombards for centuries; Nestorianism, betrayed by its champion Theodosius II, was for a time welcomed by the Eastern Syrians; and Monophysitism, thrust out from Byzantium in spite of all the efforts of the Emperors, finally became the national religion of Egypt, Abyssinia and Armenia.

At the opposite extreme to this heretical party, trebly anti-Christian — in its religious doctrine, its secularism, and its nationalism — we find the absolutely orthodox Catholic party engaged in defending the purity of the Christian idea against all the pagan compromises and in championing free and worldwide ecclesiastical government against the onslaughts of Cæsaropapism and the aims of national separatism. This party could not count on the favor of earthly powers; of the higher clergy it included only individuals here and there. But it relied on the greatest religious force of those times, the monks, and also on the simple faith of the mass of devout believers, at least in the central parts of the Byzantine Empire. Moreover, these orthodox Catholics found and recognized in the central Chair of St. Peter the mighty palladium of religious truth and freedom. To indicate the moral weight and ecclesiastical importance of this party, it is enough to say that it was the party of St. Athanasius the Great, of St. John Chrysostom, of St. Flavian, of St. Maximus the Confessor and of St. Theodore of the Studium.

But it was neither the declared heretics nor the genuinely orthodox who controlled for many centuries the destinies of the Christian East. The decisive part in the story was played by a third party which, although it occupied an intermediate position between the other two, was distinguished from them by more than mere verbal subtleties; it had a clearly defined aim and pursued a well-considered policy. The great majority of the higher Greek clergy belonged to this party, which we may call semi-orthodox or rather “orthodox-anticatholic.” These priests held firmly to orthodox dogma, either from theoretical conviction or from force of habit or from devotion to the common tradition. They had nothing in principle against the unity of the universal Church, provided only that the center of that unity was situated in their midst; and since in point of fact this center was situated elsewhere, they preferred to be Greeks rather than Christians and accepted a divided Church rather than the Church unified by a power which was in their eyes foreign and hostile to their nationality. As Christians, they could not be Cæsaropapists in principle, but as patriotic Greeks first and foremost, they preferred the Byzantine Cæsaropapism to the Roman Papacy.

Unluckily for them the Greek autocrats distinguished themselves for the most part as the champions or even as the authors of heresy; and what they found still more intolerable was that the rare occasions when the Emperors took orthodoxy under their protection were exactly the occasions when the Empire and the Papacy were in accord with one another. To disturb this accord and to attach the Emperors to orthodoxy while weaning them from Catholicism was the chief aim of the Greek hierarchy. In pursuit of this aim they were ready, despite their sincere orthodoxy, to make sacrifices even on questions of dogma.

Formal and explicit heresy was regarded with horror by these pious gentlemen, but when it pleased the divine Cæsar to offer them his own version of orthodox dogma, they did not scrutinize it too closely. They preferred to receive a revised or incomplete formula at the hands of a Greek Emperor rather than accept the truth pure and intact from the mouth of a Pope; they were glad to see Zeno’s henoticon replace the dogmatic epistle of St. Leo the Great. In the six or seven successive episodes in the history of the Eastern heresies, the policy of the pseudo-orthodox party was always the same. When heresy in its first flush of victory was being thrust upon them with violence, these prudent people, having a pronounced distaste for martyrdom, gave way, though unwillingly. Thanks to their passive support, the heretics were able to convene general assemblies as large as, or even larger than, the true œcumenical councils. But when the blood of confessors, the fidelity of the mass of the people, and the threatening authority of the Roman pontiff had compelled the imperial power to forsake the cause of error, these unwilling heretics returned en masse to orthodoxy and, like the laborers hired at the eleventh hour, received their full pay. The heroic confessors seldom survived the persecutions, and it was the worldly-wise who enjoyed the victory of Truth. They formed the majority in the orthodox councils, as they had previously in the heretical conventions; and though they could not refuse concurrence to the Pope’s representatives when he sent them a precise and definite formulation of orthodox dogma, though at the first they even expressed their concurrence with more or less sincere enthusiasm, the evident triumph of the Papacy soon brought them back to their prevailing sentiment of jealous hatred toward the apostolic see, and they proceeded to use all the efforts of a determined will and all the resources of an astute intelligence to counterbalance the success of the Papacy, to rob it of its rightful influence and to set up in opposition to it an unreal and usurped authority. The Pope had been useful in dealing with heresy; but once heresy was done with, what need was there of the Pope? Could not the patriarch of the old Rome be replaced by the patriarch of the new? Thus each triumph of orthodoxy, which was always the triumph of the Papacy, was invariably followed at Byzantium by an anti-Catholic reaction into which the sincere but short-sighted champions of orthodoxy were also drawn. This separatist reaction would last until a new heresy, more or less favored by the imperial power, supervened to disturb orthodox consciences and remind them of the advantage of a genuine ecclesiastical authority.

When official Arianism, having reigned supreme in the Eastern Empire for half a century, failed in the attempt to invade the Western Church, and a Spaniard came to Constantinople with the blessing of the Roman and Milanese pontiffs to restore orthodoxy there, the decisive part played by the Papacy in the great struggle and in the final triumph of the true doctrine of the Trinity did not fail to arouse the jealousy of those prudent members of the Greek hierarchy who, having been semiArians under Constantius and Valens, had now become completely orthodox under Theodosius. Gathered in the year 380 in an assembly which a great saint of the period, Gregory the Theologian, has described in familiar words, they constituted themselves an œcumenical council without more ado, as though the whole of Western Christendom did not exist; they wantonly replaced the Nicene profession of faith, the common standard of universal orthodoxy in East and West, with a new formula of purely Eastern origin, and they crowned their uncanonical proceedings by conferring on the bishop of Constantinople, a mere suffragan of the archbishop of Heraclea, the dignity of first Patriarch of the Eastern Church, in despite of the apostolic sees of Alexandria and Antioch which the great Nicene council had confirmed in their rights. If the sovereign pontiffs had been ordinarily as ambitious as some like to represent them, if, indeed, the defense of their lawful rights had been dearer to their hearts than the preservation of universal peace, nothing could have prevented the separation of the two Churches in the year 381. But the generosity and Christian spirit of Pope Damasus succeeded in averting that disaster. He recognized that the creed of Constantinople was as orthodox as that of Nicæa and that the additional article on the Holy Spirit was justified in view of the new heresy of the Pneumatomachi, who held the Third Person of the Trinity to be a creature begotten by the Son and thus denied the procession of the Spirit from the Father. The Pope therefore approved the dogmatic act of the Greek council in his own name and in that of the whole Latin Church and thereby gave it the authority of a true œcumenical council; the usurpation of the patriarchate by the see of Constantinople was ignored.

But the Papacy played an even greater part in the history of the chief Christological heresies during the fifth century than in the Arian struggles of the fourth. Most of the Greek bishops, forming our third party, were shamefully compromised by their passive acquiescence in the robber-council of Ephesus at which the great body of orthodox prelates were obliged not only to see St. Flavian done to death before their eyes, but also to sign an heretical profession of faith. In contrast to this criminal weakness, the Papacy appeared in all its moral power and majesty in the person of St. Leo the Great. At Chalcedon the great number of Greek bishops who had taken part in Dioscorus’ robber-council were obliged to beg forgiveness of the legates of Pope Leo, who was hailed as the divinely inspired head of the Universal Church. Such homage to justice and truth was too much for the moral mediocrity of these corrupt prelates. The anti-Catholic reaction followed immediately at the very same council. After enthusiastically applauding the Pope’s dogmatic epistle as “the very words of the blessed apostle Peter,” the Byzantine bishops attempted to substitute for this apostolic utterance an ambiguous formula which left the door open to heresy.3 Foiled in this attempt, they chose a different ground for their anti-Catholic activities, and in an irregular session of the council they asserted the imperial patriarch’s primacy of jurisdiction over the whole East, and his equality with the Pope. This act, aimed against the sovereign pontiff, had nevertheless to be humbly submitted by the Greeks for the ratification of the Pope himself, who quashed it completely. Thus, in spite of all, the council of Chalcedon has its place in history as an outstanding triumph for the Papacy. But the orthodox anti-Catholics could not rest content with such an outcome, and this time the reaction was decisive and persistent. Pure orthodoxy being too Roman for them, they began to flirt with heresy. The patriarch Acacius favored the Emperor Zeno’s henoticon, which was a compromise with Monophysitism; he was excommunicated by the Pope and has the unhappy distinction of giving his name to the first formal schism between East and West. But the main circumstances of this anti-Catholic reaction prevented its development into a definite cleavage. In the schism of Acacius the semi-orthodox party were discredited by the concessions they had to make to undisguised heresy, concessions which not only did violence to the religious convictions of the faithful, but did nothing to meet the demands of the heretics. The latter, emboldened by the henoticon which they had rejected with contempt, proceeded to set the whole of Egypt ablaze and threatened to separate it from the Empire. On the other side, the orthodox monks, exasperated by the treachery of the prelates, were stirring up discord in Syria and Asia Minor; and even in Constantinople itself the monk who pinned the bull of excommunication issued by the Pope on to the cope of the schismatic patriarch was applauded by the crowd.

To prolong such a state of affairs was not good policy; and urged by the imperial government, the successors of Acacius showed themselves more and more conciliatory. At length, under the Emperor Justin I, peace was concluded between the Churches to the advantage and honor of the Papacy. The Eastern bishops, in order to prove their orthodoxy and gain admission to the communion of the Roman Church, were obliged to accept and sign without reservation the dogmatic formula of Pope Hormisdas, that is, to recognize implicitly the supreme doctrinal authority of the apostolic see.4 But the submission of the Greek prelates was not sincere; they were still meditating an entente with the Monophysites against the see of Peter. Despite their underhand intrigues, however, the power of the Papacy was demonstrated afresh — as the liturgical books of the Greco-Russian Church record — when Pope St. Agapitus, who had come to Constantinople on a political mission, deposed on his own personal authority a patriarch suspected of Monophysitism, set up an orthodox patriarch in his stead, and compelled all the Greek bishops to sign anew the formula of Hormisdas. 

Meanwhile, Justinian’s forces were victorious in Africa and Italy; Rome was recovered from the Ostrogoths and the Pope was once again de facto the subject of the Byzantine Emperor. In these circumstances and under the influence of his wife’s Monophysite tendencies, Justinian changed his attitude to the head of the Church. The anti-Catholic party seized the reins and Pope Vigilius, a prisoner at Constantinople, was fated to bear the brunt of a triumphant reaction. The supreme Teacher of the Church maintained his own orthodoxy, but as sovereign Head of the government of the Church he found himself deeply humiliated; and soon afterwards a bishop of Constantinople thought himself powerful enough to usurp the title of Œcumenical Patriarch. 

This bishop, orthodox in his doctrine and an exemplary ascetic in his private life, fulfilled the ideal of the great anti-Catholic party. But a new imperial whim was sufficient to dispel the illusion of this precarious orthodoxy. The Emperor Heraclius thought he saw in Monothelitism the means of reuniting the orthodox with the moderate Monophysites and thus restoring peace to the Empire, consolidating the Greek religion and freeing it once for all from the influence of Rome. The higher clergy throughout the East welcomed this idea unreservedly. The patriarchal sees were occupied intermittently by a series of more or less fanatical heretics, and Monothelitism became for half a century the official religion of the whole Greek Empire as Semi-Arianism had been in the time of Constantius. A few monks, the heroic champions of orthodoxy, headed by St. Maximus the Confessor, took refuge at Rome; and once again the apostle Peter strengthened his brethren.

A long succession of Popes from Severinus to St. Agatho met the heresies of the Emperors with an unflinching opposition and one of them, St. Martin, was dragged by soldiers from the altar, was haled like a criminal from Rome to Constantinople and from Constantinople to the Crimea, and finally gave his life for the orthodox faith. At length, after fifty years’ struggle, religious truth and moral power won the day. The mighty Empire and its worldly clergy surrendered once again to a poor, defenseless pontiff. 

At the council of Constantinople, the sixth œcumenical council, the apostolic see of Rome was honored as an authority that had remained untainted by error; and the Greek bishops received Pope Agatho’s pronouncement with a repetition of the acclamations with which the fathers of Chalcedon had formerly hailed St. Leo the Great. But once again it was not long before this momentary enthusiasm was followed by a powerful reaction. While the true heroes of orthodoxy, such as St. Maximus the Confessor, could not find words strong enough to extol the preeminence and achievements of the Roman see, the orthodox anti-Catholics, though profiting by its achievements, were too jealous of its pre-eminence to give it recognition. In their humiliation and irritation at the long list of heretics and heresiarchs who had defiled the see of Constantinople and whom the council was bound to anathematize, the Greek bishops revenged themselves by inventing the heresy of Pope Honorius and foisting it upon the good-natured Roman legates. Not content with this, they re-assembled some years after the council in the imperial palace at Constantinople (in Trullo); for this convention they claimed œcumenical authority on various absurd pretexts either by representing it, contrary to the evidence, as the continuation of the sixth council, or alternatively — such is the usual duplicity of falsehood — by reckoning it as the conclusion of the fifth and sixth councils under the outlandish title of “Quinisext.” The object of these absurd deceptions came out clearly in certain canons promulgated by the fathers of the Trullan council, which condemned various disciplinary and ritual usages of the Roman Church. There, ready-made, were the grounds for schism; and if schism did not follow then and there, two centuries before Photius, we have only to thank the Iconoclast Emperor, Leo the Isaurian, who at that moment came on the scene to upset the well-laid plans of the orthodox anti-Catholics.

Here was the most violent, as it was the last, of the imperial heresies; and with its emergence all the indirect and disguised denials of the Christian idea were exhausted. After the condemnation of the Iconoclasts, the fundamental dogma of Christian orthodoxy — the perfect union of the Creator and the creature — was defined in all its aspects and became an accepted fact. But the seventh œcumenical council which achieved this task in 787 had been assembled under the auspices of Pope Adrian I and had taken a dogmatic epistle of that pontiff as guide to its decisions. It was again a triumph for the Papacy; it could not then be “the triumph of Orthodoxy;” that was postponed till half a century later when, after the comparatively feeble Iconoclastic reaction brought about by the Armenian dynasty, the orthodox anti-Catholic party finally succeeded in 842 in crushing the last remnants of the imperial heresy without the help of the Pope, and in including it with all the others under a solemn anathema.5 Indeed, Byzantine orthodoxy might well triumph in 842; the great Photius, its light and glory, was already making his appearance at the court of the devout Theodora, the Empress who caused the massacre of a hundred thousand Paulician heretics; before long he would be mounting the throne of the œcumenical patriarchs. 

The schism initiated by Photius in 867 and consummated by Michael Cerularius in 1054 was closely connected with the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” and was the complete realization of the ideal which the orthodox anti-Catholic party had dreamed of since the fourth century. Dogmatic truth having been once defined and all the heresies finally condemned, they had no further use for the Pope; nothing remained but to crown the work by a formal separation from Rome. Furthermore, it was this solution which best suited the Byzantine Emperors; for they had come to see that it was not worthwhile rousing the religious passions of their subjects by doctrinal compromise between Christianity and paganism and thus throwing them into the arms of the Papacy, when a strict theoretical orthodoxy could very well be reconciled with a political and social order which was completely pagan. It is a significant fact, and one that has not been sufficiently observed, that from the year 842 not a single imperial heretic or heresiarch reigned at Constantinople, and the harmony between the Greek Church and State was not once seriously disturbed. The two powers had come to terms and had made their peace, bound to one another by a common idea: the denial of Christianity as a social force and as the motive principle of historical progress. The Emperors permanently embraced “Orthodoxy” as an abstract dogma, while the orthodox prelates bestowed their benediction in sæcula sæculorum on the paganism of Byzantine public life. And since “sine sanguine nullum pactum,” a magnificent hecatomb of one hundred thousand Paulicians sealed the alliance of the Second Rome with the “Second Church.”

This so-called “orthodoxy” of the Byzantines was in fact nothing but ingrown heresy. The true central dogma of Christianity is the intimate and complete union of the Divine and the human without confusion or division. The logical consequence of this truth — to confine ourselves to the sphere of practical human existence — is the regeneration of social and political life by the spirit of the Gospel, in other words, the Christianization of society and the State. Instead of this synthetic and organic union of the Divine and the human, the two elements were in turn confused or divided, or one of them was absorbed or suppressed by the other. To begin with, the Divine and the human were confused in the sacred majesty of the Emperor. Just as in the confused thought of the Arians Christ was a hybrid being, more than man and less than God, so Cæsaropapism, which was simply political Arianism, confused the temporal and spiritual powers without uniting them, and made the autocrat something more than the head of the State, without succeeding in making him a true head of the Church. Religious society was separated from secular society, the former being relegated to the monasteries, while the forum was abandoned to pagan laws and passions. The dualism of Nestorius, condemned in theology, became the very foundation of Byzantine life. Or again, the religious ideal was reduced to bare contemplation, that is, to the absorption of the human spirit in the Godhead, an obviously Monophysite ideal. The moral life, on the other hand, was robbed of its practical force by the inculcation of the supreme ideal of passive obedience and blind submission to power; that is to say, of an ideal of quietism which was in reality the denial of human will and energy, the heresy of the Monothelites. Finally, an exaggerated asceticism attempted to suppress the bodily nature of man and to shatter the living image of the divine incarnation — a logical though unconscious application of the Iconoclastic heresy. 

This profound contradiction between professed orthodoxy and practical heresy was the Achilles’ heel of the Byzantine Empire. There lay the real cause of its downfall. Indeed, it deserved to fall and still more it deserved to fall before Islam. For Islam is simply sincere and logical Byzantinism, free from all its inner contradiction. It is the frank and full reaction of the spirit of the East against Christianity; it is a system in which dogma is closely related to the conditions of life and in which the belief of the individual is in perfect agreement with the social and political order.

We have seen that the anti-Christian movement, which found expression in the imperial heresies, had in the seventh and eighth centuries issued in two doctrines, of which one, that of the Monothelites, was an indirect denial of human freedom, and the other, that of the Iconoclasts, was an implied rejection of the divine phenomenality. The direct and explicit assertion of these two errors was of the essence of the Moslem religion. Islam sees in Man a finite form without freedom, and in God an infinite freedom without form. God and Man being thus fixed at the two opposite poles of existence, there can be no filial relationship between them; the notion of the Divine coming down and taking form, or of the human ascending to a spiritual existence, is excluded; and religion is reduced to a mere external relation between the all-powerful Creator and the creature which is deprived of all freedom and owes its master nothing but a bare act of “blind surrender” (for this is what the Arabic word islam signifies). This act of surrender, expressed in a short formula of prayer to be invariably repeated day by day at fixed hours, sums up the whole religious background of the Eastern mind, which spoke its last word by the mouth of Mohammed. The simplicity of this idea of religion is matched by a no less simple conception of the social and political problem: Man and the human race have no real progress to make; there is no moral regeneration for the individual and therefore a fortiori none for society; everything is brought down to the level of a purely natural existence; the ideal is reduced to the point at which its realization presents no difficulties. Moslem society could have no other aim but the expansion of its material power and the enjoyment of the good things of the Earth. The spread of Islam by force of arms, and the government of the faithful with absolute authority, and according to the rules of an elementary justice laid down in the Koran — such is the whole task of the Moslem state, a task which it would be difficult not to accomplish with success. Despite the tendency to verbal falsehood innate in all Orientals as individuals, the complete correspondence between its beliefs and its institutions gives to the whole of Mohammedan society a distinctive note of truth and sincerity which the Christian world has never been able to achieve. Christendom as a whole is certainly set upon the path of progress and transformation; and the very loftiness of its ideal forbids us to judge it finally by any one of its various phases, past or present. But Byzantinism, which was hostile in principle to Christian progress and which aimed at reducing the whole of religion to a fact of past history, a dogmatic formula, and a liturgical ceremonial — this anti-Christianity, concealed beneath the mask of orthodoxy, was bound to collapse in moral impotence before the open and sincere anti-Christianity of Islam. It is interesting to observe that the new religion, with its dogma of fatalism, made its appearance at the precise moment when the Emperor Heraclius was inventing the Monothelite heresy, which was the disguised denial of human freedom and energy. It was hoped by this device to strengthen the official religion and to restore Egypt and Asia to the unity of the Empire. But Egypt and Asia preferred the Arab declaration of faith to the political expedient of Byzantium. Nothing would be more astonishing than the ease and swiftness of the Moslem conquest were no account taken of the prolonged anti-Christian policy of the Second Empire. Five years were enough to reduce three great patriarchates of the Eastern Church to the condition of historical relics. It was not a matter of conversion but simply of tearing off the mask.

History has passed judgment upon the Second Empire and has condemned it. Not only did it fail in its appointed task of founding the Christian State, but it strove to make abortive the historic work of Jesus Christ. Having attempted in vain to pervert orthodox dogma, it reduced it to a dead letter; it sought to undermine the edifice of the pax Christiana by attacking the central government of the Universal Church; and in public life it supplanted the law of the Gospel by the traditional policy of the pagan State. The Byzantines believed that true Christianity meant no more than guarding the dogmas and sacred rites of orthodoxy without troubling to Christianize social and political life; they thought it lawful and laudable to confine Christianity to the temple while they abandoned the marketplace to the principles of paganism. They had no reason to complain of the result; they were given their wish. Their dogma and their ritual were left to them; it was only the social and political power that fell into the hands of the Moslems, the rightful heirs of paganism.

The vocation to found the Christian State which the Greek Empire thus refused was transferred to the Romano-German world of the Franks and Allemanni. It was transferred to them by the only Christian power that had the right and duty to do so, by the power of St. Peter, the holder of the keys of the Kingdom. Observe the coincidence of dates. The foundation-stone of the future Empire of the West was laid by the baptism and anointing of the Frankish king Clovis in 496, just when, after several fruitless attempts at agreement, it seemed that the schism of Acacius would mean the final severance of the whole of Eastern Christendom from the Catholic Church. The coincidence of the year 754 is even more remarkable; at the very moment when, with every appearance of œcumenical authority, a great Iconoclastic council at Constantinople was approving the last and most violent of the imperial heresies, directed especially against the Roman Church, Pope Stephen was anointing the father of Charlemagne at Reims — or was it at St. Denis? Who will say? — with these words: “Quia ideo vos Dominus per humilitatem meam mediante S. Petro unxit in reges ut per vos sua sancta exaltatur Ecclesia et princeps apostolorum suam recipiat justitiam.” The Carolingian dynasty was bound to the Papacy by a direct filial relationship. The Pope, says an old chronicle, “per auctoritatem apostolicam jussit Pippinum regem fieri.” This act, together with its inevitable consequences, the conquest of Italy by the Franks, the donation of Pepin, and the crowning of Charlemagne as Roman Emperor, was the real and immediate cause of the separation of the Churches. By transferring the imperial scepter to a Western barbarian, the Pope became doubly a foreigner and a foe to the Greeks. All that was needed to rob him of any support at Constantinople was that the Emperors should once for all renounce their heretical tendencies, and the union of all the “Orthodox” under the standard of anti-Catholicism would be complete. The event was not long delayed; the “Triumph of Orthodoxy” and the schism of Photius were the answer of Byzantium to the crowning of Charlemagne.

This was no matter of a dispute in theology or of a rivalry between prelates. It was simply the refusal of the old Empire of Constantine to give place to the new Western power born of the close alliance of the Papacy with the Frankish kingdom; everything else was secondary or by way of excuse. This view of the matter is confirmed by the fact that after Photius’ death the schism took no effect for a century and a half — exactly the period when Western Christendom, newly organized, seemed on the verge of collapse, when the Papacy was subservient to a degenerate oligarchy and had lost its moral and religious prestige, and when the Carolingian dynasty was consumed with internal strife. But no sooner was the imperial power restored under the energetic government of the German kings, no sooner was the see of St. Peter again occupied by men of apostolic character, than the anti-Catholic movement at Constantinople broke forth with violence and the schism was consummated. 

The Franco-German Empire made sincere attempts to fulfill the task imposed upon it by its dignity as a Christian state. Notwithstanding its vices and its disorders, the new society of the West possessed one enormous advantage over the Byzantine Empire, namely the consciousness of its own evils and a profound desire to be rid of them; witness the innumerable councils summoned by popes, emperors and kings to effect moral reforms in the Church and to bring the condition of society nearer to the Christian ideal. These reforms were, indeed, never fully successful, but the point is that they did occupy men’s minds and that there was a refusal to accept in principle a contradiction between truth and life after the manner of the Byzantine world, which had never been concerned to harmonize its social conditions with its faith and had never undertaken any moral reformation; its councils had only been interested in dogmatic formulæ and in the claims of its hierarchy. 

But in giving Charlemagne and Otto the Great, St. Henry and St. Louis their due, we are bound to confess that, taken all in all, the medieval monarchy (whether under the fictitious form of the Roman Empire or under the real form of a national dynasty) did not fulfill its mission as a Christian State, nor succeed in definitely modeling society on the Christian ideal. Those great sovereigns themselves were far from grasping the social and political problem of Christianity in all its bearings; and even their ideal, for all its imperfection, proved too exalted for their successors. It was the policy of the Emperor Henry IV and of King Philip the Fair, not that of their saintly predecessors, which formed the general rule; it was their policy that paved the way for the reformation of Luther and in time bore fruit in the French Revolution. The German Empire, brought to the birth by the Roman See, broke the bonds of its parentage and set itself up as the rival of the Papacy. Thus was taken the first and most momentous step on the path of revolution. Such rivalry between father and son could not form the organic basis of a social order. The German Empire, by exhausting its strength in an anti-Christian struggle lasting through two centuries and by attacking the very basis of Catholic unity, forfeited not only its supremacy among the nations, but its very right to that supremacy. Disregarding this fictitious Roman Empire, the states of Europe proceeded to constitute themselves complete and absolutely independent units; and once again it fell to the Papacy, while warding off the attacks of the German Empire, to assume the great task which that Empire was unworthy and unable to discharge. 

It is not our present concern to praise or to justify the historical achievement of a Hildebrand or an Innocent III. Among historians of the present generation, they have received not only vindication but encomium from such distinguished Protestant writers as Voigt, Hurter and Neander. In what the great medieval popes achieved (beyond the purely spiritual sphere) for the culture of the European peoples, the peace of nations and the good order of society, there is all the greater merit inasmuch as in this work they were fulfilling a function which did not properly belong to them. Zoology and medicine tell us of cases in which a young and vigorous organism, accidentally injured in one of its essential organs, transfers its function for the time being to another organ in good condition, which is known as a “vicarious organ” (organe vicariant, vikarirendes Organ). The imperial papacy or papal empire of Innocent III and Innocent IV was such a “vicarious organ.” But this could not continue indefinitely. It needed men of exceptional quality to deal with the details of a vast and complicated political administration while keeping them all the while subordinate to the universal and spiritual goal. In succession to popes who had raised politics to the height of moral activity, there inevitably followed many more who degraded religion to the level of material interests. If Protestant historians have extolled the high achievements of the papal empire, its rapid decay is recorded by the greatest of Catholic writers, who in immortal lines calls upon a second Charlemagne to put an end to the fatal confusion of the two powers in the Roman Church (Dante, Inferno, xix; Purgatorio, vi, xvi). 

Indeed, if we consider the political and social condition of Europe towards the close of the Middle Ages we must admit that the Papacy, robbed of its secular organ and obliged to combine the two functions, was unable to give to the society which it had governed a genuinely Christian organization. International unity — the pax Christiana — was nonexistent. The nations were given up to fratricidal wars, and only by a supernatural intervention was the national existence of France saved. 

The social constitution of Europe, based on the relationship between victors and vanquished, always retained this anti-Christian character of inequality and oppression. The predominance in public life of a pride of blood which created an insurmountable barrier between noble and serf, and of a spirit of violence which made every country the scene of civil war and plunder, in addition to a penal code so barbarous as to seem diabolically inspired — where in all this can the features of a truly Christian society be recognized? 

For lack of an imperial power genuinely Christian and Catholic, the Church has not succeeded in establishing social and political justice in Europe. The nations and states of modern times, freed since the Reformation from ecclesiastical surveillance, have attempted to improve upon the work of the Church. The results of the experiment are plain to see. The idea of Christendom as a real, though admittedly inadequate, unity embracing all the nations of Europe has vanished; the philosophy of the revolutionaries has made praiseworthy attempts to substitute for this unity the unity of the human race — with what success is well known. A universal militarism transforming whole nations into hostile armies and itself inspired by a national hatred such as the Middle Ages never knew; a deep and irreconcilable social conflict; a class struggle which threatens to whelm everything in fire and blood; and a continuous lessening of moral power in individuals, witnessed to by the constant increase in mental collapse, suicide and crime — such is the sum total of the progress which secularized Europe has made in the last three or four centuries.6

The two great historic experiments, that of the Middle Ages and that of modern times, seem to demonstrate conclusively that neither the Church, lacking the assistance of a secular power which is distinct from but responsible to her, nor the secular State, relying upon its own resources, can succeed in establishing Christian justice and peace on the Earth. The close alliance and organic union of the two powers without confusion and without division is the indispensable condition of true social progress. It remains to enquire whether there is in the Christian world a power capable of taking up the work of Constantine and Charlemagne with better hope of success. 

The profoundly religious and monarchic instinct of the Russian people, certain prophetic events in its past history, the enormous and compact bulk of its Empire, the great latent strength of the national spirit in contrast to the poverty and emptiness of its actual existence — all this seems to indicate that it is the historic destiny of Russia to provide the Universal Church with the political power which it requires for the salvation and regeneration of Europe and of the world. 

Great tasks cannot be accomplished with small means. It is not a matter of religious compromise between two hierarchies, nor of diplomatic negotiations between two governments. It is primarily a moral and intellectual bond that must be forged between the religious conscience of Russia and the truth of the Universal Church; and in order to commend to our reason the truth of a principle of which the historical realization is foreign and even repugnant to us, we must seek the ultimate ground of this truth in the fundamental idea of Christianity. 

In the first part of my work, the critical and controversial section, I have tried to show what Russia actually needs if she is to fulfill her theocratic mission; in the second I have expounded, in the light of theology and history, the basis of the universal unity established by Christ, the monarchical government of the Church; in the third I have set out to relate the idea of theocracy (the social Trinity) to the theosophic idea (the divine Trinity).7

This work is an abridgment of a larger work in the Russian language at which I have been working for seven years, but which has not been allowed to appear in my own country; the first volume, published in 1887 at Agram in Croatia, was banned by the Russian censorship. In these circumstances it seemed to me more practical to epitomize my work and address it to a wider public.8 I firmly hope to see the day when my country will enjoy that blessing which is her primary need — religious freedom. But in the meantime I thought that I ought not to keep silence, and it seemed that to publish in French would be the most effectual means of making the truth heard. 

In the two first parts of my work, I have suppressed or reduced to a minimum all those topics on which I could only repeat what has been better said by others. For details concerning the state of religion and of the Church in Russia, I am glad to be able to refer my readers to the third volume of M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu’s well-known work, L’Empire des Tsars. The Western reader will also find useful and interesting information in the Rev. Fr. Tondini’s book, Le pape de Rome et les papes des Églises orientales. 

By way of bringing this too lengthy preface to an end, here is a parable which will perhaps bring out more clearly my general point of view and the purpose of the present work. 

A great architect, setting out on a voyage to distant parts, called his pupils and said to them: “You know that I came here to rebuild the principal sanctuary of the country which had been destroyed by an earthquake. The work is begun; I have sketched the general plan, the site has been cleared and the foundations laid. You will take my place during my absence. I will certainly return, but I cannot tell you when. Work, therefore, as though you had to complete the task without me. Now is the time for you to apply the teaching that I have given you. I trust you, and I am not going to lay down all the details of the work. Only observe the rules of our art. I am leaving you the solid foundations of the Temple which I have laid and the general plan that I have traced; that will be sufficient if you are faithful to your duty. And I am not leaving you alone; in spirit and in thought, I will be always with you.” With these words he led them to the site of the new church, showed them the foundations and handed them the plan. 

After his departure, his pupils worked in complete harmony and almost a third of the building was soon raised. As the work was vast and extremely complicated, the first companions were not enough and new ones had to be admitted. It was not long before a serious dispute arose between those who were in charge of the work. Some of them maintained that of the two things left them by their absent Master — the foundations of the building and its general plan — only the latter was important and indispensable; there was nothing, they said, to prevent them from abandoning the foundations already laid and building on another site. When their companions violently opposed this idea, they went further and in the heat of the argument actually declared (contrary to what they themselves had often maintained before) that the Master had never laid nor even indicated the foundations of the Temple; that was merely an invention of their opponents. Many of the latter, on the other hand, in their anxiety to maintain the importance of the foundations, went to the opposite extreme and declared that the only thing that really mattered in the whole work was the foundation of the building which the Master had laid, and that their proper task consisted simply in preserving, repairing and strengthening the already existing part of the building, without any idea of finishing it entirely, for (they said) the completion of the work was reserved exclusively for the Master himself at the time of his return. Extremes meet, and the two opposing parties soon found themselves agreed on one point, that the building was not to be completed. But the party which insisted on preserving the foundations and the unfinished nave in good condition plunged into various secondary activities for that purpose and displayed indefatigable energy, whereas the party which thought it possible to abandon the original foundation of the Temple declared, after vainly attempting to build on another site, that there was no need to do anything at all; the essential thing in the art of architecture, they maintained, was theory, the contemplation of its classic examples and meditation on its rules, not the carrying out of a definite design; if the Master had left them his plan of the Temple, it was certainly not with the object of getting them to work together on its actual construction, but simply in order that each one of them by studying this perfect plan might himself become an accomplished architect. Thereupon the most zealous of them devoted their lives to meditating on the design of the ideal Temple and learning and reciting by heart every day the explanations of that design which some of the early companions had worked out in accordance with the Master’s instructions. But the majority were content to think of the Temple once a week, and the rest of the time was spent by each of them in attending to his own business.

There were, however, some of these dissentients who, from a study of the Master’s plan and of his own original explanation of it, perceived clear indications that the foundations of the Temple had actually been laid and could never be changed; among other remarks of the great architect they came across the following: “Here are the impregnable foundations that I have laid myself; it is upon them that my Temple must be built if it is to be proof for ever against earthquake or any other destructive force.” Impressed by these words, the good workers resolved to give up their quarrel and to lose no time in joining the guardians of the foundations, in order to assist them in their work of preservation. There was, however, one worker who said: “Let us admit our mistake; let us be just and give due honor to our old associates; let us rejoin them around the great building which we began, but to our shame abandoned and which to their incalculable credit they have guarded and kept in good condition. But above all we must be faithful to the Master’s conception. He did not mean these foundations which he laid to remain untouched; he meant his Temple to be built upon them. Therefore we must all unite to complete the building upon the existing foundations. Shall we have time to finish it before the Master’s return, or not? That is a question which he did not see fit to answer. But he did tell us explicitly to do everything to continue his work; and, moreover, he added that we should do more than he had done.” This worker’s appeal seemed strange to most of his companions. Some called him an idealist, others accused him of pride and presumption. But the voice of conscience told him clearly that his absent Master was with him in spirit and in truth. 

As a member of the true and venerable Eastern or Greco-Russian Orthodox Church which does not speak through an anti-canonical synod nor through the employees of the secular power, but through the utterance of her great Fathers and Doctors, I recognize as supreme judge in matters of religion him who has been recognized as such by St. Ireneus, St. Dionysius the Great, St. Athanasius the Great, St. John Chrysostom, St. Cyril, St. Flavian, the Blessed Theodoret, St. Maximus the Confessor, St. Theodore of the Studium, St. Ignatius, etc. etc. — namely, the Apostle Peter, who lives in his successors and who has not heard in vain our Lord’s words: “Thou art Peter and upon this rock I will build My Church;” “Strengthen thy brethren;” “Feed My sheep, feed My lambs.”

O deathless spirit of the blessed Apostle, invisible minister of the Lord in the government of His visible Church, thou knowest that she has need of an earthly body for her manifestation. Twice already hast thou embodied her in human society: in the Greco-Roman world, and again in the Romano-German world; thou hast made both the Empire of Constantine and the Empire of Charlemagne to serve her. After these two provisional incarnations, she awaits her third and last incarnation. A whole world full of energies and of yearnings, but with no clear consciousness of its destiny knocks at the door of universal history. What is your word, ye peoples of the word? The multitude knows it not yet, but powerful voices issuing from your midst have already disclosed it. Two centuries ago a Croatian priest announced it with prophetic tongue, and in our own days a bishop of the same nation has more than once proclaimed it with superb eloquence. The utterance of the spokesmen of the Western Slays, the great Krishanitch, and the great Strossmayer, needs only a simple Amen from the Eastern Slays. It is this Amen that I come to speak in the name of a hundred million Russian Christians, in full and firm confidence that they will not repudiate me. 

Your word, O peoples of the word, is free and universal Theocracy, the true solidarity of all nations and classes, the application of Christianity to public life, the Christianizing of politics; freedom for all the oppressed, protection for all the weak; social justice and good Christian peace. Open to them, therefore, thou Keybearer of Christ, and may the gate of history be for them and for the whole world the gate of the Kingdom of God! 

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1. I am not forgetting that in 1861 Russia made amends by freeing the serfs.

2. See, among recent publications, the remarkable work of G. de Pascal, Révolution ou Evolution: Centenaire de 1789 (Paris, Saudax). 

3. This melancholy episode is somewhat glazed over in the acts of the council, but it stands out quite clearly in the account of the Church historian Evagrius.

4. John, the patriarch of Constantinople, wrote to the Pope: “Prima salus est quia in sede apostolica inviolabilis semper catholica custoditur reigio’ (Labbe, Concil. viii. 451, 2). 

5. The memory of this event is perpetuated by a feast bearing the title “The Triumph of Orthodoxy,” on which the anathema of the year 842 is repeated. 

6. I am speaking here of the general result; that there has been progress in certain directions is unquestionable. We need only mention the mitigation of the severity of penal legislation and the abolition of torture. The gain is considerable, but can it be regarded as secure? If class war were to break out one day with all the fury of a long restrained hatred, we should witness remarkable happenings. Events of ill-omen, acts of Mezentian barbarity, have already taken place between Paris and Versailles in 1871.

7. In order to support my argument I have been obliged in places to introduce a literal translation of certain passages of the Bible. I have thought it right to add the Hebrew text, not in order to parade my knowledge which is quite elementary, but to justify my rendering which might appear quaint and arbitrary. Since there is no absolutely binding rule for the transcription of Hebrew words into Latin characters, I have endeavored to suit my spelling to French pronunciation, while avoiding typographical complications. [In the present translation the author’s transcription has been adapted to conform to the recognized English transcription of Hebrew.—Tr.]

8. We recall to our readers the pamphlet L’Idée russe, which for the same reasons M. Solovyev published in Paris in 1888. — Ed. 

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